ent built your rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 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 httpwww.wordtracker.com. WordTracker rankmaniac 2012 is a much more powerful tool but you have to pay to use it you can subscribe for a day for around 10. WordTracker 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 as 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 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. rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 traffic payoff is good once you reach top. Single Keyword v Keyword Phrases Generally speaking youre better off targeting phrases not single words. For most 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 by the multinationals at the time of writing Apple and Dell. 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 rankmaniac 2012 theyre looking for much faster. So instead of targeting computers try to think of a more specific keyword phrase. rankmaniac 2012 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 a chance in the rankings youll also display in much more targeted searches. In other words a higher percentage of your sites visitors will be people looking to buy 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 time youll start ranking well for computers even though rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 16 Step 3 Choose your keywords 16 Use keyword phrases instead of single keywords but develop a long term keyword strategy which rankmaniac 2012 will increase your ranking for hotly contested single keywords even as you target your specific keyword phrase. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write rankmaniac 2012 Copywriting rankmaniac 2012 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 copy and within your HTML code HTML 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 keywords frequently and in the right places without compromising the readability of your rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 of my 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 measured using LiveKeywordAnalysis httpwww.livekeywordanalysis.com. Density is a measure of frequency in 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 saying our cheap second hand computers. Similarly dont say things like with our help instead say with the help rankmaniac 2012 of our cheap second hand computers. Once you get the hang of it youll find there are rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 service. If your site is hard to read people 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 You dont need to be paranoid about density. You can have some pages which have a high density and some which have a low density. What if I want to target more rankmaniac 2012 than one keyword Its best to only target one keyword per page. If you try to target more your keywords rankmaniac 2012 will be competing against each other diluting each rankmaniac 2012
others impact. If you need to target more than one keyword simply create a page for each. For example divide your Second Hand Computers site into separate pages for Macs and PCs and then segment again into Notebooks Desktops etc. This way youll be able t