Website Development

Have you heard someone mention “natural search engine ranking” and wonder what that means?  Well, there are two ways to show up on the search engine results pages (SERPS). The first way, which is the easy way, is to pay for placement.  If you do a search using Google, the links you see on the right hand side of the page are there because an advertiser has bid on the search term you used.  Depending on the competition for the search term the advertiser could pay anywhere from a few cents to many dollars for each click they recieve from that paid placement.

The second type of ranking is natural search engine ranking.  To be ranked in the search engines naturally takes some time and often a great deal of effort.  The goal of a search engine is to provide relevant results to the user.  The more relevant the results, the better the search engine.  Probably the biggest reason Google is the number one search engine is because they provide the most relevant results.  To determine what is relevant, they use a sophisticated algorithm.  No one knows for sure outside of Google what that algorithm is exactly, but most people agree that it takes quality content and quality backlinks to achieve natural search engine ranking. 

Google is now including their search data in their external keyword search tool.  This is great news and a valuable new tool that you can use to find great keywords. 

Here is the link

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You may or may not be familiar with keywords.  If you are not then you definately need to keep reading.  Keywords in a nutshell are the words that people type into a search engine when looking for a website.  When you build a website you need to take into account these keywords and incoporate them into your site.

To find keywords you can use a free tool such as:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Let’s say you have a site about gardening.  Using the above tool, when you type in the word “gardening” and hit enter.  You see a list of the top keyword phrases people type into searches that include the word “gardening”.   Here are the top 10 results that were returned today:

The number on the left represents how many times the keywords are searched for a day.  Some keyword tools show the number of searches a month but this particular tool is by day.  As you can see, the keywords “organic gardening” recieve well over 5,000 searches a day.  According to these results “organic gardening” is searched more than just the term “gardening” by itself. 

Before we decide to target those keywards let’s see what kind of competition there is for the keywords “organic gardening”.  Go to Google and perform this search “intitle:organic gardening” (without the quotes). By using “intitle:” in front of the keywords you can see how many webpages are really targeting those keywords by using them in their title.  Today there are 320,000 pages with that keyword in the title.  That is a pretty big number to compete with just starting out. 

Let’s see if there is something with less competition that may be easier to rank well for in the search engines.  Try using the “intitle:” search for the keywords “square foot gardening”.  Today, there are 24,000 pages with “square foot gardening” in the title.  That is a much more reasonable number to compete against when just starting out and learning the basics of search engine optimization.

There are not hard and fast rules, but generally speaking you should be targeting keywords with more than 200 searches a day and as little competition for those keywords as possible. 

There is no point in having a website if no one is visiting it.  A great way to get backlinks and possibly a few vistors is to write articles.  You want to keep your article around 500 words and pick a topic related to your website.  Once you have an article written you can submit it to article directories.  Some of the top ones include:

EzineArticles.com
GoArticles.com
ArticleDashboard.com
Amazines.com
ArticlesBase.com

Dont forget to include links in your article back to your website!