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Halfway there! Is that exciting or what? You are well on your way. Today we are going to finish our discussion on SEO, or how to optimize your website for prime search engine rankings. I am going to show you how to use Keyword Research to get your website on the first page of Google for searches that are used by hundreds of people every day.
If you don’t understand the importance of this you should realize that people PAYto ensure their website shows up on the “Sponsored” section of Google’s first page for a limited amount of time. I am going to show you how to get your website there for FREE by doing a little (well a lot) of legwork. This is time consuming but it is totally worth it! And to make it easier for you I have included some worksheets so all you have to do is plug in your information.
I highly suggest reading three articles before beginning this lesson. If you have no background in keyword research they will be a great resource for you so you have an idea of what we are doing today. Go to THIS LINK and read Keyword Basics Part I, II and III.
(NOTE: I have attached the worksheet for this lesson in the Resources Section.)A Keyword is a word or phrase that people will use to search on Google. We will put these keywords into our website, so that when Google looks at our site it sees that it is relevant for that particular search and will include it in the results. So, when thinking of keywords, consider which phrases such as “home based business” would be relevant for your site.
In the worksheets I have included two keywords to start you off. With your first keyword go to this website to make use of their free keyword research tool; you will have to sign up for an account and choose your searches carefully because they will only give you 20 searches.
After that you can sign up for a free 7 day trial, but make sure that you can get all your research done in one week if you go with that option! Other than that you can pay for a membership or check out these other excellent paid options HERE and HERE.
The next thing we are going to do is research the top searches for your keyword. So, go to your free keyword research tool and type in your first keyword. As you
can see on the worksheet, my first keyword was “home based business”.
In the results section you will be given a number, this is how many times that keyword was searched by people in one day (if you are using a different tool it may go by month or other increments; adjust accordingly.) Any number over 60, I believe, is worth your time.
So, after you have found a keyword in your search that: makes sense (some searches are simply not coherent enough to put as a keyword on your website) is relevant to your business AND has a decent number of searches a day, you will want to find out how competitive this keyword is.
It will do you no good to have all the top searches on your website but never see the front page of Google. So, in order to do this for free (you will notice the paid version has this information already on it) go to Google and put in the keyword you want to research. Be sure to put quotations around your keyword to get an accurate result!
Directly underneath the search bar there will be a number telling you how many results Google found – this is your competition number. This tells you how many websites there are competing for that front page spot. Any number under 50,000 websites we can realistically (as a start up business with a small budget) compete for the front page. Any number under 10,000 and I can almost guarantee that you will be on that first page.
So, if you find a keyword that has at least 60 searches a day, is relevant and coherent AND has less than 50,000 competing websites, you should plug that keyword into your worksheet and mark it so that you know it is a usable keyword.
Now, if you find a keyword that has good numbers but doesn’t really seem relevant to your page, still type it in to your worksheet but don’t mark it as a usable keyword. You may be able to work it in to a post later down the road. I like to highlight keywords that I’m not going to use for my main site, but that I think are interesting, so I can easily find them later. Repeat this step with all ten of your keywords.
Now that you have a lengthy list of the top keyword searches, go through your list and analyze it carefully. According to the criteria we have in place what are the best keywords for your category? Which ones have the highest search rates with the lowest amount of competition? The goal here is to find high traffic keywords that others in your niche have not yet found or implemented.
Once you have decided what your top ten keywords are, plug them into your worksheet. Your next task is to choose which of these keywords you will begin targeting with. Normally you will want to begin targeting with the top keywords in your category, but if one keyword seems more difficult to make relevant than another, or you want to stick with only low competition keywords you might want to change it up a little bit, which is totally fine.
When you know the ten keywords you want to begin with write up a possible headline for each of these keywords. For example: If one of my target keywords was “Real Home Based Businesses” I would want to think of an article or post I could write that would make sense for that keyword. My headline might be “What Real Home Based Businesses Are Made Of,” or something to that effect.
Your goal here is to create your content based on the keywords you want to target, not the other way around. Your time is valuable, so you want to intentionally write the posts for your site that will give you the most traffic for the least effort.
Now if you do everything I listed above, you are probably going to have good results. This is what most marketers do and it works well, butyou won’t get phenomenal results by doing an average amount of work. If you read the articles in the beginning of the lesson you will remember that in Article 3 it talked about the extra step that most people miss. Well, we’re not gonna miss that step.
If you want ultra targeted leads – and lots of ‘em – the best way to get that with this method is to research one keyword deeper. Take the top ten keywords from your first research and plug them in to a new worksheet. Go through the entire worksheet again with these keywords.
Since these are already more narrowly targeted than your original keywords, your search results for them will be even narrower still, with the possibility of finding some great keywords you never would have found otherwise.
Awesome! Now that we have done all of our research, and have found the best keywords for our particular website, we get to start plugging these keywords in so that the search engines will find us. We are going to use another Plugin for this task: The All-In-One SEO plugin by Michael Torbert is the one you want. After you install and activate your plugin follow these simple steps to get it set up for maximum optimization:
· Home Title – Include Your Name and a Keyword (if possible). You want to dominate the search engines for your name. If your name is John Smith…you may have to try harder!
·
Home Description – Include Your Name in this description as well. ·
Home Keywords – Do not include more than 10.
·
Page Title and Title Attribute – Each page of your site needs to be set up. Your
title is what appears in the top left of your screen when you are on a page. Include keywords, your name, etc. I set these up with the same information. · Page Keywords – again, no more than 10 and should be relevant to the content
on that page
·
Page Menu Label – this is what will read on the drop down menu of your site.
Just include what you want it to say…for example my title attribute is “About
Dalas Mueller” because I want my entire name seen by the search engines but
my menu label reads “About Dalas”.
And that should be all! I know this was a very long section, and honestly I don’t expect you to do all of this work at once! It will take a few days to get all of your research done, especially if you’re doing it the free way. But no worries, it will certainly boost your search engine rankings, and with the help of the All-in-One SEO plugin you should be golden.
Next we will take a break from all of this website stuff and go back to the basics: relationships and how to build them online. Take a deep breath! If your head is spinning don’t feel bad, this has been a lot of information and take heart, if you’ve made it this far you are much farther than many network marketers will ever be!