Don’t Fear The Search Engines!

Step 1: Positioning (a.k.a. search term selection)

Let’s start with a quick definition: “Search terms” are the words and phrases that people type into search engines. For example, if I go to Google.com and type in “pokemon cards,” that’s a search term.

To get traffic from search engines, you need to know what people are searching for, and who you’re competing against. This sounds very basic, but it’s important. Search term selection really boils down to finding a balance between popularity, targeting, and competition.

Realtors, for example, might be tempted when they discover how many people search for “real estate,” and believe that this is a perfect set of keywords but they would be mistaken. That’s a very popular search term, but unless you sell real estate all over the world, it’s not specific enough to reach your target audience.

Some folks can come up with good, targeted search terms with nothing more than common sense, but I prefer to do my homework. The best way to do this on your own is with the Wordtracker service (http://www.wordtracker.com), which allows you to find popular search terms, and investigate the competition.

If you aren’t interested in doing it yourself, you can hire someone to do the research for you, and get a report back that tells you which search terms are the most popular, and which will be the easiest to compete for. I offer keyword reports through one of my websites (http://www.seoresearchlabs.com), and you can find any number of competing services by looking up “keyword research” on your favorite search engine.

Step 2: Optimization

“Optimizing” simply means putting the keywords you’ve selected onto your web pages in the right places, with the right formatting. That’s all it means. There’s a great deal of misinformation about this subject, so let me set the record straight: optimizing is the easiest part of this process.

How easy is it? Well, I can tell you 90% of what you need to know in just a few lines, and there’s a good chance that you’ll never need to learn the rest. Once you see what you can accomplish, though, you’ll probably want to learn more.

The first thing to understand is that you should only use 1-2 search terms to optimize each page. Once you’ve selected a page to optimize, and the search terms you’re going to use, all you have to do is put those words in the right places, and you’re done.

Where the search terms go:
1. Your page’s