SEO isn’t as complicated as some will make it sound. I am not discounting the art of it and the fact that the people who make a living at it have years of experience that can’t be over looked. However, you don’t need to be a house painter to paint your own house and have it turn out looking pretty good. Let’s start with the most commonly overlooked element of SEO:
A Unified Approach
When Google (or any other search engine for that matter) looks at your site, they want to see a common theme. They want to know what it is that you can offer to visitors and what your main strength is. Imagine that you needed your car worked on, would you rather take your BMW to a do-it-all handy-man or a certified BMW mechanic? Both may posses the BASIC knowledge to do the job, but which would you feel safer with … Google feels the same way. You don't want content that talks about a little bit of everything without ever focusing on one main point. So once you have decided what the point of your website is, you will want to put that into something tangible known as “keywords”.
A keyword is nothing more than the exact phrase or word that you feel applies to you. Not all keywords of course are created equal. Some keywords are so broad that the competition to rank in the top 10 for that keyword is just too much to overcome. Others on the other hand have so few people searching for them on a daily basis that it isn’t worth your time targeting them. The best way to determine what keywords you should be targeting is by using a keyword research tool.
I can’t give a full step by step tutorial on how to use the tools but after poking around a bit you should be able to find some keywords that suit you and will bring enough traffic. So now you have your keywords, you are ready to make your unified approach… but where to put the keywords? Check out the next part in this series soon to come.
