The best keywords in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) pose a great challenge to ordinary mortals with regular websites. How can you or I possibly complete for a keyword phrase that gets 100,000 searches per month in Google?

The plain fact is, we can’t. To compete for a top keyword you’ll need…

1. A well-established website with thousands of web pages
2. New unique and original content added daily
3. Content of sufficient quality to pass Google’s human inspectors
4. Thousands of links into your site
5. Links to a variety of pages in your site
6. Links from sites with high PageRank and Trust

Most websites have none of these things, and never will. To make matters worse, most of the “how to do SEO” articles do nothing more than tell you to get all 6 of the above.

So what is a small business owner to do, if s/he wants to get to the top of Google?

I suggest you focus on getting quick wins. There are a number of good reasons to do this, but the main one is that you’ll experience SEO success within 10-20 days. This is especially useful for beginners.

For a start, give up the idea that you’re going to get to page one for a heavily contested search term. Instead, refocus your efforts on keywords that…

• Have a lot less competition (e.g. 1,000 searches/mo)
• Are highly targeted (e.g. battersea dentist versus dentist london versus dentist)

You can probably get to page one for such a term in 1-2 weeks. Once you’ve achieved it, find another keyword and focus on that.

Doing SEO Keyword Research is one of those things that sounds difficult, but is actually very easy. Click the link for a one-page quick-start guide that explains everything you need to know.

Once you’ve settled on a particular keyword, it’s time to optimise for it. The easiest page to get to the top of Google is your site’s homepage. However, if your keyword naturally sits inside another page on your site, optimise that instead.

Content Optimisation is something anybody can do. You can find a brilliant beginner’s guide to SEO on the site I’ve just linked to. It includes links to many excellent guides, tools and SEO resources.

So there it is in a nutshell. Pick an achievable keyword phrase, and focus on getting to page one for that. Then pick another achievable phrase, and apply it to another page on your site. In 6 months time you could rank in the top 3 for 25 keyword phrases that collectively attract 25,000 searches per month.

This is almost certainly more useful than getting into the top 3 for a single keyword phrase that attracts 25,000 searches per month. Why? Because each of your terms will be highly focussed, and take people to a well targeted page designed to receive its own term. This greatly increases your chance of converting a visitor into a lead.

search engine optimisation, seo keyword research