Optimize The Wrong Keywords & You Will Never Rank Well In Any Search Engine

Back in 2004 when I created my first first website and entered the online world of Search Engines, I remember how I failed & failed dismally. I didn't fail because I was lazy or anything. My design was great, my idea was great but I was not getting any visitors to my website. I tried submitting my website to a couple of Directories such as Ananzi & Yahoo, hoping that people would mysteriously visit my site and show up and buy my products.

I waited in anticipation for a couple of weeks, months and nothing happened. I even tried changing my website a couple of times, and optimized it for a couple of important keywords and still nothing changed...No Visitors & No Money . If you were like me then you would probably think of giving up and perhaps build another website around a different market or even just quit all together. Well I am here to tell you that you do not have to go through all these problems that I went through as I am going to show you how to create a website that people will find and subsequently make money for you. You have to pick the right Keywords first before anything else.

I am going to use an example here of what your first steps must be when creating ANY website. You are going to discover that this is not like your ordinary college lecture where you spend time on theories - we will look at real live examples, using screenshots & descriptions.

Ok here we go...

We are going to create a website that sells Car Rims. We cannot create our website's content before doing Keyword Research. Keywords are very important and this step determines to a great extend whether you are going to succeed or fail on the internet. There are a lot of keyword service tools available on the internet and I'm going to show you how to use: http://inventory.overture.com/

Its a good Keyword research tool and best of all its free!

All you need to do is enter a term related to your keyword and it will give you the counts:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Isn't this amazing. You got all your Keywords in one go and all you had to do was enter one generic term and you got over a 100 Keywords - Great. Can you see all the potential markets you have there. There is no way you could have come up with all these keywords - "chrome car rim", "view rim on car", "custom wheels car rim". Amazing...

So what do you do with all these keywords? You'll notice that the keyword weight loss was searched 34 780 times during the previous month.

DO NOT start off by optimizing for the keyword "car rim"

Why? - Here is why.. if a keyword is searched that many times in Overture, then 100 times out of a 100, the competition for that keyword will be extremely high and chances are you will never win. Besides the competition, how targeted is a word like "car rims" anyway? - not targeted at all if you ask me. A person searching for the keyword "car rims" could very well be looking for red car rims or free car rims. There can be looking for just about anything related to car rims...

If you are going to create a brand new website, or a website that you are just starting to optimize, its best to choose more specific "long tail keyword phrases". I will cover this later on.

Lets look at the competition for the keyword in custom "wheels car rim" Google

 

Hmmm, looks like a very Good keyword to start our work. Lets talk about what's going on in the picture above. We queried Google and he (I like calling Google, He) said that Hilton he are the top websites about wheel car rims. He had about 1,370,000 websites from his index.

So who was ranking #1 for the above term at the time. From the above we can see that www.discountedwheelwarehouse.com is number 1. So why are they number one here. Well if you look at their Title you can immediately see the words "wheels car rim" following each other i.e. in close proximity of each other. This is the first part you need to look at. lets go to the page and do some investigation: Here is the site. It has a Google Page Rank of 5 (very good). You can attain this in a few months with the right links (offpage optimization factors to be covered later)

 

 

 

 

 

This website won't be difficult to outrank from an on page factors point of view. Let me introduce 5 important places (factors) where you will need to have your keywords

1. Title tag
2. Description tag
3. Keywords tag
4. Headings H1, H2, H3, H4 etc
5. Content

The above website does not have all these important factors and we should be able to out optimize the "on page ranking factors" for this #1 ranked website and have our site as #1.

We should be able to out optimize the "on page ranking factors" for this #1 ranked website and have our site as #1.

If you want to learn more about these optimization factors I mentioned above please call us on 011 454 0105 and make a booking for our SEO/SEM course at our Bedfordview Offices.

That wraps up lesson 1 - Targeting the right keywords. Hold on to your hats because tomorrow's lesson is a doozy! You'll be receiving Lesson #2 in tomorrow

Take care for now...

Hilton Johani & Priscilla Makhubela
SEO Consultants
http://www.internet-marketing-seminars.co.za 
(011 454 0105)