The SEO school bus was driving by one of the many make money online blogs, and went through some of the comments, one read something like this: “I could probably be making more money online if I wasn’t so lazy and actually did some keyword research.”  I stopped reading and started this post.  While this is not a self-help website, I want to create some useful information that will motivate you to “actually do some keyword research”.  One thing I tell people everyday that are just starting a new website for the first time or the 100th time is if I can show you how to do search engine optimization for your site, and you start to make money from it, you will be able to repeat the process.  Once you have that breakthrough, you’ll gain momentum and know that “you’ve done it before, and you can do it again.”

Keyword research

On a previous SEO School bus post I mentioned some tools that you need to get very familiar with if you want to succeed with your website.  Google Adwords Keyword Tool has some very useful information when you’re researching your keywords.  Again lets try to get into the minds of our potential visitors, while we use this tool.  Before you keep reading pull the tool up in a new tab or window and try this experiment.

Type in a broad search term for your keyword, for example weddings.  When you get your results there are different columns that you can view for the results, look for the drop down menu by “Choose columns to display”. Personally I like to see advertiser competition, approx search volume: “month”, approx avg search volume, and estimated avg. cost per click.  You might find that you like things that I don’t but what you’ll want to be looking at is search volume.  As your looking at your results, you’re going to have a good amount of search terms to look at.  This is where we can get into the minds of our searchers, if you’re a wedding planner in Austin Texas, that specializes in outdoor weddings then you probably won’t want “weddings” as one of your keywords to optimize for.  Now that you have an idea of some of the search terms around your keyword, start a new search.  This time type in something like:

Keyword Example List

• Keyword
• Keyword Research
• Advanced Keyword Research
• Advanced Keyword Research Help

You might find when you get your results that some search terms you typed in get little or no traffic at all, and other search terms you never thought of are getting thousands a month.  Try and narrow it down to a search term with less than a thousand searches a month with low advertiser competition that you think would result in some targeted traffic for your site.  Type that term into a G search and take a look at what sites are on the first page.  If you have your SEO for firefox enabled, then take a look at how many links some of the people on the first page have, and what their page rank is.

This will give you an idea of what kind of work you’ll need to put into with your link building to be ranking with these websites.  Does that mean if this site with 20,000 links means I need 20,000?  Not necessarily, but lets get something straight, no one can tell you how many links you’ll need to get on that first page.  What you can expect is that as your doing your SEO for your site, you will be able to follow your site going from the 100th page of the big G, to the 90th, 80th, 70th, 50th, 20th, 5th, then 1st.  This will be motivating for you and based on the kinds of links your getting, you’ll be able to get an idea of your time frame and amount of links.

Lets, not get carried away here, go out on your own now and do your SEO school bus homework and start some keyword research.

Today’s SEO school bus lesson is centered around some of the basics for landing pages.  Lets take the SEO school bus approach, and let me know if you have anything to add to some of my suggestions.

Your sites landing page will decide if a visitor comes and goes in a moment, or stays and digs deeper into the site.  Lets face it, we have to catch peoples attention within the first few seconds of them visiting our site.  We’re competing with a fast paced world of massive stimuli, from the MTV reality shows to Flavor Flav’s dating show (not familiar with either, don’t worry).  Now the seo school bus is not suggesting you start your own reality show, starring you, directed by you, and written by you.  Lets take this like it’s your first time working on a landing page.

Your landing page is the place someone “lands” after clicking on your website.  This could be because you have your link on your friends blog for share organic dog biscuit recipes, or you’ve started a pay-per-click ad campaign .  Maybe you’re on the first page of the big G and someone finds your organic-dog-biscuit-recipes.com website.  If you found the SEO school bus somewhere other than from the search engines, then you may have landed somewhere on my website, and it might not have been the home page.  This means every page and post can be a potential landing page.

Lets take the organic-dog-biscuit-recipes.com website example; this outline will apply for all the pages on your site.

1.  Call to action

Unless your website is a one page profile of your dog buddy, and that’s all you wanted, you’re going to want to call your visitors to action.  This could be subscribing to the rss feed, or buying your book on easy bake organic dog biscuits.  The call to action should be available for your visitor without them having to go looking for it.  Whats the SEO school bus’ call to action?  Well it depends on the landing page, will always be the answer.  If your an aspiring author blogging about your new book that you just published, then perhaps the call to action would be to buy the book.  If you have a program you developed that helps people find their local oil shop, then the call to action might be to download the program.

2.  Page Titles

All of your landing pages have to have their very own title page (look around the SEO school bus for examples).  They need to be unique from one another, and relevant to what the page is about.  This is where you want to make sure you include your keyword(s) into the title.  If your page is about a new jalapeno dog biscuit recipe you just came up with then your title should look something like “New jalapeno dog biscuit recipe”.  An example of what not to do would be, “Find out what you can make for your dog buddy that he would love!”.  While your dog may love the new treats, the search engines won’t.  In some cases websites will have other pages out ranking their home page for a keyword, because they’ve made a great landing page.

3.  Meta descriptions

A lot like the last one.  Just keep it simple here, make sure your keywords are in there, but don’t feel like you have to lose your creativity.  Always remember the content our website have are for humans too, not just the robots.

4.  Headlines

We’re probably not all journalists, but we can learn something from they way they write their headlines.  Open up a news paper and see what catches your eye.  I’m not here to teach you creative writing, but this is something you can get better with over time.  You may have a hit and miss experience at first, but you’ll learn how to make more hits than misses.  Make sure your code for this has the <H1> for your headline, this will tell the search engines “look here this is what this page is about”.  H1 header tags should be added into your page with the <h1> “SEO School Bus” </h1>.  Make sure your headline can deliver on its promise.  Don’t say, “How to cure the common cold.” if your just selling vitamin C pills.

5.  Internal links

Internal linking is a way I can point to other pages on the SEO School Bus. This is done with the <a href=”mywebpage.com”>My Web Page</a>.  Again with this don’t ever do it, lets try a good and bad example again.  If you are describing a how to set up your own make money online website, and you already covered what a niche market is, you wouldn’t want to say, “Click HERE!! to find out what a niche market is”.  The search engines now think the link is about HERE!!  Try this, “If you missed what a niche market is…”  Much better, now they know it’s about niche marketing.  If you have 30 different links to go to, it will be spammy and no one will read what you’ve written on that page.

Aside from the example website I picked, I hope the SEO school bus has taken you on an educational ride today.

A little story to share with you.  I have a friend with a website that posts 5 days a week.  I was reading his most recent post, when I wanted to check how many links he had coming into his website (it showed around 2400).  I quickly sent him a text saying, “You have 2400 incoming links for your site”.  He said, “How did you see that?”.  Which brings me to a SEO tool that you should be using.

SEO for Firefox, while a great resource for research, can help you learn SEO as you’re using it.  If you’re not using FireFox this might give you a reason.  I won’t go into to much depth of how this tool works, (there are plenty out there) my suggestion would be to play around with it first.

First thing to look at will be the options of the tool where you will find what kind of info you want to know about a website.  You can set any of the options to automatic, hide, or on-demand.  You may hide one that I may have automatic, and you might ask: “Which ones do you have hidden, automatic or on-demand?”  I don’t want to push my bias onto you, because then you won’t do any research on your own to understand why it’s important.

I’m now in the habit of right clicking on every website and using my “look up this page” function.  I can spend hours looking at where websites are getting their links from, then reading the articles that have been written or directories they have submitted to.  If you can understand why they have the link and how its helping them you will be able to convert this into learning SEO techniques for your site.  We will revisit this tool and touch on different aspects of what the information can do for us.

The SEO School Bus has and will have plenty of ways to learn SEO, but just like school you will have to do some homework: setting SEO goals.  Feel free to e-mail me your goals and I will give you some of my thoughts.