If you’re anything like I was when I first began online, you’ve probably created a brand new website. Maybe submitted it to a few search engines and hoped that people would mysteriously show up at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling.

After a couple of weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website, you might even try and “optimize” your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in 1 of the millions of search engines. Another couple of weeks go by and still no luck. No visitors… and no money. What a waste!

At this point you probably give up and decide to either build another website around a different market or just lose all hope and quit. Well, news flash, as you’ve probably figured out by now, this is NOT the way to go about doing things. These days you can’t just create a bunch of websites and expect people to just show up at your website and buy your “stuff”.

This was possible back in the late 90s and even early 2000s, but not anymore, as you’ve probably found out by now.

You’ll find that I don’t teach theories. I like to give specific, real life examples using both descriptions AND screenshots (pictures). I’m a visual person, so I learn best with picture examples. So, if you’re also a visual person, you’re going to learn quite a bit in these lessons, so pay close attention.

In our example, let’s create a weight loss related website. Before we start creating and collecting content for the website, we need to do a little keyword research. This is VERY important and should not be skipped. To do our keyword research we need to, first, visit a few websites.

The first of which should be http://www.goodkeywords.com/.

They have a very good keyword tool, and best of all it’s free!

Once we’ve downloaded this software, we can enter the most generic keyword for our website into the software. In our example, our keyword would be “weight loss”.

You’ll notice that in the screenshot below, Good Keywords will return a list of related terms. The “count” column will then show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for in the previous month within the Overture.com search engine. Generally, you can multiply that number by 8, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.

You’ll notice that the keyword weight loss was searched 817,038 times during the previous month.

Why, you ask? If a keyword is searched that many times in Overture, then 100 times out of 100, the competition you will have to outrank will be extremely fierce.

Not only is the competition fierce, but think about it… How targeted is the keyword “weight loss” anyway? Not very targeted at all. Someone searching for the keyword “weight loss” could very well be looking for free information on weight loss. They might be looking for the definition of weight loss. It’s really hard telling. Chances are, they’re not looking for anything specific about losing weight.

This is not something you should try to take on. For a brand new website, or one you’re just beginning to optimize, it’s better to select more specific “long tail” keyword phrases. I’ll talk about this a bit later.

Let’s take a quick peek at Google so I can show you exactly how many websites are competing for this keyword.

If you were to optimize your website for this keyword, you’d be competing against over 66 million other websites! I don’t know about you, but that’s an aweful lofty goal to start with.

By the end of this course, you will be able to eventually target super high traffic, targeted, keywords, but it’s always best to start off on the keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those keywords, and THEN as your website gets older and you build some authority in the search engines you can focus on optimizing for the larger keywords.

Ok, so back to finding which keywords we want to target.

If we scroll down, we can find some more specific keyword phrases like “weight loss story”, “weight loss picture”, “free weight loss plan”, and “safe weight loss”.

These are potential keywords we should target to begin with.

Once we have our list of 3 to 4 keywords, we need to go to Google and check out the competition to see exactly how hard it will be to optimize for the specified keyword.

Disclaimer: You’ll hear a lot of people talk about how “onpage optimization”, which are the things I’m going to be talking about below, aren’t as important as they once were. While that is true. It IS important to look at onpage optimization factors to determine if your competition really knows what they’re doing in terms of optimizing their websites. Chance are, if they have good onpage optimization, their offpage optimization will also be good. Think of these steps as a quick and easy way to determine how competitive a market is before you jump straight into it. There’s my disclaimer. If your new to SEO and that didn’t make sense, that’s ok. Just ignore it. It’s not important, but was said for those SEOs that like to nit pick at every comment made Moving on!

We’ll begin with the keyword “weight loss story”

You’ll notice that the #1 ranked website for “weight loss story” is: (Side note: rankings can change in the search engines, so if this site is no longer ranked #1 when you view this yourself, chances are their competition has optimized their site better, and passed them up.)
http://www.runwalkjog.com/weight_loss_success_story.htm which is not a top level webpage, meaning it’s not simply http://www.runwalkjog.com/

This is good news for us because, typically, if a website’s subpage is ranking well in Google, we have an immediate advantage if we choose to target the same keyword with our homepage (i.e. www.domain.com). For now, just take my word on this, as I will go into more detail why it’s usually easier to rank well for your homepage than any other webpage on your website.

You’ll also notice that the website has a Google Page Rank of 5.

Next we need to view the source code of this website by clicking “view”, then “source” within our web browser as shown below:

This will open up a text file for us to have a look at and see if this website is actually optimizing their “Onpage Optimization factors” for their website.

As we view the source file from this website, we need to look for a few things.

• Whether or not they are using <h1> header tags and are placing the keyword “weight loss story” within those tags. In this case, when we do a search for this tag/text, we find that they are not… AND they aren’t even using <h1> header tags at all. Another great thing for us.

• Whether or not they are using their main keyword in the <title> tags of the website. In this case, they are, which is one of the main reasons they’re currently ranked highly for “weight loss stories”. There title is “Weight Loss story stories” and the html code they used is: <title>Weight Loss story stories</title>

  The <title> tag is simply the text that appears at the top of the browser window as shown below:

  
  

• Whether or not they’ve bolded, underlined, or italicized the words “weight loss story” anywhere in the body of the webpage. In this case, yes… they have. They’ve actually bolded the keyword “weight loss stories” 4 different times throughout the webpage. Bolding is something we can do right away, so now we know that we should also bold some of the keywords throughout our copy. Notice I said they’ve bolded “weight loss stories” 4 times, rather than “weight loss story” (singular). You should always look for both the plural and singular form of the keyword, as the search engines view them as “almost” the same word.

  The html tag for bold is <b>. For italics is <i>. For underlined is <u>. Below you’ll see that I did a quick search for the <b> tag and found that they’re using bold tags that include their keyword, “weight loss stories”. It actually says “weight loss success stories”, but does include all of the words (weight, loss, and stories) within the bold tags.

  
  

• Whether or not they are using <alt> image tags and placing the keyword “weight loss stories” within that tag. In this case, that answer is easy because they’re not even using any images at all! This is definitely something we can do when optimizing our website. And another thing we can do to “one-up” this #1 ranked website. It is best to add images that are actually named after our main keyword. For example, we could insert an image and call it weight-loss-stories-graphic1.jpg and so on.

• The final thing we want to note is whether or not they’ve placed the keyword once towards the very beginning of the web page, and once at the very end of the web page. In this case they have placed it near the beginning and also at the end. Not to worry, we can do this as well.

• The website is not using the keyword “weight loss stories” in an <h1> header tag.
• The website did not use <alt> image tags containing the keyword “weight loss stories”.
• The website has a Page Rank of 5, which can be beaten. With a little work, we can achieve a Page Rank of 5 or better. I’ll show you the exact steps for this in the coming lessons.
• The website is ranked with their subpage (weight_loss_success_story.htm). By optimizing our index page for this keyword, we should be able to naturally get more websites to link to our website, thus getting more quality links than this website..

We’ll continue to go through the same process for the other 2 keywords we’ve found. It is best to analyze the top 5 ranking websites for each keyword. If the top 5 websites for a specific keyword have a Google Page Rank of 6 or higher, it’s probably best to not shoot for that keyword until we build some momentum, and authority, like I mentioned before, by ranking well for the longer keyword phrases that have less competition.

Earlier I mentioned that keyword research was very important in building traffic. Some other very good resources for building keywords and finding niche phrases include the following:

• http://www.keywordelite.com (This is the keyword analysis tool I use daily)
• http://www.wordtracker.com (A subscription based service where you pay monthly)
• http://inventory.overture.com (This is the same as goodkeywords.com but is web-based)