A series of step by step articles to help you market your website for free.
SEO, PART 1
I started up a brand new business in September 2008 called My Cute Dress Ups, where I sell princess costumes and other kids costumes. Mentors have helped me achieve success and I hope to help you reach your marketing goals. The first step in SEO is choosing the correct key words.
Doing research to find the right keywords is the most important thing you can do in SEO. You want to make sure they are specific and describe your product perfectly. Once chosen, you want to make sure your keywords are in your content as well as in your marketing.
A great way to do keyword research is to use Google Adwords keyword tool, then type in some suggestions unique to your website. The tool will then give you results of how many people search for that term and competition for that term. Study that list, and most important, find the key words that are searched for 1,000 times or less that have no or little advertiser competition and strive to use those in your content and marketing. This method is considered “niche” marketing and will allow you to climb to page 1 on Google easily and quickly.
For example, I sell kids dress up clothes, so I typed “Princess Cinderella Dress” in the Adword tool. Cinderella is my top seller by more than 50%, so that is one of the most important phrases, also called anchor text, which I want to market. There were about a hundred results that came up (which will give you additional key word ideas) for that phrase.
From the list, I chose to focus on “Princess Cinderella Dress Up” which averages 880 searches each month and has no competition. This describes my product perfectly and is one I can use to get more people to my site quickly since not many others a re competing for it. At this point, you could choose to buy this keyword from goggle and set advertising parameters for it, or you can just use the information to market your website on your own.
Generally the more key words you use, the less competition you will find. If I used “princess”, I would have stiff competition and it is not very descriptive to what I sell. If I use more words like “princess Cinderella” or “princess Cinderella dress”, I narrow down the competition a lot and am becoming more descriptive in what I sell. I can narrow it down even more and attain less competition by using more words like I did with “princess Cinderella dress up” It can be narrowed even more, but be careful about using too many words as a lesser percentage of searchers will use more than 4 or 5 words. “Princess Cinderella dress up clothes” may be pushing the limit and I may not get many people coming to my site from that term.
The next step is to google that search term and double check that the competition on organic search results is not heavy. You would not want to compete with someone like Disney who has unlimited advertising budgets. In the organic listings, my term, “princess Cinderella dress up” comes up with ebay and Amazon listings which are just there because no one else is competing, so I know that is a good key word phrase for me to use on my website, on my internal links on my site, and for other marketing like link exchanged and Directory Submissions.
You will want to come up with 4 or 5 different phrases to alternate through so Google doesn’t view you as spam. For example, for my website, I used “Princess Cinderella Dress Up”, “Kids Dress up Clothes”, “Snow White Costumes for girls”, and “Princess Dress Up Costumes”. I would then write a description of each one heavily weighed with researched key words. A short description, with keywords may read like this (the most important information in the beginning):
Snow White Costume for Girls
We have quality Snow White costumes for girls in sizes 2T-10 that are comfortable and machine washable. We also carry other princess dress up clothes like princess Cinderella dress up, Sleeping Beauty dresses, Yellow Beauty costumes, and other kids dress up clothes. Don’t forget the accessories like the Snow White cape, Snow White headband, princess wand, and tiara. We also have a full line of Adult Snow White costumes.
Making a key word list and short descriptions ahead of time and saving it to your computer will save you a lot of time in the long run. You will be able to use them over and over in your SEO. You will use these short descriptions for directory submissions and link exchanges.