When I set out to optimise my first website, I soon began to feel frustrated. I was still learning about SEO and was not sure why my competitors were ranking higher than me. What made it even worse is I had no idea how long it was going to take to rank above them, or whether it was actually worth my time.
As my knowledge of SEO grew stronger, I realised the best way to alleviate my frustration and work out whether the keywords I was working on were too competitive was to formulate a clear step-by-step plan.
As with setting any goal, I identified where I currently was and where I needed to be to rank above my competitors. I could then work out how long it would take to optimise my website on each keyword and whether it was worth it.
How to get the data and create your SEO plan:
On Page SEO:
1. Google the keyword you want to rank high on and look at the top three competitors’ websites.
2. See whether the keyword is in the URL, Page Title and Headings and make notes of how often it is there.
3. Look to see how many times the keyword appears in the website text. This can be done by simply clicking on ‘Cached’, which is located after the website’s URL on Google.
4. You now have a pretty good model of where your keywords should be to rank alongside your competitors.
5. Important things to consider when adding keywords:
• Try to keep to one keyword per page – don’t put too many different keywords on the same page or you’ll dilute them.
• Include exactly the same keyword or keyword phrase in the page title, URL and headings. In other words, ensure they all match.
• Ensure your headings have a H1 tag in the html script. Your CMS system should allow you to do this. However, if you need to check, right click on your webpage and choose “view page source”. This will show you the script that you can search by pressing Ctrl + F and typing in ‘H1’.
Off page SEO:
1. Take the same three websites you were analysing and enter their URLs in ‘Yahoo! Site Explorer’ (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/). This will give you a rough idea of how many links each website has.
2. When it comes to links to your website, it’s quality not quantity that counts. The way to tell if a website has quality links is by its Google Page Rank (PR). Google ranks every page out of 10. The higher the rank of the pages that link to your site, the higher your Google PR. To see what PR a webpage is you can download the Google Toolbar: http://toolbar.google.com
3. Once you know how many links your competitors have and their Google PR, you can see many links you will have to build to your website.
4. This should allow you to plan how many links per day you will need to create to compete with those websites at the top of page one.
5. Important things to remember about building links:
• It’s about quality not quantity. Your competitor may have 500 links to their website, but if he only has a Google PR of 1 then you may only need 20-30 links from websites with a Google PR of 1+ to compete with him.
• The best article I’ve come across to learn how to build quality back links is from Barry Wise’s blog:
http://www.barrywise.com/2008/09/5-seo-linkbuilding-tips-to-boost-search-results-in-google/
While I’ve simply touched on what is a huge subject, I hope these points can help you to begin to formulate your own personal SEO plan - giving you a sense of direction with optimising your website.