Search Engine Optimization can be done for free without hiring anyone to do SEO for you, make no mistake. Everything that is needed to do proper SEO and move your website up in the SERP's(Search Engine Results Page) is freely available and the only ingredients needed to apply proper SEO is knowledge and time. Everything that follows in this blog is free, however this does not mean I do it for myself for free because I don't. I have spent money on software that helps me cut the time in half for proper SEO, but this does not mean you have to spend one nickle for your own SEO process to have good results. Having these software programs do nothing more than reduce the hours, days and weeks that manual SEO requires. They are not designed to make you rich by pushing a magic button, they are simply tools.
Most people when the have a newly designed website often are excited and ready for the world to see their work of art or if they have a monetized website, they are ready for the money to start rolling in. They submit their site to a few search engines and hope that visitors will mysteriously show up and view or buy whatever is on your site. After a few weeks pass, reality sets in that maybe just submitting their site to the search engines isn't really all there is to getting their site seen by the masses. Then they decide maybe I need to "optimize" my website around my main keywords and this will make people show up. A few more weeks pass, no visitors, no money. A big waste of time!!!
This is the point where people either lose interest and give up or build another website(with the same result). Eventually they figure out that this is not the way to go about getting traffic to their website. It was possible to do this maybe 10 years ago, but not today,folks. The search engines have gotten way smarter as has the competition. To compete today online, you first must learn some very specific procedures as follows.
Let's say we are going to create a golf related website. Before we put one second into creating the site, we must first do keyword research. (I will provide a list of free keyword research tools in a later post along with other free tools). We will place the keyword "golf" in the research tool and the tool will show us a list of golf related keywords. Below are examples of golf related keywords and how often they are searched each day on average for the previous month.
5274 golf
2190 golf clubs
1049 golf tournament gifts
960 mini golf
839 callaway golf
830 golf carts
828 golf wedding favors
822 golf equipment
803 personalized golf balls
790 golf channel
784 topless golf (Very interesting this one)
776 masters golf
757 golf balls
750 golf travel cases
749 golf galaxy
749 golf travel case
747 logo golf balls
649 robin williams golf
638 golf shoes
615 golf masters scores (The Masters Tournament was last month)
I've listed the top 20 results for the main keywords related to golf that were searched the previous month. With exception to a few of the words, most all of these will remain in the top 20 each month. With some SEO tools it is possible to drill down hundreds of keywords related to one specific niche just like golf. There are thousands of different niches that can be built around one root keyword.
In the case of golf, we would not center our website around the specific keyword of golf since the field is way to competitive and it would take more time than most of us have to rank highly for golf, if we ever could for that matter. What we are looking for are what is called "long-tail" keyword phrases. More on this later in the post. If we wanted to rank for golf, we first must search out the competition. We would go to Google and place the word golf in the search query box like this, "golf" in quotes. This tell Google that we only want to search specifically what we put in the query window.
As of this post, there are 501,000,000 websites that show up in the results window on Google for the keyword "golf". I don't know about you, but this appears to be very stiff competition. We now know that we must drill down a little more and find something related to golf that we can rank highly for in the SERP's. We can choose a "long tail" keyword phrase like "logo golf balls".
Logo golf balls is searched on average about 747 times a day or 22,410 times each month with 157,000 competing websites in the SERP's. 157,000 is a whole lot easier to rank for verses 501 million, wouldn't you say? Competitive but not unreasonably so.
Ok, we've settled on our keyword phrase which is the long tailed keyword "logo golf balls". In my next post we will learn how to center our website or blog around our long tailed keyword phrase. Plus, long drawn out articles that border on epic tend to give too much information at once and tend to cause the glazed eye effect for readers. Bookmark Search Engine Optimization Memphis for later updates.
Until then,
Cheers!
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