Step 2 In Optimizing Your Site With Your Chosen Keywords

Continuing some basic SEO lessons from Cataweb Online S.L., once you’ve chosen the keywords that you want your site to rank high in, the next thing to do would be to check out the competition.  For our example we’ve taken “weight loss story”, among others, and when that term is entered in the search engines, the site that came out on top of the rankings at the time was: http://www.runwalkjog.com/weight_loss_success_story.htm, which is a subpage of http://www.runwalkjog.com, meaning it’s not a top level webpage.

When that happens, you could be in luck, because it’s that much easier to outrank a subpage IF you have your keyword in your domain name.  To further snoop around your competition’s page, you can check out their source code, which is done by simply going to the View tab on your browser and choosing the ‘Source’ or ‘Page Source’ option.  Once you’re there, you can check up on a few optimizations to see if your competition is doing them.  If they aren’t, you’re lucky again, because if you do those things, you’ll be on your way to beating them in the rankings.

Some basic site optimizations to consider are:

-Using <h1> header tags in your code and placing their keyword within those tags.
-Using your main keyword in the <title> tags of the website.
-Making sure you’ve bolded, underlined or italicized your keywords in the text of the body of your webpage.
-Using <alt> image tags and placing your keywords within that tag.
-Using your keyword once at the very beginning of the website’s copy, and once at the very end.

Those are some of the things you can check on when looking at your competition’s source code, to see how hard they could be to overtake in the rankings.  And of course now that you know these basic things to do using the keywords you’ve chosen for your site, it’s something you can start doing automatically everytime you make a site, like we do here at Cataweb Online S.L.

Cataweb Online S.L.’s First Step In Optimization: The Keywords

Before you can optimize your site to rank high for a specific search on a search engine, the first thing we at Cataweb Online S.L. do is choose the right keywords.  As an example, let’s say your spankin’ new website is selling a weight loss product.  To optimize it, you’d think you have to make the main keyword “weight loss”, right?  Wrong!  If you start out with a keyword like that to anchor your site’s SEO, you probably won’t get very far up in the rankings.  That’s because there will be bigger and more established sites out there using that same keyword, so the competition will be cutthroat for it.

So the first thing you should do is use a very important online SEO tool, which you can find from various sites, and this is the keyword tool.  I personally use the Good Keywords software, which is freeware and is only around 500kb in size.  Installing it gives you a tool to check up on generic keywords you’re interested in and gives suggestions on other good keywords derived from your original choice.  So if we take your “weight loss” keyword and enter it, what will come out is a list of terms related to it.

In terms of ranking, “weight loss” comes out on top of course, and in our example, it got 1,413,194 searches for the month, based on the Overture engine, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2003.  That’s a lot of searches, and if you want to cross check the results using even just the Google search engine, you’ll see that almost 20,000,000 pages come out for the term “weight loss”.  Those are the pages you’ll be competing against, so it’s best to scroll down the list of keyword options.

Go for more specific terms, like “weight loss story” or “weight loss picture”, which at the time we checked ths out, ranked somewhere in the middle of the Top 100 related keywords for “weight loss”, with maybe 3,000+ searches a day.  Choose your 3 to 4 key phrases from those suggestions and those are the ones you will be using as keywords for your site.  With a lower ranking than the top generic keyword, it should be easier to overtake the top site for those keywords, instead of clawing your way up a list of 20,000,000 entries!  At least that’s what we at Cataweb Online S.L. recommend.

Cataweb Online S.L. Introduction to SEO

Here at Cataweb Online S.L., we know you’ve heard all about how you need to do SEO, ever since you started your internet business or put up an online presence for your company.  And it still confuses you and gives you a headache every time you check it out on the net and look at all those graphs and charts and screencaps of online SEO tools you have to use.  In fact you’re probably thinking what is SEO and why do I need to learn all this stuff?

Well, you don’t really need to learn it, you can always hire an expert.  But you’d better at least have an inkling as to what you’re hiring that expert for, right?  If you didn’t know, SEO means Search Engine Optimization, and in layman’s terms I guess that means arranging stuff on your webpage so that it ranks higher on a search engine, especially for specific search terms or keywords that you want.

So if you’ve got a site for say… comic books, and when you type in ‘comic books’, you find your site on the 63rd search result page (if you can find it at all), then optimizing it means making it appear on the 12th page of the search for example, or as everyone wants, on the 1st page of the search.  But hey, if you’re intentionally on this site, you must know that already.  This basic explanation is really more for those who’ve wandered into Cataweb Online S.L. by accident.