SEOs Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple

SEOs Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple You’re also going to learn how to check your keyword, to see your chances of building a site, which you can get onto the first page of Google. If your keyword is ultra competitive, you’ll find it very difficult toget ranked. Because of this it’s best to try and get ranked for a less competitive keyword.

Phil Coleman Copyright 2009

SEO Storm

Search Engine Optimisation made simple

Getting high rankings in the search engines is a massive subject It’s called SEO which is Search Engine Optimisation

So you’re basically optimising your website to keep the search engines happy, or more importantly, keep searchers happy And if the searchers are happy with you, the search engines will place you higher in their results

Search Engine Sanity

When you search for something on the web, what do you want to happen? You want to see a page of results, relating exactly to what you searched for, right? Of course you do Do you want some of the results to have nothing to do with what you’re looking for? Of course not What would be the point in that?

Well, the search engines understand that you and everyone else want the same thing Extremely relevant results If you don’t find what you want, you’ll move on

to another search engine, won’t you?

That’s where keywords come in You optimise your site for certain keywords You include content, based around the same keywords If you’re an affiliate, sell products which are also based around your keywords

When the search engine spiders arrive at your site, they check the titles,

metatags, read the content, check all your links and check how many other sites link to yours

Google is also interested in the Page Rank (PR) or social importance of your site and the sites which link to you The higher the PR of these sites the more love you get from Google, simply because if big important sites are linking to you, it makes sense that your site must be good quality and relevant The only way to increase your Page Rank is to get other sites to link to you (Backlinks)

Page Rank is logarithmic and varies from 0 to 10 A page rank of 8 is better than

2

So obviously, the highest ranking sites are normally the ones with good relevant content which is updated regularly and has lots of high PR back-links

There are various arguments about how important page rank really is There are those that say it’s unimportant and obviously those that say it’s incredibly

important My advice? Don’t worry unduly about it Just stick to what I’m showing you here and everything will fall into place

How to optimise your site

There are 2 main parts to SEO On-page, which is the actual content and html of your site And off-page, which is about your linking strategy

I’m going to start with an example of how to use on-page optimisation, so you’ll stand more chance of ranking in the search engines We’ll get to off-page a little later

The keyword I use here can be changed for whichever keyword you want to optimise for The principles will still be the same

You’re also going to learn how to check your keyword, to see your chances of building a site, which you can get onto the first page of Google If your keyword is ultra competitive, you’ll find it very difficult to get ranked Because of this it’s best

to try and get ranked for a less competitive keyword

I’m sure you would rather have a few hundred targeted visitors a month to start off with than NONE!

Work through these examples with me on your PC Let’s start by using the

weight loss example again To try and rank for the term weight loss would be

very difficult It’s such a broad, popular phrase and there are so many

established sites

However, if we go to Wordtracker http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

And type in the phrase weight loss, you’ll see something like this

Scroll down

and you’ll see these results

Let’s take “weight loss workouts” for this example You can and should try other keywords in the niche you’re interested in, using the techniques I’m about to show you The more research you do, the more successful you’re likely to be Seriously And, the more research you do, the easier it will get and the more sense it will make

“weight loss workouts” had 100 searches last month according to Wordtracker Doesn’t sound like a lot but you can multiply that figure by at least 4 for google and then add all the other search engines

If we search “weight loss workouts” in Google, we’ll see 45,900 results when we use quotes

The thing to remember is you are not competing directly with 45,900 other sites

No, no, no Let me show you something to get my point across

Go back to your search results in Google Now click on Preferences just to the right of the search box You should see this screen

Change the Number of Results to 100 Then click on Save Preferences You should then see this:

Click OK and when Google takes you back to the search results, scroll down to the bottom of the page Click on the number 10 which will obviously take you to the tenth page of results for your search phrase

You’ll see something like this at the top of the page So in this example, you can see there are only 581 real results NOT 47,300 This is because the rest of the results are not as relevant

Just to cheer you up even more, scroll to the bottom of the page and take a look

Do you really think those results are serious competition for you? And results like this are not confined to the last page You’ll find them all through the results pages

Can you now see that by getting your SEO as perfect as you can, it could be easier than you thought, to rank higher than you thought? Good news eh?

That’s fine I hear you say, but what about the top search results on the first page? Their SEO will be perfect right? Well, let’s have a look shall we?

A good plan of action is to analyze the highest ranked websites on Google to see what it is they are doing and then make sure you do it even better This will hopefully get you a better ranking than them

The first thing to look at is if the result is from a homepage or a subpage

This example (look at the green text at the bottom of the listing) is a sub page because allwomenstalk.com is the home page and

3-step-approach-to-best-weight-loss-workouts/ is the sub page

That’s good news because subpage listings aren’t as strong as subpages A home page will normally get preferential treatment over a subpage There’s a chance that if we optimised our home page for this keyword, we could beat this listing Don’t get too excited yet though, because there’s a lot more to it than that

If you are using Firefox as your browser go here: http://tools.seobook.com/

Download the SEO for Firefox plug-in tool for SEO analysis It’s unbelievably useful Just click on the big link when you’re on the site like the picture above

On the next page you can just scroll down to the Download & Installation

Instructions: and you’ll see the Click Here to install text

If you are not currently using Firefox, you’ll find a link to download it just above the other link Firefox is really popular and I personally think it’s worth

downloading so you can use the SEO tool

You can usually run Firefox as well as Internet Explorer, or whichever browser you currently use So you won’t have to get rid of your current browser

Bookmark the download page for later, as it has some instructions and info on it

OK, so if you’re running Firefox and you’ve clicked on the download link for the tool you’ll see this:

Just wait till the Install link is live then click on it and follow the instructions You’ll

be asked to restart Firefox then you can use the tool

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the tool you can right click on an empty part of a website and choose SEO for Firefox, then Lookup This Page You will then see the box above with all the useful info

Now go back to: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html and scroll down to read a summary of what the info means

Just remember the info is just a guide It will help you to see how established, popular and optimised a site is Which will help you decide if it’s worth trying your luck with certain keywords

There are other ways to check the info found in the Firefox SEO tool

Another way to check Page rank is to use an online tool like:

http://www.pageranktool.net/

Just copy and paste the address of the site you’re researching In this example, the website is PR3 That’s good for us as PR3 is not very high It would be far

harder to knock a PR 7 or 8 off their spot They’re sort of internet royalty at that rank!

For another way to check backlinks go here:

http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker

Once again copy and paste the website address into the box Remember to copy the homepage address, not the subpage address This will tell us how many back links the site has In this case, at the time of writing, they have 5,094

That’s quite a lot But some sites have tens of thousands of backlinks

Remember, the point of this research is to see whether you stand a chance of ranking for your keywords As you practice and gain more experience, you’ll be able to make more and more accurate decisions Nothing is written in stone and nothing is guaranteed

Anyway, go back to the first page of results again and click on the first site

On the main browser menu (as below) click on View then Page Source

You’ll see this open in a new window

This is the HTML for the site you’ve just clicked on And it can tell us so much about how well the site is optimised for the search engines Don’t let all the HTML worry you You haven’t got to understand it all I’m going to show you what

to look for, using this site as an example YOU will then be able to do the same

on any other site How cool is that?

What you will find might just shock you I’m sure you would presume that all sites

on Google’s first page of results, are perfectly optimised and therefore impossible for you to beat Right?

Wrong!

Some of them will be But the number is far less than you would think That’s why it’s so important to do your research The people who presume they can’t

compete for first page listings really are wrong It’s possible, in fact it’s highly likely in some cases, but it does take time and research And the pay off is huge Let’s have a look at some of the main things you would expect to see in the HTML of a well optimised site Don’t worry about this It’s all covered in detail on the videos and it will all make more sense once you’ve gone over a few

examples

On-Page SEO

Title Tag

The title tag is probably the most important of these factors Look for this in the above website example:

<title> 3-Step Approach to Best Weight Loss Workouts | All Women&#8217;s Talk</title>

It’s the title tag It should contain your main keyword, which in this case it does (highlighted in green) It is the selection of text that usually appears in the top navigation bar of an internet web browser as well as the link in a good search engine result entry It should always contain your most important keywords and if needed your brand as well Generally they will be in the following format

{keyword 1}{keyword 2} | {brand}

If you have to write titles for your pages try to keep them short and sweet

Definitely below 180 characters and ideally below 100, including spaces or

special characters Always spell and grammar check your titles because they will

be your links in the Google search results

Meta Description Tags

Your Meta description is also important It should be between 80-200 characters and contain a few sentences describing your page Ensure you include your keywords and make sure it reads well

Meta Keyword Tags

The keywords tag should look something like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="????????????????????????????">

Your keywords would go where the ?’s are in this example

The Meta keywords tag is simply a comma delimited list of your site’s keywords You should use 100-200 characters which usually equates to around 10

keywords/keyphrases Always use words relevant to the page, which means using keywords that appear in the content of the page they are attached to Our research site doesn’t have meta keyword tags When you research other sites, this is a great way to find out what keywords your competitors are using

Header Tags

Look at <h1 id="mark"> 3-Step Approach to Best Weight Loss Workouts </h1> Your keyword should be within the <h1> header tags In this example it is

(highlighted in green again)

<h2> and <h3> Tags

Very similar to your header tags but more like sub header tags The header tag is the headline on your page, <h2> tags are your sub headlines <h3> tags could

be your bullet points As a guide, you should have one <h1>, 2 or 3 <h2> and 4

to 6 <h3> tags

Bold Tags

Another important aspect of on page optimization is bolding your keyword

through your webpage copy Like this: <b>weight loss workouts</b> Just bold each of your keywords once per page

You can use italics too, like this: <i> weight loss workouts</i>

<alt> Image Tags

If you have images on your website, and you should have, you’ll need to use

<alt> image tags Always name your images after your keyword ie:

weight-loss-workouts.jpg

weight-loss-workouts2.jpg

weight-loss-workouts3.jpg

The <alt> image tags work like the other tags, so:

<alt> weight-loss-workouts2.jpg</alt>

To check if our research site is using alt image tags just right click on a picture and click Properties You’ll see a box like the one below

Under Image Properties you’ll see Alternate Text: 3-Step Approach to Best

Weight Loss Workouts This is the alt tag for that picture

The idea is that you’re giving the search engines even more examples of your keyword Simple

Another quick on-page optimization tip

Always use your keyword near the very beginning of your copy and right at the end On our research site they don’t seem to have done this

We can see from all this that our research site is not optimised as well as it could

be If you take all the above and apply it to your site, you’ll be building on a solid foundation from the start

Analyze the top 4 or 5 sites for your main keyword, then do the same for your other keywords Yes it takes a little effort, but it will pay off in the long run

You may find that all the top sites for your keyword have a high page rank and are well optimized If this is the case you should pick new keywords Once your site is established you can always try and go after the more competitive

keywords

Make it easy for yourself when you’re starting out Get your research and SEO right first time and you WILL see success You’d be amazed how few people do this properly

There’s another great tool you can use to find out what your competitors are doing Knowing what keywords they are using can be especially useful A great site to use for this is www.spyfu.com

Just type a keyword into the search box, click on search and you’ll see a page of info as in the above example It includes the Cost per click range, average clicks

a day, search results and how many people are advertising using the keyword

If you look further down on the right of the screen, you’ll see a list of keywords (below) All this info can be added to your research You can subscribe to spyfu (at a cost) and get loads more functionality