-
20
Jun
When it comes to ranking a website on the search engines there are a lot of things we can do to increase our chances of ranking, but if the website doesn’t have some age and trust behind it, it becomes a lot harder to rank the website no matter how competitive or un-competitive a keyword is.
If I was trying to rank a new site for a keyword like New York Web Design then I would start by looking at onsite optimization first.
So…let’s say I was about to launch a new website and wanted to make that website rank for New York Web Design.
First thing I would do is make a couple onsite tweaks to my site and I’d keep in mind that these are tweaks made site wide and not just to my home page.
Title Tags – I believe that title tags are one of the most important parts of onsite optimization, second only to a websites URL. For maximum optimization I would focus on putting my PRIMARY keyword (New Your Web Design) into the title tag of the page I wanted to rank for the keyword New Your Web Design.
Header Tags are too easy to add not to add them. I would add <h1> <h2> and <h3> tags. This tells search engine spiders what I feel is important and it also helps to draw attention to a specific thought whenever a human visitor lands on that page.
Image Tags Once again, extremely easy to add and since the search engine spiders are unable to identify text that is contained within images itself, this tells them what the image is about. I would add keywords specific to my New York Web Design page as the image can also rank in the search engines and I’ve seen images get more searches then some keywords get.
Keyword Location I always put my keywords in the order in which I want to rank. Other words, if I have a page that I am trying to rank for website designers and web designs and web designers is the more important keyword to me then I’ll have web designers show up first in the title, header tags and text on that page.
Anchor Text internal linking is very important and I try to rotate my internal anchor text from one page to the next. Other words I use varying anchor text, so that I am able to rank one page for multiple keyword phrases.
I’ll also get links coming into those pages from different campaigns like but not limited to, article marketing, video marketing, blog marketing and even forum marketing to name a few.
Site Structure
The structure of my website is vital to my SEO traffic. A properly structured website has the content organized into categories. The article inside each category will have more relevance because it is properly themed.
Each category will have a directory inside it and all articles will be contained in that category.
The idea is to build a website that is organized like a pyramid. My main keyword would be at the top of the pyramid and the site would break down into more specific keywords as I moved down the pyramid.
For example, the main page might be insurance and the first set of categories could be car insurance, boat insurance, and life insurance and so on. Going into car insurance I could have Atlanta Georgia car insurance, Miami Florida car insurance and inside those folders I would have best prices on car insurance in Miami Florida, best prices on car insurance Atlanta Georgia and so on and so on.
Keeping in mind that every page I add to my website starts off with some kind of PR it wouldn’t take long to have built a website that has the ability to rank itself for most specific keywords.
The keywords that were a little harder to rank for I’d add a little outside link juice to in order to help boost those and then that link juice would flow through the site helping all the other pages on the site as well.
And since I’ve started talking about keywords I want to get a little deeper into the type of keywords I start off trying to rank for. You see with a new website I’ve found that targeting buyer keywords is the best way to start. These are keywords that are typed in when people have already done their research and are ready to make a purchase.
For example if someone has just bought a car and is looking for insurance their search might go something like this.
Let’s say our guys name is Bill and Bill is from Atlanta Georgia and has just bought a new car and is looking for insurance.
Bill goes to Google and does a search for insurance, after looking through the top ten results he is overwhelmed by all the different types of insurance. We have life insurance, home insurance, health insurance, boat insurance, flood insurance and the list goes on and on.
So…Bill returns to Google and does a search for car insurance.
This is almost what Bill is looking for and he is getting a good idea on prices but he’s still not happy with the results.
So…once again Bill returns to Google and does a search for best prices on car insurance.
Now Bill is finding exactly what he is looking for and he is almost ready to make purchases but before he does…
He returns to Google to make one more search and this time its best prices on car insurance in Atlanta Georgia.
The more precise the keyword phrase the easier it becomes to rank and the more likely the searcher is to convert into a buyer.
A lot of times people will first look for a solution to a problem and once that solution is found they will start looking for product names to make the purchase.
If someone is looking for a cure for arthritis the first search might be “Best Arthritis Cure” once they narrow the search down to a couple products the will begin searching Google for those products.
The searcher goes back to Google and types in keyword phrases like: ‘Product XYZ Review’ OR ‘Buy
product XYZ’, or simply ‘Product Name’.
It is at this stage that our searcher is ready to make a purchase and these are the keywords that are easy to rank for. And it is these types of keywords that cause conversion to increase and money to be made with a site.
The best part about ranking for these types of keywords is that we don’t need to sale the product. The searcher is looking for information so an information page with a buy now link is all we need.
With the keywords the idea is to go after the extremely specific easy to rank for search terms add pages to our site and double back on the less specific keywords once we’ve built up a powerful website.
Building Traffic with Backlinks
Once I’ve got the onsite stuff set up like I want I’ll move into playing with Backlinks. One of the things I’ll do at this point is to set up a blog, and when I start doing blog commenting I’ll funnel some of those links back to my blog.
A blog comment is normally a low PR comment that is mixed in with a lot of other comments, which devalues the outgoing link even more due to all the other outgoing link. And if that’s not bad enough a lot of blogs kick out your comment as spam if you use anything other than your name as the anchor text.
What I’ll do is funnel those comments into my blog and then from my blog link to the pages I am having trouble ranking with the keyword I want to rank for as anchor text.
Something else I’ll do is find some powerful blogs in my niche and see if the blog owners allow guess posting. This is one of the best ways to drive traffic as well as get a link back to the page on my site that I am needing some link juice for.
And I’ll also find some forums out there that I can start posting on as well.
There are a lot of ways to drive traffic to a website, the only reason I started with search engine traffic is because it is a lot more targeted then just about anything else. Trying to rank for a keyword like New York Web Design isn’t a bad place to start although I would think that starting with something like New York Web Designer might get you better traffic.
Tags: New York Web Designnone








