7 Basic Steps to Start Your Keyword Domination

Everyone that has a website wants to rank well for competitive terms and receive lots of traffic, because this usually means more business. The list I’m presenting here is just the starting point although for keywords that have competition under 3-4 million pages might be sufficient to start receiving targeted traffic from the long tail keywords you’ll choose to target.

Why I say that this list is only the beginning: to rank well for really competitive keywords you’ll need not only well written content but also backlinks and … time/patience. You can’t get in front of authority websites just like that. You’ll basically have to work your way up in the hierarchy of competitive keywords.

So here are the basics:

1. Choose your competitive keyword. The first list of keywords you’ll build will be the list of competitive keywords (this doesn’t include long tail keywords). Start your targeting campaign in order: this means that you don’t go for the most competitive keyword from the start. You work your way up.
2. Make a list of long tail keywords for the competitive keyword. Once you selected your competitive keyword start making a list of long tail keywords for it. So you start low and then you go even lower. Long tail keywords are easier to rank for and also offer quality traffic. And when you’ll look at your analytics you’ll see that long tail keywords deliver most of your traffic.
3. Plan the content of each article. It may sound simple but you don’t just go and say the same boring things in every article you write. Find something interesting related to the keyword that article will target. Think like this: “what benefit a reader will have from this article?”.
4. Plan a way to link the articles in a pyramid structure. The reason for creating all these articles is to link them all together and create a natural flow from one article to another. In the end your links should define a pyramidal structure of links that will lead the reader to the competitive keyword article. NOTE: don’t make all the links with the same anchor text and don’t link all your articles to your main competitive-keyword-article.
5. Write articles that target the keywords. Learn the basics about using keywords in your content: titles, description metatag, paragraphs, subheadings, anchor texts, alt property of images, file names, urls and so on. Now, after you learn the basics USE THEM.
6. Follow the results. After you created your content you’ll have to wait for a while until search engines index your content. After that check with your analytics software and see the results: how much traffic each of those pages is getting, from what keywords or from where, what is the bounce rate, did the user navigated further on the link architecture you’ve created?
7. Make adjustments. If you used your keywords well in your content, then usually you’ll need to adjust the linking architecture or to find ways to improve the reader’s interactivity with your content.

Create quality content they say but you’ll also have to create decent quantities of quality articles. Why do frequently updated websites/blogs tend to rank better, or have higher numbers of subscribers than other websites? People and search engines favor fresh quality content. Would you buy a newspaper if they would publish the same articles every day?

What do you think of this? What is your approach when it comes to getting traffic for a certain competitive keyword? Share your ideas and opinions with us.