Top listings at Google are the subject, cause and effect of the new bread of obsessive compulsive disorders. Fortunes made and lost over a single word. I remember back when you could just type a word seven hundred times on a page and watch it jump up three pages at Google overnight (not that I ever did that). Search Engines are really smart now. No cheating, no cutzees.
Let me show you something that demonstrates one of the ways Google works these days…
Go to Google and type in the keyword click here. Now look at what the top site is. ??? Adobe? Did they pay for this? No. Why then does Adobe get the top listing for the Keyword click here? Think now how many times you have seen “Need Adobe Acrobat? Click Here” A zillion times! The keyword click here links to Adobe more times than any other site so Google regards Adobe as the most relevant to that keyword thus the top listing. This is called an inbound link or a backlink.
Keyword selection:
Two things to keep in mind
- Keywords are what people type into the search box at Google.
- You MUST use the word in the actual page content or it isn’t a keyword.
For example lets say you sell high end flashlights. For keyword selection you would start with flashlights. That’s what you sell. Do a search at Google for flashlights and you will see there is a lot of competition for this word. There are many sites with that word in their URL. This is who you are competing with. You have no choice because you sell the same thing, however if you work at it you could beat them.
There is a great free tool from Google to help with this. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Type in your keyword and it displays monthly stats for your word and 100 derivatives, actual words people are typing into the search engines. Here you will find words like Military flashlights, Hi-Tech Flashlights, professional flashlights, flashlight company, military flashlight company, etc… This tool also displays the amount of times those words are being searched.
So now you would choose from these and make a page OR an entire site that targets this one keyword specifically. This is called a niche.
Page Rank:
Google ranks web pages according to their relevance to the term being searched using an algorithm developed by Google God Larry Page.
Search Engine Results:
A pages placement in the search engine results is determined in part by how well the page targets the keyword being queried. This is determined by its usage (a keyword in the head is better than one in the foot). In relation to keyword usage and the content in which they are places, a web pages authority as well how much trust it has attained are major key factors that determine where a page shows up in the search results.
Trust and Authority
Trust and authority are gauged by many factors ranging from the reliability of the pages content to how old the web page is and of course the amount and quality of inbound links, that is, links on other web sites that point to the page in question.
Inbound Links
As demonstrated above using the keyword click here inbound links play a substantial role in determining where a web page shows up in the search engine results pages. The text used (anchor text), the subject matter, authority, and trust of the containing page all play a role in determining how powerful an inbound link will be. If this was a post about Chuck Norris and had the words Chuck Norris in the title, the perfect inbound link would be from an article about Chuck Norris on chucknorris.com using the words “Chuck Norris” as the anchor text. Coincidentally, this link would probably have an awesome round-house kick which could come in quite handy.
Focusing on too many keywords on one page doesn’t really work if you don’t have the content to back it up so a good start is to focus on one keyword or phrase. You do this by …
- Using the keyword in the content of the page (duh), preferably in the HTML title, the description Meta tag, the keyword Meta tag (though this is becoming increasingly useless), the file name, the title of the page content using an H1 tag (debatable) as well as somewhere in the first 100 words of content and in the final 100 words of content. As a word of caution, some say it should comprise no more than 3% of the page text.
- Create inbound links to your pages using the keyword and variations of the keyword as the anchor text.
So get out there and find your keywords. Create a ton of keyword rich content. Get inbound links. Make your site bigger and keep it growing. Get Firefox and install the SeoQuake add-on or something similar that shows Page Rank, inbound and outbound links, keyword density, Alexis rank etc… Do not rely on these statistics however many have been proven to be somewhat unreliable. Use them as guides and benchmarks. Sign up for Google Web Master Tools, Analytics, Statcounter or something similar so that you can see what keywords are delivering traffic, you may be surprised.
In conclusion, ..twitch.. researching keywords with the Google tool and creating pages that target them properly, link building, analyzing traffic and then responding to your analysis… is a lot of fun, as a matter of fact perhaps a little too fun… especially when you awake ..twitch.. out of the trance and see ..twitch.. that four-six hours just went by ..twitch.. ..twitch…