Introduction
The key to ranking high in and recieving traffic from the search engines is to optimize your site for specific keyword phrases that are not too competetive but still recieve enough traffic to make it worth your time to try to rank high for. If you try to go after the most popular keywords you will find your site buried several pages in the search results and recieve little if any traffic as a result. Too many sites will be competing for the most popular keywords. Your time is better spent going after less popular phrases that may have been overlooked but still recieve a considerable amount of traffic. It is better to rank #1 or #2 for a specific keyword phrase such as "stock market investing tips" than to rank #100 for a more general keyword such as "stocks". "Stocks" may be searched for a lot more often but if you are buried so far down in the search results you won't get any traffic from it anyway. Below is a step by step guide to help you get traffic from the search engines.
Step One: Make a list of targeted keyword phrases
What is it that your site has to offer and what will people that want what you have to offer likely be searching for in the search engines? As you think about this begin to make a list of possible phrases that your potential visitors will be searching for. Be as specific and targeted as possible. If you sell philosophy books on your site then a possible phrase could be "Medieval philosophy books". Don't write just "Philosophy" as that would be too general.
After you have made your list of possible keyword phrases narrow down the list to the phrases that you really want to target. Use keyword research tools such as the keyword selector tool, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery to find the keyword phrases that will be most worth your time to go after.
Step Two: Create an optimized page for each keyword phrase on your list
Many people trying to rank high in the search engines make the mistake of trying to optimize for too many keywords on any one page. It is a better strategy to just stick with optimizing for one keyword phrase per page. By focusing on one phrase you are more likely to rank high for that particular phrase and you may get lucky and rank high for other related keyword phrases at the same time. If you want to rank high for more than just one phrase then just create an additional page for each phrase you would like to rank high for.
You have already made a list of keyword phrases so now all you have to do is create a page for each of those phrases. Each page should provide information about the keyword phrase that it is being optimized for. In order to fully optimize each page your keyword phrase should be included in the title, heading, and naturally within the text of the page. If possible the file name of your page should also be your keyword phrase. If your keyword phrase were "Music tune downloads" an appropriate file name for that page would be Music-tune-downloads.html.
Step Three: Obtain quality backlinks to each of your pages
The third and most important step in ranking high in the search engines is to obtain links from outside sites. The more links the better, but you should focus your efforts on sites that themselves have many links pointing to them, because the search engines place higher value on links from those sites. The amount of links that a site has pointing to it is called link popularity.Google uses a ranking system called PageRank to measure the link popularity of each page. Do a search for "Pagerank tool" or download the google toolbar to find out the pagerank of specific pages. Don't rely to heavily on PageRank to determine a pages worth, though. It is more important to obtain links form sites that are relevant to yours than.
Credits to: Chris Sandberg
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