When I first started making sites, I would come up with a list of keywords and add articles to the sites – one for each keyword. I figured that the more keywords or phrases I targeted, the more traffic I would get. This sounds like a pretty good plan, right?
But, I was making one big mistake and I didn’t even realize it until YEARS later!
That mistake was not paying enough attention to the keyword phrases that were already bringing me traffic.
You see, the keyword phrases that are being used to find your site are an excellent indicator of what Google thinks your site is about and you should really take advantage of this.
So how do you do that?
If you have been writing articles and submitting them to directories, you probably have a bit of traffic by now so you should go to your cpanel and check out either webalizer or awstats to see what the most popular keyword phrases are for your site. (you don’t have to use those, I only mention them since most hosting has them built in, if you are using another piece of software like google analytics – or anything – you can find your keyword phrases in there too!). In Awstats, you will find these at the bottom of the page under “Search Keyphrases”.
Now this works best if you are getting more than 10 visitors a day – the more visitors the better. If you aren’t getting enough visitors, you probably won’t have any keyword phrases that bring in even 1 visitor each day so you may want to wait until you have a bit more traffic.
Once you have the keyword phrase that is searched for the most, Go to google and type that phrase in with NO quotes. Now, search through the results until you find the page on your site that Google is showing for that keyword phrase.
If it is number 1 on page 1, then there is no further work to do! However, in most cases you will find it on page 2 or page 3 – maybe even further down in the SERPS.
If it is not number 1, then you want to give your page a push by getting more backlinks to it. You can do this by writing articles that point to it, or answering Yahoo questions, creating Squidoo lenses, putting your link in blog posts or any number of ways – all of which will be discussed in later emails!
The higher your page moves up in the SERPS – the more traffic you will get.
How much more?
Well, the number 2 position gets about 60% LESS traffic than the number 1 position. The number 3 position gets about 80% less traffic then the number 1 position and so on. So, you can see how much more traffic you would get if you moved from number 10 to number 1. And more traffic = more money!
Now, your ability to move up in the SERPS also depends a lot on the pages that are above you. How many links to they have and what is the quality of the links? To move into a top position you must beat these and you may not be able to get to #1 every time, but I have found that for the long tail keyword phrases it is quite easy to move up significantly and improve traffic greatly.
The other thing, of course, depends on how many people are searching for that key phrase a day. If only 3 people a day search for your target phrase, then it’s hardly worth the effort to try to move up in the SERPS. Pick another phrase!
Does this really work?
You bet! I did a case study myself with several phrases on my websites and the results were very positive. You can read the case study here .
