Getting to Page One of Google

Chapter 2 Landersweb.com SEO – Keywords, keywords, keywords, the start of any SEO effort

Jun 12, 2009 Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0

Today’s topic is website keyword selection, this is a fundamental and very important step to your website optimization efforts, if you are off on your keywords, then every SEO step afterwards will be adversely affected. As always, I will share what I plan on doing, will sign off for a day or two and then finish the post with results of my research. I will include the websites I found useful along with tips and tricks I found along the way.

The Plan
I plan on using the Google Keyword Tool as a first destination to picking keywords. I have some keywords in mind including “Professional Web Maintenance“ or even the more aggressive “Web Maintenance“. Those may or may not change based on my analysis. There are also some great blogs and Tweets from other SEO professionals that I will refer to as well and will be giving kudos to those whose advice seems knowledgeable and more importantly provides positive results.

The results
As mentioned above, my first task was to check out the Google Keyword Tool. I entered “Web Maintenance”, “Professional Web maintenance”, “Kevin Landers” and “Web 2.0″ into the tool and it listed out a few hundred keywords to choose from.
These keywords caught my eye as strong possibilities. I’m going to start by targeting the keywords in bold, but will be keeping an eye on these daily, look for posts as I learn what keywords are working and why.
maintaining websites
professional web design
professional web maintenance
web 2.0 company
web 2.0 consulting
web 2.0 content
web 2.0 developers
web 2.0 development
web 2.0 marketing
web 2.0 services
web 2.0 technology
web 2.0 templates
web 2.0 tools
web 2.0 websites
web design company
web design maintenance
web maintenance
web maintenance services
web page maintenance
web site maintenance
webpage maintenance
website maintenance
kevin landers

I plan on writing another article on this subject in a few days as I now realize there is much more to keyword selection than I previously thought. I have much research to do to get a better understanding of the following questions I have, I will probably write new posts on each of these questions.

What makes a good keyword?
Do I target large traffic keywords or more targeted keywords?
What SEO tools are best?
Do I group like keywords together?
What are keyword add-ons?
Do I want to consider listing misspellings?
Who do I trust to give good advice (1000s of free and pay “SEO experts”
What should I look for in my competition?
Other than adding to the META tags on my webpages, what else do I do with my keywords?

Basically, I have more questions about keywords than when I started. As mentioned in my initial post http://www.landersweb.com/wordpress/?p=3, I already achieved Google Page One for the search term of “Portland Web Maintenance” so I know that some of what I m doing is working.

My goal is to get to Page One on Google for some more popular searches, resulting in more click throughs of quality leads that are truly interested in my services which is Website Maintenance including (upgrading sites to using 2.0 tools, Search engine optimization, Data Conversions and .NET/PHP/Classic ASP programming).

I already know that I have a lot of work to do in getting more effective keywords, but I am learning as I go and entering in my blog, hopefully that will let others learn from my successes and mistakes (hopefully more of the former).

This is my initial list of keywords, I am adding them to my site as I speak and will be changing them often. Thankfully I built a nifty tool that allows me to edit my keywords and content in real time without moving a webpage. I simply login to my admin tool and edit away, changes to my site are instant, a necessity to stay fresh in a Web 2.0 world. (yes, this is a plug of a cool tool I built that may be of interest to those wanting an easy way to manage their website).

Thanks for giving me a portion of your day, I encourage and strive for reactions, comments, suggestions etc.

Tags: FaceBook, Google, Google Analytics, keyword, Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0