own accord. Google actually states Given the large number of sites submitting URLs it's likely your pages will be found rankmaniac 2012 in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the rankmaniac 2012 URL submission form. rankmaniac 2012 Google Information for Webmasters httpwww.google.com.auwebmasters1.htmlA1 Personally I wouldnt like to take the risk. Having said that it certainly doesnt hurt to submit your site to other search engines especially if you havent developed any content for it yet. Chapter Summary Submit your domain name to Google as soon as you register it even if you havent built your site yet or done anything else. Although you dont actually need to submit your site to the other search engines you may as well submit it to Yahoo and MSN as they offer free and simple submissions. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 14 Step 3 Choose your keywords 14 Step 3 Choose your keywords The first thing you need to do when you begin chasing a good search engine ranking is decide rankmaniac 2012 which words you want to rank well for. This is called performing a keyword analysis. Keyword analysis involves a bit of research and a good knowledge of your business and the benefits you offer your customers. There are several websites specifically designed to make keyword analysis easier.
Two examples are Overtures inventory tool which you can find at httpinventory.overture.comdsearchinventorysuggestion. This tool is free and very easy to use and understand but it only tells you how many searches have been conducted in the previous month for your keyword and similar keywords. WordTracker which you can find at rankmaniac 2012 httpwww.wordtracker.com. WordTracker is a much more powerful tool but you have to pay to use it you can subscribe for a day for around 10. WordTracker rankmaniac 2012 helps you find the most appropriate keyword for your site by telling you what people are really searching for. Heres how it works You type
in a word which summarizes what you do and it tells you how many times that word has been searched for in the last month. It also tells you how many other websites are using that word rankmaniac 2012 as rankmaniac 2012 a keyword i.e. targeting the same customers you are. Based on this information it rates the word. The best keywords are the ones that a lot of people are searching for but which few websites are targeting. WordTracker even suggests and rates alternative related words. TIP When youre using WordTracker bear in mind that its just talking about numbers and numbers dont always tell the whole story. So dont just jump in and use the best rated keywords you need to consider your own situation. It may be the case that youre forced to select a keyword phrase which is not rated particularly highly. There are two situations in which this might happen i. Youre in a niche market with relatively few customers searching for the keyword. In this situation youll probably find it relatively easy to reach the top of the rankings but you wont generate a huge volume of traffic when rankmaniac 2012 you get there. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 15 Step 3 Choose your keywords 15 ii. A lot of your competitors are targeting your keyword its hotly rankmaniac 2012 contested but its the only one you can use. If you target it youll just have to work a bit harder on your backlinks in order to rank highly. When theres a lot of competition for a keyword its likely that the traffic payoff is good once you reach top. Single Keyword v Keyword rankmaniac 2012 Phrases Generally speaking youre better off targeting phrases not single words. For most rankmaniac 2012 businesses theres simply too much competition for single keywords. For instance if youre in computer sales your normally wouldnt choose computers as your keyword. Go to Google and search for computers and youll see why There are nearly 200 million results and the top rankings are dominated rankmaniac 2012 by the multinationals at the time of writing Apple and Dell. rankmaniac 2012 Whats more research shows that customers are becoming more searchsavvy theyre searching for more and more specific strings. Theyre learning that by being more specific they find what theyre looking for much faster. So instead of targeting
computers try to think of a more specific keyword phrase. Ask yourself whats unique about your business Perhaps you sell cheap second hand computers Then why not use cheap second hand computers as your keyword phrase This way youll not only stand rankmaniac 2012 a chance in the rankings youll also display in much more targeted searches. In other words a higher percentage of rankmaniac 2012 your sites visitors will be people looking rankmaniac 2012 to buy rankmaniac 2012 cheap second hand computers as opposed to people after brand new computers people researching the history of the computer and people trying to figure out how they can use a computer to bath their dog. Develop a keyword strategy Also think about developing a keyword strategy. If you start out rankmaniac 2012 targeting a very specific keyword phrase as described above make sure it includes the more generic hotly contested single keyword. For example youll notice that the keyword phrase above cheap second hand computers includes the single keyword rankmaniac 2012 computers. This way youre really targeting both at once. As your sites importance or PageRank and search engine presence increases youll start to rank for the single word as well. In time youll start ranking well for computers even though youre only actively targeting cheap second hand computers. TIP Google PageRank PR is how Google scores a websites importance. It gives all sites a mark out of 10. By downloading the Google Toolbar from httptoolbar.google.com you can view the PR of any site you visit. Chapter Summary Find out what words your customers are searching for and make them your keywords. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 16 Step 3 Choose rankmaniac 2012 your keywords 16 Use keyword phrases instead of single keywords but develop a long term keyword strategy which will increase your ranking for hotly contested single keywords even as you target your specific keyword phrase. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 17 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 17 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines Once youve figured out what words your customers are using at the search engines you need to use those words frequently on your site and in the right places both within your rankmaniac 2012 copy and within your HTML rankmaniac 2012 code HTML rankmaniac 2012 meta tags. This is a big part of what is known as optimizing your website for search engines. There are also some site structure or information architecture and web design considerations discussed below. TIP When you optimize your website for a particular word youre essentially telling the search engines to include you in the results when people search for that word. How high up the rankings you appear depends largely on the number of links back to your site there are. For more information on generating backlinks see Step 5 Generate links back to your site on p.27. Optimizing your web copy The trick to optimizing your copy is using the most important keywords frequently and in the right places without
compromising the readability of your copy. But how do you define frequently And what are the right places What if you want to target a few different keywords And for that matter what should the wordcount of my rankmaniac 2012 pages be Below are a few tips which will help you out. What should the wordcount of my pages be Youll hear a lot about the importance of a lot of content. While I definitely agree that content is king there is no need to write volumes. You can reach the top of the search engines with a page wordcount of between 1001000. Below 100 is probably too little for the search engines. Above 1000 is definitely too much for your visitors. Certainly dont be intimidated into writing rankmaniac 2012 pages and pages of copy for your home page or any other page where short succinct copy is required. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 18 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 18 How many times should I use a keyword You dont want to fill every page up with every keyword youre targeting. This simply dilutes your sites relevance and reduces readability. Search engines and visitors alike will object the search engines will see your site as spam and visitors to your site will find it hard to read if not meaningless. A good rule of thumb is to aim for a sitewide average keyword density of around 2 measured using LiveKeywordAnalysis httpwww.livekeywordanalysis.com. Density is a measure of frequency in rankmaniac 2012 relation to the total wordcount of the page. So if your page has 200 words and your keyword phrase appears 10 times its density is 5. When you actually try to do this youll see that 2 isnt easy to achieve. The easiest way to do it is to be specific. As you write every sentence ask yourself Could I be more specific For example dont just say our computers or our products ask yourself if you can get away with rankmaniac 2012 saying rankmaniac 2012 our cheap second hand computers. Similarly dont say things like with our help instead say with the help of our cheap second hand computers. Once you get the hang of it youll find there are more than enough opportunities to replace a generic term with your keyword phrase. Obviously theres a bit of an art to it. Sometimes it ends up just sounding like youre repeating your keyword phrase over and over again. If this happens you may just need to restructure the sentence or paragraph. Remember your site reflects the quality of your product or service. If your site is hard to read people rankmaniac 2012 will infer a lot about your offering Readability is allimportant to visitors. And after all its the visitors who buy your product or service not the search engines. NOTE