Before we begin this next section, I just want to clarify what stage you should be at by now.
You should have:
Sounds simple when I put it like that right? Because it is. Even though we've covered a lot, you'll find that after your first few sites this will all become second nature. And that the process from starting your keyword research to actually writing your first blog post usually takes less than 90 minutes.
Anyway, in this section we're going to talk about optimizing your website for Google and the overall structure of it.
This is important because Google likes to see certain things on websites (privacy policy, contact, about me) and having them, as well as a properly optimized main page, will greatly improve your SEO rankings.
On the next page is a diagram of what is the setup of the majority of my websites, although admittedly some are larger (maybe 5-6 posts instead of 3) and some are smaller (like 2 posts and no `useful article' page). However, after much testing this is the basic structure that has produced the best SEO results.
You can decide what works best for you, but this is the structure that I recommend you start off with. It represents a good balance between providing enough good content for visitors, enough content for Google and time (with practice, it will only take 1-2 hours to create the entire site).
There's the basic structure. You website will have 5 pages, 2 of which will take less than a minute to create (Contact and privacy policy). Don't worry about LSI keywords for the moment, we will talk about them in a minute.
Some key things to point out about each page:
Home page: This is the meat of your site, the other pages just serve to support the content you have here. Notice that the first post you make (this post will rarely get read so don't put too much effort in) is at the bottom. I've done this to represent how as you make posts to a wordpress blog, the older ones get pushed down. So, don't write your main post (story or review) straight away. Only write it when you're sure that it will be the final post, since it's what you want your visitors to see first.
About me: This page will just have a picture of you along with your story and make sure to include why you created the website. Curious visitors will want to know what your motivation behind it is.
Helpful article: Later on we're going to be talking about creating youtube videos and how effective it can be both to bring traffic AND getting your site indexed faster. By the way, indexed means that Google has discovered your site and has added it to their database basically.
So, on this page you can write a couple of hundred words talking about something related to the niche and then a link to your youtube video. If you decide not to create a youtube video, then you can still link to a related one. Why? Because it gives you something to base your article on, and Google does like to see some external links of some kind. And I suspect they even give sites linking to their own website (youtube) a better SEO score.
Contact Us: Just a very quick page saying contact me here and provide an email address.
Privacy policy: Half the time my policy's don't even make sense. Really just scrape anything together, it doesn't have to be over 100 words.
So, that's what your site's overall structure will look like when it's completed (first diagram), as well the actual layout of your home page when a visitor lands on your site. (The picture above)
But... Before we actually create the site and start writing posts, there are still a couple more things we need to do and also some more theory to be aware of.
What do I mean by optimizing for search engines? Making sure our pages are jam packed with our main keyword and related keywords (LSI keywords). While you don't want to spam the keyword, we do want it to represent a good chunk of our website, so that there can be no mistake when Google decides what our website is about.
In fact, we want to make it seem as though our site is almost exclusively about that one keyword Which it is. Now, the balancing act comes in when you realise that you have to factor in readability for humans and cramming in a good amount of key phrases at the same time.
One or two of our three main posts will need to have the keyword as the first part of their title. This can be tricky to implement if you're targeting a long tail keyword, since if it's long then it doesn't leave much room for anything else to entice the visitor with. Here's an example. Let's say your keyword is "best way to make money quickly".
Now, it's hard to pair that up with another phrase that serves to entice the visitor to read the post. You couldn't have "my best way to make money quickly story" for example, since it just doesn't make sense.
But if you forgot about the search engines for a minute (and therefore forgot about including the full keyword), you could have "How I made $10,000 quickly & how you can too". The human visitor would interpret that as what they were looking for and it would trigger their interest at the same time.
But the search engines aren't THAT smart unfortunately, so we must include the full keyword. Not just part of it either, honestly, it needs to be the FULL keyword. So, here's what I do. If it's a story site you're building, I simply add How I did it to the end of the keyword or My story.
"Best way to make money quickly" could become... "The best way to make money quickly How I did it", or
"What's the best way to make money quickly - My story". Notice that they appeal to the search engines AND entice visitors at the same time.
Post titles aren't the only place where this balance will have to be stricken either, you'll need to do it throughout your site.
For a review site for example, in places where it would just be easier to say `the system' or `the product' you could slip in the product name, if it was your keyword. Sure, it's unnecessary a lot of the time but you need to please Google as well as your visitors. It's all about getting your keyword count up.
But don't spam it, don't say it too often more on this in a minute. Basically, what I've been getting at in this section is this: You need to make your content read as well as it possible can to humans, but at the same time get your keywords (main keyword and LSI keywords) in there for the search engines. Just remember that when you're writing your posts and you'll be fine.
Whatever your thoughts are on that (surely it wasn't really that easy was it?), one thing's for sure: it's certainly a not viable strategy today. Spamming (or strategically placing) a single keyword throughout your site will NOT get you a good position of Google. Because Google changed the way it ranked pages.
My guess as to why they did it is that it was too easy to rank just stuffing the same keyword And therefore that the `user experience' of the searcher was suffering as a result, from crappy, unhelpful affiliate websites dominating the rankings. In today's ultra competitive SEO climate, Google also places a massive emphasis on synonyms (keywords that Google thinks are related to the keyword in question).
Essentially, Google looks at all of the keywords on your site, pairs each keyword up with similar keywords to develop well, we'll call them `clusters of keywords'. Then uses the biggest cluster of keywords to help determine the topic or `main keyword' of your site. E.g. If you're site was about `get a six pack fast' you would want a lot of keywords that relate to getting a six pack fast.
Obviously, these clusters aren't the ONLY factor in determining your sites topic, but getting this part right plays a big role in the overall effectiveness of your on page optimization.
Now, that's probably the most unscientific explanation of what's really going on I've ever written (or seen for that matter), but essentially, it IS what happens. And more importantly, we don't need to understand the maths behind it, we don't need to know HOW Google does it, because at the end of the day, it won't make us any more money.
Which never forget, is what internet marketing is all about: Making money. All we need to know is how we can use these keywords to our benefit.
By exploiting their importance. These related or synonym keywords have a name by the way... named after the mathematic formula from which they stem from, they are known as Latent Semantic Indexing keywords.
LSI keywords and how to use them to your benefit If you thought the smartest way to force Google to give you a high ranking was by stuffing the main keyword, you'd be wrong. The smartest (and most effective way) is by stuffing the LSI keywords! I use the term stuffing loosely by the way, this isn't black hat SEO (true spamming).
But, what I mean is that the more LSI keywords you have `backing up' your main keyword, the more important and relevant your main keyword will appear to the search engines.
Basically, if we use the unscientific principle mentioned earlier, you want loads of LSI keywords to create the biggest cluster, and you want the main keyword at its centre.
How do we do that?
Well, first of all we've got to find out what the LSI keywords are. Obviously, you can take a pretty good guess at what the LSI keywords are going to be (stuff related to your topic) and in all likelihood you'll probably include some LSI keywords in your content without even knowing it.
So why then do so many SEO marketers go to all the trouble of looking for the most `highly weighted' LSI keywords? Because they want to find the MOST related keywords, the ones which will link closest to their main keyword and therefore give them the biggest ranking boost.
In fact, If you do a search on yeah, you guessed it: Google (does your whole life ever seem to revolve around that site?) you'll find hundreds of crazy and inventive methods that SEO marketers have created to find them.
And I've no idea why, because it couldn't be simpler to find what the most important LSI keywords are, all you have to do is go to the very company you're trying to impress and see what they think they are... And Google is more than happy to tell us, in order of importance, exactly what the LSI keywords are for ANY given root keyword.
So, here's step by step how to find your key LSI keywords straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak...
Step 1: Go to the Google keyword tool and type in your main keyword.
Step 2: In the results you'll see your keyword plus a whole bunch of other related keywords.
These are your LSI keywords. These are the keywords that Google expects to find on a high quality site about dog training.
(Please, don't be intimidated by the quality of my graphic design skills by the way...)
So with the root or main keyword for our site as `dog training' you can see that they are some of the LSI keywords. However, I also recommend that you scroll down and use some from the `additional keywords to consider section':
As these are ones that Google would expect to find on a site related to dog training, without actually having the term `dog training' in them, so it doesn't look like you're spamming `dog training'.
How many LSI keywords should I use?
I tend to use quite a few because while Google will punish you for stuffing (spamming) a single keyword, they reward you for smart stuffing, as I like to call it (stuffing a variety LSI keywords). I recommend that you try to incorporate at least 10 of the LSI keywords into your main blog page and sprinkle them throughout the rest of your website as well.
Keyword Variances Before we move on, I think that it's important to understand that every search conducted on Google is typed in by a unique person. And often, they will type in completely unique query's (they'll type something in that no one has searched for before and that no one will search for again probably).
These obscure keywords are usually longer versions of a more popular keyword (your sites main keyword for example). And it's important that I explain just how important they will be to your site.
Because while we are `sniping' a single keyword, anywhere from 30% all the way up to 90% of your traffic will come from these obscure keywords. Keywords that you never even optimized for in the first place.
Now, this might be a little tricky to get your head around, but in my experience this has proved to be true. I think what explains it best is if I give you a real life example of one of my sites so you can see how many visitors the main keyword brought in and how many visitors the unique variations did.
Note: By the way, I am showing you one of the real keywords I built a site around. So please, don't come in and steal my niche. I've got enough competition as it is!
As you can see, the keyword I targeted and built my whole site around ONLY brought me 17% of my visitors. In fact, there were 1,306 different phrases in February alone that led visitors to my website. And what's really shocking is that I'm not even number one for the main keyword.
Why am I telling you all this?
Firstly, because I think it's important to understand where your traffic will be coming from. And secondly, to give you a real example of just how important LSI keywords are to the success of your website.
You see, it is the LSI keywords that are responsible for a lot of that `unplanned' traffic... You may have noticed that the search phrases other than my main keyword look a lot like LSI keywords. And a lot of them are - by incorporating more LSI keywords onto your website you're increasing the number of search phrases that your website will rank for.
Basically, you may or may not rank for the LSI keyword itself, but you will rank for some weird variation of it. So, LSI keywords don't just serve to increase your rankings for your main keyword, they also increase the chances that you'll rank for these `unique' search terms (which will bring you a hell of a lot of visitors!).
You should have:
- Decided on the keyword and product
- Bought a domain
- Uploaded the plugins and themes
- Decided on your angle of attack and how you're going to presell your visitors
Sounds simple when I put it like that right? Because it is. Even though we've covered a lot, you'll find that after your first few sites this will all become second nature. And that the process from starting your keyword research to actually writing your first blog post usually takes less than 90 minutes.
Anyway, in this section we're going to talk about optimizing your website for Google and the overall structure of it.
Overall Website structure
This sub section serves as a guide to exactly what your website should look like, what pages it should have and what content should be on them.This is important because Google likes to see certain things on websites (privacy policy, contact, about me) and having them, as well as a properly optimized main page, will greatly improve your SEO rankings.
On the next page is a diagram of what is the setup of the majority of my websites, although admittedly some are larger (maybe 5-6 posts instead of 3) and some are smaller (like 2 posts and no `useful article' page). However, after much testing this is the basic structure that has produced the best SEO results.
You can decide what works best for you, but this is the structure that I recommend you start off with. It represents a good balance between providing enough good content for visitors, enough content for Google and time (with practice, it will only take 1-2 hours to create the entire site).
There's the basic structure. You website will have 5 pages, 2 of which will take less than a minute to create (Contact and privacy policy). Don't worry about LSI keywords for the moment, we will talk about them in a minute.
Some key things to point out about each page:
About me: This page will just have a picture of you along with your story and make sure to include why you created the website. Curious visitors will want to know what your motivation behind it is.
Helpful article: Later on we're going to be talking about creating youtube videos and how effective it can be both to bring traffic AND getting your site indexed faster. By the way, indexed means that Google has discovered your site and has added it to their database basically.
So, on this page you can write a couple of hundred words talking about something related to the niche and then a link to your youtube video. If you decide not to create a youtube video, then you can still link to a related one. Why? Because it gives you something to base your article on, and Google does like to see some external links of some kind. And I suspect they even give sites linking to their own website (youtube) a better SEO score.
Contact Us: Just a very quick page saying contact me here and provide an email address.
Privacy policy: Half the time my policy's don't even make sense. Really just scrape anything together, it doesn't have to be over 100 words.
So, that's what your site's overall structure will look like when it's completed (first diagram), as well the actual layout of your home page when a visitor lands on your site. (The picture above)
But... Before we actually create the site and start writing posts, there are still a couple more things we need to do and also some more theory to be aware of.
Humans vs. the search engines: Striking a balance
Now, there are two goals for our website. The first is to write quality content for human visitors, to get them to read our stuff and ultimately buy whatever we're promoting. The second is to optimize for search engines, since without them we won't get any human visitors in the first place.What do I mean by optimizing for search engines? Making sure our pages are jam packed with our main keyword and related keywords (LSI keywords). While you don't want to spam the keyword, we do want it to represent a good chunk of our website, so that there can be no mistake when Google decides what our website is about.
In fact, we want to make it seem as though our site is almost exclusively about that one keyword Which it is. Now, the balancing act comes in when you realise that you have to factor in readability for humans and cramming in a good amount of key phrases at the same time.
One or two of our three main posts will need to have the keyword as the first part of their title. This can be tricky to implement if you're targeting a long tail keyword, since if it's long then it doesn't leave much room for anything else to entice the visitor with. Here's an example. Let's say your keyword is "best way to make money quickly".
Now, it's hard to pair that up with another phrase that serves to entice the visitor to read the post. You couldn't have "my best way to make money quickly story" for example, since it just doesn't make sense.
But if you forgot about the search engines for a minute (and therefore forgot about including the full keyword), you could have "How I made $10,000 quickly & how you can too". The human visitor would interpret that as what they were looking for and it would trigger their interest at the same time.
But the search engines aren't THAT smart unfortunately, so we must include the full keyword. Not just part of it either, honestly, it needs to be the FULL keyword. So, here's what I do. If it's a story site you're building, I simply add How I did it to the end of the keyword or My story.
"Best way to make money quickly" could become... "The best way to make money quickly How I did it", or
"What's the best way to make money quickly - My story". Notice that they appeal to the search engines AND entice visitors at the same time.
Post titles aren't the only place where this balance will have to be stricken either, you'll need to do it throughout your site.
For a review site for example, in places where it would just be easier to say `the system' or `the product' you could slip in the product name, if it was your keyword. Sure, it's unnecessary a lot of the time but you need to please Google as well as your visitors. It's all about getting your keyword count up.
But don't spam it, don't say it too often more on this in a minute. Basically, what I've been getting at in this section is this: You need to make your content read as well as it possible can to humans, but at the same time get your keywords (main keyword and LSI keywords) in there for the search engines. Just remember that when you're writing your posts and you'll be fine.
Keyword Variances and LSI
Waaay back when internet marketing was in its infancy (a LONG before I was a marketer), I'm told that ranking on search engines was as easy as spamming a single keyword throughout your site.Whatever your thoughts are on that (surely it wasn't really that easy was it?), one thing's for sure: it's certainly a not viable strategy today. Spamming (or strategically placing) a single keyword throughout your site will NOT get you a good position of Google. Because Google changed the way it ranked pages.
My guess as to why they did it is that it was too easy to rank just stuffing the same keyword And therefore that the `user experience' of the searcher was suffering as a result, from crappy, unhelpful affiliate websites dominating the rankings. In today's ultra competitive SEO climate, Google also places a massive emphasis on synonyms (keywords that Google thinks are related to the keyword in question).
Essentially, Google looks at all of the keywords on your site, pairs each keyword up with similar keywords to develop well, we'll call them `clusters of keywords'. Then uses the biggest cluster of keywords to help determine the topic or `main keyword' of your site. E.g. If you're site was about `get a six pack fast' you would want a lot of keywords that relate to getting a six pack fast.
Obviously, these clusters aren't the ONLY factor in determining your sites topic, but getting this part right plays a big role in the overall effectiveness of your on page optimization.
Now, that's probably the most unscientific explanation of what's really going on I've ever written (or seen for that matter), but essentially, it IS what happens. And more importantly, we don't need to understand the maths behind it, we don't need to know HOW Google does it, because at the end of the day, it won't make us any more money.
Which never forget, is what internet marketing is all about: Making money. All we need to know is how we can use these keywords to our benefit.
By exploiting their importance. These related or synonym keywords have a name by the way... named after the mathematic formula from which they stem from, they are known as Latent Semantic Indexing keywords.
LSI keywords and how to use them to your benefit If you thought the smartest way to force Google to give you a high ranking was by stuffing the main keyword, you'd be wrong. The smartest (and most effective way) is by stuffing the LSI keywords! I use the term stuffing loosely by the way, this isn't black hat SEO (true spamming).
But, what I mean is that the more LSI keywords you have `backing up' your main keyword, the more important and relevant your main keyword will appear to the search engines.
Basically, if we use the unscientific principle mentioned earlier, you want loads of LSI keywords to create the biggest cluster, and you want the main keyword at its centre.
How do we do that?
Well, first of all we've got to find out what the LSI keywords are. Obviously, you can take a pretty good guess at what the LSI keywords are going to be (stuff related to your topic) and in all likelihood you'll probably include some LSI keywords in your content without even knowing it.
So why then do so many SEO marketers go to all the trouble of looking for the most `highly weighted' LSI keywords? Because they want to find the MOST related keywords, the ones which will link closest to their main keyword and therefore give them the biggest ranking boost.
In fact, If you do a search on yeah, you guessed it: Google (does your whole life ever seem to revolve around that site?) you'll find hundreds of crazy and inventive methods that SEO marketers have created to find them.
And I've no idea why, because it couldn't be simpler to find what the most important LSI keywords are, all you have to do is go to the very company you're trying to impress and see what they think they are... And Google is more than happy to tell us, in order of importance, exactly what the LSI keywords are for ANY given root keyword.
So, here's step by step how to find your key LSI keywords straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak...
Step 1: Go to the Google keyword tool and type in your main keyword.
Step 2: In the results you'll see your keyword plus a whole bunch of other related keywords.
These are your LSI keywords. These are the keywords that Google expects to find on a high quality site about dog training.
(Please, don't be intimidated by the quality of my graphic design skills by the way...)
So with the root or main keyword for our site as `dog training' you can see that they are some of the LSI keywords. However, I also recommend that you scroll down and use some from the `additional keywords to consider section':
How many LSI keywords should I use?
I tend to use quite a few because while Google will punish you for stuffing (spamming) a single keyword, they reward you for smart stuffing, as I like to call it (stuffing a variety LSI keywords). I recommend that you try to incorporate at least 10 of the LSI keywords into your main blog page and sprinkle them throughout the rest of your website as well.
Keyword Variances Before we move on, I think that it's important to understand that every search conducted on Google is typed in by a unique person. And often, they will type in completely unique query's (they'll type something in that no one has searched for before and that no one will search for again probably).
These obscure keywords are usually longer versions of a more popular keyword (your sites main keyword for example). And it's important that I explain just how important they will be to your site.
Because while we are `sniping' a single keyword, anywhere from 30% all the way up to 90% of your traffic will come from these obscure keywords. Keywords that you never even optimized for in the first place.
Now, this might be a little tricky to get your head around, but in my experience this has proved to be true. I think what explains it best is if I give you a real life example of one of my sites so you can see how many visitors the main keyword brought in and how many visitors the unique variations did.
Note: By the way, I am showing you one of the real keywords I built a site around. So please, don't come in and steal my niche. I've got enough competition as it is!
Why am I telling you all this?
Firstly, because I think it's important to understand where your traffic will be coming from. And secondly, to give you a real example of just how important LSI keywords are to the success of your website.
You see, it is the LSI keywords that are responsible for a lot of that `unplanned' traffic... You may have noticed that the search phrases other than my main keyword look a lot like LSI keywords. And a lot of them are - by incorporating more LSI keywords onto your website you're increasing the number of search phrases that your website will rank for.
Basically, you may or may not rank for the LSI keyword itself, but you will rank for some weird variation of it. So, LSI keywords don't just serve to increase your rankings for your main keyword, they also increase the chances that you'll rank for these `unique' search terms (which will bring you a hell of a lot of visitors!).
Next Read: How to Optimizing Your Site
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