Before you begin to optimize your site, you need to do some research. There is absolutely no point in you doing lots of hard work only to find out that you have been wasting your time.
It is far better, to find out in advance precisely how many hits your site will receive when you rank for a specific keyword. This is easily done using Google Keyword Tool . This tool will tell you how many people searched in the last month giving you a good idea of potential traffic volumes.
Once you have a list of potential keywords, you will need to choose a few to focus your attention on. If you spread your net too wide you will fail to achieve any of your targets, so concentrate your home page and all your efforts on three or four keywords maximum.
If you carry out a search for the keywords that you have chosen, you will see who is ranking well. We need to analyse these sites in order to beat them. What have they done to their sites? How many backlinks have they got? What is the quality of their backlinks like? Are they one way, reciprocal, high PR, all from different IP addresses etc
You will need to pick fights that you can win. If you think you are going to outrank "Rightmove" any time soon with your brand new site then think again. Having said that, many "Big" brand sites are very beatable in the rankings, so do your research before you decide.
To compare site links I use SEO Elite which will give you a breakdown of all the key indicators of site strength.
Many SEO Companies favour long string search terms due to the lack of competition. What they do is to create hundreds of different pages for you built around 4 - 6 word search terms. Each of these pages might very well rank well due to a lack of competition and the traffic from all of these pages adds up to a reasonable monthly volume.
In reality you will mostly end up with lots of pages that never receive any traffic and a few that receive a trickle of hits.
If you bite the bullet and accept that traffic lives in quite small enclaves online, it becomes a more focused process. If you target high traffic keywords that have significant footfall then the return you are going to receive will outweigh the time and effort you are going to dedicate to the process.
Most people are too general with their webpages. They want their home page to rank for everything and so try to cram in all their keywords. They end up with a page that is far to general in structure to ever rank well for anything.
The whole point of SEO is to think like a search engine. Ask yourself; what is the search engine trying to provide for its searchers? What does it want to show them?
Once you have the answer to that question, all you have to do is to provide it, and then make it seem popular via copious quantities of high quality backlinks.
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