1. Make A Master Keyword List
Your first step is to make a master list of the keywords you wish to target. Obviously these should be closely related to the theme of your site. Check the keyword competition by seeing how many sites are listed in Google for that keyword. Webmasters also check the Google PageRank of the sites that hold the top 10 positions. If all those sites are PR6 and above it may be hard to get ranked high for your keywords.
2. Choose Related Keywords
Once you have your master list of keywords, find long tail related keywords to target. Again, check out the competition and daily searches made for each chosen keyword.
3. Use Quality Content For Your Keywords
Creating quality content should always be your main goal. Write for actual visitors who will see and read your content. First and foremost you must have good useful content that your visitors will use themselves and recommend to their friends or colleagues. Tie this quality content in with your chosen keywords. Use one keyword phrase per page.
4. Keyword In Domain Name, Title and URLs
Having your keyword in your domain name will score big points from search engines. Plus, each page of content should contain your keywords in the title & meta tags for that page. Most experts also suggest you have your keyword in the URL and use hyphens to separate your keywords. Although the author has gotten good results by using an underscore and htm in URLs.
Example: www.yoursite.com/your_keyword.htm
5. Do On Page Optimization
Keyword ratio is a much discussed topic by SEO experts and many suggest you should have your keyword in the H1 or headline title of your page. Sprinkle your keyword and variations of it throughout your page. Don’t over do it but make sure the robot/spiders will clearly discover what your page is about. Many webmasters make sure they include their main keyword in the first and last 25 words on their pages.
6. Use Traffic Modules
One technique that works extremely well in Google is clustering a closely related topic or subject into a distinct separate section on your site. For example, if you have a marketing site, you could create a whole section on article marketing where you would have 50 to 100 keyworded pages all relating to your subject. Writing articles, formatting articles, submitting articles, article software… place a keyword linked menu on each page to connect all your pages together.
Keep in mind, your main objective is to supply quality information to your visitors. One reason Google may favor this type of structure is because they want quality content returned in their SERPs.
7. Try Article Marketing
Article marketing is writing short informative articles on keyword topics related to your sites. You then submit these helpful keyworded articles to ezine directories on the web, when your articles are picked up by related sites you receive quality One-Way links. The higher the quality of your article, the more links you will receive.
Another ranking tactic to use, if you’re just starting out your site will probably have a low PR rank and you will find it hard to rank for even modest keywords. That’s why it’s useful to take advantage of the higher PageRank of the major ezine directories. Your keyworded articles on these high PR sites will get picked up by Google and displayed in the top 10 rankings. Now the displayed URL will be the article directory site but the links in the resource box will be pointing back to your site. Over time this article marketing technique will raise your own site’s rankings for those keywords. Simple but effective.
8. Anchor Text And One Way Links
Off page optimization is important in obtaining high rankings in Google. Getting quality One-Way links is very important. Anchor Text simply refers to “the underlined clicked on words” in your links. Most webmasters include their keywords in their anchor text as this tells the search engines exactly what the links are about.
9. Tags, Blogging And Web 2.0
Take advantage of Web 2.0 by using blogs, RSS feeds and the social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Digg. Try AddThis.com for a simple social bookmarking system. At the very least your site should have a blog and RSS feed attached to it as this is an effective way of boosting your keyword rankings.
