photo credit: Matter = Energy

This is the ninth and final post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

Whew! You made it! You rock!

By now you have some serious DIY SEO for WordPress tools in your toolbox to help you get the attention of the search engines. By no means are you now an SEO expert – sheesh, neither am I – but you’ve got the basics now and let me tell you what – that’ll take you far.

Here’s the Catch

Fat lot of good all these new skills will do you if you don’t use them!

Oy. There’s always a catch.

I’m not going to get all preachy on you, but seriously…now that you know what to do to improve your exposure and rankings in the search engines, doesn’t it make sense to actually do it? You can’t claim you don’t know how anymore, right?

Christa at GiggleOn.com is now ranked #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5 in Google for her tag line. Smart girl – she’s working on her branding, obviously.

Tom at DelightfulWork.com has 3 of his keyword phrases with top listings in search results, and one of them, while it’s #13 in Google, is #2 in Windows Live search and #5 in Yahoo. Go on with your bad self, Tom!

Get the Handy Checklist

I know all this might seem a bit overwhelming when you think about applying all these tips and tricks to your posts, but I’ve made a handy little checklist to help you. It’s free for subscribers, so subscribe to my RSS feed or get updates by email so you can download it.

I’ve laid everything out in an easy to follow format and it’s all on one page, so you can print it out and hang it up for easy reference, or you can print one out for each page/post you write. All the posts in this series are listed, so if you forget what the heck keyword density actually is, for example, you don’t have to hunt all over creation to get back to the explanation. It’s right there…and clickable (the checklist is a PDF file, so if you view it on your computer, the links in it are clickable.)

The Wrap-Up

Getting found doesn’t have to be rocket science. But you do have to have a plan. Here it is, in a nutshell:

1. Know who you are, what you have to offer, and to whom. Specifically. Write it down.
2. Do your keyword research based on your answers to #1. Take the time – it’s important.
3. Apply the DIY SEO steps to your site and posts using your keywords and phrases from #2.
4. Enjoy your success!

Related posts:

1. DIY SEO: Step By Step Instructions on SEO You Can Do Yourself Today
2. DIY SEO: Step 5 – Make Navigating Your Site Easy
3. DIY SEO: Step 0 – Keyword Selection

photo credit: Matter = Energy

This is the eighth post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

Commenting is one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your site. Assuming you’ve got great content waiting for your visitors when they get there, it’s also a great way to initiate conversations and build community in your target market. You can use commenting to get the attention of and build relationships with other bloggers which might turn into JV partnerships down the road. And of course, allowing comments on your own blog gives your visitors, customers and referrals a way to connect with you and give you feedback about your content, products and services.

Commenting to Get Traffic

Now that your site is all optimized and loaded with great content, one of the fastest ways you can get traffic to it is to comment at other blogs. When you comment, you’re typically asked for your name, your email address and your website URL. Guess what?! That website URL is a link back to your site! People who read your comments on other blogs (particularly if they’re good comments that add to the value of the post, not just the ‘hey – nice post’ kind of comments) will click through on that link you left behind and BAM! They’ve just become a visitor to your site!

(See why we talked about the importance of site navigation, last time? When you get a visitor to your site, you want to make it easy for them to stick around and see what else you’ve got!)

Commenting Elsewhere Creates Backlinks

Links on other sites that point to your site are called backlinks, and they are part of the algorithm Google and the other search engines use to determine your site’s popularity or ‘authority’. The more backlinks you have, and the better sites they come from, the more page rank you earn, and the higher up in the search result listings your site appears. (Backlinks are an off-page factor, meaning they’re not something you can create or adjust at your site. They’re off your site – on other sites.)

How cool is it then, that this is one off-page factor you can actually influence?! Way cool, my friend, because it also gives you something productive to do to promote your new site and get traffic to it.

When you’re out there commenting, pay attention to DoFollow blogs. Not every DoFollow blog will be a good fit for your commenting strategy, but some will, and they give you “Google juice” when you comment there. (This site is a DoFollow site, too. So be sure to participate here! Read my explanation of DoFollow here.)

We Interrupt This Broadcast for a Rant about Blogger Blogs

As you may know, Blogger (blogspot.com) is owned by Google. A few months back, Google had a brain fart of magnanimous proportions: They started requiring you to log into your Blogger account to be able to leave a comment at a Blogger (blogspot.com) blog. That put a SCREECHING HALT to my commenting at many Blogger blogs.

I’m sorry, folks, if I’m going to take time out of my busy, busy day to come read your posts, you damn well better be asking me for my name, email address and website URL in the process. Otherwise, I’m out. Gone. I don’t want to log in to my Blogger account and leave my comment, because then you’ll be taken to my Blogger account INSTEAD of my site when you click on the link left behind with my comment. Can we say COUNTERPRODUCTIVE to using commenting as a strategy for gaining exposure and building traffic for my site?

Same goes for LiveJournal, or anywhere else that I have to have an account for that blogging platform. Not happenin’, folks. I’ve got enough passwords to remember.

Now, Google has since seen the light and put back the option of allowing commenters to leave their name and URL, but apparently a lot of the owners of the blogs I used to comment at haven’t noticed and switched their commenting options back. Too bad, too, because I’ll bet they’ve lost a fair amount of commenting activity.

Ok, rant over.

Encourage Comments At Your Own Site

Nothing beats the sense that you’re blogging in a vacuum better than getting comments on your posts. In the beginning, you can feel like no one is reading your site and it can be downright discouraging. Yes, you can email your friends and ask them to come and leave a comment (and I encourage you to do that if your site is brand new. Exposure is exposure is exposure…) but you want to go out of your way to encourage your visitors to leave comments, too.

Plugins That Encourage Commenting

In addition to being a DoFollow blogger, I use three other plugins to encourage commenting: WP Ajax Edit Comments, CommentLuv and Subscribe to Comments.

WP Ajax Edit Comments allows visitors to fix any typos in the comments they leave. Awhile back, I left a comment at Barbara Swafford’s blog on her post Should You Edit Your Reader’s Comments? and promptly made a typo I couldn’t fix myself. Ugh. So, I left a second comment correcting myself and letting her know about this plugin, and now she’s using it, too, and I can comment at her blog all I like without appearing to be a doofus. Love that plugin. I use it here so no one (including me!) has to leave behind typos.

Comment Luv is another comment-encouraging plugin because it goes and grabs the commenter’s last post and puts a link to it at the end of their comment. Andy Bailey has gone to town on adding features to this baby, and I highly recommend it.

Subscribe to Comments allows your visitors to subscribe to the comment thread of the post so they’ll get an email when I or anyone else responds to the comment they left. Handy, eh?

Write to Encourage Comments

Hands down the best way to encourage comments is to ask for them! Ask questions in your post. Add a poll. Be just a bit controversial. Stick your neck out. Trust me, someone will kindly come along to chop your head off, but that would be a case of mission accomplished, right? You got a comment.

Write quality content that helps people solve a problem, makes them laugh, or makes them think.

Maybe You Don’t Want Comments, After All

Depending on the type of blog you have, you may elect to take comments off your blog altogether, like Naomi did. She’s living, breathing proof that you can make a living online without comments on your blog. She’s made 6-figures with her business this year already, so who am I to argue with her? But she’s quick to acknowledge that commenting is a great traffic building strategy, but draws this distinction:

Commenting on other people?s blogs is a very good strategy for getting people to your site. Meticulously commenting on the same blogs, day after day, because it makes you feel all fuzzy inside is not the same thing.
- Naomi Dunford, IttyBiz.com

Commenting is a traffic building strategy where strategy = planned, has a point, isn’t just a way to waste the day away feeling busy.

Avoiding Comment Burnout

I have the following rules about commenting that I follow religiously:

1. When commenting at others’ blogs, if I don’t have anything remotely useful to say, I keep quiet.
2. Some comments left at my blog don’t require a response from me. When they do, I respond if I can also follow rule #1.
3. When someone links to me, I go check them out. Then I follow rule #1.

One of the hazards of using commenting as a traffic building strategy is tricking yourself into thinking that you have to comment back to everyone who comments on your stuff. It’s fine to do that in the beginning when you’re calling your best friend or business coach to celebrate every comment left, but one day, hopefully sooner than later, you’re going to find yourself drowning in comments and unable to keep up.

I have over 200 blogs in my reader, and no, I don’t comment on all of them. If I tried, I would do nothing but comment all day long. Besides, just because I CAN say something, doesn’t mean I NEED to say something. The Earth will not stop spinning on its axis if I keep quiet. People WILL live to see another day, even without my two cents thrown into the pot.

Keeping an eye out for being useful in my commenting keeps me from burning out, even when I’m on a purposeful commenting ramp-up mission to boost traffic or gain exposure. Remember – commenting is a strategy.

Unless you’re at Aunt Edna’s blog or your sister’s MySpace. Then commenting is simply commenting.

Related posts:

1. Give Extra Link Love by Using the CommentLuv Plug-in
2. NoFollow, DoFollow – Do You Know or Even Care?
3. DIY SEO: Step By Step Instructions on SEO You Can Do Yourself Today

photo credit: Matter = Energy

This is the seventh post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

This step really has more to do with your site overall, rather than individual content. Though you do want to have a site navigation plan in place from day one, some of what I discuss here will only make sense when you’ve been adding content for awhile.

Great site navigation is extremely important because it helps you keep your visitors on your site longer. Remember, all the great content in the world won’t help if your visitors can’t find it. So, let’s make sure visitors can easily find all that great content you’ve got! They’ll hang around longer, and the work you’ve put into your site has a better chance of paying off.

Create Permanent Links to Important Posts

Tom Volkar of Delightful Work does a great job of this with his sidebar section, Best of Delightful Work. Nancy Boyd of Dances With Flowers went a step further and created an Are You New Here? page at her site. These are great examples of highlighting important posts that either show off your best work or bring new visitors up to speed.

Show Off Your Categories

Hopefully, you’ve created your Categories using your most important keywords or keyword phrases. Make sure your Categories are plainly visible on your site. Here at vAssistant Services, I have my Categories featured prominently across the middle of my front page (see Browse Categories.) At the very least, put your list of Categories in your sidebar. This allows visitors to see at a glance what your site is about and easily drill down into your content. Christa at Giggle On! does a great job of highlighting her categories, both in her sidebar and on her Stories page.

Put a Tag Cloud in Your Sidebar

I strongly advise you to include a tag cloud in your sidebar. This gives visitors another way to quickly and easily drill down into your content. Tags give a more granular view of your content and can cross Category boundaries. Again, use your keywords and keyword phrases as tags. An advantage of your tag cloud is that the more often a tag is used, the bigger the font in the tag cloud. This gives a visual ‘summary’ of what you most write about on your site. Very handy for your visitors to use in exploring your site.

Use the Related Posts or Similar Posts Plugin

Another way to keep visitors engaged at your site is to employ a plugin that inserts a list of related or similar posts at the end of each post. If your visitor likes the post they just read, then odds are they’ll click on related or similar posts and read them, too, if you give them an easy way to do so. I use the Related Posts plugin because I had some conflict with my theme and the Similar Posts plugin. (Another reason I’m glad there are so many plugin options with WordPress.)

Create a Google Sitemap

A sitemap helps the search engines index your site properly. I use the Google XML Sitemap plugin. It supports all the pages WordPress generates, plus any custom ones I’ve created outside of WordPress. Then, every time I edit or create a post, my sitemap is updated and all the major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified of the update. Cool, huh? Yeah!

Related posts:

1. DIY SEO: Step By Step Instructions on SEO You Can Do Yourself Today
2. DIY SEO: Step 6 – Commenting
3. DIY SEO: Step 2 – Page Title, Page Description and Keywords

photo credit: Matter = Energy

This is the sixth post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

Short, but illuminating exercise today: determining your keyword density.

What’s Keyword Density?

Keyword density is how often your keywords appear in your text relative to other words. Let’s say you’ve got a 500-word post and you’ve used your keyword 25 times – that’s a keyword density of 5% (25/500 = 5%) – and that’s the target that’s most widely recommended. Any more than that and you run the risk of Google thinking you’re “stuffing” your post with your keywords at the expense of quality content and treating your page as junk. And it would be junk. Don’t believe me? Pick a keyword, any keyword and just TRY to use it more than 25 times in a 500-word post without ending up with junk. Shoot – depending on the keyword and the post – even 5% keyword density might be pushing it.

Calculate Your Keyword Density by Hand Before You Publish

There are a number of keyword density checkers and tools available online these days, and they are quick, accurate, and for the most part, easy to use. Only one problem: they can’t check pages that aren’t published and ‘live’ on the web. Not much help when I’m writing a new post, right?

So until I publish, I like to roll ‘old school’ on this one, so here’s what I do: I copy/paste my post (title, headings and all) into something like MS Word, where I can click a button and find the total word count quickly. Then, I use Word’s ‘find’ function and search for my keyword or keyword phrase in the text. I just count how many times I successfully ‘find next’. Divide that number by the total number of words and bang ? I?ve got my keyword density calculated!

For example, until this paragraph, there are 309 words in this post. My keyword phrase keyword density appears 9 times, for a keyword density of 2.91%. “But Suzanne, your math is skewed because keyword density is actually two words and it’s counted as two words in your total of 309, yet you’re counting it as if it were one word that appears 9 times…that percentage is a little off…”, I hear you thinking.

Easy fix: use Word’s Find/Replace function to make it one word by hyphenating the two words together. That makes my total word count 300 and my keyword still appears only 9 times, so now I’ve got a keyword density of 3% even.

And now, after that last bit, my keyword density is up to 3.16% (411 words, 13 occurrences). Are you sick of me saying keyword density yet? I’m almost sick of me saying it, and I’m still 2 points away from 5%! Just imagine how awful this would be if I jacked it up to 10%. See why Google would think I was keyword stuffing? It’s just not natural to repeat the same word(s) over and over again.

Turns out, Mrs. Williams, my 7th grade English teacher, knew what she was talking about. She did such a good job encouraging me to expand my vocabulary and use different words to say the same thing (“…to make it more interesting for your readers, Suzanne…”) that I have a hard time getting remotely close to that 5% number. But I’m working on it…

Use Online Keyword Density Checkers After You Publish

Keyword density is impacted by using your keywords in your page title, page description and keyword meta tags, as described in Step 2 of this series, so if you remember to optimize there, your actual keyword density will get a boost.

As I said, there are many tools online, but I like this keyword density checker the best. Just search for keyword density checker and you’ll find lots of options.

Related posts:

1. DIY SEO: Step 0 – Keyword Selection
2. DIY SEO: Step By Step Instructions on SEO You Can Do Yourself Today
3. DIY SEO: Step 3 – Headings, Bold and Italics

photo credit: Matter = Energy

This is the fifth post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

We’re heading into more familiar territory in this step. You’re probably already used to highlighting words and phrases within your text using bold and italics. The only thing new here is to be a little more purposeful about your highlighting.

Purposeful Use of Bold and Italics

You want to make sure you highlight your keywords and keyword phrases when they appear in your text. Whether you use bold or italics is up to you – use whichever fits best in your post. With each, a flag is raised to the search engines which means, “Hey – this word or phrase is important.” The more your “important” words and phrases match your keywords and keyword phrases, the more relevant the search engines will consider your content. Makes sense, right?

So, do you have to make EVERY appearance of your keywords and keyword phrases bold or italic? Because, you know, that has the potential to look kind of overstated or strange to the people reading your content. The answer lies in that dance we do when optimizing for both human eyes and search engine eyes. Err in favor of your human readers. If it looks dorky to have every instance of a keyword bolded, then don’t bold every instance of it. If it doesn’t look dorky, bold away! And remember, your opinion of what looks dorky is the one that matters, so just go with your gut. The rest of us will go with the flow, I promise.

Take the Time to Use Headings

The use of headings throughout your text pleases both people and search engines. People like them because they break up your content into manageable chunks and search engines like them because they’re yet another indicator of what your content is about.

Think about it. You’re busy, right? And you’re always pressed for time, or at least it feels that way. So what do you do most when you’re online? You scan. You don’t read everything you see, you scan it to see if you want to take the time to read it. Headings make scanning easier. They draw people in to your content, and if they’re written well, they – alone – should be able to convey your core message.

HTML offers six different heading tags, <H1></H1> through <H6></H6>, and in their default state, H1 is the biggest font-size-wise, and H6 is the smallest.

Of course, search engines don’t care how big the font is (because they don’t have eyes to see it the way we do), but to the search engines, H1 is the most important, H2 is the next most important, and so on down to H6, like in an outline. It’s this hierarchy of importance that’s meaningful to search engines, so remember that as you use headings throughout your content.

I’m pretty sure you can guess what I’m going to tell you next: Make sure you are putting your keywords and keyword phrases in those headings! Headings, bold and italics are important for your readers and for the search engines, so make sure you make good use of all three in your content!

Related posts:

1. DIY SEO: Step By Step Instructions on SEO You Can Do Yourself Today
2. DIY SEO: Step 0 – Keyword Selection
3. DIY SEO: Step 4 – Keyword Density

photo credit: Matter = Energy

This is the fourth post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

You’ve done your keyword research, you’ve got your list of keywords you want to optimize for, and now it’s time to put all that good research to use.

Ready?

When it comes to SEO that you can do for your site, the page title, page description and the keywords in your keyword META tag are extremely important. But let’s clear up a point of potential confusion before we start.

Your page title is NOT what you think it is. It’s not the title of your page or post that you enter in the box called “Title” when you’re writing a page or post. Well, ok, that’s a page title to you, yes, but the search engines see that title as merely a header. To the search engines, your page title is the title contained in the <title> tag in your code. (Click the image to see an example.)

If you click (in FireFox) View then Page Source, or (in Internet Explorer) View then Source, somewhere near the top you’ll see the title tag:
<title>The Page Title</title>

The page description and the keywords are contained in META tags, also in your code:
<meta name="description" content="This is the page description. Make sure to utilize your keywords." />
<meta name="keywords" content="this, is, where, you, put, your, keywords, and, keyword phrases, all, separated, by, commas" />

WordPress configures these for you automatically, but maybe not in the most optimized fashion, depending on your site and your content. To override what WordPress does, I recommend a handy plugin called All In One SEO.

Helping All In One SEO Help You

Immediately upon installation, this plugin is ready to go. Its defaults are based on current SEO best practices and are updated frequently through plugin upgrades. That’s both good news and potentially bad news for you, because the defaults are dependent upon what you enter as titles, categories and tags. So the good news is, if you’re already in the habit of making sure your keywords are in your post and page titles, and you’re using your keywords as categories and tags, you’re good to go. Just install this baby, activate it, and continue blogging. The bad news is, if you’re not doing these things, the defaults aren’t going to help you as much as they could, so you’re going to have to do some overriding.

Titles
This is where you’ll want to do the bulk of your overriding, as this is the single most SEO-important element on your page…period. This is also where you’ll feel the greatest conflict between what’s good for your readers and what’s good for the search engines. By giving you access to override the META title for your page, this plugin gives you a way to cater to both:

• Continue to use your eye-popping, attention-getting, smarty-pants post titles. They’re for people and people like when you’re interesting. Cater to them when you write your post titles and continue to grab their attention in creative ways.
• Override the META title the plugin generates from the title you’ve given and load it with your most effective keywords relative to the content of your post. You don’t have to work so hard to be interesting and attention getting here, at least not in the same way you do for human readers. Search engines are much more Maxwell Smart-like; they want “just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.”

Page Description
When your pages show up in search engine results, the page description is the part that shows below the clickable link to your page (aka the META page title) in the results list. You want your keywords in there, yes, but you also want it to be descriptive of what your page is about in an enticing way that will encourage people to click through to read it. This is the “commercial” for your page. Make it count.

Keywords
Here is where you can help this plugin do its job more effectively: start using your keywords as your tags on your posts. Do this, and you won’t have to override anything here.

Once the plugin is installed, you’ll see a new section on the post and page edit screens, right below the categories section, aptly named “All In One SEO Pack“. Here’s what it looks like:

Site-wide settings can be found by clicking Settings -> All In One SEO Pack from your WordPress Dashboard. Fill in the Page Title, Page Description and Keywords with your WHOLE site in mind, here. Leave the default settings for the rest of the options you find. Don’t forget to save your changes!

Related posts:

1. DIY SEO: Step By Step Instructions on SEO You Can Do Yourself Today
2. DIY SEO: Step 5 – Make Navigating Your Site Easy
3. DIY SEO: Step 3 – Headings, Bold and Italics

photo credit: Matter = Energy

This is the third post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

What Is A Permalink Structure?

A permalink is the URL of an individual blog post. To see what I’m talking about, click the title of any of your blog posts. What you’ll end up with is just that blog post, in its entirety, shown on that page. The address bar of your browser will reflect the URL (permalink) of that blog post.

You want your permalinks to make sense to both people and the search engines. If your address bar reflects something like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=156

then you want to change your permalink structure to reflect your blog post’s title:

http://www.yourdomain.com/your-post-title/

See how much better the second URL is than the first? It makes more sense to you, doesn’t it?

Ok, but why does it make more sense to the search engines? Because one of the most important factors in search engine algorithms is filename, so it is important to use a permalink structure on your WordPress blog that will include your relevant search terms for that post. (I’m getting a little ahead of myself with that explanation, but just go with me here, ok? Somethings just need to be in place ASAP, and this is one of those things.)

What If You’re Using the Default Structure and Have a LOT of Posts Already?

I know what you’re thinking: You’ve been blogging for awhile now and you’re using that squirrelly ?p=153 structure and you’ve got all these links out there in the search engines and from other blogs and sites in this format. If you change it now, won’t it render all those links dead and useless?

Yup – sure will.

So why would I recommend you change your permalink structure midstream? Because you need to use an SEO-friendly structure and because I have a fix for you that will handle all those links using the old structure: Dean?s Permalinks Migration Plugin Version 1.0 Install this plugin and supply it with your old permalink structure BEFORE you change it.

Then, when someone clicks a link out there somewhere in the search engines, or on another site linking to you that’s using your old, SEO-unfriendly permalink structure, instead of getting a 404 error, it’ll redirect to the correct URL using the new structure (once you’ve changed it, of course.) Pretty slick, huh? Now you can change your permalink structure without worrying you’re going to break all the links you’ve already got out there in cyberspace.

Note, if you’ve changed your permalink structure more than once in the past (like a certain unnamed, didn’t-know-better-and-definitely-wasn’t-thinking-newbie-blogger has done before), this plugin will only be able to help you with THIS update to your permalink structure. But hey – correcting some of your links already published out there in cyberspace is better than not correcting any at all, or worse yet, not using an SEO-friendly permalink structure just because you’ve got so much content out there using an SEO-unfriendly structure. You’re not stuck, you can change and adapt, even now.

Besides, you can always update your 404 page template with a message to let people know that the content they’re looking for might actually still be there and how to find it. Here is an example of a modified 404 page implemented by the aforementioned unnamed, didn’t-know-better-and-definitely-wasn’t-thinking-newbie-blogger. Sometimes it’s best to admit you’ve made mistakes and offer a way to fix them, rather than leaving a bad impression and no fix. We’re all human, after all.

How to Customize Your Permalink Structure in WordPress

Go to Settings in your WordPress dashboard, and click Permalinks.

Click the radio button next to “Custom Structure” and enter: /%postname%/

Click “Save Changes”.

Now your post URLS will look like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/your-post-title/, which is much more SEO-friendly than the default.

Now, if you’re interested, there’s another plugin that’ll make your post URLs even MORE effective as far as the search engines are concerned called SEO Slugs. Check it out and read what it does for you. You might want to use it, too.

Related posts:

1. DIY SEO: Step By Step Instructions on SEO You Can Do Yourself Today
2. DIY SEO: Step 5 – Make Navigating Your Site Easy
3. DIY SEO: Step 3 – Headings, Bold and Italics

photo credit: Matter = Energy

This is the second post in our DIY SEO for WordPress series.

Compile Your Keyword List

Write down all the keywords from the list you generated using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool that have high search volumes and low advertiser competition. I won’t try to give you cutoffs or thresholds, because every market is different, so make your selections relative to the list you generated.

Write down keyword ideas you think should have appeared on the list. These will come from that ‘gap’ between what you think your site?s about and what the search engines see. Include the keywords you would like to target based on what you want the world to know about you and what you do. (Remember, use your ideal customer’s vocabulary.)

Ask for help from friends, relatives, kids (yes, kids!) to generate even more keyword ideas. Getting outside your own brain is a very useful tactic to employ. If you are a parent coach, ask your friends and relatives, “If you were to search online for the kind of help I give parents, what words would you type into the search engines?” This is where the keywords you probably haven’t thought about will likely show up. For example, I might tell you I’d search for information on ‘how to deal with stubborn kids’ or ‘effective discipline for ADHD kids’. Notice the words ‘parent coach’ weren’t a part of my answer.

A Word About How People Search

Most people search one of two ways:

Broad match means that if you type in maid service Tulsa without any quotes around it, the search engine will bring back a list of results in which any of those words appear. That means it’ll bring back results that contain maid and service and Tulsa in any order, and possibly along with other terms. Your results could also show singular/plural forms, synonyms, and other relevant variations. As of today, this search returns 112,000 results in Google.

Phrase match is a search with quotation marks around the phrase. The search engine will bring back a list of results which contain the phrase maid service Tulsa, in this order, almost as if it were one word instead of three. As of today, this search returns 18 results.

Big difference.

We’re going to deal with broad match numbers, though, because that’s the way most people enter search terms…no quotes.

Gather Relevant Data

Now that you have a list of potential keywords and keyword phrases, it’s time to see how valuable they might be to you and your site.

There are a number of factors you can research about any given keyword, but let’s concentrate on two for our basic selection criteria: search volume and competition. I suggest you create a spreadsheet and create three columns to start:

Col A: Keyword/Phrase
Col B: Search Volume
Col C: Competition

Load it with your keywords and keyword phrases from the list you compiled.

We’ll use the free version of WordTracker to find out search volume, and we’ll pull the competition numbers from Google searches.

First, let’s do the search volume. Enter your keyword in the keyword box and click the “Hit Me” button. WordTracker will then return to you a list of all the keywords in its database that contain the keyword or phrase you entered, as well as the search count for each. (Keep your eyes peeled for good keywords and phrases you don’t have on your list…and add them! You always want to be on the lookout for great keywords and phrases!)

The count is the total number of times that a keyword has been looked up in the past 110 days using WordTracker’s 300+ million keyword database. This database is the *complete* log of all requests made at the Metacrawler/Dogpile Metacrawlers (WordTracker doesn’t use search engines because of software robots/position checkers distorting the results but the lookups are very similar).

Enter the count number for your keyword or phrase in Column B.

Next, find the number of search results for your keywords and phrases by conducting searches for them in Google.

Enter your keyword or phrase and click search. Google will tell you how many results it brought back. (Click the picture to the right for a larger view.) Enter that number in Column C of your spreadsheet.

Repeat this process for each of your keywords and phrases in Column A.

Choose Your Keywords and Phrases

Now you’ve got some data to help you choose which keywords and phrases are best for your site.

You want to choose 10-20 keywords that are a good mix of single word and multi-word phrases, that have higher search counts and lower competition numbers. Paring down your list of a couple hundred keywords and keyword phrases to just 10-20 sounds a bit daunting, but you’re going to be eliminating LOTS of them because they don’t have any search volume (why use a keyword no one searches?) or they have way too much competition (ranking in the top ten of 21,600,000 results will be a bit of a trick.)

Remember, though, to leave those one-word keywords that really describe who you are and what you offer, because though you won’t rank well for them, they do help categorize your site. In our example, that means keeping “maid service” (because it describes your service), and “housekeeper” (for the same reason, and because it’s actually a better choice than “housekeeping” because more people search for it and there is less competition.) If geography is important to you, keep a few phrases that include your city, or use your city as a keyword, itself.

How Else Would You Have Known?

Conducting this kind of research is tedious, yes, but SO IMPORTANT. How else would you have known that “housekeeper” is a better keyword than “housekeeping”? You might have thought housekeeping was better without this research. Heck, I might have, too. But that’s why we do this critical step before we go to all the work to optimize our sites. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather do a few (shoot – maybe even several!) hours of tedious research and make the rest of the work I do pay off for me, than wing it make the rest of the work I do a waste of time.

Related posts:

1. DIY SEO: Step By Step Instructions on SEO You Can Do Yourself Today
2. DIY SEO: Step 4 – Keyword Density
3. DIY SEO: Step 3 – Headings, Bold and Italics

photo credit: Matter = Energy

This is the first of a series of posts called DIY SEO (Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization): Step by Step Instructions on SEO You Can Do Yourself Today. While you could pay hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to an SEO company to optimize your site for the search engines, there is an awful lot of SEO good you can do for your site all by yourself – for free – even if you’re not a programmer or particularly “technical” by nature. So why not do what you can do, first? Armed with a little information and some step-by-step instructions, you can significantly and positively impact your site’s performance in search results and ranking. Yes, YOU!

Step 0: Keyword Research

Keyword research is about finding and researching actual terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search. It’s about finding out what words people actually use, not necessarily what you expect they’d use. It’s about thinking like your ideal customer, from their frame of reference, using their vocabulary, not your own.

If You Skip This, Don’t Bother With the Rest

There is no point in doing any SEO anything if you don’t do your keyword research first. Almost all the SEO you do is based on keywords, so if you don’t know what keywords are the right keywords to target, then there’s no point in doing any SEO. If you’re targeting the wrong words, the people who need what you have to offer may never find you. You’d be better off not doing any SEO, because targeting the wrong keywords can not only waste your online advertising time, effort and dollars, but hurt you and your brand, in the long run. So, don’t skip this step.

Forget What You THINK You Know

Most people skip this ultra-important preparatory step because they think they already know what keywords to target. You might think you know what others would enter into a search engine to find what you have to offer, but often, your vocabulary is different than your ideal customer’s because you’re closer to your subject and know more about it. The ‘obvious’ words to you are not so obvious to your target market.

Your branding efforts might get in your way, too. You might want to put yourself out there as a ‘domestic goddess for hire’, but who sits down at Google and searches for a domestic goddess? More likely, the person looking for you will search for ‘maid service’ or ‘house cleaning service’ or ‘housekeeper’, don’t ya think? And don’t forget to include geographic keywords if they’re appropriate for you. I don’t care about housekeepers in Dallas, I want to know about housekeepers in Tulsa.

You might also think you should target only the broad, generic, high-traffic keywords related to your site. Yes, you want to include those broad terms in your keyword list because they tell the search engines what your site is about, not because you want to show up on the first page of results. Where there’s high traffic, there’s also stiff competition and you’ll rank for that search term…somewhere 30-50 pages back.

Think about how you use the search engines. If you’re shopping for shoes, do you really sit down and type in ‘shoes’ and expect to get something other than 30 million results to wade through? Probably not. Neither does anyone else, likely. You and the rest of us try to get as specific as possible because we don’t have all day, right? So get more specific with your keyword research, too. Use multi-word phrases that really define who you are and what you do.

Find Out How the Search Engines See You Now

Let’s say you’ve got a site up and you’ve got lots of great content on it, but you haven’t done any SEO at all. It’d be VERY REVEALING to find out what the search engines think your site is about, wouldn’t it?

Google AdWords Keyword Tool will let you research keyword ideas two ways: descriptive words or phrases and website content. Use the website content option, enter your site’s URL and click the ‘Get Keyword Ideas’ button. This will show you what Google perceives as keywords from your site as it exists now. This will help you see where you need to concentrate based on any gap between what you think your site’s about and what the search engines see. This tool doesn’t show exact search or competition numbers. Instead, it gives approximations, but that’s still useful because it’s more information than you had a few minutes ago, right?

Ok, brainstorm on this until the next post in this series which will tell you what to do with this list of keywords you’ve generated and how to detemine which ones to eliminate and which ones to run with.

Related posts:

1. DIY SEO: Step 0 – Keyword Selection
2. DIY SEO: Step 3 – Headings, Bold and Italics
3. DIY SEO: Step 4 – Keyword Density