Are you currently generating free traffic to your website?
Are people finding your website in the search engines?
Is your website search engine friendly?
How can you increase your current rankings?

These are just some of the questions you should be asking yourself if you want to build a profitable business on the Internet. The best free traffic you can receive is from an organic listing in the search engines (websites listed on the left). Ideally your site should be listed on the first page for a specific keyword. If your website appears on the second page or beyond no one will see it. There’s no guarantee you’ll get a first page listing (because search engine formulas change and more competitors come online everyday) therefore you need to create a list of many keywords then integrate them into your web pages.

Step by step process on how to do keyword research:

1. Create a list of keywords

Use the free keyword research tools such as WordTracker or the Google Adwords suggestion tool to create a list of at least 100 keywords. For example here are the first 3 monthly results when you enter “keyword research” in Wordtracker..

keyword research…………….. 1,018
keyword research seo…………… 44
keyword research tool…………… 44
seo keyword research………………2

The longer your list the more keywords you can use in your website content. Your goal should be to dominate your niche by obtaining good rankings for all your keywords.

2. Select long tail keywords

Long tail keywords don’t have a high number of searches per month and have less competition than the popular keywords. Therefore it will be easier to attain high rankings for the them. In the above example you would use the second and third results instead of the first because there are less competing websites.

3. Create a list of competing websites

Enter each keyword into the Google search box with quotations around it to view the number of competing websites. The higher the number the more competitors you have.

Example

“keyword research”…………………11,500,000 (competing sites in Google)
“keyword research seo”……………41,910,000
keyword research tool………………1,410,000
“seo keyword research”……………….432,000

After doing a little more research you’ve discovered the first 3 searches have too many competitors but the fourth one has much less. You should now check the number of backlinks of the top 10 websites for this keyword. This will determine what you need to do to rank above a competing website.

4. Analyze the backlinks of competitors

These are links that point to a website. It’s one of the main factors Google uses to rank websites. The quality and quantity of backlinks will determine your rankings. If you can outnumber the backlinks of your competitors you will outrank them in the search engines.

Use Yahoo Site Explorer to check the number of backlinks for a web page or website. For example if the first website you check has 6000 backlinks you’ll need to get over 6000 to outrank them. That would take too long. If the second result only has 20 backlinks you could outrank them by building more than 20 to your own web page containing the same keyword.

5. Use the keywords in your content

Only use one or two keywords in the content of each web page. Include it in your meta tags, headings, sub headings, paragraphs and links. Don’t over do it otherwise the search engines will think you’re spamming them and lower your rankings.

6. Build backlinks to your website

Build backlinks to all your web pages using a combination of article marketing, video marketing, commenting on blogs, forums and social networking. Avoid getting backlinks from unrelated websites. Focus on sites that compliment or relate to your own.

7. Add unique content

As you add more content you increase the places visitors find your website. Instead of just finding your business through the home page they find it from other pages. Therefore make sure you optimize each web page plus build backlinks to it.

Related Article
How to Optimize Your Website for the Search Engines

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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com
Web Design, Hosting, SEO