SEO Help for Beginners

When you build a house, the most important part is the foundation. It’s easy to get caught up in making it look nice, with hardwood floors and fresh paint. It turns out that building internet content, whether it be a website, blog or article, is much like building a house. The decorations (pictures, formatting, etc.) are nice, but what you really need is the foundation.

There are a few key things that go into the foundation of your internet content.

First, you need to know who you’re trying to attract (your target market) and what you’re trying to accomplish (inform, educate, sell, etc.). Another critical part of your foundation is identifying your “targeted keywords”. If you skip this step, then people won’t find your content and all the hard word you’ve put into your information and design, will be for not. Targeted keywords are at the heart and soul of SEO, or search engine optimization.

SEO is a pretty complicated subject and taget keywords is just one part of the puzzle. I’m not an expert at SEO but one of my greatest strengths is making sense of complicated information. I would like to share some insights I have gathered about SEO in the hopes it will give you a more solid foundation for your house (or internet content).

I’ll be sharing this information over the course of a few articles, because digesting it all at once can be overwhelming. I hope you’ll join me on this journey and share your insights with others along the way.

Let’s get started with defining SEO. It is commonly understood as a strategy to achieve higher rankings on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The goal of SEO is to optimize your site for search engines, so that it brings targeted traffic to your site.

Targeted traffic means people who are actually looking for your products or services. Targeted traffic is much more likely to increase conversion, namely turn visits into sales or encourage repeat visits.

A big part of understanding SEO is identifying your “targeted keywords”. A keyword is a word used in performing a search online. A keyphrase is a collection of words people use when searching online. People tend to string keywords together into keyphrases to make their searches more targeted.

To be really good at SEO you need to identify your “targeted keywords”.

This means keywords that your target market would be looking for. Pick words you personally would use if you were looking for a page about your topic. Also use keyphrases instead of just words on their own.

There are two advantages to using targeted keywords vs. broad keywords.

First, you will have less competition with “targeted keywords” vs. using broader keywords. Second, you are more likely to convert to sales, because you’re attracting people who are looking for what you have to offer.

For instance, say you are promoting a network marketing training program. If you use the keyword “network marketing” you will have tremendous competition. If you are more targeted with your keywords and use “network marketing training”, you will not only have less competition but will have a higher conversion rate because you are attracting people who are looking for what you have to offer. Yes, the number of people searching for each of the more focused phrases is lower, but your chances of success are far greater.

If your site is relatively new, a good idea is to focus on some key phrases that you know will be easy to get the top-spot for. As your site and visitor-count grows, you can use broaders keyword terms. It’s important to pick up some momentum before you go for any highly competitive searches.

Another important tip is to not spam the search engines.

If you cheat by adding in tons of keywords that don’t pertain to your page, then you will not only make the search engines angry, but the visitors who come to your page will be equally annoyed.

In the next article, we’ll look at some resources for identifying targeted keywords and explore what search engines are looking for.

Please be sure to leave your comments, thoughts and suggestions.

Thanks!

Cindy Schulson helps solo entrepreneurs find and attract their ideal niche so they can market themselves authentically and get faster results. Finding the right key words is an important part of attracting your niche -- you have to understand what keywords your target market is looking for. 

Get Cindy's free report "Ten Steps to Finding and Attracting Your Ideal Niche" for a step-by-step guide that will help all of your marketing be laser focused.