How can your brand new website come out of nowhere and take on rival sites to become the number one result in Google for your chosen keywords or key phrases? It can be done; it starts with choosing the right keywords, then checking out the competition.
Before we talk about actually getting into the first 10 listings in Google, I think we need to first cover some exceedingly important ground.
You see, if you optimize the wrong keywords, you will likely never see results. It does you absolutely no good to become the number one ranked site for search terms people aren't using much.
Personally, I really like Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool for figuring this kind of stuff out. I'm also very ambitious. To me, when I go after something, I want to go after something big. Maybe it's just plain greed -- or heck, maybe just plain laziness, but either way, I want to hit the top of something worth being at the top of.
So, I don't start with that tool. Instead, I first head on over to Word Tracker and get their completely free keyword report. It'll tell you what the absolutely most searched-for terms are.
I'm not interested in adult keywords, so I get the "adult filtered" version of the report. Taking a look at this, I see that "dogs" is the 43rd most searched-for thing on the planet.
Now that I have some idea of what I want, I take a look at Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool. At this point, if you're smart, you do not try to become one of the top ranked sites for "dog" or "dogs." At 1,072,295 searches, this is going to be an exceedingly competitive and cutthroat term to try to break in with.
Besides, there are easier ways to "crack" these difficult terms (which we'll get into later in the series). If you scroll down a little, you'll see that "dog training" gets a whopping 109,510 searches. I realize that's only a little more than 10 percent of the biggie term "dog", but one hundred thousand searches a month is nothing to sneeze at. Especially when you figure that Google will get roughly eight times that number of searches. That takes you to very close to the one million searches a month mark.
Now that's a market worth some time!
But it's even better. You see, if you do a quick search on Google (as of this writing) the number 1 listed site is: http://www.uwsp.edu/psych/dog/dog.htm
This is incredibly good news. You see, that isn't a top level index page. Not only that, but the Page Rank of the site is only a 5. While a 5 is pretty good, it's a pretty far cry from a 7 or 8, which I will also show you how to get in later parts of this series.
So, it's time to put on the black clothes. We're going to steal our way into the top 10, maybe (probably) even get that coveted #1 spot by the time this series is over.
What we want to do now is to take a little advice from an article here on SEO Chat by Jacqueline Dooley. That article is SEO Tools and Tricks that Help You Think like a Search Spider.
One of the first tools that article talks about is the Crawler Simulator. That tool lets you see what a search spider will see. What you want to do is take our example website, http://www.uwsp.edu/psych/dog/dog.htm, and plug that URL into the simulator.
Take a look at that page from a search engine spider's point of view. Open up another browser window and go to SEO Chat's Keyword Density Tool. In the "Valid URL" box, enter in the URL for that top Web page.
At this point, let me explain what you're doing, and why. The idea is to take a look at what is winning with Google right now and "steal" that for your own page.
No, I'm not saying you want to take content, Web design, or anything like that. I'm saying you want to model your own site after what is obviously working ... and working well.
What is the keyword density of the winning page? What sorts of things is that winning page doing to rank so high with your chosen keyword?
But wait!
You will never get into the top spot if all you do is copy the top person. You want to take a look at the top person and then do things better than they are doing them.
Allow me to demonstrate.
If you take a look at the page source of the number one ranked site you do not see the words "Dog Training" wrapped inside of <h1> tags. This is very good for us! We can already utilize "on page" optimization techniques to make our page more likable to not only Google, but Yahoo and MSN as well.
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