When I was an internet marketing beginner, every webinar I attended, every talk I heard, emphasized the need to get the right keywords. Uh huh, I thought… keywords… those are the words that people search for. If your search and my specified keywords match, my ad/article/post/video will appear top in the search engine. Cool. How complicated can that be? Of course I know what people are looking for… “make money, work at home, do business online”… I’ll use those words, I thought… simple.

Over time, I got not overwhelmingly good results. Hmm. Nothing actually appeared on Google in the first 10 pages.

Hmm. SEO. Search Engine Optimization. People seem to be making a lot of money with it. These techniques put keywords in the ‘right places’ for search engine spiders (bots) to ‘crawl’ to them.

Now I’m not one to spend money on something I know I can learn by putting two and two together. So I spent a lot more time. And I learned what I share here.

What I know can be divided into 3 parts:

1. What do search engines look for?
2. Where you can look for what they are looking for
3. Where you can put what you found

What do search engines look for?

Initially, it was a mystery to me how Google* can ‘see’ a video and know where to rank it and when to show it.

Now, if you’ve ever posted a video, you’ll remember that there are 3 things you feed. The title, description, and tags. It also saves your video with a ‘filename’. Remember it.

Google seeks to offer content that its users are happy to read. Why? Because if Google understands what you’re looking for, it will keep looking. Therefore, Google uses a lot of programming to constantly “mow its garden” of content grass.

Yes, Google is a living organism. The largest artificial intelligence on the planet. It knows what everyone in the connected world is thinking (searching for) and carefully organizes what works for it. Scary? Live with it! And read Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Google AdWords to master Google with authority.

Therefore, Google will constantly keep in touch with the places where the content appears. YouTube, Squidoo, EzineArticles, Free Press Release are a few places like that. It will search for new tags, descriptions, names and titles every few hours and index them. Then it will be served and watched over. If people click on your content (because the keyword/tag matches) but hit the ‘back’ button in a few seconds and search again, Google will know that your content doesn’t really match their words. “Shadow guy. Says something…does something else.” Google will make a mental note.

Similarly, search engines will (less frequently) check for news on all web sites. You can use pingomatic .com once a week to “ping” the spiders so they know you’re usually posting something new every week.

Don’t ping very often. Remember how irritating it is when the doorbell keeps ringing? Same with Google. You want him to like you.

Apart from this, search engines also look for image names, headers, text links, and URLs. Let’s understand this with the example. Let’s say you like dog food. Now you’ll do just fine if you can put these in order:

1. Get a URL like dogfood .com. Generally, this will not be available. So give welovedogfood.com a try. A great site to check these is pcnames.com. Once you have a name, register it at namecheap.com or any service that sounds good to you.
2. If you already have a blog domain like youname .com and dogfood is an area of ​​interest, create a permalink yourname.com/dogfood This is easier to find but less authoritative.
3. Now your title. This is the part that appears in the blue band at the top (left side of the minimize-close buttons). Make sure the words “dog food” are there.
4. In your title, use the words ‘dog food’.
5. Post a photo of your product? Call it “dog food with your name”
6. Fill in a description box? Use dog food several times. Also/Alternatively in the first paragraph, with other words around it, eg ‘dog food lovers buy dog ​​food with your name on it because your company’s dog food is so good’.
7. Select the labels like dog food, dog food lovers, dog food with your name, dog food from your company, etc. Notice the stupid repetition. Also note variations… with and without spaces dogfood and dog food. All this counts.
8. Whenever possible, especially at the beginning and end of the text, incorporate “dog food with your name” and link to your site. This is called anchor text, and the link helps earn brownie points for your site on the anchor text keywords.
9. Finally, write down all the keywords you’ve used so you can check how well they show up. You are in a scientific experiment on artificial intelligence! Congratulations!

Where you can find what you are looking for.

Now this is the most boring part. Also the most fundamental. Like most things in life, vegetables included.

It is best to have a pen and notepad handy. This is very important advice. Do it now.

As we move forward, we will follow a 3-step process. Just know that our goal is to find out 3 things:

1. What words do people search for?
2. How many people search, how often and where (traffic)
3. How many sites use the same keyword (competition)

In case you are doing keyword research for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you will also need to consider the “business value” of your keyword (will it be profitable). But this is what paid keyword software is all about and beyond the scope of this article.

So here it goes:

Step 1: Think of a seed keyword and write it into this tool (it will be ‘dog food’ for now).

adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This tool will return many phrases related to dog food along with the number of searches per month. This keeps changing over time… what I see now are (top 5):

dog food – 2,740,000 searches / month

dry dog ​​food – 165,000 searches / month

dog food – 135,000 searches / month

best dog food – 110,000 searches / month

natural dog food – 110,000 searches / month

Try it. That is the best way to learn.

Step 2 – Pick a few of these search words that relate to you (maybe you don’t like ‘dry dog ​​food’ so don’t bother with that) and jump to google.com/insights/search

Here you will get trends of how much the search word is searched for. Which countries/states. Any seasonality and so on. Change the filters to find out. You now have some relevant keywords that work in your area. Right?

Step 3: Go to Google and type in your 10 (or so) selected keywords. Look for the number of sites it shows on the top right. For dog food I see:

“Results 1 – 10 of approximately 43,400,000 for dog food with Safesearch activated”

Phew! 43 million is a very large number. Try ‘dog food’ and 25 million will appear. That’s still a lot. Go through the list in step 1 and add a word or two until you can hit a sweet spot of less than 500,000. A well-optimized site will rank high in that type of competition. Now do you see why it is tedious and boring? Well, you can buy a keyword research software tool to help you out.

Where can you put what you found?

Now you finally have 10 (more or less) keywords that work and just for you. Follow the 9 points in section 1 (above) to place them in the correct places in your content. That’s obvious.

Also go back to Google with the keywords you dropped (now you see why you needed notepad?). Look up which sites score well on them. For example, for ‘dog food recipes’ I find 20 million competitors… but there is a YouTube video in the #5 spot. This tells us that YouTube is being crawled by Google for this word. Study that video. Better package keywords and get your video posted on YouTube. In a day or two, if this video is replaced by yours… bingo, you’ve got your site linked from the first page of Google (be sure to start your description with your site address).

If the latter got you, that’s the law of the jungle… you don’t have to be the fastest deer… you have to be faster than the slowest to not get eaten!

But it is not always so simple. The site at the top may have a story, lots of back-links, links from authority sites like .gov and .edu… all of which give it credibility. So you can never say for sure. What you can do, however, is keep posting good stuff on popular sites with your matching keywords…and who knows, maybe a .gov site will link to you!