Most people believe that Google can read their mind.

Well, it cannot; and Google doesn’t think that your page is optimized for the same keyword (s) as YOU think it’s being optimized for.

Most people think the first keyword in their META Keywords tag is the keyword that they are optimizing their article for.

And that adding a few keywords as secondary keywords will help them in some way.

So first, follow the link to see for yourself that Google doesn’t read the meta keywords field.

Whatever you write in there doesn’t matter to Google.

So What Does Matter to Google?

It is the keywords in the title and the link text of incoming links that matter.

Your page is actually optimized for ALL keywords in the title.

The keywords that you use in the title of the page are the main “filter” that will tell Google for which keywords to rank your page.

Other ranking factors will then determine how well that pages ranks against the competition – like link popularity, page rank, website authority, etc.

So the answer to the question whether to optimize the page for “green widget” or for “green widget accessories” is this:

If your title will say: Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In Town

Then your article is optimized for:
- Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In Town
- Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In
- Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets
- Green Widget Accessories – Coolest
- Green Widget Accessories
- Green Widget
- Green

And it’s also optimized (not perfectly, but still) for:
- Green Widget Accessories – Gadgets In Town
- Green Widget – Coolest Gadgets In Town
- Green Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In Town
- Green Town
- and all the zillion other word combos for every  keyword in that title.

Your article is optimized for ALL these keywords and keyword combos; and Google WILL rank it for all of these searches.

The difference in ranking of course comes from competition!

You’ll probably rank #1 for the keyword search “Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In Town”, maybe #5 for “Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets”, maybe #30 for “Green Widget Accessories” and maybe around 9,876,486 for “Green”. 

If you then get more links to your page (external and / or internal) with the link text that includes “Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In Town” and other combos of these keywords, you will start to rank better and better.

Are There Important And Not So Important Keywords In The Title?

One more example to help you understand this:

A lady asked me whether she should optimize the page for “Green Widget” or “Green Widget Accessories.”

I asked her what the title of her article would be if she optimized just for “Green Widget.”

She replied: “Green Widget – Finding The Right Widget For Your PC.”

And if she would have optimized for “Green Widget Accessories” her title would say:

“Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In Town”

Her assumption is that Google will know and rank her article optimized for “Green Widget” for that keyword (green widget) and that the rest of the keywords in the title are just some kind of fill – and that Google will disregard those words.

Then her assumption is that if she optimizes for “Green Widget Accessories,” Google will rank her for that keyword (but not Green Widget!) and won’t pay much attention to the rest of the keywords – since Google can read her mind and knows which keyword is really important to the lady and which keywords are not that important to her.

Funny, isn’t it? And yet most of us think that way – at least I did for some time until I figured this out.

The fact is simple: Google ranks your page according to ALL KEYWORDS in the title and doesn’t know which keywords are important to you.

Remember the title: “Green Widget – Finding The Right Widget For Your PC?”

You may think that Google will know and rank you for “Green Widget” but not really for “Finding The Right?”

If you do a search for “Finding The Right” you’ll see that sites rank accordingly to their keywords in the title, link popularity and all other factors that affect the ranking.

No one searches just for “Finding The Right” keyword and yet Google has a ranking for that search and of course for any keyword search you type.

It’s a computer algorithm and not a smart human.

This tells you that Google doesn’t know for which keywords you want to rank. It WILL rank you for ALL keywords in the title.

The competition and links and other factors will then determines how HIGH you will rank.

The Importance Of Keywords In The Title

One more thing: let’s say that you don’t use “Finding The Right” keyword in the title but you use it on the page in content.

Will you rank for this keyword? Yes, but not in the main index. You’ll almost surely be dumped into the secondary index and will never get found for this keyword search.

(See my previous post about the real competition to understand what I mean by main and secondary index.)

If you look at your keyword stats for a page (for which keywords that page was found in the last month for example), you’ll see that almost all searches for which your page was found include one or more keywords that you used in the title.

It is almost impossible to be found for a keyword search when NONE of the searched keywords is in the title!

In other words, your page can only be found for keywords that you used in the title. (Not 100%, but very close.)

This includes correct order of words, inverted order or some keywords missing or added in between.

Example: My page on where to book hotels and flights with PayPal is being found quite often.

Look at the top keywords:

They ALWAYS include a few keywords that were used in the title.

And if I check the keywords that brought just an occasional visitor, you can still see that at least one of the keywords from the title (Book Cheap Flights and Hotels With Paypal) is always used.

That article has quite a lot of other words but it gets found ONLY for keywords when one or more were used in the title!

For example, there’s a sentence with “If you’re travelling in the USA” – but I will NEVER be found for “travelling in the USA” or any other keyword combos.

That’s because I theoretically rank for that keyword search but since none of the keywords is in the title, I probably rank on page 98754.

You can also test this claim by simply doing a search on Google for something; and then checking on which page of results do you see the first site ranked that DOESN’T HAVE AT LEAST ONE KEYWORD in the title.

If I do this for “Finding The Right”, I find the first site without any of the keywords in the title at #48 – and even that site has a keyword “right” in the domain name.

And as you probably know, most of the clicks on search results happen on the first page.

How To Efficiently Optimize Your Articles

The next time you wonder which keyword to optimize for your article, know that in reality you will optimize your article for ALL keywords that are in the title.

Google will not read your mind and know that some are important to you and that some aren’t.

So how can you use this knowledge to your advantage?

Always optimize the page for multiple keywords that you know are being searched.

Optimize for long tail – and you will automatically optimize for “short tail” too.

If you optimize the article for “Green Widget Accessories” (and all these keywords are in the title), you will automatically optimize it for “Green Widget.”

The difference in rankings between “Green Widget Accessories” and “Green Widget” is because of the competition. (there are more pages writing just about green widgets than there are pages writing about green widget accessories!)

You’ll need more links (to the page and / or to the whole website) to rank high for a shorter keyword than you will need for a longer keyword.

And if you cannot decide between two keywords that you’d like to use and are not sure which one is better (Green Widget or Coolest Gadgets), then use BOTH in the title.

Then just make sure that incoming links to that page have these keywords in the link text and you’ll rank better for all keywords that are included in the title and link text.

You can link to the page with “Green Widget – One of The Coolest Gadgets” in the link text and it will help both keywords. Or you can sometimes just link with “Green Widget” and sometimes with “Coolest Gadgets” in the link text.

One more thing: if you look closely at Google’s results, you’ll see that the searched keyword is typically at the beginning of the title for highest ranked sites.

So the keywords near the beginning of the title have more weight than those later in the title.

I’ve experienced a small crisis on my website with Google slashing the PR of site. Until yesterday my homepage had a PR of 4 and most of the other pages had PR 3s and 2s.

Yesterday I tweaked a few things on my homepage and when uploaded through SBI the google PR had been slashed site wide! I’m panicking that maybe I’ve experimented and done too much stuff on my own now, and have done something to piss off the google algorithm.

Now i’m desperately going over all the recent changes I’ve made and trying to work if I can undo it. I was just wondering if you had any advice on this minor catastrophe and if you could offer any other pearls of wisdom on what i’m doing wrong on ________.com.

Thank you for all your advice on your freedomideas.com blog it has been very useful and will continue to be an important resource for me in the future.

————————————–

Google updates Pagerank every few months. So whatever you did yesterday or a few days ago has nothing to do with the PR you see right now.

PR is simply the sum of all links coming to your site. So tweaking your homepage has nothing to do with PR.

It’s just a coincidence. Also, I bet that nothing has changed with your traffic.

PR of your site changed because the PR of incoming links changed. Other websites lost PR and consequently your site lost PR.

But this is out of your control. So no point obsessing about it.

PR doesn’t bring money. Traffic does.

Build page and links – it’s as simple as that. Let the PR do whatever it wants to do.

Here’s a question I got from a friend and I’ll use it as an example to explain a slightly more advanced on-page SEO:

> I’m still learning how to use the brain stormer and figuring out the best pages to write. I would like to write a check list page and want to hear your thoughts about which page is best.
>
>                                                   Supply    Demand    Profitability
>
>
> Free Planner                               1081        567            2332
>
> Wedding Planning Checklist         6069       1136            5342
>
> Free Wedding Checklist                918        59              15559
>
> Free Organizer                            1101       181                6083
>
> The profitability is higher for the Free Wedding Checklist, but is it better to go with the Wedding Planning Checklist because they have a higher supply even though the profitability is less?

The profitability is a waste of time. NEVER look at profitability. This is not financial profitability. It’s just a computer number.

If the demand is not high enough, you won’t get people on your site. Your profitability can be 10000000 but so what if no ones comes to the site!

You need DEMAND. Then you need a  chance to rank well. That’s LOW SUPPLY.

Second, you can optimize pages for MANY keywords, not just one. Google HAS NO IDEA for which keyword you have optimized the page.

You probably think that because you have put your keyword in the meta keywords field, you somehow tell Google to rank your page for that keyword.

Google doesn’t look at keyword meta fields!

It doesn’t matter!

This is ONLY for your Analyze It so that it knows what is the main keyword for the article and then makes sure you include it in all places which ARE important for Google: title, first sentence, in text links, etc.

But Google sees hundreds of keywords on your page and the keywords in your title (you probably use 4 to 8 or something like that).

How does Google decide for WHICH of these hundreds of keywords to rank your page?

MOSTLY by the keywords in the title + the link text of incoming links – which can be external (from other sites) and internal (from your own site).

So you have up to 8 keywords that you can use in the title of your article and it will be “optimized” for ALL these keywords in Google’s eyes as long as you include them in the title of the article and in the link text of the incoming links.

You’ll very likely include those keywords automatically in your article a few times so I wouldn’t really worry about that.

Now – you can use this approach when you have two or three VERY SIMILAR keywords that talk about the same thing – like in the example above. You can optimize the article for most of your keywords.

You DON’T use this strategy for VERY DIFFERENT keywords like – wedding planning checklist and free wedding graphics or something like that.

When you brainstorm your niche you will find hundreds of keywords based on which you’ll write pages. But some are very similar and that where you can optimize your article for most of them and not stay stuck and wonder which one is a better one.

So in your case, you have these keywords:

Free Planner                               1081        567            2332

Wedding Planning Checklist         6069       1136            5342

Free Wedding Checklist                918        59              15559

Free Organizer                            1101       181                6083

And you wonder whether to optimize for Free Wedding Checklist or Wedding Planning Checklist?

BOTH!

Now it also depends whether this is a T2 or a T3 page.

If you can expand it with 5 or more articles, then you can make it a T2 page. In that case, I’d choose Wedding Planning checklist as my primary keyword and optimize the article for it, but would include free wedding checklist in the title and in the text.

Even if you do it like this: Free Wedding Planning Checklist Google can see that the keyword Free Wedding Planning Checklist is in there and you’ll rank well.

But your title can also say: Wedding Planning Checklist – Free Wedding Checklist Ideas

And you now have optimized your article for both keywords!

Sure, I would still suggest you to write a T3 page for Free Wedding Checklist and then link back to your T2 page. It will strengthen both and you might even get a double listing in Google.

As for Free Planer and Free Organizer – these are not really wedding keywords. They can be about business planning. I’d look for wedding keywords since your site is focused on this theme.

You can of course include free planner and free organizer in the article and you may well end up getting some traffic for them.

But back to the topic of this post; you don’t have to EXCLUDE other keywords from an article if you choose to optimize it for one keyword.

On the contrary, you SHOULD optimize your articles for MULTIPLE VERY SIMILAR keywords.

The key are keywords in the title and in the incoming links.

That’s what Google understands and that’s what helps you get ranked higher for a certain keyword and NOT what you put into your meta keywords field.

Press Releases

> What kind of website do they work best for?
Press releases in reality work best for companies that release a new product or a service. These press releases are then picked up by other sites and journalists and that creates a lot of buzz.

For a normal SBI site, the press releases are really not that powerful. All you get in most cases is one link from a trusted site.

> When is it a good time to consider writing one?  If you don’t use them or like the idea of them, why?
> How do you write one?  What information is needed in one to get the best impact?
> Who have you used or recommended?  I have heard of www.prweb.com but would like to know from someone who has used them how they work and if it is worth the investement.

I’ve tried a few press releases in the past when I launched a new website or when I launched a new product but I have seen no real impact from them – not in terms of traffic and not in terms of link effectiveness.

I would much rather get a PR3 link from a related site from within a content and it’s worth 10 times more than a normal press release.

You can find all the important info on press releases in these two articles from SBI Tips HQ:

http://sbitips.sitesell.com/press-release.html

http://sbitips.sitesell.com/press-release-outline.html

Yahoo Directory

> When is a site good enough to consider going into the directory?
I’ve seen pretty crappy sites get accepted into Yahoo directory. I think Yahoo will check mostly that your site is not spammy and they will be happy to take your $299 from your credit card.

> Is it worth spending the $299 to be looked at by them?
In my personal opinion, yes, if you get placed on at least PR2 page. That will give you good link boost and of course you’ll also get many additional links from subdomains of Yahoo directory. Some of these are:

http://uk.dir.yahoo.com/

http://ca.dir.yahoo.com/

http://asia.dir.yahoo.com/

…and others.

I’ve seen some sites which get massive traffic (over 5000 daily visitors) and had just over 200 pages of content and didn’t have that many links. In fact, the most powerful links they got were from Yahoo directory page which had a pagerank 5 and most of the pages of other Yahoo directory subdomains had a pagerank of 4.

So with one single submission to Yahoo, the site got one PR5 link and about 10 PR4 links. If you add just a few of other relatively quality links, you’ll do very well and can practically forget link building.

> Is it true that things happen quicker after you get accepted in the directory?
Again, this depends (in my opinion of course) on the page where you get placed. If you get placed 8 levels deep into Yahoo directory on a PR0 page, it’s almost the same as if nothing happened.

But if you get placed on a PR5 page, your traffic may quadruple in 3 months like in the example I mentioned before. (see image below)

The Effects on Traffic after getting a PR5 link from Yahoo Directory

> Is there a format or sound advice on what they look for in a site that should be done before you submitted your site, so you don’t have to go through a rejection first?
If you’re building a normal site which is not porn or aimed at spamming, you’ll be accepted.

> Should a Press Release or the directory be done first or does it matter?
It doesn’t matter.

Feel free to share your experiences with press releases and whether a link from Yahoo directory made any significant difference to your rankings and traffic!

Well, some of these sites have a fake pagerank displayed. I don’t know how they do it but I do know how to detect fake pagerank sites and stay away from these losers and cheaters.

Here’s an example of an email I got a few days ago:

—————————————
Hi!
Your website  freedomideas.com  is very interesting, and I’d like to know if you’d agree on placing a link to my partner’s website. I’m trying to get links for a business website.

In exchange, I could offer you a link back from http://www.adstro-online . com (Page Rank 4).

If you agree to this exchange, please place a link in your website with the following details:

Title: …

URL: …

Once my link is up, don’t forget to contact me back and send me the information of your site (title and URL) so I can give you the links I promised. Also, let me know if you have more websites, maybe we could do some more exchanges?

Thanks for the attention! Hope to hear back from you!

Link Exchange Team

——————————————————————–

So if you go to adstro online website, you’ll see that it shows a pagerank 4 in your toolbar.

There are a few steps you can take to check if this pagerank is valid or not.

1.    info:www.domain.com in Google – this is usually the only thing you need to do and here’s what you can see in this example:

You can see that you typed in one domain into the search box and Google shows you another domain as the info for that page – the astro-share . com.

Somehow the astro-share site is redirecting the pagerank to the adstro-online site. If you see another domain as the result of the info: query in Google, then something bad is going on.

2.    Link:www.domain.com in Yahoo – see if the site really receives many quality backlinks to deserve the pagerank 4 status. If you’ve ever started a site from scratch, you surely know how much work and backlinks it takes to get the site to PR4.

Holy cow! They got to pagerank 4 without any backlinks! That has to be some pagerank magic or …

… it’s a fake pagerank.

Wherever there is money, there are cheaters. Stay away from those and let karma take care of them…

How?

Well, I am not the originator of this idea so I’ll just link to this excellent link building article where everything is explained.

By the way, there’s one comment below the article that I want to quote here:

Melanie Nathan said:

“I suspect that most people will be too lazy to put in the work of doing the research and contacting each site though. That’s good. Their loss = our gain.”

I agree 100%.

I also keep in mind a short sentence from a very successful person (forgot who it was):

Do It Now.

Update: I followed my own advice and started emailing people when I found out another tip: once you identify the geocities page to which a site links, run a backlink report from Yahoo on that geocities page to find out other websites still linking to it.

I’ve been now actively involved with Internet marketing for 4 years and want to share my findings related to Pagerank – as I disagree that Pagerank is dead.

My findings are not based on a scientific study but on experience and I don’t claim that they are the unviversal truth about Pagerank. But there is some hard logic behind my ideas so I invite you to check them out.

Here’s why Pagerank is not dead yet:

Google says:

PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

In plain English this means: Pages with higher Pagerank are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. This is especially important to note for those SEO geniuses who like to show examples of how their low pagerank page beats a higher pagerank page.

Yes, there are exceptions but the probability is NOT on your side. Google says »likely« and not »always«.

So what you’re doing with your example is showing the »unlikely« event and I definitely won’t base my link building strategies and success of my site on »unlikely« examples.

Feel free to follow the »unlikely« path though – a few less competitors for me in the long run.

And based on my experience and every day Googling on various topics, I almost always see high PR pages and website ranked higher than lower PR pages and websites.

Not always but “almost always”. Guess which path is the smarter one…

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.

Plain English: A link from a higher PR page will be more beneficial than a link from  a low PR page.

Therefore, I look to get links from high pagerank sites and pages as they are more beneficial. I will continue to do so until Google removes their claim and until I see no difference between high and low PR incoming links. Right now, I still see huge difference.

A PR5 link pointed to a site with lots of content (100 pages or so) and very few links, can quadruple the site’s traffic in a couple of months.

The Effect Of A PR5 Link - Very Few Pages Were Added From July To October

Why the exceptions? Why are sometimes low PR sites ranked higher than high PR sites?

From my experience, in order for Pagerank to really do its magic, it must be COMBINED with 3 other factors:

1.    Main keyword in the title – A low PR page can beat a higher PR page if the low PR page has the main keyword in the title and the high PR page doesn’t. If the high PR page added the main keyword in the title, it would most likely outrank the low PR page!

2.    Main keyword in the anchor text of incoming links – Similary, a low PR page can beat a higher PR page if the low PR page has the main keyword in the link text of the incoming links and the high PR page doesn’t. A high PR page has big advantage though; if it just gets a few anchor text links including the right link text (main keyword), it will very soon outrank the low PR page.

3.    Theme of the website – A low PR page can beat a higher PR page if the low PR page is on a website that is themed around tightly related keywords to the main keyword. Google says:

We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.

Therefore if other pages of your site talk about similar topic, you’ll have better chances of ranking high.

This is where a high PR website cannot do much – except gain even more links to it to gain the »monster authority« status.

Typical examples of »monster authority« status in Google’s eyes are Wikipedia and Ezinearticles. They can outrank themed high PR sites even though their theme is spread among huge diversity of topics.

Note that in most cases (ALL from my experience), they have the main keyword in title and they have lots of internal links with that keyword in the link text!

So in order for Pagerank to work its magic, you need to:

-    Include the main keyword in the title
-    Include the main keyword in the link text of incoming links (external and internal!)
-    Build your site around a theme

If you do that, the probability of a lower PR page ranking higher than your page is microscopingly small.

So is Pagerank dead yet? Far from it:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms.

You just need to know what part of the recipe for high rankings the PR  has. If you exclude Pagerank from the recipe, it’s very likely that your »cake won’t taste really sweet.«

Update: Matt Cutts in this video mentions pagerank as the key to why some pages rank higher than other. Is pagerank really dead?

I visit the SBI forums daily and every day there is someone asking for a site review and complaining about low traffic.

And EVERY time I check their sites, I see the same thing; almost 0 incoming links or having some links but they’re coming from low quality sites.

Somehow, somewhere the most important information on how to get lots of free search engine traffic got lost.

So here it is: In order to rank high for a certain keyword in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live, your keyword most have good demand, not too much competition and LINKS pointing to it.

Ideally, the link’s anchor text includes your keyword or a slight variation of it. These links should come from quality websites (and pages!) where the quality can be determined by high pagerank and high Alexa rating.

This is it. This is the most important information about getting free traffic. EVERYTHING else is less important.

How many links do good sites have?

Have you ever asked yourself this question?

Because if links are so important, then getting close to your competitors (or partners) in search ranking results will depend on whether you can get approximately the same amount and quality of links.

I’ve hired a freelancer to do analysis of backlinks of 110 websites which will enable you to compare your site’s backlinks to their count and see WHY you still struggle.

Trust me, it’s not the design of your site (Google doesn’t care how your site looks like) and it’s not the publishing platform (Google doesn’t care whether you use SBI, Wordpress or simply upload static HTML to a server).

In 99% of the cases, you’re lacking links.

Sure, you need content and hopefully you’re choosing most of the winnable keywords and hopefully you aim for at least a 100 page website. All that is necessary but I rarely see the number of pages as the key problem to low traffic.

It’s the links that are missing.

The analysis was done on the top 10 websites in each category of the SBI Results page. There are 11 categories and I’ve chosen top 10 websites in each and done a link analysis on them.

The backlink analysis consists of two numbers:

1.    The total number of incoming links reported by Yahoo. The number represents only external links and to the entire site. (so not only to the homepage)

2.    The number of domains (different websites) linking to your site. The number of different domains seems to be one of the most important factors determining the overall trust of your website in Google’s results. You can get of course 100 incoming links if a blog with 100 pages puts your link in their blogroll. That will of course give you much weaker results than for example getting 1 link from 100 dfifferent websites.

You’ll also see Alexa rating of each website.

Here’s a shortcut if you don’t want to check the whole analysis:
-    The average incoming link count of top 10 websites in 11 categories is around 4000 incoming links.
-    And the average number of different websites linking to a top 10 website in these 11 categories is over 220.

If you’re not anywhere close to these numbers, you WILL NOT get lots of traffic. This is what’s needed to make your site stand of from the crowd of crappy sites and get tons of free search engine traffic.

You can download the full backlink report here (Right click and choose Save Link As or Save Target As… – it’s an .xls file for Microsft Excel).

How to analyze links

You can get the total number of incoming links by typing link:www.domain.com in Yahoo.com and then selecting »Except from this domain« and »to: Entire Site«.

To get the number od domains linking to your site, use SEOmoz Linkscape and then look at the »Root domains linking to the page« number.

So in order to get lots of traffic (as those sites do clearly do), you need to have similar factors. These factors include the number of pages and the number and quality of incoming links.

If you’re still struggling with traffic and you have more than 100 pages (without lots of pages, the links cannot do their magic!), then start working on links, links, links!!!

P.S. And where can I get links? In the same places as the other sites in your niche did!

Yahoo shows you almost every site and almost every page from where the other site gets links. Check those pages and see if you can get a link there too!

One way is to keep track of all link exchanges in an Excel file where you’d note the exact page from which the other site links back.

If you are that disciplined to do that for every link exchange across all your sites, then skip this post.

If on the other hand you’re a little bit lazy or you completely forgot to record pages with reciprocal links, then here are two simple ways of checking whether the partner site links back:

1.    Bing LinkFromDomain command

Even MSN.com had the command before but you’ll probably use Bing.com now. Type LinkFromDomain:domain.com and Bing will list all OUTGOING links from that domain.

In case you want to check if another website links to you, add your domain name to the search query like this:

LinkFromDomain:domain.com yourdomain

So, if I want to check whether Chitika.com links to this blog, I would enter:

LinkFromDomain:chitika.com freedomideas.com

There are two results which confirm that Chitika links to my blog BUT it doesn’t tell me FROM which pages on Chitika.com.

2.    Google site command

The Google site command doesn’t actually check for a link, but it looks for a keyword on the website. So I might search like this:

freedomideas site:chitika.com

Try this search in Google and you’ll see more results – but some of those are not actual links, they just contain the keyword freedomideas.

The main advantage of this search is that I can visit the page and see the pagerank of that page for example.

There are some reciprocal link checking tools online, but they all require that you input the exact URL of the page which you then check for a link to your site.

If you want to find them, just Google »check reciprocal links«…

If you have any other ways of checking reciprocal / outgoing links, please share them!

I’ve shared my ideas in the SBI forums not long ago about keyword research and did my best to simplify things, but that thread is now on page 11 and I am still getting questions.

All of these, of course, are well explained in the SBI Action Guide (if you are an SBI user), but perhaps you need a different perspective to understand them. So let’s tackle these terms and ideas one by one…

1.  What is a Site Concept?

A Site Concept is an idea. It can exist only in your head.

a) The Site Concept of my tennis website is the mental game of tennis, which I am trying to convey to visitors with the domain name – tennismindgame.com. The key is that a visitor will »get it« immediately – what your site subject matter is – just by seeing your domain name.

Tennis mind (the part of the domain name) is NOT a site concept, it’s just a keyword. It’s a keyword that tries to tell you what the whole site concept is.

I’ve later expanded my site to include tennis instruction, talking more about technique, and tennis strategy, which talks about strategy and tactics. Both of these concepts are NOT a part of the mental game of tennis, but so what?

This has nothing to do with the rankings and traffic of my articles. Tennis strategy and tennis instruction are still tightly related to the mental game of tennis and, of course, all of these cover tennis. If I were to start writing about golf strategy or baseball technique, then these articles would probably not rank so well. (Although I have no proof. Maybe they would. )

b) The Site Concept of my vacuum site is vacuum cleaner reviews. The site will cover reviews and I am trying to convey this idea in the domain name which includes a keyword vacuum (but not cleaner).

(Note; my site concept is NOT »vacuum cleaner«. That’s just a product or an idea.)

I could, for example, create a site that talks about vacuum cleaner technology and dissects all the little things going inside a home or industrial vac. Or I could talk about the history of vacuums. These are different site concepts.

The only keyword used in the domain is vacuum, which is not even the full keyword – vacuum cleaner. So what? The domain name has very little to do with your rankings, unless you target an exact keyword (for example vacuumcleanerreviews.com – which is taken by the way).

However, these domains look spammy to me and probably do to many other webmasters. Consequently, in most cases, I do not choose a keyword-based domain unless I feel it’s a tough keyword to win.

(Again, I can see the future questions: How do you know whether the keyword is easy or tough to win? . Ok, as a rule of the thumb, if the top 5 sites in Google for this search have an average pagerank (PR) of 3 or lower, then you can easily get there. If the average PR is 4 or higher, then you may want to attack them with the domain name that includes that keyword.)

In conclusion, the Site Concept is an idea of what your site subject matter will be. Of course, I suggest that you use only one or a maximum of 2 keywords in your domain name, and your goal is to convey this site concept to visitors when they see your site in the Google search results page.

What keyword should you use in your domain name to explain your site concept?

A keyword that clearly shows the concept of the site and that possibly has some demand and for which you have some chances of obtaining a ranking. Tennis mind doesn’t have much demand and not much competition, so I rank #1 for it.

Vacuum (in the domain name) has lots of demand and too much competition and I won’t rank for it (and I don’t really need to), but I chose the domain name for the reasons of coolness of the name. I also researched beforehand and found that I can rank well in Google for the keyword search »vacuum cleaner reviews«, even if I don’t have the exact keyword in the domain name.

2)  What is a seed word?

a) A seed word on my tennis site is, of course, tennis. It’s NOT tennis mind. As you just learned, that’s just one keyword that tries to explain to the visitors the topic of  my site.

In order to find more keywords for which I will write articles, I need to brainstorm much more BROADLY, so I need a SEED WORD that will give me many more keywords.

So – tennis is my seed word.

This seed word gives me lots of keywords from which to choose and now I can »cherry pick« the keywords that fit my SITE CONCEPT!

I first wanted to write only about the mental game of tennis, so I chose tennis psychology, mental tennis, and tennis mind, among others. Later, I expanded the idea to get more traffic and added tennis instruction, tennis tips, how to play tennis, and others.

My site concept is not about tennis equipment or racquet reviews, so I didn’t use these keywords.

b) The seed word on my vacuum site is vacuum cleaner.

I also brainstormed just »vacuum« and got a few more good keywords, but my general seed word was »vacuum cleaner«. Based on it, I got a list of useful keywords, which I then arranged into main pages and related articles.

3.  What is a Tier 1 keyword?

A Tier 1 keyword is the keyword around which you want to optimize your Tier 1, or  homepage. This is my definition, though.

The SBI Action Guide tells you that »Tier 1 focuses on your Site Concept word (ex., “Anguilla”).«

The problem with this definition is that you will most likely never rank with such a broad keyword. Therefore, you are wasting the power of your homepage, which will have (or has) the highest pagerank with the most incoming links!

So – here’s how I do it:

I choose 3 to 5 keywords which I have already chosen for my Tier 2 pages and try to squeeze them into the title (and headline) of my homepage.

The T2 keywords are those with very good demand and not so high supply, so that you can rank in the top 10 in Google, right? It’s even easier to rank for these keywords if your homepage is optimized for them! Why? Again, because the homepage is »stronger«; it has higher pagerank and more incoming links!

a) In case of my tennis site, my main T2 keywords are tennis tips, tennis psychology, tennis instructions, and tennis strategy. Check the title of my site www.tennismindgame.com and see how I used all of these keywords in the title. Of course, I didn’t use the main seed word tennis every time because that might »upset« Google.

Use it at most 2 times in the title and in the headline.

Do a Google search for each of these keywords and you’ll find that I now have 2! listings in the top 10, which brings me much more traffic! The homepage may rank higher or lower compared to the T2 page, depending on how well it’s optimized and how many incoming links with that anchor text it receives.

b) In the case of my vacuum site, I chose vacuum cleaner reviews, vacuum cleaner ratings, and best vacuum cleaners (these are all of my T2 pages) and used them in some logical way in my title.

Note that when you optimize your homepage for a longer keyword, like best vacuum cleaners, you AUTOMATICALLY include your main seed word vacuum cleaner(s). The page is then AUTOMATICALLY optimized for this keyword too, in case you later get more links and more pagerank and eventually start ranking well for this broad keyword too!

Final Words

Let’s make a quick summary of both of these examples:

Tennismindgame.com
-    Site concept: mental game of tennis
-    Domain name: tennismindgame.com – the tennis mind part tells you the site subject matter
-    Seed word: tennis – from which I then cherry pick keywords that fit my site concept
-    T1 keyword(s) – tennis mind, tennis tips, tennis strategy, tennis instruction, tennis psychology

Vacuum______.com
-    Site concept: vacuum cleaner reviews
-    Domain name: vacuum______.com – which suggests expertise on the topic of vacuums
-    Seed word: vacuum cleaner – from which I choose keywords with good demand and not too high supply
-    T1 keyword(s) – vacuum cleaner reviews, vacuum cleaner ratings, best vacuum cleaners

For your homework , go to Sitesell Results page and pick 5 to 10 websites that have very good rankings (Alexa close to 100,000 or even lower).

Now try to figure out what their Site concept is, whether you can see that from the domain name, what seed word they used (or maybe even more), what their T1 keywords are, and whether they have 2 listings in Google for that search phrase.

Once you »get it«, apply this knowledge to your site!

One last tip: To help your homepage to rank well for all of those T1 keywords (which are the same as some of your T2 keywords), get links to your homepage that include those keywords in the anchor text. You can do that with external and internal links.