Simple Fool-Proof Strategies to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking Part 1: Keyword Research

Being on top of organic search results is probably one of the utmost goal of every online business. Why? Because it is the ultimate free traffic ever! If you're on top of search results in keywords relevant to your niche, it's like you have a free goldmine of leads flowing to your business.

Many people think that search engine optimization is a rocket science. But it's really not. There are certain things you have to consider in the coding part of your website but even the not-so-good coded websites still get higher rankings.

With literally millions of websites competing to be on top of search results in a particular niche though, how do you achieve this success?

There are Two Main Keys in Search Engine Optimization:

1. Relevance (This is where the on-site optimization takes place.)
Google and the other major search engines rank your website based on the relevance of its content to the words or phrases entered by the user.

There are three areas in your website that the search engine bots crawl to get
this information:
a. Site Meta Title and Description
b. H1 and H2 Headings
c. Actual Content

In these three areas, the bots index the keywords that are related to your website and match those to the words keyed in by the user. But there has to be a certain density of relevant words present before it actually weighs in the results.

2. Popularity (This is where the off-site optimization takes place.)
Off-site optimization, to put it simply, is a process that makes your website look popular in the eyes of the search engines. I would say that of the two keys, this part takes a lot more work than the other. Making your website relevant is not as tedious as making it look popular.

Now let's go through the process of optimizing your site for higher rankings:

Step 1: Perform a Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation of any search engine optimization efforts. Without this, you're going blindly with the process and you may not achieve the results that you want. You must know the search terms you want to rank higher and you must know your chances and how to get those chances. This is a little time-consuming but it's well worth it!

This is the typical flow of a keyword research process:

a. Create a general list of keywords.
a.1 Write your own keywords that you know are relevant to what you offer. Then use the following free tools to find other keywords that otherwise you might not have known people are using to possibly find businesses like yours:

- Google Search-Based Keyword Tool
- Google Adwords Keywords Tool
- Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
- Trellian

Your goal at this stage of the process is to just list as many keywords as you can. Don't worry about the volume of the search term for now.

a.2 In addition to creating a list of your own keywords and keywords suggested by the tools above, pick your three (to five) main competitors online that rank high on search results and go to their websites. Using this free Firefox extension called KGen, visit each of those websites. KGen will allow you to see words on a visited page and how many times the words appear on a given page. Another tool that you can use if you want to take this keyword spying on your competitors to the next level, there is a paid tool called Keyword Spy which will provide you a more detailed information about the keywords your competitors are using.

Here is an excel Keyword Research worksheet that you can use.

b. Find more details about the keywords.
Once you have all your keywords listed, you will now go back to Google Adwords Keywords Tool in order to get the monthly search volume of each of the keyword. Based on the keyword search volume, put your keywords into three different categories (see excel worksheet above): High Volume Keywords, Median Volume Keywords, and Low Volume Keywords.

If you would like to get additional information about your keywords, you can also use the following tools below:

Google Insights for Search
This tool will allow you to find how a particular keyword is doing in a certain location and on a specific time of the year. This is a great tool for a more geo-targeted search engine optimization.

Google Trends
This tool is helpful if you would like to compare multiple keywords based on their trend or "hotness."

c. Create long-tail keywords.
Once you have gathered your keywords and categorized them, your task is now to create long-tail keywords based on your research. What are long-tail keywords? These are simply key phrases that are made up of four or five sometimes even more keywords such as home teeth whitening kit, florida scuba diving tours, houston asian nail salon

Why long-tail keywords? Long tail keywords are easier to rank for and leads that you get from these searches almost are guaranteed to convert!

Example: Teeth whitening is a very competitive keyword. You are better off creating long tail keywords from that basic search term rather than trying to optimize your website for that particular keyword. So instead of using just those two words, you can say (depending on what your product is), "how to whiten teeth from home" or "whiten teeth using home kit." All of these of course will be based on your research from the steps you created above.

Your next step is to optimize your site pages and make it relevant with your keywords. Part 2 of this post coming up next!

Until then!…