SEO (search engine optimization) is a process where a website is designed with the intent of having the search engines recognize the site as having proper, relevant content and setup to rank highly when someone searches for the terms that describes the website.
For example, say that the search term in the search box of a search engine is “growing the best tomatoes”. The goal is to optimize, or build a website around, that keyword phrase in order to rank the website highly. When people search for a term they like to get good information quickly, that is why search engines are so popular.
Keyword Research
The first thing to do is to find out how many people are searching for the term you want to build your site around, and also find out what the competition is. To do that, we can use a free tool that Google provides called the Google Keyword Search Tool. We can input our term and we might find that 9500 people search for that term in a month and there is medium competition.
We would design our website around that word or phrase by including it in the title of the webpage, and several times in the body of the first page of the website. The keyword phrase might even be broken down into other sub phrases like “Growing the best delicious tomatoes”, or “How to grow the best delicious tomatoes”. You could even develop different websites on these different terms, if there are enough people searching for that information.
Publicize Your Site
Once the website is designed and built, you need to publicize it. There are several ways to go about this.
- Article Directories – You could start writing articles about the website, and publishing them in article directories such as Ezinearticles, Goarticles, Squidoo, Digg, and Hubpages. The article directories will have an authors box at the end of the article for you to put a link, which links back to your website. A link shows the search engines that there is interest in what you are doing, and it scores good points with the search engines.
- Guest Posting – Another good strategy is to make “guest” blog posts on high-ranking blogs about tomatoes. You would be surprised how many blogs will accept a guest post if it is intelligently written and thoughtfully contributes to the theme that the blog is promoting. You can find blogs that will let you guest post by searching for something like “Write for us tomatoes”. The more blogs you post on and the more articles that you write, the higher the chances are that the search engines will rank you more highly.
- Social Media – You would also want to spread the word about your blog on Social Media sites. Talk about it, with a link back to it, on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, or any of the 100s of social sites out there.
The whole concept of the keyword and the niche that you choose for your subject matter is to find an area where there is a lot of demand for the keyword or keyword phrase, yet there is little competition in the way of websites that are promoting that keyword. This will make your website rise to the top and stay there. Keep in mind, however, your niche does not have to be low competition. You want a niche that has buyers, and some niches have low competition simply because there are too few buyers in the niche. You do want to look for low-competition keywords or keyword phrases within that niche.
You must have good content on your website pertaining to your keyword. It must be relevant and informative because that is what the searcher wants and that is what the search engine wants. When all of those moving parts work together you will have a winner and your website will rank well.
The statistics show that in order to have anyone really notice your site, it should rank in the top five on the first page of the search engine. While it may seem impossible for that to happen, by following the foregoing procedures, your chances are greatly improved that it could happen to you.
