Search Engine Optimization – Get it right from the start!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and this method enables you to promote your blog over the Internet for free. According to this, your content should be keyword-rich so that its relevance can be easily recognized and indexed by search engine robots (or crawlers, spiders).

Your goal is to organically (naturally) rank high in search engines, so you need to implement certain SEO strategies, and keywords will play an important role in those.

The purpose of your keyword research is to discover how your prospective customer is utilizing search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc) to find information, services or products that they want. You then take those keywords and use them on your site to ensure its relevancy for your target audience.

As you reading this post I assume that you either have your own blog and need to improve your search engine rankings, or you’re in the process of creating your own blog and want to be sure that it is search engine friendly from the start.

Let’s talk about the first steps towards achieving a good ranking in the search engines.

I would recommend that you do the following:

1) Think about of all the keywords that people may use to find your blog post or page. (Write them down on a list of paper).

2) Once you have this list, go to the Google Keyword tool (it’s free to use but you’ll need an Google account):

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

3) Enter your keywords into the “Word or phrase” box (one per line).

Click on “Advanced options” link and select “All Countries” if your blog has a potential global market. If not, choose your target country.

4) Enter the displayed characters in the “Security Check” box to proceed

5) Click “Search”

6) As you enter your keywords you’ll see a lot of suggestions from Google and you’ll see an estimate of the number of searches that your keyword phrase gets per month on Google.

7) If your keyword phrase have only a small amount of searches per month (eg. a few hundred, or no data at all) then you should either remove them from your list or keep them aside as potential phrases for other posts or pages of your blog.

8) Your goal is to find just one or two keyword phrases for your blog. Choose a phrase that has more than 15,000 under the “Global Monthly Searches” section (more than 500 searches per day).

9) Now that you have your list of phrases go back to Google and type them into search box with quotes (“yourkeyword”) and take a look at the total number of SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) generated by Google. This is the number of blogs (or websites) you are competing with.

I recommend that you should choose a phrase that:

• Fits the target market of your blog
• Has a good number of searches per month (>15,000)
• Has the least amount of competition (<100,000)

Take your time doing this as it is a very important part of SEO.

Go get them!

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