How To Win The SEO War

So, you have the site: large, content rich and full of relevant information. You submitted this website to every possible search engine. So where are the visitors? Weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website. What's wrong?

Most likely, they simply cannot find your site because the keywords they use are not found on your pages...

For example, suppose your company provides some software for search engine optimization. If you were to search for a page on SEO tools, what query would you use? "SEO tool", "website promotion software" or probably "search engine marketing product"? It is hard to say isn't it? Your first guess is probably wrong. People do not think alike.

What you need is a tool that can tell you what keywords searchers are using when searching for a site like yours. You need a list putting the most frequently used keywords at the top.

There's a good news for us — there exist a lot of such tools, and best of all, many of them are free! Any of the tools mentioned below will give you a large number of alternative queries to the keyword or phrase you have entered into the search form.

The most famous one is the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool. Formerly called the "Overture Keyword Selector Tool", this free service is primarily designed to help advertisers who wish to select terms to target with ads on the Yahoo network. But you can use it to see how popular particular keywords are.

Google recently launched a new Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool (you have to be logged in for the link to work), which is much more usable than their older Google AdWords Keyword Sandbox.

One of the best desktop tools is Good Keywords. Once we've downloaded this software, we can enter the most generic keyword for your website into the software. In our example, the keyword would be "SEO".


You may notice that during the last month the word "SEO" was searched 67867 times at Overture (please remember that Overture is not the most popular search engine. The actual searches performed on Yahoo or Google will be much higher). Also, given one word Good Keywords will tell you all relevant combinations of that word (again this is based on actual searches done by people).

Don't try to optimize for this "SEO" word!

Why? you ask. Here's why:

Firstly, single word keywords tend to be hyper-competitive. A search for "SEO" (or any other single word keyword) in any search engine will generate hundreds of thousands of pages. For example, Google shows 25,800,000 pages for this keyword.


While it is possible that you may get your page in the top 10 for such a single word keyword, it is quite unlikely.

Secondly, because of the sheer number of pages that single word searches usually throw up, most search engine users have already realized that they can get more relevant pages if they search for phrases rather than individual words. Statistical research has shown that most people are now searching for 2 or 3 word phrases rather than for single words.

Thirdly, single word keywords won't get you targeted traffic. When people search for "SEO", it's impossible to say what exactly they are looking for: for some SEO article or SEO tool or SEO services — they may be interested in any information related to SEO. Even if you got your site into the top 10 for "SEO", you gain nothing from such visitors. However, when someone searches for "SEO tool", he/she is your potential customer, and hence, it makes sense for you to try and get a top ranking for your site for that keyword.

Hence, whenever you are trying to generate keywords, try to find some specific keyword phrases.

Of course, by the end of this course, you will be able to target even such BIG keywords as "SEO", but it's always better to start on the more specific keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those smaller keywords, and then you can focus on the larger ones.

So, the first step you must do is to find what keywords you should optimize your site for. After that you can start optimizing your site one by one for each keyword. Exactly how many of the keywords you choose to optimize your site for largely depends on the amount of time that you can spare from your normal business activities. But whatever the number of keywords that you target, it obviously makes sense to go for the least competitive keywords first.