SEO Tips & Keywords

Before you start building your website, keyword research is a crucial step that you must perform. Why is it so crucial? How will people find you?

What’s More Risky: SEO or PPC?

Two of the most popular traffic building strategies are SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click advertising). Both of these rely on search engines. There’s been so much talk that PPC is so great because SEO techniques get smashed when an SE algorithm changes.

For those of you following the search engine news, PPC is also at risk as well. PPC rules change as well. When these rules change, it’s possible for your cost to increase. When costs increase, there’s an increased probability that your traffic will drop if you’re not will to pay for it.

So knowing that search engines play a huge role in building traffic to a site, you have to gather keywords first. Not just any keywords or phrases, but ones that have a low supply and a high demand. This will help you to increase your ranking.

Killer SEO Tools

There’s a variety of tools you could use. I’m using a combination of Keyword Elite and Keyword Discovery. Keyword Discovery has a database of over 32 billion searches – which gives a good representation of what people are searching for.

There are also free tools available. Nichebot is my favorite free keyword research tool. Jim Morris, the creator of Nichebot is always looking for ways to enhance his service. Jim has been working on some killer keyword manipulation tools. Keep you eyes open for a new Nichebot update.

Get Your Site Into The Top 10!

With both of these tools, there’s a R/S ratio (Results to Searches). I like this ratio better than KEI. It’s simple and easy to understand. The close you are to zero, the less competitive the keyword is.

The next thing to do is pull up keywords that have less results. I would rather target something that had 10,000 competitors than 1 million. The free version of Nichebot doesn’t allow to to easily search for these keywords, unless you’ve gathered multiple thousands in your keyword basket. Keyword Elite allows you to filter your list.

For filtering and sorting, the best tool I’ve found is Dr. Andy Williams Keyword Results Analyzer (aka KRA). Although you could sort and filter using Keyword Elite or MS Excel, KRA allows you to have multiple filters all at once. You could then stack layers of filtering by using colors. It’s a great time saving tool if you’re working on keyword research a lot.

So once you’ve gathered your keywords, you can sort them, and pick out the ones that have less competition. If you thought this process has been tedious so far, the next step is keyword theming.

Using Theme Optimization

When you theme a site, you’ll want to gather relative keywords and then use the unique elements of them.

For example, let’s say you’re site is based on life insurance.

Then you could have a page focused on term life insurance. Let’s look at a few related keywords.

return of premium term life
ROP insurance
cheap term life insurance quotes

In this hypothetical scenario, you’re uniques for “term life” would be:
ROP
insurance
cheap
quotes
return
premium

So then, you would have an article with these uniques spread throughout it – along with the primary keyword “term life” close to the top – and also in the title. If you’re not willing to build this list of uniques, Keyword Results Analyzer builds themes automatically.

Is That All There Is To It?

Now these are some of the on site optimization techniques that you can use. Although it’s a good idea to optimize your site, optimizing outside of your site is the key. Search engines consider how other sites view yours. So keep an eye out for Off Site SEO Strategies in the coming week.