1. Select the correct keywords
Selecting the proper keywords for your website is the most overlooked piece of search engine optimization.
So before you buy your domain and start trying to get traffic you must decide what your website is about and what keywords you want to focus on.
I recommend spending at least 10 minutes making a list of potential keywords that you would like to rank high for in the search engine. You should have a list of at least 10 keywords.
Once you have your list you want to see how many people are actually searching Google for that particular keyword. Some of your keywords will have many people searching for them. Other keywords will have very few people searching for them.
Luckily Google has a free tool that you can use to determine how many searches different keywords are getting:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Once I know how many searches each keyword has I look at the competition for each keyword. So if my keyword is “poodle manicures” I would do the following 4 things:
- First I will go to Google and search for: poodle manicures
This tells me how many websites have my keywords in them.
The order of the keywords does not matter so a website might have manicures at the top of the page and poodle at the bottom of the page.
I record how many sites are competing for this. - Next I will go to Google and search for: “poodle manicures”
This tells me how many websites have my exact keyword phrase.
I record how many sites are competing for this. - Now I’m going to search Google and see how many people have the the words poodle manicures in their title:
I go to Google and search for: allintitle: poodle manicures
I record how many sites are competing for this. - Now I am going to search google and see how many people have the words poodle manicures in their URL
I go to Google and search for: allinurl: poodle manicures
I record how many sites are competing for this.
After doing all of this I should have a good feel as to which keywords have the best balance of high searches and low competition.
2. Select the correct type of domain
When buying the domain I highly recommend getting any .com or .net or .org. I would also stay away from .info domains as they are frequently used by Web spammers and sometimes have a harder time ranking high in the search engines.
3. Keywords in your domain
Make sure that your keywords are in your domain. For example if your keywords are “poodle manicures” then you would want to get poodlemanicures.com.
If poodlemanicures.com is not available then try different variations like: poodle-manicures.com or poodlemanicuresblog.com
4. Keywords in your file name
When someone visits pages on your website is a good idea to have your key words in the URL.
For example you may have something like poodlemanicures.com/page1.htm which should be changed to poodles.com/your_target_keyword.htm
5. Keywords in your title tag
Consider putting your keywords in your title tag.
For example if your keywords were poodle manicures then you would want your title tag to look like this:
<title>Poodle Manicures</title>
6. Keywords in your h1 tag
No. Consider putting your keywords in your H1 tag.
For example if your keywords were poodle manicures then you would want your H1 tag to look like this:
<h1>Poodle Manicures</h1>
7. Keywords in your image filename and tag
Adding an image and an alt attribute to your image tag can help as well as having your keywords be in the file name. On my Poodle manicure page I would have:
<img src=”poodle-manicures.jpg” alt=”poodle manicures” />
You would be surprised at how much traffic some people get simply from their images.
Every day a ton of people search for images using Google images search. So make sure you have your keywords in your image.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Good tips and most are easy enough to do. I think 4 and 7 may be the most overlooked. I make a point of naming every page and subdirectory using keywords (on my money sites at least). But come to think of it, a lot of my images have names like sm334a12.jpg – not very useful for SEO.
And 4 & 7 are pretty easy to fix most of the time.
Simple and straight forward stuff. And yet, I am going back though my pages since I know lots of my images were cut and pasted in and the Alt Tags simply aren't what they should be. And of course many of the images are just "step1.png", step2.png etc. I'm sure I can make these work harder for me.
The keywords are tricky. You get so bound up in the way you describe something, it can be tricky working out how a searcher might describe it instead.
Good easy to follow advice, Thanks for the tips.
Thank you so much for informing me about the google keyword tool.
I am glad to help.
What about link from relevant content, because i think it's hard to improve search engine optimization without backlink from other sites, am i right Nick correct me if i wrong
Thank
Getting links to your website will certainly help you rank higher in the search engines. The focus of this particular blog post were internal things you can do to your blog itself to rank high. (I probably did not explain that very well.)
There are numerous external things you can do to get traffic and rank high in the search engines. Back links is one of the most important of these things.