7 Days To Complete Search Engine Domination - Day 1

A word of warning! SEO is hard work.  If you are  not serious about getting your site to the top of Google, Yahoo and MSN, don't even start.

SEO Lesson 1 

Congratulation!  You have made this far which means you are serious about your website. When I first thought about getting into the online business, I created a brand new website, then submitted it to search engines hoping that visitors would start coming in shortly thereafter.

A couple of weeks later, seeing that very few visitors actually showed my at my website, I began to research the net for reasons and came accrose the word: "optimize". It sounded great and made of lot sense so I started to apply to my new website some of the Search Engine Optimization techniques I had read about, centering my efforts around my main keywords. Two weeks on and still no major traffic and I was beginning to feel that all my efforts had been a huge waste of time!

After years of creating websites for my customers, here are some of the steps I always follow!

Before I start create and collecting content for my websites, I do a little keyword research. This is probably to most important step of all often times completely ignored by webmasters.

To do a keyword research, first download this tool: http://www.goodkeywords.com/

There a number of excellent tools outthere for cornering your website keywords and the one above is equally good and best of all it is free!

Once you have downloaded the software, enter the most generic keyword for your website into the software. As I am currently working on nutrional website let's use it as an example. In this case, the keyword would be: Vitamin

Good Keyword will return a list of 100 related terms from 1 to 100, with Words as a second column and Count as a third. The results are taken from the Overture.com search engine compiled during the previous month.

For the sake of this example, I will list the top 8 results:

As you can see, the keyword vitamin has a count of 169510 whih means Vitamin was searched more than one hundred and sixty nine times during the previous month (nearly 8 times more in google)

The first lesson is NOT to start off by optimizing the keyword "vitamin"

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

In addition, although vitamin looks like an important keywords for my customer's website, it is not a very targeted keyword at all. Chances are anywone searching for vitamin is in fact searching for information or definition of vitamin.

A quick peep at Google and we found out how many websites would be competing for this keyword. As of Jul 30th, a wooping 60 Million pages are competing for Vitamin. tha'ts an aweful lofty goal to start with.

At the end of the course in this website, chances are you will eventually be able to target super high traffic, targeted keywords but it's always best to start off with a keyword that is less competitive.

Scrolling down the Keyword Suggestions Tool list, in position 59 there is:

Back to Google, and we find that 8 million pages are competing for the keyword best vitamin. Now that's something we can start working with!

In the keyword suggestion tool, in position 73 is an even more attainable keyword

with a Google competition ratio of 1.9 million pages

whole food vitamin is certainly a keyword that can be targeted.