Stealth Marketing Solutions Blog

Archive for October, 2009

Performing keyword research for your business to display either in a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, article marketing, SEO, or social bookmarking is by far one of the most important things you can do to gain traffic to your website.  A lot of businesses do this poorly or do not do it at all.

For example, let’s say you own an SEO company in Atlanta, GA, which is where I live, and you’re putting together a website and planning your onsite and offsite marketing campaign. ..you need to choose the “golden” keyword for which you will fight to associate with your website.  That “golden” keyword must not be too broad because it if is, it will require a lot of work, either on your part or the company you outsource to, to rank for.  Very broad keywords like “real estate” or “mortgage” are very competitive as there are sites with hundreds of thousands of backlinks.  It could take years of link building to get to page 1 for such keywords.

Back to the example – The first sets of keywords that would come to mind are “Atlanta SEO company“, or “search engine optimization Atlanta” or a derivative thereof.  Someone not familiar with keyword research would probably may just decide to use “SEO” instead.  The competition for that keyword is huge because it is too broad.

What you want to focus on are the longtail-keywords, keywords that are more than one or two words longs.  Longtail keywords provide you with longevity because you have to put thought into them and can quickly achieve #1, #2, or #3 rankings on Google for them.

What are “golden” keywords that you are trying to rank for?

I thought I would start off this blog and the first post by describing what the term SEO means.

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of improving the natural ranking and traffic volume to a web site from the search engines via natural or organic results.  Unlike SEM or search engine marketing, there’s no paid inclusion needed in SEO.

Ranking for specific terms within niches that are heavily searched on the search engines, should be the goal of every site.  Being on the first page of Google and in the top three positions or even owning the whole first page for your keyword, will ensure a site receives the majority of the traffic for that keyword.

Optimizing a site involves more than just editing content, keywords repetition, and removing barriers to search engine inclusion.  The biggest part of SEO, from my point of view, is link building via anchor text for the main website or other pages within the site.

What keywords are you trying to get your site ranked for?  How many incoming links or anchor texts do you have coming into your site?  These are some of the questions we’ll cover in the next post.