Quick Start Up Guide For SEO

The Total Guide To Blogging Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Part One

In the form of…

A Short Story About A Man Named Gerald Florentine.

I am a blogger so this quick start guide revolves around blogging. You can use this guide using other web publishing methods, but it will prove to be most effective when put to use with blog publishing, specifically blog publishing with WordPress. This is a guide that will show you everything you need towards creating a site that is totally optimized for search engines.

I want to introduce you to a fictional character I created and named, Gerald Florentine. Gerald is a craftsman and enjoys woodworking. Recently and after many years of saving his money he finally built a woodworking shop next to his house. Gerald Florentine has lived in Maine and woodworking has been a family tradition for many generations. Gerald is very excited to finally have his shot at being successful selling his woodworking crafts. He is excited that by luck of the draw, he happens to live in the digital era. This is the day and age of Online marketing, being an entrepreneur and selling your products through the Internet. And that is exactly what Gerald wants to do. He doesn’t necessarily have goals to become filthy rich (although he wouldn’t complain about it if it happened) but rather he wants to just live a comfortable life style where he can rest at night and count on being able to pay the bills and have some fun on the occasions when he feels a little froggy. No big deal…

So everyone… meet Gerald Florentine. He is a guy that lives in Maine, enjoys woodworking, has a woodworking shop and wants to sell his woodworking products online. He knows his stuff and can tell you anything and everything about woodworking. The proof is in the quality and craftsmanship of the products he wants to sell. In this Quick Start Up Guide For SEO, we are going to use Gerald as our guinea pig. From start to finish, this guide will teach you how to optimize your site for search engines by reading and learning how Gerald Florentine optimized his.

Step One: Research and Investigate Keywords and Search Terms.

Gerald sits down at a table with a pad and pencil. He writes down five phrases that he would want his site to pull up first in a search engine. He thought about using broad search terms such as the single word: woodworking and saw that there was way too much competition. Gerald knew that the likelihood of his site pulling up first, or at least on the first page of results using broad search terms like this was slim to none. With a little investigation he saw that the potential for landing a great position in the result pages by using narrower or more specific phrases increased dramatically. Woodworking produced over 15 million sites, but when narrowed down to the specific product he sells, the results narrowed down to under half a million. Gerald also noticed that the sites listed in the results page from the narrowed down phrases weren’t quite as relevant to the search query compared to searching for broader terms. What Gerald quickly realized is that there was a valid opening in Google for his market. When Gerald searched for the specific products he wants to sell Online, he noticed that the returned results were not exactly relevant to the search term. That is a vacancy! An Opening! And it didn’t take long for Gerald to act on this.

Gerald wrote down these five phrases:

• Custom Wood Mailboxes
• Handcrafted Wood Mailboxes
• Custom Wood Birdhouses
• Handcrafted Wood Birdhouses
• Custom Handcrafted Woodworking

Here are screenshots of Google’s search engine results page on the five narrowed down search phrases that Gerald wrote down on his pad. Take notice to the amount of sites these search terms return compared to the broader search term. Gerald knows that he can compete with these are search phrases . These search terms do not pull up highly relevant results compared to the products he wants to sell Online. These five phrases are a sound choice for use of what we call, Search Engine Marketing.

Step Two: Domain Name Selection.

Gerald soon discovered that the more times the words in a search term is found on a page, the more likely the chance it will be seen on the front page. Knowing this, Gerald Florentine took special care in selecting a domain name that has a few of these words in it.  In the process of choosing a domain name, Gerald counted the number of times each word was used in the five search phrases he wrote down on his pad. Here is the breakdown:

• Wood x4
• Custom x3
• Handcrafted x3
• Mailboxes x2
• Birdhouses x2
• Woodworking x1

So on that same sheet of paper and directly below the list of five search phases, Gerald began writing down different nice sounding domain names using only the words that were used the most. After trying different word orders, Gerald found a domain name that was perfect for his business and perfect for adding what we call, keyword density to his five targeting search phrases. The domain name that Gerald registered was: Handcrafted-Wood.com. This domain name was absolutely perfect. I had the two most popular words used in his five search phrases. Having this domain name is ultimately one of the most relevant domain names he could have possibly asked for.

To Be Continued…

In the mean time,

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