FREE does NOT equal junk. You’ll learn more in this SEO course than most all paid courses on SEO. You’ll learn only the things you need to know to get a #1 ranking in Google, while avoiding the fluff and filler that isn’t important.

Before optimizing your website, you MUST find “buyer” keywords. Do not go after “browser” keywords, which is almost every case are the super high search count keywords. These are the keywords that MOST people try to rank for. Don’t waste your time.

Browser keywords will bring you a ton of traffic should you rank well for this (which is extremely difficult) ; however, this traffic will not convert into buyers (i.e. money in your pocket). If anything, you’ll be paying more money to your webhost for bandwidth.

When starting out, use The Google Search Term Suggestion tool for your keyword research. This tool is located here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

While comparing 3 different type of keywords, from browser keyword to buyer keyword:

• diet: 37,200,000 searches per month
• diet program: 246,000 searches per month
• the diet solution program: 14,800 “buyer” searches per month!

You will see that browser keywords typically will send you A LOT more traffic; however, they’re not only much harder to rank for, but won’t make you anywhere near as many sales as a “buyer” keyword like “the diet solution program”.

Optimizing your website for a long tail phrase like “the diet solution program” will still contribute to you ranking slightly higher for the short tail keywords: diet AND diet program, because both of those words are included in the long tail keyword: the diet solution program

To find good buyer keywords, you can simply include words like: buy, purchase, get, discount etc. in front of your main keyword. An example would be:

• buy Christmas gift baskets
• purchase Nintendo Wii
• discount printer paper
• etc.

To assess how competitive a market is, in terms of how hard it will be for you to rank in Google for the specific keyword, you’ll need to perform the following steps:

Step 1: Open a spreadsheet up and make columns for website, Google page rank, total links, page title, h1 header tags, h2 header tags, bold tags, alt image tags, keyword density.

Step 2: Visit each of the top 10 ranked websites and fill in each column with the appropriate data related to each website.

• website: The full URL of the website ranked in Google for the keyword.
• Google page rank: A number that Google assigns to each web page on the internet to determine how powerful the URL is. To see Google page rank, you need the Google toolbar installed. You can download and install the Google toolbar here: http://toolbar.google.com
• total links: the total number of links pointing to the website ranked in Google. To get this information, you’ll need to visit Yahoo.com and input this search command: link:http://www.WhateverTheDomainIs.com and then perform a search.

The reason we’re using Yahoo here is because Yahoo gives a better, more thorough list of all of the websites linking to the website you input. Google no longer gives us a full list. They don’t display it publicly because they don’t want people like us manipulating their search results, which is what we’re able to do with this information

Yahoo lists sites in order from the MOST POWERFUL link at the top, to the least powerful at the bottom. This is very important because you’ll know that if you could get a link from the top site in Yahoo’s results, you know that that specific website would help boost your Google ranking more than any other link.

• page title: The title of the page ranked in Google. This is the text located within the tags. Your main keyword should appear in the title of the page. You should say “yes” or “no” on the spreadsheet as to whether or not the Google ranked web page is using their keyword here.
• h1 header tags: A special heading tag that websites use. Think of it as an article title or article heading. Usually this text is larger on the page. To see this, you must look at the “source code” of the Google ranked web page. To do this, click “view” and then “course” within the top of your web browser. Then search for <h1>or</h1> Then look at the text between those 2 tags. That is the h1 header tag. Your keyword should be inside an h1 header tag. You should say “yes” or “no” on the spreadsheet as to whether or not the Google ranked web page is using their keyword here.
• h2 header tag: Same as h1 header tag, but it says h2. This is sort of a sub heading. You should say “yes” or “no” on the spreadsheet as to whether or not the Google ranked web page is using their keyword here.
• bold tags: The keywords that are bolder on the Google ranked page. This is the text inside <b></b> tags. You should say “yes” or “no” on the spreadsheet as to whether or not the Google ranked web page is using their keyword here.
• alt image tags: The text located inside images on the Google ranked page. You should have your main keyword PLUS the word “image” inside the alt tag. You should say “yes” or “no” on the spreadsheet as to whether or not the Google ranked web page is using their keyword here.
• keyword density: Not a percentage. This is whether or not the Google ranked web page had the keyword at the top, middle, and bottom of their web page. You should do this. You should say “yes” or “no” on the spreadsheet as to whether or not the Google ranked web page is using their keyword in all of the places here.

Step 3: Get averages of the Google page rank column, and the total links column to get a rough idea of what sort of Page Rank and total links you’ll need to get into the top 10. Also, look at the #10 ranked website’s stats to see the minimum you’ll need to hit the top 10.

Look for keywords that have over 1,000 monthly searches.

Look for keywords where the #10 ranked website on Google for that keyword has less than 1,000 links when using the “link:” command on Yahoo.

Look for keywords where the #10 ranked website on Google is a Page Rank 3 or lower.

Look for BUYER keywords only.

In the next lesson I’m going to go over exactly what you’ll need to change/fix on your own website to make sure that your “on page optimization” is 100% perfect so you’ll get as much of a boost in Google as possible, by making a few small tweaks to your website itself. Stay tuned for tomorrow!