Dave:    Almost overnight you can get a hell of a lot of back links. Again, I’m in a very competitive space. I’m either in the SEO space or I’m in the stock market education space, and both of those are very competitive.

If you imagine your little blog from some of your listeners or watchers and they’re in a little tiny space like maybe plumbing in Greensboro, or whatever space that they’re in on a much smaller scale, just one press release has the potential to get you enough links.

Gideon:    You could just run it.

Dave:    Yeah, and that filters through to the rest of your website. I’m building a whole lot of links to those pages, but then the way WordPress blogs work is all of the pages are interlinked so all of that same good PR and page rank, it’s all flowing around and will help other things rank as well.

Gideon:     Awesome.

Dave:    The lucky last one I’ll leave you with, this is I suppose a little bit of a hot topic right now, is doing guest blog posts. That’s another really good way, contacting different bloggers saying, “Hey, I want to write an article for you.”

You write it for their audience and they publish it on their blog, and in some sort of resource box at the end of the article you link back to yourself. That’s another way to get some really good quality links.

I know Yaro’s been doing some of that at the moment and sending some link love out. Not that I want to get him getting spammed for people wanting to do guest blog posts, but I know there’s a whole lot of bloggers out there who are hungry for content.

I’m the same as well. If you’re in the internet marketing space, on www.DavidJenyns.com and a few things like that, we do guest blogging posts as well. I’m sure you probably do the same.

Gideon:    I haven’t yet, but I guess it’s not a strategy that I’ve really been following. So far I’ve just been more a video guy. I really love the video stuff, but this has really just opened my eyes to what’s possible and there’s so much that I’m not doing. I can see that I don’t have to do it myself. I can source it out to one of my workers.

Very, very useful stuff. This is awesome.

Dave:    Cool. We talked a little bit about on-page and off-page. Where do you want to head now?

Gideon:    I think we’ve probably done pretty well. I don’t want to totally fry people’s brains with this call. To me, I think there are three really key steps. Why don’t you summarize it for us, Dave, in terms of the key things that you need to do for optimizing your blog and, in general, your pages online. Could you summarize it for us?

Dave:    The summary would be, get yourself a WordPress blog and make sure that you install the right permalink structure. Make sure that you do some good keyword research to pick out your primary money phrase, and then get a whole lot of other keywords that you want to optimize for.

Keep those keywords handy so then as you start to build content on your website, you choose one phrase and optimize each page or each post for one phrase plus some variations, and then just make sure once you choose that keyword, put it in the few places I mentioned – title tag, meta descriptions, meta keywords and then in your content a few times – and then after that you can start your link building.

There’s a few different ways I talked about doing links, but just making sure you build good quality back links to your website with the appropriate anchor text. That’s pretty much SEO in a nutshell right there.

Gideon:    I think I’ve become somewhat more of an expert of SEO just by having you on the call, David. I’m sure a lot of our listeners will be feeling the same way. This is just awesome.

Thank you so much for this wealth of information. I can tell you’re a true expert. You’ve got the results, so I think that’s always my acid test. I look for people’s results. You’ve certainly shown that, so that’s really, really good. Thank you so much.

Dave:    My pleasure. If anyone wants to find out anymore, obviously you can dig a lot deeper into these sorts of things. We didn’t really get much of a chance to touch on SEO for videos and some of the other things as well, so people can head over to www.DavidJenyns.com or www.MelbourneSEOServices.com. I’m on Twitter, Facebook and all that sort of stuff. My YouTube channel is www.YouTube.com/theseomethod.

I give away tons and tons of free content mainly because my core business is the stock market stuff, and I also work with SEO clients, not so much in the internet marketing space, so I’m happy to give a whole lot of my info away for free.

Gideon:    Awesome stuff. Thank you, David.

Dave:     Yeah, no worries. The off-page factors really are the major components when it comes to search. When you talk about a pie, you’d probably say 20% of that SEO pie and the chances of you coming up in the Google rankings is about 20% on-page, but the 80% of that pie, the factors that are the most important are going to be what we talk about now, which is off-page SEO.

That has all to do with the quality of the links that you’re building back to your website. This is kind of my bread and butter. There’s plenty of ways that you can take this to the next level [inaudible] operating those more competition niches to do with stock market related stuff.

Obviously I need to super charge all of this, but for 99% of people who are listening to this, the few tips that I can give you now to make sure that you build these good quality links will set you head and shoulders above the rest.

The first thing that you need to know is when you’re building links to your website, it’s important to make sure you build links with the appropriate anchor text. You’re linking back to your website on all of these other websites back to your website with the right keywords that you’re trying to rank a particular page for.

Let’s say, for example, this SEO services page you can see, the keyword that we’re looking to rank here is SEO company. SEO company is the keyword that we’re optimizing this particular page for. Now when we send all of the inbound links back to this website, it’s important that the anchor say the right thing.

This is one of the really good ways to build links back. In fact, this is probably one of the first places that you want to get started.

Gideon:    You create articles in Ezine Articles and link back to your page?

Dave:    Yeah. As part of off-page optimization, you want to make sure that you’re building links back to your website with the appropriate anchor text. The anchor text is the keyword there.

I’m linking back to a specific page, and then that keyword that I’m linking with is the keyword that I’m trying to optimize and rank that particular page for.

What I’m going to talk about is all of the different ways and methods you could go about building as many of these links back to your website from high quality sites back to your website, which will ultimately end up helping it rank.

Gideon:    Awesome.

Dave:    The first thing that I’d suggest is you head over to something called Directory Maximizer. That’s a good relatively cheap way to start getting some inbound links. I think they charge like $0.06 a link for directory submissions. We’ll just go to here and you can go ahead and for a small fee you can have your website hand-submitted to 200-odd directories.

From an actual benefit of the inbound links, you’re not necessarily getting really high quality inbound links here. The reason we do Directory Maximizer or directory submissions first is because we’re building a whole lot of links back to our website with our URL as the anchor text.

When they submit using Directory Maximizer, they actually send a whole lot of links back to your website with your URL. See here? www.MelbourneSEOServices.com. That will build a whole lot of back links back to your site with your URL.

The reason we do that is it looks natural to the search engines. Obviously, Google doesn’t like the idea of people gaming their search engine, so when we do anything with link building you want to make sure that you replicate what happens in nature.

It’s natural for people to link back to your website with your URL. We use Directory Maximizer to build a whole lot of inbound links back to your site with the URL so that when we start our really specific direct linking campaigns like this, SEO company, it’s offset by also having a lot of links back to your website with the URL. It just looks more natural.

Start off with Directory Maximizer, then head over to Ezine Articles and open yourself up an account. It’s free. It doesn’t cost anything. Then go ahead and submit maybe 10 articles and just send links. You might pick out 10 pages that you’ve created as optimized and send specific links back to those pages, and you’ll also send some links back to your home page as well.

That’s probably where I’d start. Director Maximizer, then Ezine Articles, then SEO on the cheap. There’s a whole lot of different ways that you can do it. You can purchase different services that will give you access to different blog networks and things like that.

They’re a little bit gray hat and a little bit more frowned upon, a little bit more dodgy. You do need to make sure when you head down that path that you’re choosing networks where you know that the person behind the network has a good understanding of SEO so they don’t do anything that’s going to get you into trouble. If you are going to head down that path, just offset it with really good white hat, good clean link building strategies.

I’m talking about directories. That’s fine. That’s good clean stuff. Submitting to Ezine Articles, good clean stuff.

The other thing that you want to do is set yourself up some Google alerts and use something like Google Reader so you can monitor what’s going in your particular niche, and then monitoring keywords and things like that that are associated to whatever you’re working on, and then you can get notification when different blogs are having discussions.

I would head over to those blogs and join in the discussion and build links back to your website, because when you post a comment on a site, as all bloggers know, you often get the option to enter in your name and also your URL, and you’re building some of those inbound links back to your website while also involving yourself in the community.

There are a few other things you can do. To get a really good hit, this is something that we did for our Melbourne SEO Services when we first launched it. We ran this little video. I talked about it here, this Google versus Yellow Pages, a bit of a  viral marketing type thing.

We created a press release for it. We used PR Web to do that, and a really good way to create a press release is to run some sort of survey. If you’ve got a blog, survey your members about what’s important in your particular niche, create a survey, and then you can create a press release around that particular survey.

If we go “Google versus Yellow Pages,” I’m just going to go up to News here and just see if we can find it. We’re still on page one. You can see here. This our press release. We’ll head over here and we listed it on www.PRWeb.com. You can see that. Here’s our press release.

What I wanted to show you is we embedded a whole lot of inbound links. You can see down at the bottom here, Melbourne SEO Services, search engine company and a few other links, right?

If we go ahead and copy the title tag of this particular post, I’m going to head over to Google and we’ll post this into Google. We’ll put quotes around it and we’ll hit search. It’s a pretty unique title and you can see at the moment – wow, it’s popped up since I last looked at it, 2,330 results.

Not all of them are going to necessarily be specifically my thing, but quite a lot of them are. You can see Melbourne SEO Services, new survey data, that’s me. A lot of these places are republishing my content.

If I click on one, let’s just hope that this happens since we’re all doing this on the fly. That’s good,  they’ve included and left all of the links, so I’m getting all of those links back to my website, SEO Blog.

Basically for a cost of a couple hundred bucks – or actually I think we did the highest one because we also wanted to embed videos – so it was about $360. We just got so many inbound links back to our website.

Gideon:    That’s from PR Web, right?

Dave:    That’s PR Web.

Gideon:    You pay them a bit of money and you can do this press release which then allows people to copy it and put it on their sites or whatever and get us back links. Nice.

Dave: Where that information appears and why it’s important is if you come over here.

Let’s say I’m going to go back to our trading systems. That is our title tag and that is our meta description. That’s why it’s really important to make sure that your title tags are written with copywriting in mind.

I think it’s important when doing SEO. You always put usability first, because I think that ultimately, when the spider comes to your website, it’s not going to pull out its wallet and purchase your product. That’s the end user. Always optimize with a view for optimizing for usability first, then SEO, what I’m talking about, second.

You can see here, you want to make sure you have some good copywriting skills and you put your keyword in that title tag, and then you also have it in the description because Google’s going to bold those. That obviously draws the eye to it.

Gideon:    Does it make a difference where exactly you put that keyword in your title tag? For example, is it better at the beginning or does it not matter too much?

Dave:    People say it’s better to weight it towards the front. We swap it around a little bit. Again, I would err towards going for usability. As long as it’s in there, then go for usability first and then the other stuff, you’re down to a point where you’re splitting hairs.

If let’s say you went after a keyword and you couldn’t rank for the keyword that you wanted to go after, you would look at what your competition is doing, reverse engineer what they’re doing, and copy what they’re doing and at least you start there first.

If they had the keyword at the front, you might move the keyword to the front of yours and then that would be a way to try and slowly work that.

Most stuff, especially with off-page optimization, you can just overcome any issues when it comes to search engines by just sending more links to the page that you want to rank for.

Gideon:    This is extremely helpful. There’s your title that you’ve got to get right. You’ve got to get the meta description right and the meta keywords. Those three things are absolutely key for when you’re creating your new blog post, for example, to think about that.

First of all you do your research, do your keywords, and then you optimize those three things for the search engines. Sounds awesome.

Dave:    Then for the on-page, like on the rest of the page, here’s your actual post. For this post here, what you then want to do is take your keyword and make sure that you put the keyword in early and often. You want to make sure that you have it in the first paragraph.

A lot of people talk about density and all that sort of stuff. Don’t worry about density. Push that to the side,
as long as you mention it two or three times.

It can be a little bit more. You probably don’t want to have it a little bit less. It does depend on the amount of words that you’ve got on the page.

I don’t really worry about density so much anymore. I try and have it early. I’ll try and have it in the first paragraph. I’ll try and mention it a couple of times throughout the article or whatever the post is and then also down at the bottom of the particular post as well I like to add the keyword.

Let’s just hope that this page has been optimized correctly. I’m going to go right click using this search status thing and I’m going to go here. Where is it? I’m looking for keyword density. Highlight Keyword. We’ll just type in, selling a website. You can see here. Bang, it’s in there. It’s not in the first paragraph so that’s a bit of a bummer, but that’s okay.

It’s a little bit further down in the page there. We’ll keep scrolling down. We’ll see if it’s mentioned again. It’s mentioned again. It’s mentioned again down in the last paragraph and also mentioned down in the tags as well.

It’s a good idea to load your keywords into your tags as well. I’ll show you that in the back end in a moment.

That’s the basic on-page optimization. Choose your keyword, use what I was talking about, load it in your title and your meta description and your meta keywords, and you put it throughout the site, and then you should be fine.

Gideon:    That is very cool. That’s very useful. Thank you. That’s awesome.

Dave:    I’ll show you the back end now so you can see how easy it is with WordPress. I’m just logging in here.

Gideon:    If you’re watching this and you’re thinking, “This is quite overwhelming,” I think if you just follow these initial simple steps that Dave’s talking about, maybe watch the video a couple of times, to my mind this all just really super boosts your ability to get found by the search engines and help you get that extra traffic from the search engines. It’s really good.

Dave:    From the back end, it’s quite simple. You’d obviously put your keyword in here. You can edit the permalink structure. Usually what I’ll do if I’m here in editing it – and I won’t do it now because we’ve obviously started sending links to these pages – but I would just have the keyword that you’re trying to rank for as the link like that. That’s a good idea.

You do a little bit of your keywords loading them in here. I’m in Thesis at the moment so it will vary slightly but the All-in-One SEO looks very similar. You will just get the option to do a custom title tag, a custom description, and your meta keywords which I talked about.

That just goes to show you don’t have to hop into the back end coding side of things. It’s really quite easy. Just type it in there.

Gideon:    I’ve just been ignoring that stuff. I’ve done some focusing on the title and the content of the blog post, but everything else I’ve just been ignoring. This is really good. I’ll be doing this from now on for sure.

Dave:    When it comes to driving the traffic to your websites, just organic traffic, making these slight changes that we’re talking about now will make the world of difference.

I’d also go ahead and drop your keywords in your tags here as well. That’s always a good idea. Sometimes I’ll put a few more and sometimes I’ll put a few less.

Another thing that you’ll want to keep in the back of your mind is just when you set your permalink structures. This is a really important thing. Hopefully I can find it. There you go. It’s under Settings on the right hand side or left hand side when you’re in your WordPress. If you just go for something like this, you can set your custom structure.

If you just copy that you’ll be fine. /%postname%/and then finish with the slash again. You can just copy it there and if you set that, your permalink structure is going to be better and more indexible by the search engines.

If you look up here, a lot of times it’s set to the default and you’ve got question marks in there and the search engines don’t like that as much.

Gideon:    Good. This is a whole bunch of stuff here and specifically now this is all on page SEO stuff, right? I’m just conscious of the time as well and your time, David. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about the on-page stuff or can we talk a little bit about the off-page stuff as well?

Dave:    I’ll finish with two final things with the on-page stuff. Number one, I would make sure that you set up some plugin. There’s plenty of free plugins there. Look for a plugin for generating a site map. That’s a good idea and then you can submit that to the Google webmaster tools. It just helps with making sure your site gets indexed completely.

The second tip is don’t stress so much with no-follow. A lot of people are getting out there trying to do page rank sculpting and channel a lot of their page rank to specific pages and they do that by no-follow.

The way that no follow has recently changed and [inaudible] has come and said, “It’s not operating the way it used to.” You’re best if you just throw that to the side and send the links to the pages that you want to have ranked. Make sure you know what pages you ultimately want to have ranked and then send as many links to those pages as you can.

I also would suggest turning off no-follow for comments, because it will attract spammers. I would say when you’re first starting out the chances of you being on the radar of those spammers isn’t going to be very high anyway, and the more you can encourage people to comment on your blog, the better.

If you turn the comments off you can ultimately approve and disapprove whatever you’d like, so it’s better to just sit there and manually approve them. Just don’t approve the ones that are clearly not adding any value. It’s going to encourage people to want to comment on your site.

Gideon:    Awesome. Turn the no-follow thing off for that? Awesome, very good. How are you doing for time, David?

Dave:    I’m good.

Gideon:    Do we have time to talk about the off-page SEO tips?

Dave:     For sure. I’ll move through a little bit quicker.

Gideon:    This is extremely useful and I’ve learned a ton already and I’m sure our listeners and viewers will be learning in time too. It’s really, really good. Let’s keep going.

Dave:    Yeah. This is probably just the easy way to do SEO, which is build as a big of list as you can, find out what the competition is for each one of those keywords, make sure it’s under 500,000 just so you’re not going after super competitive phrases, and then I would sort them based on number of searches.

Going back to our keyword tool here, “SE0 Services,” then I would do it based on number of searches, and then I would choose a phrase that sounds good from a branding point of view and also one that you can get in the domain name like I talked about. Choose one of those. It might be dog training or whatever the keyword is.

Try and find something that has less than 500,000 competition. Then rank them based on the number of searches, and then choose something within the top five or the top 10. That will become your primary phrase.

Then when you start to look for those longer tail phrases to optimize for the posts that you were talking about, those individual posts, I’ll jump around, but as long as it’s got over at least 50 searches when you search on the globe – you want to make sure you’ve got some traffic there but I can go anywhere up to 5,000 or 6,000.

As your website gets stronger you can start to go for those more competitive keywords. You might start off though going for those longer tail phrases with less competition, because that way you can get some quick easy wins and get some traffic to your website, and then you can build up to the more competitive phrases.

Gideon:    I think this is really cool. I’m so glad I’m recording this screen so that I can go back and watch this again.

If I understand this right, there are really two things happening here. You’re doing the research using the keyword tool, but then you do that for checking out the competition and the amount of traffic that those keywords are getting.

Then you also go back to the perform a Google search to basically find out how many real competition is there, and if it’s too much, you basically filter those out and just go back to the ones that you can still compete on.

Dave:    Spot on. That’s a little bit of a manual process. I show you that because if you want to do SEO on the cheap, you can do it that way, but there are different keyword tools.

Market Samurai is a really good one that’s worth checking out. It can automate a lot of this where you can just dump a whole string of keywords in and then you can find out the competition and then you can [inaudible] based on the number of searches, and basically it can speed up this whole process.

Another thing for bloggers as well, which I think is important – let’s just say we go to our dog training example – is this new area here. I only noticed this just recently because they’ve just launched this new update beta version keyword tool and it’s really quite cool. What I wanted to show you is these categories here.

These categories – when I type in my keyword – you’ll actually notice Google changes these categories and highlights the ones blue if it’s got a category in there that it thinks is applicable or associated to “dog training.”

Basically, this is Google saying to us, “Here are the categories that we think are important relative to dog training.” Under dog training, there’s some sort of clothing so having some dog clothing is probably a good idea to have on your website.

When you’re actually building your site and you’re building a blog, you get to select the categories, so why not feed back into Google the categories that it says are important?

If I go down to pets here, we can see pet food and supplies. Let’s say you were doing a dog training website. I would suggest you have dog clothing. You’d have something like dog food, dog supplies, dog leashes and collar. There are other ones under here, different categories.

Basically what this is going to do is it enables you to feed back to Google what it is that it thinks is relevant and important to the keyword that you’ve typed in. This will help you when you’re doing your initial site structure.

Gideon:    Awesome. That’s pretty cool. Would you class this stuff as on- page SEO stuff? Basically everything you’re doing on your page and on your website to make sure that it’s optimized for search engines, right?

Dave:    Yeah, pretty much what we’re doing now. It’s almost like that initial planning stage, and you’d apply this when you’re setting up a new domain name. Then it actually comes to a real on-page optimization after you’ve selected your domain name and you’ve got a list of keywords that you know people are searching for.

I’d save that in an Excel document, so when you start to build that particular site you can refer back to that list, and then you can build pages around those keywords so you don’t have to keep on doing your keyword research every time you add a new post to your blog.

I’ll head over to this little SEO blog here. We’ve done some keyword research here. I’ll show you a little bit of on-page optimization stuff.

A lot of [inaudible] I personally haven’t done, but some of the guys may have done here so, if we do come across something that isn’t the perfect rule of thumb – I’m going to give you the rules of thumb, but we might stumble across something that doesn’t exactly adhere to that, and I’ll make sure I point those out for you.

Let’s just click on the first post here. I’ll show you where you want to look when you’re actually doing your on-page optimization.

The first thing you want to do is, like I mentioned, you’ll install something like the Thesis plugin or you’ll go for the All-in-One SEO plugin. From the back end, that enables you to edit your title tag, your meta description, and your keywords. I’m going to go View, Page Source, just so you know where this information actually ends up.

The reason I start with this information is because this is kind of like on the back end. You might not necessarily see it, but this is important stuff that Google looks for.

Firstly, you’ve got your page title. You’ll get the option to edit that. You’ve identified that list of keywords that you want. For every page, you want to make sure you optimize that page for only one keyword and maybe one or two variations of that keyword.

A lot of people will try to optimize one page for a whole host of keywords. That’s never a good idea. Make sure you just pick one keyword and then maybe a variation of that keyword.

Gideon:    Also when you say page, that applies for posts as well, right?
You use that as the same thing, correct?

Dave:    Yes. By page and posts I mean any piece of content that you create that is its own unique thing, that’s a stand-alone. Each one of those should only be optimized for one keyword plus a variation.

If we have a look down here, you want to make sure that you get that keyword in the title tag. By the looks of things I can see down here, the three main pieces we need to look at is your title tag, your meta keyword, and your meta description.

Your keyword, I can tell here, the primary one we’re going after is Google Yellow Pages. I’m hoping that they’ve done the right keyword research and there’s a few people searching that.

You can also see some variations of that, which is Google Versus Yellow Pages. I’m not too sure why they’ve done the same keyword twice. Really, you’d probably just put both of those. Then you make sure that your primary keyword is in your title tag, which it is. I’m going to find a better example because this one isn’t optimized as well as I would like for this.

I’m going to show you the rules of the thumb and it’s the best idea to do that, but that’s not to say that you can’t not do it and still do very well. I’m just going to go in here and we’ll have a look at this company and see if [inaudible]

Gideon:    I’m just going to add something in here. Of course if you’re seeing this code stuff and you’re freaking out, don’t worry. You don’t have to deal with the code if you’re doing WordPress. It all happens in the back end.

Maybe we can quickly show people where they can change these things inside of the WordPress interface.

Dave:    That’s an excellent idea. What I’m showing you here is more so you know where the content appears, but you’re right, you’re not going to be back in the back end editing this. I’ll show you where it appears.

This one here, I can see the meta keywords here. This is the keyword I’m trying to optimize for which is selling a website, and then there’s a few variations of that – selling a website on Flippa and how to sell a website. You can see where we’re going from one primary keyword and then there are a couple of variations of that.

Then that keyword selling a website is in our title and then down here. This is our description. Selling a website, the keyword, is also in our description.

Dave: I know I’m probably jumping the gun a little bit there, because we haven’t really got to talking about the off-page factors, anchor text, and making sure that you’re building the right links, but I think this is really, really key.

Like you talked about, it’s like you’re building an asset. That’s why rather than going from WordPress and installing something like www.DavidJenyns.wordpress.com, you’re installing it on your own domain name and you’ll have a lot more control over it. Things do change. You’re building a business that way, as opposed to trying to build something on the cheap.

Domain name are $10 each. If you can’t afford to just spend $10 on a domain name, then go get a part time job, save up, make yourself $10, and then do I,t because that’s the cost of doing business online.

Gideon:    What you’re saying is it’s critical to have the right keywords inside your domain name. What if you’ve got David Jenyns or you’ve got an existing blog and some pretty good traffic, but you want to rank for a specific keyword? Say you’re David Jenyns blog and you want to actually rank for Melbourne SEO Services. Obviously, it’s going to be a bit harder because you don’t have that in your domain name. You can still do that, right?

Dave:    A lot of that comes with initially why I try and put that keyword in the domain URL. It’s that magic phrase, if you could wave that magic wand and then you could get that number one positioning.

You’re looking for the balance between going for a really broad keyword that’s got a lot of traffic and also one that’s going to convert as well.

This is where we start to talk about buying phrases versus browsing phrases. A buying phrase is someone who’s typing in, Sony handicam SRH11 relative to just Sony or Handicam or video recorder.

Video recorder is the very generic broad phrase. It’s going to have a lot more people browsing for a Handicam and they’re not necessarily ready to make a purchase.

When you compare that to a longer tail, a buying phrase like that Sony Handicam S11 or whatever it may be in your particular niche, you almost want to find a balance for your primary money keyword that you put in your domain name at the top here.

You want to find that balance between both being broad so there’s enough searches going on and also the buying phrase. That’s where you find that sweet spot, and if I could rank for that keyword, that would be fantastic.

When you start to do your keyword research later on and, like you were talking about, you want to rank for some of those other keywords on a domain name, even though that keyword isn’t in the actual primary URL, then you’ll go do some keyword research and then you can do some on-page optimization.

I’ll show you two quick things. I’ll just head over to Google and if you just type in free keyword tool, you want to go for the Google free keyword tool. Just yesterday I noticed this. They’re in the process of launching a new data keyword tool and it’s meshing together some of the keyword research tools that you had when you were in AdWords as well.

Here we’ll just scroll down. This is a good tip for doing SEO for your blog as well. Let’s just say your money phrase is – we’ll just keep going along the SEO services theme. I’ll just hit Search.

What you’ll find here are a couple of things of interest. Obviously you want to be looking for keywords that have people actually searching for the keyword. There’s no point in ranking for a particular keyword if no one’s actually searching for that keyword.

You can have a look over here. It’s going to return a whole lot of results. Just make sure that you go with keywords that do have some people actually searching it.

What is the perfect keyword to choose? That’s the one million dollar question. You ultimately want to find something with low competition and a high number of searches.

For my primary phrase that goes into my domain name I’m going to choose something a lot more competitive, and then for the longer tail phrases which are going to be when I optimize a post, I’ll go for things that have a lot less searches. I’ll just bounce it around.

The way I can tell competition is I’ll do something like I’ll head to Google and put in “dog training.” That’s a good niche to have a look at. If we have a look at the dog training to see how competitive a particular keyword is, I’ll usually look at what are the types of sites that are coming up at the top here.

You can see we’ve got Wikipedia at the top. Is the keyword in the domain name? Does it look like they’ve put the keyword in the title tag? This will give you an idea as to how competitive they are.

I’ll also look at each of these pages and double check what the page rank is. I don’t mind that the first couple might have a high page rank, but I’m looking for that page rank to drop quite quickly.

The first one might be a page rank 2. I’ll show you what page rank is. This is an indication of authority that Google’s got. If I move my mouse up here, I’ve got a special tool. It’s a Firefox plugin worth getting called, “Search Status.” I’ll just see if I can open it up. It’s Search Status, if you want to install it into your Firefox.

You can see here, this is a page rank 3. That was one of the first ones. Obviously Wikipedia is going to be quite high. What I like to do now is scroll further down the page and see what the page rank is. I come back up here. It’s still a page rank 3and I’ve come halfway down the page.

Now I’m starting to get an idea that this really is quite a competitive niche, because the page rank is staying quite high the further down the page that I go.

I’ll just click this lucky last one down at the bottom.

Gideon:    One of the things you could do if you’ve got a bit of page rank, which will be building up over time, you could out rank those people potentially, right?

Dave:    Yeah. The main reason we look at page rank, and it doesn’t have nearly as much effectiveness as it used to, is it gives you an indication as to how competitive they are.

You can have a look and see they’ve done a little bit of optimization. All of them seem to have the keyword in the title tag, so you know that’s a competitive term.

You want to try and find those phrases in here that are getting searches that aren’t necessarily overly competitive. You pick out what your primary phrase is and that will end up being your domain name.

Gideon:    Just before you go on, David, with the number of searches, how do you figure out whether it’s a good or bad number?

Dave:    Over here we’ve got our global searches in here and then our local searches. Local searches are going to be targeted geographically to where you are, so usually I’ll look at the global searches because I’m usually trying to go after keywords and get them to rank on www.Google.com as opposed to some extension or variation of .com.au.

For the number of keywords, it will depend on the niche you’re going after. Obviously, search engine optimization and SEO services is going to be quite a competitive niche. As you can see here, SEO services has got quite a lot of searches here. I’m going to try and go for that because I go after competitive phrases.

Probably the best thing to do is a lot of keyword research. Find all of the keywords that you can about your particular topic, load them into a spreadsheet, then try and delete out any of the keywords that have competition greater than about 500,000.

There are different keyword tools that you can use to do this. This will basically show you how to have [inaudible] keywords. You’ve built a big list of keywords. Then you can use something like Market Samurai, but let’s just say “SEO services” just to find out. We’ll put it in quotes like we talked about.

Over here, there’s three million results for that specific exact phrase. That’s going to be a hell of a lot of people to try and compete against.

What we’ll look at doing is look for anything when you do this search [inaudible] for anything that has competition of 500,000 or below. At least that’s something you know is not super, super competitive.

Gideon:    Before we go on, you just broke up a little bit there. Basically for this search, you make sure we’ve got the inverted commas going and you do the search for anything below 500,000, is that right? That’s what you should be looking for?

Part 4 of this video interview coming next…

Gideon: I notice that you’re on position one there. I’ve looked to the top right of the screen. It says you’re number one out of 39,400,000 results, so obviously you’ve done the inverted comma thing to do the search there, but still the number one position and most people will be typing in those keywords.

What’s the importance of coming up say number one compared to number two, three, four and the rest of the results on that page?

Dave: The lion’s share of the traffic goes to position number one. We actually recently did a short little video. I’ll try and think of the best way to find it over at my YouTube account.

Here in Melbourne I sent some of my team members into the city and they interviewed random people on the streets and we created a little video. It’s Google Versus Yellow Pages.

I wouldn’t call it a viral video, but it’s kind of like branded content. We interviewed random people and of all the people that we interviewed, they said they click on position number one or number two. They absolutely never go on to page number two. It’s always the one or two positions and they just trust that that is the right information.

If you were to compare position one to position three, I’ve heard numbers and they vary around, but it’s like 70% or thereabouts of the search traffic, 60 or 70% goes to this number one listing and then the rest is spread out beneath. The further you drop down the page, it drops off really quickly.

If we talk about right down at the bottom here – and there’s another one of my websites there going for the same keyword – further down here, these keywords down here aren’t going to be getting hardly any traffic relative to these.

That’s actually another little tip that I think a lot of SEOers miss out on. That’s the idea of making sure that you have a look where you’re already having easy wins.

You want to jump into your Google Analytics account and see where you’re already driving traffic from and what keywords you’re ranking for.

Visit those pages in the search engines, and then anywhere where you’re driving traffic from a particular keyword but you’re not in position number one, that is what I’d call the low hanging fruit and where you should target your link building efforts first.

If you’re already getting traffic on a keyword that’s in position number four or five, you send a few links to it, and Google already thinks it’s relevant because it’s on that first page. You can quickly pop it up to number one and take the lion’s share of that traffic.

Gideon: As you say, if you can get to the number one position, you can get like 60 to 70% of the traffic so it’s really worth it. I just want to make sure I understand what you said there and for our audience too.

If you already have an existing blog set up and you’re using Google Analytics, which is the program to track your statistics, look at the keywords that you’re already ranking for, the way the people are naturally finding your content on your blog already.

Then do the search in Google and find out where you’re ranking. If you’re not number one, do whatever you can to get your page to that number one position.

You mentioned getting links back to that page, for example, as a strategy to help you look more relevant to Google and to push it back up, right?

Dave: Spot on.

Gideon: I think we probably need to back track just a little bit. I think we’ll start with the foundational stuff and then we’ll blow that up a bit.

If I’m just getting started with this, maybe even if I already have a blog but I haven’t thought about SEO, what are the first few things that I need to do, the basic things that I need to do to help me set up for search engine optimization?

Dave: I think if you’ve got a blog, chances are you’ve probably gone for something like WordPress. WordPress is really good, and there are other ones like Movable Type and different things like that. I’d probably recommend WordPress just because it’s open source.

A lot of people are developing plugins and these plugins can give you a whole lot more flexibility and add additional functionality that you can’t get in just the plain install of WordPress.

I’d say go ahead and get WordPress. If you want to do it on the cheap, you can just use their standard default template and then go ahead and install some plugins.

Have a look at getting the All-in-One SEO plugin. If you just search All-in-One in the plugins area and you add that in, that will help you out as far as SEO because it gives you a little bit more control over making sure that you can edit your title tags, meta descriptions, and keywords. I can show you where those things fall on the page.

If you happen to spend a little bit of money, one particular theme that we’ve used which is the Thesis theme. Search WordPress for Thesis Theme and go there.

This is a theme that we’ve used and it’s done with two things in mind: usability, so the back end is really quite simple and there’s quite a lot of functionality, and they’re constantly updating it. There’s a good community there.

You know that that’s a template that’s evolving and you’ll get the upgrades, and in addition to that, it’s being built very much with SEO in mind, so the template itself is quite clean.

It uses a lot of CSS, which is cascading style sheets, which enables you to split out parts of the code into separate files so that when Google reads the page, analyzing what that page is about or what content is on the page, it’s as clean as possible.

That said though, you can just go for the plain WordPress install and you’re going to have just as much effect. This WordPress Thesis theme is just something we’ve used and it’s quite good.

You’ll see over here — I’m headed over to our Melbourne SEO Services website. This particular theme here is the Thesis theme. We use this on quite a few of our sites.

It doesn’t really feel like a blog, apart from we’re on the blog area here, but we’ve set each of these areas up here as pages, so depending on what you’re doing it for – I know we’re talking to a lot of bloggers, so you can set it up with a blog feel, but you can also take that and do just a normal business as well, or any product-based website. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that.

Gideon: When you say WordPress, I just want to clarify once again. It’s www.WordPress.org and get the software from there as opposed to www.WordPress.com. I just want to clarify.

Dave: If you just head over here and you can jump in there. It’s free to download. Just go ahead and download it and install it.

Gideon: I’m glad you’re showing that because I get a lot of people asking me, “Is it okay to install a www.WordPress.com blog?” I always kind of cringe because you don’t actually own it when you have a dot com WordPress blog. So definitely www.WordPress.org, that’s a really good tip.

Dave: There are some benefits for why you want to make sure that you register your own domain name as well from an SEO point of view.

Whenever we’re structuring out and planning out a new business that we’re about to move into, we pay really close attention to the keywords that we’re getting into our domain name because it does help. You’ll see it’s actually quite easy to rank for a particular keyword if that keyword is in the domain name.

There’s a whole variety of reasons why that could be something to do with the algorithms saying that, “Yes, this is important because it’s got the keyword in the domain name.” When I say the algorithm, I mean the Google algorithm.

It could also be that when you’re building links back to your website, obviously when you’re building links, a lot of people will link to you just with the URL of your site.

If you have the keywords in there, effectively that anchor text back to the website is going to be the URL. It’s like you’re building links back to your website with your keyword as the anchor text. That’s another reason it might work. I would definitely suggest people go ahead and register their own domain name.

When they do a little bit of keyword research, they’ll analyze what is the primary keyword phrase that they’d ideally like to rank for. This may vary, depending on whether or not you’re trying to build a brand or whether or not you’re trying to go after a particular keyword or something based around your niche.

Let’s talk about brand. If I go to www.DavidJenyns.com, obviously my brand is www.DavidJenyns.com. Therefore I wanted to have my name in there, but how many people are really searching in www.DavidJenyns.com? Not that many at the moment. I’m hoping that will build over time, but that’s the brand that I’m building.

When I compare that to something like the Melbourne SEO Services, we were very particular in registering our business name as Melbourne SEO Services, because that way, when I registered the domain name, it’s going to have the keyword in it.

I would like to rank for Melbourne SEO Services. That’s my initial longer tail phrase that I think I can pick up quite easily and then rank.

Then once I get that, I’ve also built in a more competitive phrase, www.SEOServices.com, which is something that once we’ve got Melbourne SEO Services, we can go after quite easily. All of that link building that we’ve been doing is going to have been building links with SEO services in there, so that’s going to ultimately help us rank.

Gideon:    Welcome to the next call that I’m doing today. I’m talking to Dave Jenyns. He’s all the way from Melbourne in Australia.

I met Dave at an event with Ed Dale and had a pretty interesting chat with him and got to know him a little bit, but not enough to really understand what he’s doing, so after the event I got in touch with Dave and figured out that he’s a real guru with SEO stuff.

Since I didn’t know much about SEO I thought I’d better get this guy online and ask him a few questions, pick his brains so to speak, about SEO and specifically how that applies to blogging because that’s what I do.

I love blogging and especially video blogging and we’re going to see if Dave can help us with some SEO tips specifically for blogging, but also in a more general sense so that we can get our heads around this whole SEO concept.

Dave, thank you very much for joining us today. How are you doing?

Dave:    Very well, thanks. It’s a pleasure to be here and thanks for the intro.

Gideon:    Dave, you’ve got a pretty interesting background. Maybe to put things into perspective for people, maybe give us a quick rundown of where you’ve come from and the stuff you’ve done and we’ll get straight into the SEO stuff.

Dave:    I first got interested in the stock market when I first left school, and then I went and did one of those weekend courses where you pay $5,000 and you end up being a super trader by Monday, or at least that’s the plan after you do two days worth of training, and found it was actually a little bit more difficult than that.

After I’d started to build up a little bit of my trading flow, I’d really realized to make the whole stock market thing work, you did need a quite a sizeable amount of cash.

That’s when I went down the wealth creation avenue. I’ve always been interested in that sort of thing, so a business partner and I created a few products in the stock market education niche.

We had these really good products and we knew that the demand was there for the product, it was just a matter of getting the word out, because you can have the best product under the sun but unless anyone knows that that product exists then the product isn’t worth anything at all. That’s when I got interested in a lot of old school direct mail stuff.

I started to study some of the greats, which are Gary Halbert, Jay Abraham, here in Australia, Mel Emry, he was one of the first guys that I got interested in. Who else was there? There’s Peter Sun and a whole host of these guys. This was a good 10 years ago or more.

Then I think I just evolved into doing a lot of online marketing.  I think it was the natural evolution. You saw a lot of that old school direct mail stuff started to shift online and some of the early adopters started to pop their head up, like Cory Rudl and even Yanik Silver, who was there quite early, John Reese when he first got started, and Jonathan Mizel. Some of these names, very early on in the piece, really started to set the stage for online marketing.

I got interested in that and did a lot of my own study as well, my own testing. There were a few little entrepreneurial avenues along the way that I followed, not just to do with the stock market niche, but everything from selling pieces of the MCG to setting up a clothing retail store, both in the real physical world and also we had an online presence as well – quite a varied and well-rounded expertise in online marketing.

Probably just recently in the last three to four months, with a lot of people contacting us for what I do in the stock market niche, a few people, friends, colleagues were asking, “Hey, what is it that you’re doing to generate so much traffic to your website and getting buzz?”

People are saying, “Whenever we type in anything to do with Meta Stock, your name always comes up position number one,” and all these sort of variations.

That’s when we launched a recent business, which was all about SEO and talking about how we do SEO, and that I suppose brings you up to speed with where I am now.

Gideon:    That’s awesome. I always look at some internet marketers that are kind of self-proclaimed gurus. You try and look at their background, and a lot of times it seems that they’re making money from teaching people how to make money online. There doesn’t seem to be much background with showing any evidence of results in other niches before they started doing that.

That’s what I really like about you, Dave. You’ve gone through another avenue to look at another business other than internet marketing, and used internet marketing, specifically SEO, to help you get these results. I really like that, and I think that really adds a lot to the credibility.

A lot of my audience, including me, we don’t really know much about SEO. We do the blogging thing. We create content like crazy and we sometimes hope for the best that the search engines will pick us up, but perhaps it would be a good idea at this stage to give us a quick overview of what SEO, search engine optimization, is and why that’s important for us.

Dave:    SEO is just one of those things where I think it can play a real major part in your business because it’s the ability to drive ‘free’ targeted leads to your website.

I say ‘free’ in inverted commas because everything has its price, and the good thing about SEO is you really can do it on a budget if you don’t have much money. A lot of the work can be done manually by yourself.

You are trading time for dollars and that’s where that cost comes into it, but there’s the ability to take advantage of the search engines and drive a lot of that traffic on a budget, as opposed to having to go down the paid route through any sort of PPC stuff and drive traffic and having to pay for that traffic.

I think that’s where SEO really comes into play. I’ll bring it up on the screen here. If we just type in this particular term, trading systems, I’m quite proud of the ranking we’ve got because it’s quite a competitive term in my niche. You can see we’re position number one.

When we’re having a look at the results here, if you have a look at the rest of the page, when they do eye-tracking studies to see where people’s eyes go when they hit this page, it appears first of all in the top left hand corner here.

A lot of people will skip over the sponsored links if they know it’s sponsored links. It’s probably your everyday Joe when they look up here, even though it says Sponsored Links at the top here, they don’t really know that, so a lot of people click that, these sponsored links at the top here.

You’ll see those sponsored links in more competitive niches, but on less competitive niches where those aren’t there, all you’ll really have are these sponsored links over on the right hand side here.

These will get a lot less clicks because your eye is automatically drawn to this area on the website. For the people who do know, there’s that feeling that natural organic search results are somehow more authoritative or more important because they’re not just paying for that spot.

It’s like Google is saying, “Yes, this is the most relevant information for you.” I think that’s a reason to focus in on SEO.

You’re also able to really meet the person. I think this is to do with anything online when you’re targeting specific keywords. You can meet the individual at a point at where they’re typing this keyword into the search engine and you know exactly what it is that they’re thinking about, so you can speak straight to that person.

Some of this comes to on-page optimization, which we can talk a little bit more about, but when you write your title tags and your descriptions, that’s going to appear in the organic search here. Someone typing in trading systems, I’m speaking directly to them by saying, “Download your free trading systems here.”

Obviously someone typing in trading systems, that really speaks to that individual because that’s what they want. Underneath here, “Looking for free trading systems.” That really speaks to the right person.

I think what we’re trying to do here in SEO, a lot of SEO is all about making sure that we’re targeting the right keywords to come up in the natural organic search results.

We know the qualified lead or client that clicks that link is probably going to be a lot better than any other source, and we know what conversation is going on in their mind based on the keywords that they are typing in so we can serve up the most persuasive [inaudible] ultimately land on our landing page.

We can talk on-page optimization and off-page optimization, but what we’re trying to do is build up enough attention. You know this as a blogger, it’s all about putting out that excellent content, and that will ultimately help you in the long run with your SEO campaign.

Once you reach a certain size or critical mass, SEO starts to happen naturally. As long as you do the basics, like make sure your on-page optimization is correct, but once you’re putting out this good content, naturally people start linking to you and naturally people start to embed your videos. All those elements really start to play a major part in your rankings online.

The way I use SEO when I’m working for myself or for clients is we just use it to build up enough of a groundswell to get to a certain size, and then we often find that SEO takes over at that point in time and happens naturally.

Part 2 continued in next post…