OrangeSoda Internet Marketing Blog

Court at Court’s School of Internet Marketing wrote about how to rank high on a particular keyword. This is one approach that can help your SEO efforts to rank on very competitive keywords. We apply many approaches based on the need of the business or client and their budgets.

Rather than going after the biggest most competitive term, you can circle around your keyword phrase by providing content about related topics. He uses the example of trying to rank for “cell phones.” That is going to be difficult. It could cost a lot of money and still take years.

Many small businesses don’t understand or grasp how competitive and difficult it is to rank well on some terms. It’s not tangible like real estate is - but just like in real life - location is everything on search engines. You want to come up in the top 10 search results for key terms relating to your business. So do a lot of other businesses. The more people who want to rank the more difficult it is to get to the top.

So rather than going directly at a large keyword phrase like “cell phones” you can add articles or blog posts about subtopics like ‘how to change a cell phone battery’ or “most popular ring tones for your cell phone.”

“Stringing together 50 or so keywords like that one on a single site will help you to start getting somewhere for ‘cell phones’, even though you haven’t tried specifically for cell phones. Why? Google and other search engines know that the terms are related.”

So try to rank well on these smaller less competitive terms and it will help your rankings on more competitive terms. I must add that your writing should be very specific - more detailed than you’re probably used to being. Write using very descriptive and specific terms to describe a topic.

So come up with a list of keywords for your site (maybe even getting these from your web stats or PPC data to see what people are interested in). Use those keywords to create articles. Notify other sites that cover that topic, and repeat. This is why blogging is so effective when combined with traditional SEO. It allows you to easily target related subjects and build authority for them which will help bolster your bigger keyword phrases. Using this approach we can effectivey partner with businesses to help them get rankings quicker - including actually writing the content.

Court also breaks down factors that search engines use to decide how to rank web sites, such as:

• Using keywords throughout your entire site
• Which sites you’re getting links from (the more relevant and popular they are for the keyword the better)
• What words a site uses to make the link to you (anchor text).

I would add the words that you use to link from page to page within your site (anchor text) or from post to post (inter-linking).

Thanks for a great post Court!