SEO Techniques For Outside Your Site

3:14 AM | Posted by | | | Edit Post
It's great to know you have made a fantastic start in terms of SEO by optimizing the content in all of the pages of your site. This can actually take a while depending on how your site is structured. You may need to create a sitemap which search engine bots like along with a cleaner layout where the headers and subheaders clearly show and have the necessary keywords. Optimizing the content and sprinkling keywords is one of the more important SEO techniques to get familiar with. But once you are confident with your site's optimization, don't stop there. Take your knowledge of SEO techniques outside your site so your website has even more exposure. Don't forget that having lots of inbound links is important for your site to successfully take in SEO traffic. If you do not know where or how to get started, just visit these good offsite areas for executing your SEO techniques.

Article Directories

If you want the quickest possible start, article directories should be your first stop. There are so many article directories in the net and the most popular ones are extremely easy to find. Just type "articles" in Google and visit the sites that you see on the first page. Submitting an article is not very difficult as long as you read the rules. If your site has a blog that is filled with interesting content, you should be able to copy the content and paste it as an article submission for a particular site. Then, you can add a link after the article so readers to visit your website. If the article is already optimized, search engines should be able to index the article very quickly especially if the article directory has a high page ranking. Even if links are not allowed in articles, you can always create an account and edit your profile where you can add the site you want to advertise as your homepage just in case people decide to view your profile just because your article is well-written.

Video Sharing Sites

SEO techniques are all about good use of words. Video sharing sounds like it has nothing to do with words but do not forget that video sharing sites not only allow you to upload videos but also allow you to tag and describe them. Use your SEO techniques to make optimized descriptions. Just pretend you are posting an ad in an advertisement directory because that kind of text should be enough to fit in a video description. When adding tags, simply put the keyword phrases that you frequently use for your onsite optimization.

Blogs

Having a blog is great for making your site optimized and easy to update but that still counts as onsite optimization. However, there are so many other blogs where you can add content to. Just because you do not have admin access to the blog doesn't mean that it isn't impossible to add optimized content or an inbound link to the blog. Many blogs allow others to comment which can serve as a nice entry point for unleashing your SEO techniques. Blogs are not as flexible as article directories since some bloggers may just delete your post for spamming but if you make quality posts that will appeal both the blogger and his or her readers, your post should stand and the search engine should index it.
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Optimize The Wrong Keywords And You'll Likely Never See Results

1:36 AM | Posted by | | | Edit Post
Note: Before you begin, if you're NOT 100% serious about getting your website to the top of Google, don't read another word. Only read on if you plan to put into action everything I will be teaching you. It's best to print each article off on your printer, highlight areas and take notes as you learn the exact steps needed for a top Google ranking.
Ok, on to lesson 1...
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. 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 http://www.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. 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 8, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.
You'll notice that weight loss was searched 1,592,607 times during the previous month.
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.
Let's take a quick peek at Google so I can show you exactly how many websites are competeting for this keyword.
If you were to optimize your website based on this keyword, you'd be competing against over 45 million other websites! I don't know about you, but that's an aweful lofty goal to start with.
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"
You'll notice that the #1 ranked website for "weight loss story" is:
http://www.runwalkjog.com/weight_loss_success_story.htm which is not a top level webpage, meaning it's not simply http://www.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 5.
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.
In order to see your own Google Page Rank, as well as others, you must have the Google Toolbar installed on your computer. You can get that for free here: http://toolbar.google.com/
Seeing that the #1 ranked website for this keyword only has a Page Rank of 5 is also good news for us, because a Page Rank of 5 should be reasonable to obtain. Remember, the ONLY way to increase our website's Page Rank is by getting other websites to link to 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
Next we need to view the source code of this website by clicking "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".
* Side Note: There are 2 types of optimization, onpage and offpage optimization. We'll cover offpage optimization in the following lessons.
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!
... Atleast for all the onpage optimization factors that Google deems as important. The reason we know we can out optimize them is because of the following things we've found out by analyzing their website:
  • 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 didn't place the keyword "weight loss stories" at the very end of the page.
  • The website has a low Page Rank of 5, which can be beaten. We can easily achieve a Page Rank of 5 or better. I'll show you the exact steps for this in the coming lessons.
  • 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 and then doing those things that they're doing, BUT just a little more to on 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. 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.
Earlier 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://www.wordtracker.com
  • http://inventory.overture.com (This is the same as goodkeywords.com but is web-based)
  • http://www.adwordanalyzer.com/
That wraps up lesson 1 - Targeting the right keywords.
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