The process of getting good search engine listings is really based on how your site is built. Hopefully you are reading this before you even started building your site. If not, then be prepared to make some significant changes to what you have already done.
The first thing you need to do is decide what search terms you would like your site to be found under. Make a list of 30 - 50 different phrases that you think someone would use if they were looking for a site like yours or for the products you sell or the services you offer. Those phrases should consist of 2, 3, 4, or possibly 5 words in each phrase. Those phrases are called keyword phrases. Your list can and should contain variations of the same phrase, such as plurals or compounded words. An example of this would the phrases search engine listing and search engine listings. The "s" can sometimes make a big difference in the amount of traffic you'll get from a particular listing.
Next, you need to find out how many of the keyword phrases on your list are ones that other people have actually searched for recently. Just because you think they are good doesn't mean that the general public will use them. So you need to do some investigating to weed out the bad ones.
Currently there are only a few ways to find out if the keyword phrases on your list are any good. There are tools available that can access the databases of the major search engines and tell you approximately how many searches were done for any particular keyword phrase during the previous 30 - 60 days. The best tool is totally free, for now, and one other that is quickly gaining recognition is free to try in a limited way.
The Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture.com) Listing Suggestion Tool. The link to this tool is a must have for any website owner. This wonderfully simple, totally free tool works just like a search engine. You enter the keyword phrase of your choice into the search box and in a few seconds it shows you how many times that keyword phrase was searched for across all the networks that use their results. Again, this tool is currently totally free for anyone to use. But that could change at any time since it was originally created for paying clients. Yahoo Search Marketing is a pay-per-click advertising option offered by Yahoo which means website owners bid to get the best position in their results. We discuss how to best use those types of search engine listings in a different lesson. We're working on free search engine listings now. Click Here To See The Search Phrase Suggestion Tool. The page will open in a new window. Be sure to add it to your bookmarks so you can easily get back to it later.
Enter all of your keyword phrases and write the number of times it was searched for on your list next to each phrase.
The other tool that many professional webmasters like to use is called WordTracker. It provides results in a similar way as the Yahoo tool does, but in addition it combines them in a report with the results of the next step in your lesson. WordTracker also gets its information from a variety of search engine databases. However, WordTracker is a little more difficult to use and it only offers a free trial with limited results information. To get the most out of it you'll want to use the paid version. We tried it and were impressed by the results. But it took us some time to learn how to best use it and we decided to just stick with the Yahoo tool for now since it is still free. You should check it out and also bookmark the page for future use in case Yahoo starts charging to use their tool. Click Here For The WordTracker Homepage.
*New - We have found a single tool that combines both of the above tools into 1. Use it here - Digital Point Keyword Tool. Digital Point also offers a tracking tool that is useful for quickly checking on where your site ranks for the search phrases you are targeting. We'll cover that in more detail later. For now, work on getting your list of target phrases figured out.
Hopefully you now have your list of 30 - 50 keyword phrases with the number of times each phrase was searched for during the previous calendar month. Any phrase that was searched for 30 times or less should be scratched off your list. Optimizing any part of your site for those keyword phrases would be a waste of your time since their average potential visitor count for any given month would be less than 1 visitor per day. Now re-write your list with the remaining phrases and put them in order from most searched to least searched.
You are now ready for the next step toward getting good search engine listing placement. The next step is determining how many other sites are competing for each phrase remaining on your list.
Click Here to learn how to gauge your competition - Part 3
