Optimize The Wrong Keywords And You'll Likely Never See Results ....

If you're anything like me, you've probably created a brand new website, Submitted it to a few search engines and hoped that people would mysteriously show up at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling.

After a couple of weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website, you decide to try and "optimize" your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in 1 of the millions of search engines. Another couple of weeks go by and still no luck.

At this point you probably give up and decide to either build another website around a different target market or just lose all hope and quit. Well, news flash, as you've probably figured out by now, this is not the way to go about doing things.

Let me give you a specific example of what your very first steps MUST be when creating any website.

In our example, let's create a weight loss related website. Our weight loss related website will primarily sell a weight loss eBook. Before we start creating and collecting content for the website we need to do a little keyword research. This is VERY important and should not be skipped. To do our keyword research we need to visit a few websites.

The first of which should be goodkeywords.com

They have a very good keyword tool and best of all, it's free! Once we've downloaded this software, we can enter the most generic keyword for our website into the software. In our example, our keyword would be "weight loss".

You'll notice that in the screenshot below, Good Keywords will return a list of related terms.

SINo. is a next numbering system and just shows shows you the rank of which keyword was searched the most times last month. The SINo. 1 is "weight loss" and was searched 1,413,194 times in the Overture search engine last month.

The Words column shows the specific keyword that was searched. If you enter "weight loss", the Good Keywords tool will bring back the 100 keywords containing the word "weight loss" that were searched for last month.

The "count" column will then show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for the previous month within the Overture.com search engine. Generally, you can take that number times 3, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.

Already, I will see many people making a BIG mistake, and I'll admit, I was one of these people when I first begin my online endevours.

Do NOT start off by optimizing for the keyword "weight loss"

Why? you ask... If a keyword is searched that many times in Overture, then 100 times out of 100, the competition you will have to outrank will be extremely fierce. This is not something you should try to take on right away. For now, just take my word for it. I'll be teaching you later why starting with these highly competitive phrases is not smart.

Let's take a quick peek at Google so I can show you exactly how many websites are competing for this keyword. If we go to Google and enter "weight loss", you'll see there are almost 20 million websites competing for this keyword phrase!

I don't know about you, but that's an awful lot of websites to be competing against, especially if you're just starting.

By the end of this course, you will be able to eventually target HUGE keywords such as "weight loss", but it's always best to start off on the keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those keywords, and THEN you can focus on the larger keywords.

Ok, so back to finding which keywords we want to target. If we scroll down, we can find some more specific keyword phrases like "weight loss story", "weight loss picture", and "safe weight loss".

These could be possible keywords we should target to begin with. Once we have our list of 3 to 4 keywords, we need to go to Google and check out the competition to see exactly how hard it will be to optimize for the specified keyword.

We'll begin with the keyword "weight loss story" because people looking for weight loss stories are more than likely trying to find out how to lose weight and may buy your weight loss eBook.

You'll notice that the #1 ranked website for "weight loss story" at the time of writing this e-Book is: weight loss success_story which is not a top level webpage, meaning it's not simply runwalkjog.com.

This is good news for us because, typically, if a website's subpage is ranking well in Google, we have an immediate advantage if we choose to target the same keyword with our homepage (i.e. www.domain.com). For now, just take my word on this, as I will go into more detail why it's usually easier to rank well for your homepage than any other webpage on your website.

You'll also notice that the website has a Google Page Rank of 4.

Note: Here's a quick definition of Page Rank. Page Rank is Google's way of giving a specific value to how popular your website is. It is based on the number of "votes" other websites cast for your website. A "vote" is simply when another website places a link on their website that is pointing to your website. Generally, the more "votes" or links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank (PR) will be. Page Rank is 1 of the many factors that Google takes into account when ranking websites.

For example, on the page below this website is linking to www.motivation123.com. So, this website is casting a "vote" for www.motivation123.com, thus increasing the Page Rank of www.motivation123.com.

In order to see your own website's Google Page Rank, as well as others, you must have the Google Toolbar installed on your computer. You can get that for free here: toolbar.google.com. Once you've installed the Google Toolbar, it will be located at the top of your web browser as shown below:

Seeing that the #1 ranked website for this keyword only has a Page Rank of 4 is also good news for us, because a Page Rank of 4 should be easy to obtain. Remember, the ONLY way to increase our website's Page Rank is by getting other websites to link to us (getting other websites to "cast votes" for us). Later, I'll teach you the right way to get thousands of links pointing to your website in a matter of a few days.

View The Source Code

Every website on the internet is created using a programming language called "html". In order to see the "html code" that is used to create a webpage, we must click "view", then "source" within our web browser as shown below:

This will open up a text file for us to have a look at and see if this website is actually optimizing their "Onpage Optimization factors".

See text file below:

* Side Note: There are 2 types of search engine optimization methods, onpage and offpage optimization. We'll cover offpage optimization in later chapters, but for now we're going to have a look at "Onpage Optimization".

As we view the source file from this website, we need to look for a few things.

Whether or not they are using <h1> header tags and are placing the keyword "weight loss story" within those tags. In this case, they are not... AND they aren't even using <h1> header tags at all! Another great thing for us!

Whether or not they are using their main keyword in the <title> tags of the website. In this case, they are, which is one of the main reasons they're currently ranked highly for "weight loss stories".

Whether or not they've bolded, underlined, or italicized the words "weight loss story" anywhere in the body of the webpage. In this case, yes... they have. They've actually bolded the keyword "weight loss stories" 4 different times throughout the webpage. At first glance, it looks as though this is another one of the major reasons they've managed to grab the top spot for this keyword. Bolding is something we can do right away, so now we know that we should also bold some of the keywords throughout our copy.

Whether or not they are using <alt> image tags and placing the keyword "weight loss stories" within that tag. In this case, that answer is easy because they're not even using any images at all! This is definitely something we can do when optimizing our website. And another thing we can do to "one-up" this #1 ranked website. It is best to add images that are actually named after our main keyword. For example, we could insert an image and call it weight-loss-stories-graphic1.jpg and so on.

The final thing we want to note is whether or not they've placed the keyword once at the very beginning of the copy, and once at the very end of the copy. In this case they have placed it near the beginning BUT have not placed it at the end. This is another thing we can do to better optimize our webpage.

We now know we can easily out optimize this #1 ranked website!

... At least for all the onpage optimization factors that Google deems as important. The we know we can out optimize them is because of the following things we've found out by

• The website is not using the keyword "weight loss stories" in an <h1> header tag.
• The website did not use <alt> image tags containing the keyword "weight loss stories".
• The website did not place the keyword "weight loss stories" at the very end of the page.
• The website has a low Page Rank of 4, which can be beaten. We can easily achieve a Page Rank of 5. I'll show you the exact steps for this in the coming chapters.

The website is ranked with their subpage (Weight_loss_success_story.htm). By optimizing our index page for this keyword, we can one up them.

Remember, the main idea behind ranking well on Google is to analyze the top ranked websites to find out exactly what they're doing and then do those things, BUT just a little better to one up them and obtain a better ranking.

We'll continue to go through the same process for the other 2 keywords we've found. It is best to analyze the top 5 ranking websites for each keyword.

Note: If the top 5 websites for a specific keyword have a Google Page Rank of 6 or higher, it's probably not best to shoot for that keyword until we build some momentum and get some initial traffic from the easier ranking keywords with less competition, like I mentioned earlier.

Above I mentioned that keyword research was very important in building traffic. Some other very good resources for building keywords and finding niche phrases include the following:

http://inventory.overture.com/
(web-based version of goodkeywords.com)
Cost: Free

http://www.keywordlocator.com/
One Time Cost: $87

http://www.wordtracker.com/
Monthly Cost: $52.70

That wraps up chapter 1 and the first steps you need to follow in order to choose whcih keywords you're going to target. This is probably the most crucial step in optimizing any website. You MUST build a solid foundation by selecting the keywords with the right amount of competition or you're doomed for failure.

Ok, let's move on to chapter 2!