SEO Tips: How to Organize Your Site For Fast Ranking

In my last keyword building article I wrote about how to select keywords that would generate the highest return with the least amount of work.

I demonstrated how employing advanced search strings and recording Overture data can be used to find keywords with very little competition and high search volumes. My conclusion was that by conducting keyword research in this manner, ranking for keywords becomes easier.

The next step in Keyword Building is learning how to organize a site around a keyword list for fast ranking and best results. The following is my strategy for doing so.

What You’ll Need

• A finalized list of keywords as well as their corresponding search volumes and number of competitors.
• Excel, or some other spreadsheet program.
• An understanding of the site’s industry, and which terms are semantically related.
• Enough SEO knowledge to decide which words from your list are "low competition."

Low Competition Keywords

"Low competition" is a relative term. To illustrate why, search the term "Marietta, Georgia real estate" in Google. Here are the key numbers:

• 99 inachor and intitle competitors for the term
• 1,300 searches for the term each month
• 330.8 average backlinks for a top 10 result
• 4.2 average page rank of a top 10 result

Now here are some seemingly perplexing numbers regarding the 9th result:

• It has only 8 backlinks
• It also has a PR of 0

Meanwhile the 10th result has…

• 240 backlinks
• PR of 3

This raises the question of why the 10th result doesn’t rank higher than the 9th result, as well as why the 9th result is even on the first page. The answer is two-fold:

• The 9th result is a sub-page optimized singularly for that search term.
• The 9th result’s domain has roughly 1.1 million more backlinks than any other site on the SERP and is a subdomain of Yahoo.com.

For Yahoo, a term with 99 competitors and 1,300 searches every month is very "low competition." However, because it has optimized a page for the search term, and is well trusted by Google, it easily ranks.

When organizing your keywords, picking out the "low competition" words is an integral part to driving traffic. Devote a page to every word that will easily rank from your list, optimizing the title tag, h1 tag and keyword density.

Remember, just as you look to Yahoo, thinking, "I wish I could rank for a word like that without having to link-build" so too will a site smaller than yours say of your "low competition" keyword pages.

High Competition Keywords

Keywords that will require a link-building strategy before ranking are considered "high competition." High competition keywords should be broken down into semantically similar groups. Intuition is largely used to separate the keywords, but here are a few universal guidelines:

• Keep the groups under 6 words each.
• Group phrases together with more than one word in common.
• Check to see if two keywords return similar results in Google.
• No group should have only 1 keyword. Maximize the efforts of your link building.

Once the keywords have been semantically split, prepare an optimized title tag containing all of the keywords from that group. Also choose one word from each group which is the most important to get ranking. That term should be what is in the anchor text of your links when you begin a link building campaign.

Overall, this strategy will save you hours of fiddling and tweaking. Remember, SEO is no different than any other business process - it requires a plan. Practice these tips and you will see success.

This article was written by Mike Bradbury. Mike is an employee of Objectware, Inc an Atlanta Web Design and Atlanta Search Engine Optimization Company. Mike creates search engine visibility for clients in the Atlanta and Washington DC areas.