Top Local Rankings
  • Local Search
    • Local Search Traffic
  • PPC
  • Services
  • Pricing
  • Blog
  • Contact
2

Top Ten Natural Search Engine Placement

17 August, 2009 - Blog, Local Search




Top Ten Natural Search Engine Placement

The start of getting a top ten natural search engine placement is keyword research. The logic of this is easy. If you find and use the terms that people are searching for (in your particular niche) balanced by the terms that have less competition, you will be able to rank fairly quickly.

Over the years I’ve used many many keyword tools; from Wordtracker, NicheBot, etc. to Google’s keyword tool. I’ve even spent $200 per month for fancy, supercharged Latent Semantic Indexing keyword research tools that were “state of the art” (and now defunct.)

The tool I have recently become a huge fan of is Market Samurai (… that’s not an affiliate link).

It’s developed by a bunch of “cut snakes” from down under (OZ). I’ve found that it is the easiest and for me, best thing I’ve ever used for keyword research. It also adds in a Rank Checker; a SEO Competition checker; a Monetization module (to find CPA, Clickbank, and other offers); a Find Content module; a Publish Content module and a Promotion module (for link opps) and more to come! It is freaking awesome!

Here’s a video on how to do keyword research with Market Samurai…

[mc src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cR05tDZLe88" type="youtube"]Market Samurai[/mc]

After you’ve done your keyword research, there are three specific places to put your keywords. The first is in the Title Meta Tag and the closer to the start the better. The second place is in your Heading tags (h1, h2) and again the closer to the front better. The third place is one or two times in your body content.

For extra bonus (and long debates about effectiveness…) you can also use the Description Meta Tag and the Alt text of any images on the site. Please don’t put more than one instance in these places; you are asking for trouble if you put more. These are one case where more is definitely not better!

If you have a blog you also want to make sure that you put the keyword phrase you are optimizing for, in the Post tags.

For WordPress blogs and SEO optimization, I also strongly recommend using Semiologic. It simply is “the” SEO wordpress blogging platform.

Now for a completely different view on this, check out my friend Colin McDougall’s blog post on doing this. He has some contrary advice that is worthwhile checking out!

Colin’s VEO Report blog is an in depth, extensive and kick butt resource about internet marketing! Again highly recommended.

In fact, this post is a test to see if… and how fast I can get ranked for the keyword phrase “top ten natural search engine placement”. I’ll report back with results in a week or so!

Add a comment

Comments

  1. Colin "Google" McDougall, August 27, 2009
    Hey Mark, Gotta a say a HUGE congrats to you on getting the #5 spot on your new blog after taking action on my advise!!! But I am seeing some strange things happening on some 404 issues that are likely due to way too many tweaks and tunes that need to still be done to properly set up your blog. Mark, blog configuration is on the surface seemingly complicated and that is EXACTLY why I am teaching my followers about performing research first because based on your goals and your niche the configuration of a blog will have some variances Yes, I am systematically showing folks what they need to do and when my tutorial series is followed everything will make complete sense I will be in touch with you soon but in the meantime keep up the great work!