When establishing an online presence the very first thing you simply must do is consider how to implement SEO strategies. Whether you have recently established your own website and are wondering where is the traffic, or if you are about to start putting together a new website; the choice of words on your site will make or break you. The very first strategy you should implement and be focusing on carefully is what keywords you will use for your website.
Doing keyword research is fairly straight forward, and wont even take you very long to do, but done well it can make all the difference between your website sitting at the bottom of the search engine rankings, or shooting to the tops of the search engine lists. There are software tools available to help you with this process, and they can help you select a good keyword or keyword phrase to implement into you web content.
Start by entering your keyword into the keyword tool and you will receive a list of results for how many times that particular keyword was searched in a given search engine. A good tool with also give you a list of keyword phrases built around your keyword. Once you have done this, you want to find the phrases that have a moderate amount of traffic and that are relevant to your product or service. The reason these keyword phrases are helpful is because they narrow the field you are competing against in your bid to drive traffic to your site. By implementing these keyword phrases you can start to make these a part of your onpage optimization.
What is onpage optimization? This phrase is simply referring to how you select and arrange the elements that make up your page. This includes the domain name you choose and the headings and page titles that you create. One way to implement a successful onpage optimization plan is to sneak a peek at what your competitors are doing. Using a search engine such as Google, do your own search and see who is on page one and what they are doing with their sites.
A relatively easy way to start is by looking at their source pages. This can take you a bit into the technical territory, but even if you arent totally savvy with programming or html code, dont be too quick to put this one in the too hard basket. Finding out the information you need to know is fairly straight forward. Go to the site and select the view menu of the browser window and then select source in the drop down menu. When you do this a notepad file will open containing the html code for the page. To quickly locate the page elements in the file, simply open the find tool, select it under the edit menu, and look for the main elements used in onpage optimization. The short list below shows some of the coding to look for and explains what they mean:
o header tags are placed before the headings. Look hear to see if the headings contain the keywords of interest
o title tags are these should indicate if the keywords have been used in the page name in the top bar of the browser window
o b, i or u are the html tags that show bold, italics and underlined respectively. A quick search will tell you if this has been done with the keywords on the page
Once you start working out how to select effective keywords and how to optimize them on page, you are ready to get your page climbing the search engine ranks. If you know how to analyze what trends are strong with site viewers, and what you competitors are doing, then it is a real possibility for you to get your site doing it even better than the competition
