Why did I write this?

I’m guessing you probably don’t want to spend hours researching, tweaking and testing the hundreds of different SEO techniques that are talked about these days. The truth is that most of them only have a tiny impact (if any) on your search position. If you’re a smart small business website owner, then you’ll probably just want to target the most important factors, and then move on to creating some more content.

After reading the guide, you might feel that some factors have been left out. Feel free to contact me to chat about these, why they aren’t included and what you should do about them.

To recap, a great keyword must be:

1. Laser-targeted to your chosen niche

Have you heard? General keywords are out and ultra-focused long-tail combinations are in. I’m thinking here about the difference between ‘Gordon Ramsay’ and ‘Gordon Ramsay hamburger recipe’. Focused keywords help you to zero in on your niche and to write content that searchers are really looking for.

If you go for general terms, you’ll find it hard to compete and get your website seen on search engines. You’ll also risk writing content that’s too general for your visitors.

2. Highly relevant to the page that you are optimizing

Keyword relevance is vital and the closer to your subject area the better. Going back to Gordon for a second, there’s no point going for the hamburger keyword if your page is about the latest repeat of Kitchen Nightmares. Yes, they are related, but your average web visitor only gives you a nanosecond to show them exactly what they are looking for.

3. Something that lots of people are searching for

The first two points will be wasted if you don’t have a decent search volume of people looking for your chosen keyword. It’s easy to find long-tail keyword combinations, but you need to know there’s someone out there looking for them. You can use online tools such as Wordtracker or AdWords to check out search volumes for your keyword shortlist.

4. A term that has very, very low SEO competition

Once you have 1 to 3 nailed down, you’re probably well on the way, but you need to check how much competition you have. Long tail keywords mostly have lower competition than general terms (not always) but you need to verify this.

It’s OK to measure how many competing sites you have using a simple Google search, but that doesn’t tell you the whole picture. Google will return everything that seems relevant and that includes all the different combinations and extensions of your keyword. If you’re going to do this properly, you need to see whether the other sites have been optimized for search. What does this mean? I’m talking about titles, tags, text and links – standard SEO stuff.

So hopefully I’ve convinced you that these rules are important.

Do your keywords pass the test?

A good keyword has to be:

1. Laser-targeted to your chosen niche

2. Highly relevant to the page that you are optimizing

3. Something that lots of people are searching for

4. A term that has very, very low SEO competition

If you can get all of these right, you’ll succeed in the search engines. Another way to put this is that if your keyword doesn’t seem so good for any one of these points, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful.

I’m making a bold assumption here of course (it’s Friday after all). I’m guessing you don’t have a major website with a huge presence like Apple or Google and that you don’t have 10,000 backlinks and a PageRank of 7. Am I right? If you are one of these sites then well done! You can probably let go on a few of the points listed above.

If you’re one of us little guys then read on.

My Four Points listed above might sound a little bit harsh. Why shouldn’t you be able to compete on a nice, simple keyword like iPhone or Gordon Ramsay or 24? A direct answer would be “OK. Have a go then”. I’ll see you in 6 months after you’ve spent all your time collecting links, tweaking pages and checking your Google position.

The point is, you can’t win on these highly popular keywords. There’s too much competition out there. Too many other websites and too many relevant backlinks to these sites. You’ll blow your entire marketing budget and still not get the search traffic that you deserve.

The better approach is to find a niche that you can dominate and build from there. Follow the keyword rules above and you’ll get site that appears high in the search rankings for relevant, good volume keywords. This will help to grab the visitors.

Next time we’ll go into some more detail on why the four points are important, what happens if you don’t follow them and some handy tips to check how you’re doing on each point.

One of my subscribers asked me about this today. If you know me then you won’t be surprised to hear that I had a simple answer:

1. Get the right niche/keywords
2. Write superb content using these keywords

… and then (only then)…

3. Get started on the SEO tweaks

How can it be this simple? Well, it’s not really. Working out the answers to number 1 and number 2 can be pretty hard. It can take a while to get these right, and you should spend time perfecting them.

My point is that if you get the first 2 parts right, then they can have such a huge effect on your search traffic, any SEO tweaks that you make are not going to make much difference.

The other way to look at this is that if you’ve got the wrong keywords and/or your content is poor, there’s not much point spending a huge amount of time on SEO.

Don’t get wrong though. SEO tweaks are important, and they can help you to get that vital edge over your competition.

So don’t ignore number 3!!

Megan Casey announced the new check tool on SquidBlog a couple of days ago. If you are a Squidoo user you’ll find the tool on your lensmaster dashboard, under My Lenses. Float your mouse over the lens you want to check and follow the link marked ‘health’.

The new health check has a few differences to other versions out there…

The recommendations on tags are quite different and include some very good tips. You should only choose a handful of simple, relevant tags for your lens. Many people have blogged and written about this in the past and the recommendation has often been to include as many tags as possible (Squidoo allows 40) and to stuff them full of all the long tail keyword variations you can think of.

It makes sense to simplify your tags though. They provide referral paths from other lenses so you need to choose tags which are used by other people on Squidoo. If your tags are too long and complex, you won’t find any other lenses sending you traffic.

There are also good recommendations on the primary tag. This is clearly used by Squidoo to determine what ads to place on your lens, so again, should not be too long and complex. The primary tag should also reflect the subject of your lens.

I also like the tips about renaming your lens modules so they don’t keep their default headings. This helps to differentiate yourself on search engines and also helps your lens readers to understand what you’re talking about. This is a good thing!

There are a lot of blogs like this out there in the blogosphere and there are a couple of reasons for this:

1. Someone starts off with good intentions, then forgets to add any more posts
2. The blog was built purely to create a link to another site

At least #2 is deliberate, but it does tend to fill up the internet with useless spammy sites. It also uses up all those “useful” URLs such as asdfgh.com

If you don’t keep updating your blog then you might get an initial spike of interest and you might pop up on Google for a couple of days. These will both disappear after a while though. Not really a long term solution, is it?

If you want a successful blog then you need to add posts regularly so that search engines find you and your visitors keep coming back for more.