Before you begin, if you're NOT 100% serious about getting your website to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, don't read another word. Close this page, grab a back of potato chips and go watch the television or something. Only read on if you plan to put everything I will be teaching you into action.
At the top of this lesson you'll notice a download link. I like giving readers this option so that you can print off each of the lessons and take notes as you go along.
Ok, now on to lesson 1...
If you're anything like I was when I first began online, you may have started online by doing the following:
You've probably created a brand new website. Then maybe even submitted that site to a few search engines and hoped that people would mysteriously show up at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling.
A couple of weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website. If you're one of the "smart" few, you might have even tried to "optimize" your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in one of the millions of search engines. Another couple of weeks go by and still no luck. No visitors... and no money. What a complete waste of your time!
At this point you probably give up and decide to either build another website around a different market or just lose all hope and quit. Well, news flash, as you've probably figured out by now, that is NOT the way to go about doing things. These days you can't just create a bunch of websites and expect people to just show up at your website and buy your "stuff".
This was possible back in the late 90s and even early 2000s, but not anymore, as you've probably found out by now.
Let's go through a VERY specific example of what your very first steps MUST be when creating any website... no matter what the subject matter.
Note: As you go through this course, you'll find that I don't teach theories. I don't beat around the bush about things. I like to give specific, real life examples using both descriptions AND screenshots (pictures). I'm a visual person, so I learn best with picture examples.
If you're also a visual person, you're going to learn quite a bit in these lessons, so pay close attention.
In this example, let's create a weight loss related website. I just picked this topic at random because I do some things in the weight loss market, so it makes things easier for me to explain to you. 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, first, 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 "words" column will show us the top 100 search keywords that contain the words "weight loss".
The "count" column will show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for in the previous month within the Overture.com search engine. Generally, you can multiply that number by 8, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.
This step is critically important because we need to know if there is a market for whatever topic we choose to sell. This tool will quickly show us if people are looking for what we want to sell!
You'll notice that the keyword weight loss was searched 817,038 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 in Google will be extremely fierce.
Not only is the competition fierce, but think about it... How targeted is the keyword "weight loss" anyway? Not very targeted at all. Someone searching for the keyword "weight loss" could very well be looking for free information on weight loss. They might be looking for the definition of weight loss. It's really hard telling. Chances are, they're not looking for anything specific about losing weight.
The keyword "weight loss" is not something you should try to take on.
As a side note, when I first started online, that was exactly what I did... and I did it very well. I ranked #2 on Google, out of over 66 million websites for the term "weight loss". I ranked #1 for many other terms like "weight loss program", "lose weight" etc. Although I was getting a TON of traffic, the product I was trying to sell was not converting very well at all... and now you know the reason why. I was targeting the WONG group of people; a keyword phrase that was way too broad...
For a brand new website, or one you're just beginning to optimize, it's better to select more specific "long tail" keyword phrases. I'll talk about this a bit later.
Let's take a quick peek at Google so I can show you exactly how many websites are competing for this keyword.
If you were to optimize your website for this keyword, you'd be competing against over 66 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 super high traffic, targeted, keywords, but it's always best to start off on the keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those keywords, and THEN as your website gets older and you build some authority in the search engines you can focus on optimizing for 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", "free weight loss plan", and "safe weight loss".
These are potential 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.
Disclaimer: You'll hear a lot of people talk about how "onpage optimization", which are the things I'm going to be talking about below, aren't as important as they once were. While that is true. It IS important to look at onpage optimization factors to determine if your competition really knows what they're doing in terms of optimizing their websites.
Chance are, if they have good onpage optimization, their offpage optimization will also be good. Think of these steps as a quick and easy way to determine how competitive a market is before you jump straight into it. There's my disclaimer. If you're new to SEO and that didn't make sense, that's ok. Just ignore it. It's not important, but was said for those people that like to nit pick at every comment made :-) Moving on!
We'll begin with the keyword "weight loss story"
If we go to Google and type in the keyword "weight loss story", without quotes, you'll notice that the #1 ranked website for "weight loss story" is: (Side note: rankings can change in the search engines, so if this site is no longer ranked #1 when you view this yourself, chances are their competition has optimized their site better, and passed them up.)
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/ . It is a sub page off of their main homepage: weight_loss_success_story.htm
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 Google Page Rank. Page Rank is Google's way of giving a specific value to how popular a website is. It is based on the number of "votes" other websites cast for another website. A "vote" is simply when another website places a link on their website that is pointing to another website. Generally, the more "votes" or links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank (PR) will be. Page Rank is one 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/
Moving on...
Seeing that the #1 ranked website for this keyword only has a Page Rank of 5 is pretty good news for us, because a Page Rank of 5 should be reasonable to obtain.
After you install the Google toolbar and browse through websites, you'll notice that most websites online have between a 2 and 5 Page Rank. The extremely popular, high traffic websites tend to have Page Rank's of 6 and 7. A select few will have Page Ranks of 8 and 9... and only a couple websites on the entire internet will have a Page Rank of 10. Those websites would be sites like google.com themselves. If a website has a Page Rank of 7 or higher, it would be best to not try to outrank them.
Remember, the ONLY way to increase our website's Page Rank is by getting other websites to link to us.
* Critical: Later, I'll teach you the right way to get hundreds of links pointing to your website in a matter of several days... and I'll go into more detail about Page Rank.
For current News on seo visit
http://topsearchengineoptimizationservice.blogspot.com/
View The Source Code
Next we need to view the source code of this website by clicking "view", then "source" optoin within our web browser as shown below:
Note: Source code is simply the code that was used to create the web page. You don't need to know html, which is the progamming language used to create most websites, so don't worry. You just need to know a few things to look for when viewing the source code.
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" for their website.
Note: There are 2 types of optimization which most highly ranked web pages contain, onpage and offpage optimization. We'll cover offpage optimization in future lessons, but for now, we're going over the onpage optimization.
Note: An eay way to check whether or not the website is using any of the tags mentioned below is to simply click the "edit" button within notepad, and then select the "find" option.
Then just enter the specific tag you're looking for. For example) In the first bullet point below, we're looking for, what's called, an h1 header tag. The specific code for this is
, so just enter into the "find textbox" and click search. If the tag is in the source code, notepad will find it and highlight it. If it's not, it will tell you it's not found. Piece of cake.
As we view the source file from this website, we need to look for a few things, which include:
Whether or not they are using header tags and are placing the keyword "weight loss story" within those tags. In this case, when we do a search for this tag/text, we find that they are not... AND not only are they not using the keyword "weight loss story" inside of their h1 tags, but they aren't even using header tags at all. Another great thing for us.
As we view the source file from this website, we need to look for a few things, which include:
Whether or not they are using
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