Why SEO is important for your website?

The #1 SEO challenge is to find the best keyword or key phrase around which to build your campaign. Once you have that, you need to optimize your site(s) around that keyword so as to best take advantage of it.

If you can discover the best high-search but low-competition keyword, your Google rank for THAT particular keyword will be tops – and you will automatically attract clickthroughs. In my experience so far, as well as that of others, if you get your keywords right, you can really get some meaningful traffic, if you’re operating in a popular niche.

SEO- Use SEO/keyword optimization techniques to discover the best keywords for your page. To do that, use Google, SpyFu as well as the Google Keyword Tool to start with. There are more tools as well, which I’ll tell you about in due course.

Keywords can be short or long (a.k.a. “key phrases” or “long-tail keywords”), and it goes without saying that the short ones are the toughest to dominate. They’re all taken and you’ll probably never rank very high with any of them. If you have an indie music website, for example, and you thus feel that one of your keywords should definitely be “indie music”, you’ll discover that your page will be listed at the bottom of the search results on page 999,999 – in other words: no one will ever find it!

If your site specializes in really cool new indie music – use THAT very phrase and see what you come up with. I just did and wouldn’t you know “really cool new indie music” returned 6,540,000 results. Not great but already better than the shorter keyword.

We need to get our search results down to something much more manageable. I tried “really cool new indie music that rocks” and I “only” got 330,000 competing results… Hey, we’re getting somewhere now! If we can get under 100,000 we’re in with a chance, and if we can get it down to even fewer – like 10,000 or so – we’re almost guaranteed to get to the top of Google for THAT very phrase. You’ll discover that this exercise can take you quite a lot of time. But if you take it seriously – it can seriously reward you. One note at this point, however: just because you get a popular phrase right, doesn’t mean that it’s worth taking. Use the keyword tool and SpyFu to establish whether there is a lot of competition for it! No competition might mean that nobody’s searching using that phrase!

Once you find a few potential (long) keywords – with low competition – enter them into the analytical tools mentioned above and check how many people search for the component words. You want low competition on the long keyword but high popularity of the whole niche and the individual components of your keyword.

Getting the keyword right means that Google’s organic results will be working for you – FOR FREE. Just remember that EACH PAGE of your website needs its own keywords!

One word of caution: Google doesn’t like single-page websites, so even if you get the best keyword in the world, if all you have is a squeeze page – chances are you won’t get listed high at all. Google loves content sites. For this reason, your squeeze page MAY benefit from at least a few internal links, menus, and such. Some marketers will tell you, however, that this is a distraction and shouldn’t be done. In truth, you can justify both positions. Experiment!

The way around this “squeeze page prejudice” is to place an article with links to your squeeze page on one of those article marketing sites! (Look for insights on those within these pages!). If Google finds your article – people will read it, and your article will direct them to your squeeze page! Just make sure that your article’s title is keyword-rich!

A Few Things To Keep In Mind

Google looks at individual pages, not the whole website

• Compare organic results vs PPC results on a Google results page. Organic results get MORE clicks!

• Top-ranked pages get to the top of the listing

• The right side of the page – sponsored links – tend to get the lowest clicks…! 1 – 2%

• The top portion of the results page  – sponsored links – also get the lowest clicks…! 4 – 6%

• Organic results – NEAR top of the page – get the most clicks (ca. 30%)

• Google wants their customers to be happy & trust them so results must be pertinent

• Site content is king

• Backlinks (web page pointed to by other sites) – with one-way links being the most valuable.

• Google doesn’t like squeeze pages

• Write a keyword-rich article – eg eZineArticles.com; then give it to a popular website – the same article as on your squeeze page. If you’re on a PAGE at EzineArticles Google will respect that and your *article* will appear on top (which leads to your squeeze page via your signature under the article).

• Twitter posts can appear on top of Google as well!

• A Few More Things To Keep in Mind, Regarding Keywords

• Research: discover which words will be most profitable

• Most popular – not necessarily most intuitive – to you

• Use Google Keyword Tool to discover how many searches a keyword gets

• Then proceed to discover the competition for this keyword

• Look for – high searches but low competition

• Long/short-tail keywords: short keywords mean lots of competition!

• Find profitable long-tail keywords.

• Use Google AdWords Keyword Tool! Anything over 2000 is potentially a profitable keyword

• To find what your actual competition is, go back to Google and type keywords in quotation marks. This will list ### pages that match.

• Millions of results are too many – less than 60,000 is probably “low competition” for keywords.

• Each page of a website needs specific (good) keywords!

• A Squeeze Page doesn’t get to the top of Google because it’s a 1-page website – Google loves content, i.e. a page from a bigger site. But an article can easily get to page 1! Just remember: keyword-rich article title is key.