Search engine optimization

If you're doing business on the web, you've probably heard about search engine optimization or SEO, basically trying to make sure your web site shows up on the search results pages when people search for the proper terms.

There are some catches.

• You want only the most qualified interested people to visit your site. It doesn't do you much good to increase your traffic if none of them want what you offer, be it information, services, or hard goods.
• Once people do land on your site, or on a specialized landing page designed around specific terms, you need to reassure them that they landed on the right site for them.
• After they've determined the site is appropriate, you need to guide them down the path you want them to take.

Keyword research is a specialized task, not one I offer but one I play around with for my hobby sites, like CheapCooking and my new Urban-Homesteading. I use these sites for a variety of purposes. First, I honestly enjoy writing about the subject matter so it's fun. Plus, when I need to experiment with something or learn some new thing, like keyword research, I use one of those or my other sites to play around on and learn the impact of changes I've made.

I just had a friend alert me to NicheBot, a site that will help you figure out what phrases you ought to optimize for, what your competition is for those phrases, where your site ranks for various phrases, and more. For example, my CheapCooking site has ranked #1 on Google for "cheap recipes" for quite a while. When playing around with some keyword research tools, I figured out that many, many more people search for "easy recipes" rather than "cheap recipes." Being someone who likes to go with the low-hanging fruit whenever possible, I made some pretty simple additions to the site. I added the phrase to the page title of the index site, created a brand new page listing easy recipes, made sure the phrase was in that page title, page description, and headings, and linked to that page from my home page, using the phrase in the text link. Pretty quickly the site had climbed to #10 for that phrase on Google, where before it had not shown up on at least the first 5 pages or so.

But using this NicheBot I learned tonight that the page I created of easy recipes ranked #11! I'd never looked beyond #10 since I was pretty happy to be up on the first page.

Plug the words you want to be optimized for into their tool and it will tell you where you rank. You can also have it tell you related words, competition, incoming links, and other cool stuff. Very useful site!