News Courtesy of Yoast.com:
Keyword research is your first step in optimizing your website for certain keywords. Without keyword research, you might find yourself lost in your own lingo and battling giants in your industry that can’t be beaten in the search result pages just like that. There is a variety of factors you have to take into account when doing keyword research and setting up your keyword strategy.
I tell my customers that there are two phases for succeeding in SEO. On-site search engine optimization involves proper use of your targeted keyword phrase within your website’s content. This includes setting up header tags, alt, and title tags and internally linking for these phrases. They key is to come off as genuine and not spammy.
Of course, how a website performs is important for ranking too. However, a lot of people don’t fully understand that the other phase, off-site SEO, is just as important but much more difficult. Building trust and relationships with other website owners is a lot of work. But it’s necessary to help give your website exposure and ultimately rank for your targeted keywords.
My post from yesterday touches on keyword research using SE Ranking’s tools. Having a realistic goal, one that you can achieve in a reasonable amount of time, is paramount. If you set your sights too high, you risk becoming discouraged with the lack of progress. It is important to see what competitors are doing with keywords you want to rank for. This means reviewing their website in detail and spying on their backlinks (there are free tools online you can use to get an idea).
Using Yoast’s SEO plugin for WordPress works great for keeping you focused on your own content. It’s a good start and once you feel comfortable with on-site SEO you can then concentrate on developing a strategy for off-site SEO.
