Improving your ranking keyphrases
Whether you’re building a new domain or rehabilitating an old one, you need to consider what keyphrases you want to rank well for in search engines. You have only so much control over this, as keyphrases come from the anchor text other webmasters use to link to you. Obviously, you can make clear what the title of your site is, and that shou00ld take care of any sidebar links to your homepage. As for links in articles, most webmasters will link to you with either the title of your site or relevant keywords, and the ones who don’t, you can’t do much about.
Picking your key phrases
The trick is figuring out which keyphrase you want to go for. You need to rank highly for your domain name, but other than that? If your domain name isn’t the exact name of your site, or the exact name of your site doesn’t describe what your site’s about, you have a little more work to do. Your keyphrase needs to be two things:
- Relevant. Obviously, it needs to have something to do with your topic.
- Attainable. If there are already 8 SERP pages full of big companies and huge bloggers ranking for your keyphrase, and you don’t have a huge marketing budget, you’re probably never going to reach page 1 for that phrase.
Since this series of posts is about improving or rehabilitating a domain, I’m assuming that when you first started the domain, you already considered your topic and whether there was any traffic for it, and so on. There are tons of tools online for finding good keyphrases, but the basics are simple: imagine you are someone who wants to learn about your topic. You don’t know anything special about it. What do you put into the search engine? Do the searches and see what comes up. Is it what your imaginary newbie wanted to read? Even if it is, chances are this search will make you think of other searches that might get you even better info. Do the search. Make a list of search terms that got you what you wanted. Remember that a lot of new searchers type in full questions, like “How to start affiliate marketing?”
Take your list of searches and look at the SERPs again. Do the high-ranking sites belong to big companies with big budgets for marketing and SEO, or not? Are some of them medium-sized blogs or sites you might be able to beat? What about the second page? The third? Balance how important the key phrase is against how easily you can get it. “Affiliate marketing” is a sweet but competitive key phrase – if you think you can get onto the second or third SERP, it’s worth pursuing, even if you think there’s no hope of ever ranking #1. But if you can find another phrase that’s close, that you think you could maybe hit #1, go for that one, too.
Don’t forget to look at your stats
At the start, you’re likely to find yourself ranking for phrases you weren’t trying to rank for – the search engines don’t always see your site the way you do. But these phrases might suggest other key phrases you should aim for. Keep an open mind.
Write about the keyphrases like a real writer
Don’t get caught up in ratios telling you how many times to use a keyword in a page or article on your site. Just write about that topic. Use the key phrase the way a real writer would, without considering the search engines. The engines keep getting better and better at looking at sites the way a human does.
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