This is critical, ideally you should choose something specific, which will bring good traffic, and not have too many sites competing hard for the first pages.
The easiest free way of optimizing your target keywords is to use Googles Keyword Finder Tool simply enter a keyword into the box that you think suits your site, and google with give you information on how many searches there are monthly, both globally and locally for that particular word. One word keywords are going to be VERY hard to compete on, popular two word phrases will also, so look for a three word combination that suits your site and has good monthly search traffic.
Once you have your target keywords - you can start optimizing your site. You should ideally try to have your keyword in:-
- The URL of the site
- The title meta tag of the site
- The keywords meta tag of the site
- The description meta tag of the site
- At least one Header tag <h1> </h1> for example.
What this means is for the first two hundred words you write on your site you should include the keyword between five and eight times. This should allow your site to seem relevant but not like you are blatantly spamming the target keyword. You also need to keep in mind your human readers - my suggestion is to write for human readers, then use a good keyword analysis tool like SEO Quake to check the density and tweak it a little.
You should also try to include various media on your site, include images and video's and optimise their alternative tag for the keyword. The more content you can include the better, there might be an upper limit, but a 2.5% density keyword distribution that is big enough to include the keyword seven times, will rank higher than one that only has it mentioned twice - all other factors being equal.
Once you are happy with your content, it's time to look at off-page optimization.
Before we go any further - I think it's important to talk about how exactly Google ranks pages. The exact details change with each update - but the principle remains the same. Currently Google has no real competitor - it has a hugely disproportionate percentage of search traffic go through it's engine. For that reason we will talk about Google. Rank well in Google and the other engines will probably fall in line too.
There are two factors which Google looks at the first is 'relevance' and the other is 'authority'. To get good relevance you need the onpage optimization to be excellent, with a good length, good content and a healthy distribution of keywords. You also need incoming links with an appropriately relevant anchor text. Links should be contextual. Google doesn't like link farms or big lists of sites it prefers one or two links embedded in the text on a page with a relevant keyword as the anchor. For example if I wanted to put an SEO boosting link to the blog http://whichairconditioner.blogspot.com/ I wouldn't simply link that as is I would write a sentence with the keyword in it - and use that word for the link instead - hiding the URL. For example:-
It can be difficult choosing which air conditioner to buy , given the current broad range of models on sale.
Google likes this kind of link, it improves relevance.
The next big thing is authority. Authority is how Google perceives the internet to rate a site. A well placed relevant link to a site will pass on a certain amount of 'pagerank' and amongst competing relevant sites, sites with higher authority will rank better. Google itsef is a Page Rank 10 site, You Tube is Page Rank 9. Most high page rank sites guard their 'follow' links very jealously. No Follow links still help relevance, but they do not normally pass any pagerank forwards.
The rank you get from a link depends on the Page Rank of the page where the link is placed, and the number of links on that page. So a page that is page rank 4 and links only to your site might give more rank than a page rank 6 page which links to 2000 sites. Extreme examples - but that's the gist.
The real trick of course is finding places you can create links. Of course you can always create more websites and link from them to your site - but it's believed too many links coming from the same domain, subdomain or even IP address can lessen their worth.
Forums are generally an easy place to put links, but Google doesn't seem to give as much weight to forum links, also blog comments are easy to post - but generally have to be approved and may be no follow. Directories - or paid directories are only allowed to offer no follow links for payment. So they may help relevance if you are listed in the right category - but they are unlikely to feed any page rank through.
Building links is a big challenge for todays web masters, but it's a critical part of any web masters strategy. Well placed links will also generate traffic of their own.
Many people ask me - do one-way links from sites google doesn't approve of, link farms, porn sites etc... Have any negative bearing on my sites performance?
I can't imagine they do - otherwise a simple strategy would be to spam negative links to a competing site until they got penalised enough to drop below you. Instead I think Google simply doesn't count links it doesn't like. that way - trying to sabotage a competitor would penalize you by wasting your time - and trying to use link farms to boost your site would penalize you by wasting your time. This seems the fairest solution - and as far as my own experiments have shown seems to work.
