Effective Search Engine Optimization tools

First identify the key phrases (generally known as key terms, or keywords) that you want your site pages of content to be found in search engines– these are the words that the prospective visitant might character into an online search engine to find related websites. For instance, if your organization’s mission has to do with environmental protection, are your target visitors it’s almost guaranteed that looking for “acid precipitation”, “save the forests”, “toxic industrial waste”, “greenhouse warming”, or all of the above? Do you wish to reach visitors who are local, regional or national in scope? These are definitely factors that require attention as you begin the search engine optimization process. Since it’s no use having good search engine ranking for terms no one’s looking for.
Choosing Pages for Search Engine Optimization

Your target terms have to be at the least two words long and, naturally, be relevant to the table of contents of your websites page. An individual’s intuition and team thinking are good places to start with key term selection. Nevertheless, there are actually tools meant to aid you in validating your alternatives and researching keyword phrase solutions perhaps you may not have even taken into account.
WordTracker and Overture offer two of the very most popular research tools: WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com) is the industry standard tool intended for search phrase selection research. Although there is a fee for utilizing the complete version of WordTracker, they also offer a limited trial that enables you to test out the device. Overture (www.overture.com) now offers a “Term Suggestion Tool” that could be utilized for finding target keyword phrases should you register for a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) account with their organization. Another excellent option that is free and I also use on a daily basis is Google Adwords keyword tool. By logically choosing terms which are popular enough to bring you visibility with target visitors, yet not too general/competitive that any prominent scoring would be difficult, you can easily ensure that your search engine optimization attempts are built upon a stable foundation from the start.

We Found the Terms, Now Just What Do We Do With Them?

Once you’ve decided on the keyword phrases you want to target, the next task is to incorporate the terms into your websites web pages to make them relevant.

Initially, all pages and posts which you choose for optimization should really be the ones that deliver the most focused content on the topic of the terms you wish to target – you may already have these kinds of pages and posts on your website, or perhaps you may prefer to produce them completely from scratch. You can optimize any amount of pages of content that you like for search engine optimization, but each page really should focus on no more than one or two of your total target terms.

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The Mistakes of Keyword Research

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when entering into a new market is doing the keyword and market research incorrectly. Unfortunately, most of the “gurus” out there have been teaching keyword research totally wrong. I’m going to show you how I do keyword research for a new website, but first let’s clear up a few of the bigger misconceptions out there about picking keyword.

1. Competition Level in Google Keyword Planner:
This is a common mistake people make when getting started, but even some people who have been at this for a while still do not get this. The competition level that is reported in Google’s Keyword Planner has nothing to do with the level of competition for organic rankings. It is an estimate of the competition among Adwords advertisers. Nothing else.

When you see ‘Low’ competition, that does not mean it will be easy to rank for. It just means that there are not many people spending money on ads for that keyword.
If anything, you probably want to look for keywords that show a ‘High’ level of competition. That usually is a good indicator that there is money to be made with that keyword.

PR, DA, TF, Age, Number of Links, and Pretty Much Any Other Metric You Can Think of. Another common lie spread about keyword research is that you should look at the PageRank of the pages ranking on the first page of Google for the keyword you are looking at. Is PageRank a factor in rankings? Sure. However, it is not a direct factor that you can measure for a specific keyword. Just because a page has a PR of 5, for example, does not mean it is going to outrank all other pages below a PR of 5 for that keyword.
PageRank is a measure of the quality of incoming links to a page, but it does not measure the relevancy of those links for the search query. Same thing goes for Domain Authority and Trust Flow. They really tell you nothing about how difficult the page might be to outrank.

Number of links is also a waste of time. A site with 50 links can outrank a page with 50,000 links for a specific search query. It happens all the time. I would be much more concerned with the anchor relevancy of those links and the relevancy of the pages they are coming from.

2. Number of Pages in the Search Index:
This one pisses me off beyond belief. Morons like the people behind tools such as Market Samurai keep telling people this matters. They will tell you to put your keyword into the Google search bar and see how many results Google has in their index. The fewer results, the easier it is to rank for. Sometimes they will tell you to do the search in quotes instead or they tell you to do a search like inurl:keyword-phrase because “this is the real competition”. It is complete and utter bullshit. It has nothing to do with the level of competition for a keyword and it should have nothing to do with if you select to target a keyword or not.

Do you really think that over 73 million webpages are trying to rank for that term?
The top 3 webpages, or top 5 for heavily searched terms, are really all that matter for a keyword. If you can beat number 3, who cares if there are 1,000 other webpages or 100 million other webpages? It makes no difference. It’s like running a race. If you are the third fastest runner in the race, you are going to finish third. It does not matter if the race has 50 participants or 50 thousand participants. You are third.

3. Building Sites Around Long-Tail Keywords:
I think this is a huge mistake. It can work. I almost never do it anymore. Now, I still target long-tail keywords, but I build sites that are themed around larger keywords, and then have internal pages designed to attract the longer tail phrases.

I think when you build a site entirely around a few long-tail keyword phrases, you are limiting the potential of that site. I’m going to show you a little more in the video below what I mean and how I choose keywords for a new site. My intent here is to show you that simply finding and targeting nothing but long-tail keywords is not the only method available to you. By building sites around larger keywords, you will attract a lot of traffic around related keywords that you never thought of. The sayingGo big or go home comes to mind here.

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