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Before ever doing any SEO, I always research which keywords I want to target. I’ll use a real world example that I currently hold the #1 ranking for in Yahoo and the #2 in MSN, so you can see how I did it. I’m still waiting on the results for Google, since Google takes so very, very long to rank a site these days. Besides, there are very good reasons for AdSense and YPN publishers to focus on Yahoo and MSN instead of Google in their SEO efforts. More on that in a little bit.

I have a blog called “Feline Photos”, located at: http://felinephotos.blogspot.com/

When I created it I had to decide which keywords would get me the most traffic while not being too difficult to rank for, so I did the research at my favorite research tool, Digital Point’s Keyword Suggestion Tool (it’s free):

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

I entered the term “cat” into the search box to see what I’d get.

Here’s an image of part of the results:

As of the time of writing this tutorial, “cat picture” is getting 1,600 searches a day in Overture. It’s not in the Wordtracker list, but I’m rather more inclined to trust Overture’s search counts since Wordtracker relies on meta tag data and things that really have nothing to do with what people are actually searching for. I like to see the comparison, though, so I use Digital Point’s tool a lot.

Keep in mind that Overture does not deal with plural keywords, it counts the plural searches as singular searches. So I had to stop and think, would people be searching for “cat picture” or “cat pictures” most of the time? In my mind, “cat pictures” seemed like the more natural search query, so I decided to target that as my primary keyword for the blog.

Also keep in mind that the search counts you see are not the exact search counts for the search engines. Sometimes the search engines get a lot more queries than what you see, sometimes a lot less. What you’re more interested in is how the keywords compare to each other in the list. If “cat pictures” gets more searches than “feline pictures” according to Overture, then chances are that “cat pictures” gets more searches than “feline pictures” in the search engines, too.

The Value of a Keyword

In addition to knowing how many times a set of keywords was searched for, it’s extremely important that you focus on the keywords that you know are going to pay well. To research this I used my Keyword Explosion database. Keyword Explosion contains almost 2 and a half million keywords and their AdWords CPC (cost per click) value, as well as how many clicks they receive on a daily basis according to the AdWords Traffic Estimator Tool. Very good stuff for deciding which keywords you should build your site around if you want to make the most money per click.

AdSense SEO tutorial: Step 2: Analyze the Competition

Great, so “cat pictures” gets a lot of searches, but will it be very easy or very difficult to rank for? That’s step #2 for me–analyzing the competition for the search terms I want to target. I do this by going to the search engines and checking the results for the keywords.

I tend to focus on Yahoo first, MSN second, and never really focus on Google because it takes months to rank for anything in Google. Frankly I’d rather focus my efforts on the two search engines that are responsible for 45% of search traffic (Yahoo and MSN) than focus all of my efforts on Google (a common mistake). Google only gets 30% of search traffic, and it takes anywhere from 6 months to a year to rank in Google. I always get ranked in Yahoo and MSN much faster.

So if Google eventually ranks me well due to my efforts with Yahoo and MSN, fine, if not, whatever.

Ok, let’s take Yahoo’s results for “cat pictures” and do a little competition analysis.

Pretend that my blog is not #1 for a bit.

The first thing I noticed is that of the top 10 results, 3 had almost nothing to do with cat pictures at all. There was a site in there about cat health and

cat care, and a cat ezine, etc. That’s a sign that it will be pretty easy to rank for the keywords, because if 3 of the top 10 are ranking for keywords that they obviously are not optimizing for, if I focus my attention and efforts on optimization for the keywords, it’s quite likely I’ll succeed. Also, of the top 10 results, only 3 had the exact phrase “cat pictures” in the title. Having the exact phrase in the title (and especially having the exact phrase BE the title) is a powerful SEO technique, so if only a few of the results have the exact phrase in the title, that’s another sign that competition is light.

Finally, I check the number of in-bound links for the top 3 results. That’s easy to do. Just do a search for “link:http://www.therankingpage.com/”.

Here are the results (again, pretend that my blog isn’t #1 for a second):

1. http://cats.about.com/od/catpictures - 8,070 in-bound links

2. http://www.catanddogpictures.com/ - 5,190 in-bound links

3. http://www.xmission.com/~emailbox/graphics.htm - 2,900 in-bound links At first glance it might look like it’s going to be really difficult to rank for “cat pictures”. I mean, it would take a lot of time and hard work to get 8,000+ in-bound links to compete with about.com’s cat pictures page. And we all know that links are what really matter, right?

Ok, it’s time to dispell a few myths about in-bound links here.

Two Common Myths About In-bound Links

Myth #1: Having tons of in-bound links will automatically rank your site very well.

FALSE.

Tons of in-bound links will only rank your site well if those links contain the keywords that you want to rank for. Moreover, you should have links from content relevant websites. Say you have a site about speed boats. If you get 8,000 in-bound links whose link text is “fast boats”, you might rank very well for “fast boats”, but you won’t rank well at all for “speed boats”–unless there’s just not much competition for the keywords “speed boats”.

Having thousands of people with links that do not contain your keywords will help a little, but quality links that contain the keywords (or better yet, where the link text is the exact keywords) are 50 times more valuable. That means you need 50 times less links to rank well.

So how do you know if a ranking page has in-bound links that are actually related to the keywords you want to target? How do you know if they are really optimizing for the keywords or if they are ranking well only because there’s not much competition?

It’s incredibly important that you know if your competition’s links are targeted to your keywords or not, and there’s an easy way to get this information which I’ll get to in a little bit.

Myth #2: The number of results returned for the “link:” command in a search engine is the number of links that the search engine actually counts toward the ranking of the page.

FALSE.

For the about.com cat pictures page, Yahoo reports 8,070 in-bound links. But I’m going to teach you a powerful little trick to find out how many inbound links Yahoo is applying to the ranking of that about.com page.

Go to the Yahoo search home page:

http://search.yahoo.com/

Click on the “advanced search” link next to the search button.

In the “All of these words” input box, enter the link: command for the about.com page:

link:http://cats.about.com/od/catpictures

Now scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, and change the number of results from 10 to 100, then click the “Yahoo! Search” button.

Oh my God! Now Yahoo shows 10,500 results! I can’t compete with that! Ok, overreaction. Don’t get too worried yet. Scroll down to the bottom of the results page to where it shows the links for the additional search results pages.

Wait a minute. There’s only TWO pages of results! Two pages of results at 100 results per page means… um… 200 links or less. Click on the page 2 link and scroll to the bottom of the results page.

Yup, there are only 170 linking pages listed in the results. Why only 170 when Yahoo shows between 8,000 and 10,000 links in the results figure? The page explains at the bottom: “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ones already displayed.”

There’s your answer: almost all of those 8 to 10 thousand links were considered “duplicate” links by Yahoo. This usually happens when one domain has a link on every page of its site that points to the ranking page.

That domain may have 2,000 pages, and so there might be 2,000 links pointing to the ranking page, so Yahoo includes that full figure in the “Results” count. But it only actually counts a few of those links (or maybe even just one) toward the ranking of the page.

So what you may have thought was really serious competition turns out to be much more moderate. I’m going to compete with a page that has only 170 in-bound links that Yahoo pays any attention to, not a page that has 8 or 10 thousand. That’s much more doable.

But when I did my research, I knew that I didn’t need 170 in-bound links either, because I knew that the links to the about.com page were not well optimized for the keywords “cat pictures”. How did I know that? I’ll tell you all about it in a little bit. Now that I know that I have a good chance to rank for “cat pictures” without too much effort, I’ll move on to the on-page optimization.

AdSense SEO tutorial: Step 3: On-Page Optimization

There are two kinds of search engine optimization: on-page and off-page. On-page optimization is the stuff you do to your actual web page that will help it get ranked. Off-page optimization means stuff that isn’t on the page that affects your ranking (namely, in-bound links). Both are important. For Yahoo and MSN, on-page is more important than it is for Google. Google relies more heavily on links than the other big two, though Yahoo and MSN also weight links heavily.

In this case, I wanted to optimize the home page of the feline photos blog for the phrase “cat pictures”. This is how I normally do this:

• 1. Make sure the domain name contains the keywords.
• 2. Make the title of the page my exact keywords I am targeting, capitalized appropriately.
• 3. Make the very first text on the page the keywords in an H1 (header) tag.
• 4. Put an introductory paragraph that uses the keywords right after the H1 tag.
• 5. If I have a lot of text on the page, break it up with H2 tags that contain variations of my keywords.

Unfortunately, catpictures.blogspot.com was not available, so I couldn’t do #1. Since competition for “cat pictures” was light, I knew that I could get by without worrying about it. But if you are targeting more competitive keywords, make sure that your domain name (or subdomain name) contains the exact phrase you want to rank for. This especially helps for MSN.

Also, I didn’t do number five for my feline photos blog, because being a picture gallery there wasn’t that much text on the page. But I’ll give you more detail on how that works in case your page does have a lot of text. Let’s say that I have an article on pontoon boats that I want to rank for the phrase “pontoon boats”. This is what I would do for the on-page optimization: Try and get a domain name with the words “pontoon boats” in it (www.pontoonboats.com would be perfect). If there isn’t anything available, then setup a subdomain for it (pontoonboats.mydomain.com).

Make the page title “Pontoon Boats”, put the H1 tag at the beginning of the text as “Pontoon Boats”, then break up the article with H2 subheadings like “Maintaining Pontoon Boats”, “Pontoon Boats for Fishing”, “Are Pontoon Boats Fast?”, etc. You don’t want your subheadings to be exactly your keywords like the main H1 heading and the title, but you want the subheadings to contain your keywords.

That’s really all I do with on-page optimization, and as I said before, if the competition is light I don’t always do all five of those things.

There are other things that search engine marketers focus on and spend a lot of time with (things like keyword density and image alt tag density, etc.), but since I don’t try to rank for fiercely competitive keywords I don’t usually bother with all of that. I leave the ranking of really tough keywords to the SEO gurus, because to me it’s just too much dang work.

To me, ranking for really competitive keywords is like owning a boat: it requires far too much time, money and effort to maintain to be worth the end result (going to the lake three times a year–sorry boat owners!). No thanks. I’ll rank for moderately competitive keywords and only have to do a little bit of maintenance every now and again, and by multiplying that effort I’ll earn 10 times the AdSense and YPN revenue that I would if I focused on one tough set of keywords.

AdSense SEO tutorial: Step 4 : Getting Links

Now I’m ready to start getting in-bound links. In-bound links serve two purposes:

1. If it’s a new site, they will get your site crawled by the search engines and put into the index.

2. They will help a site rank well if the link text contains the keywords you’re targeting.

There’s a couple of methods you can use to get in-bound links, but I only use one of them.

• 1. You can pay other sites to link to you.
• 2. You can swap links (called reciprocal linking) with other sites.

When I’m actively trying to get links, I only do number two. I’m told that number one works better than number two because one-way links are more highly valued by the search engines than reciprocal links, but I’ll tell you why I don’t care.

First, though, a little explanation of one way links. A one way link is a link that points from some other site to your site, but your site does not link back to the other site.

The search engines value one-way links more highly because they figure it’s not just “artificial” link trading going on, but that somebody has given you a real live “vote” for your site without you asking for it–the greatest compliment.

Yes, one way links are more valuable. But I don’t care. Why not? First of all, as I said before, I don’t go after fiercely competitive keywords, so usually reciprocal links work just fine. Secondly, if you have a quality site with quality content, after getting some reciprocal links into your site and getting some visitors, people will start to link to your site with one way links, and you won’t have to pay for those! If you decide to go my route and do reciprocal linking, here are the steps you need to take to do it right:

• 1. Do a search at the engine you want to rank for using the keywords you want to rank for.
• 2. Go to each page that ranks well and email the webmaster offering to trade links.
• 3. Once you’ve emailed all of them, do the link: command on each of those ranking pages and email all of the webmasters who link to those pages to see if they will link to you, too.

If it sounds like an enormous amount of work, that’s because it is. Well, it is if you do it all manually. But if you know me at all, you know that I hate to do things manually. I guess that’s the programmer in me coming out–I want to automate everything.