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.