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…