How to Build a Site to Get Search Engine Rankings

(Part 1 of 2)
By David Wells

There are many ways to get visitors to your website but none are as desirable as search engine traffic. It’s highly targeted (provided you build your site correctly), has the potential to drive large numbers of visitors to your site and, best of all, it’s free.

Trouble is, there are only five major search engines and each one has ten spaces on the first page of results for any given keyword phrase. That makes only 50 front page spaces for your keyword. The competition can be fierce.

The internet is mature enough that you probably aren’t going to be able to target a top-level general keyword and have any hope of getting top rankings. There are just too many established players to compete with and they have a huge head start on you.

The key is to start small and focus on a very narrow sub-niche. The process of selecting your niche is half the battle. Many people are eager to get the building part and rush past the all-important planning phase. This is a mistake.

You wouldn’t build a house without a complete blueprint. A website should be treated the same. Take your time and develop a careful plan before you start posting pages. It will save you time in the long run and your odds of success will be much better.

The analysis and design of a website should follow a series of logical steps. Pick your topic, identify your keywords, determine the competitive landscape and then build your site.

The first item of business is to select the general topic your site will be about. It’s important to recognize that your final topic selection will be driven by market forces and competitive pressures. Your goal is to achieve high rankings in the search engines after all and you aren’t likely to achieve that if you choose a topic in a well-defined and highly competitive market. So this process is essentially one of narrowing your focus until you have a niche that you can effectively compete in.

You will do better in every way if you pick a topic that interests you. First, your passion, or lack thereof, for the topic will come through in your writing. Passion and enthusiasm for a subject are necessary ingredients for writing content that people actually want to read. Second, you are far more likely to stick to it if you have a genuine interest in the subject matter.

To begin your topic selection process you should brainstorm general topic ideas for at least 30 minutes. During the first few minutes the ideas will come fast and furious, but then you will have to start thinking about it deeply and intently. This is the point where most people quit and take the list they have and run with it. That’s a mistake.

Your topic selection is the most important determining factor to your success or failure on the internet. Take your time and do it right the first time. Spend the entire 30 minutes focusing intently on listing every topic that interests you, even if it sounds silly. The first benefit of staying on task is that you will create a much larger initial list than you would if you quit after the ideas stopped flowing freely.

The second benefit, and the real power of this technique, is the message you are sending to your subconscious. When you focus intently on a question for a full 30 minutes your subconscious gets the message that you want an answer, so for the next few days your subconscious will provide answers to your brainstorm question. And many of these ideas will be the best you’ll get from your brainstorming session. Be sure to capture these ideas and add them to your list.

You now have your general topic list. This list will form the basis of your research for this site and the next so be sure to keep it safe and back it up with a hard copy.

Go through your list and select the top five topics based on the sole criteria of how excited you are about writing content on this topic for the foreseeable future. Your topic must interest you or your writing won’t interest your visitors.

Now you have your short list and step one of your website analysis and design is finished.

Step two is much more involved. During this step you will narrow your topic down into a set of competitive niche keywords to build your site pages around. These keywords will form the foundation of your website promotion efforts. I can’t stress enough how important it is to do a thorough analysis of your niche market before you start building pages.

Take the first topic term from your short list. This will be your first research project. It may seem like a lot of work but you should go through this market analysis process for each of your five short list topics. Only by doing all five will you have a clear picture where your best opportunities for success lay.

This works best if you create a spreadsheet or a chart to help you organize the data you collect for each topic. Start by labeling your columns from left to right with the following:

1. Keyword
2. Searches
3. Results
4. Results / Searches
5. # of Google AdWords Campaigns
6. 1st AdWords bid
7. 2nd AdWords bid
8. 3rd AdWords bid
9. # of Yahoo Search Campaigns
10. 1st Yahoo bid
11. 2nd Yahoo bid
12. 3rd Yahoo bid
13. 1st site
14. 2nd site
15. 3rd site

Collecting the data and filling in this spreadsheet will take some time and effort but it will prove worth it in the long run.

The data for columns 1 & 2 can be obtained by using Overture’s free search tool. Go to http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and enter your topic into the search box. You will get a long list of keywords that include variations on your topic along with the number of searches performed for that keyword during the last month. Go down the list and enter your keywords in column 1 and their corresponding search volume in column 2.

You should have quite a list here. Remember, this is the process of narrowing your niche so it’s ok to have lots of potential terms to pick from. At this stage it’s good to have a big list.

For column #3 go to Google or Alta Vista and do a search for each term on your list. Be sure to put quotes around your search term to narrow the results to a more targeted subset.

The results page for your search will provide you with the data you need to fill in columns #3, #13, #14 and #15. Column #3 is simply the number of results returned. This will be listed at the top of the page. For columns 13, 14, and 15 simply enter the URL’s for the top three sites listed in the order listed on the search results page. These sites are your primary competitors for this keyword. You will come back to these sites later to determine how well optimized they are and to help you develop your site promotion strategy – but more on that later.

At this point you have a list of keywords related to your topic, search volume (demand), search results (supply), and the top 3 sites for each keyword. Column #4 can be calculated by dividing the search results by the search volume. This will give you a number you can easily use to compare the supply vs. demand of each keyword. The lower the number the less competitive the market is with regard to searches verses websites targeting that niche.

Columns #5 through column #12 will tell you how expensive the pay-per-click market is for this keyword. You can get a good feel for how competitive a market is and how profitable it is by how many other marketers are paying to advertise for those keywords and how much they are spending for a click.

Another important reason for collecting this information is to reveal arbitrage opportunities. Often there will be an imbalance between the cost per click for Yahoo and Google. You can take advantage of this imbalance.

In simplest terms you add content that has a high PPC cost in one engine. Add page display ads (AdWords etc…) to the same page for the high cost PPC engine. Then drive traffic to that page with the same keywords using the low-priced PPC engine. This isn’t necessary for site rankings but it can earn you some extra revenue.

To fill these fields you will need to go to Google AdWords and sign up for an account (https://adwords.google.com/select/). It costs $5 to get started and is well worth the price. Use your AdWords account to go through each keyword and determine the number of campaigns and the top three bids for each keyword.

The process for Yahoo search is basically the same. Although Yahoo does require a $50 initial deposit, you can use this money towards click costs. Sign up here http://www.content.overture.com/d/.

The process has been tedious to be sure but you now have a valuable collection of data for your first topic idea. Now it’s time to begin narrowing the field. Print off your spreadsheet so you can cross off keywords. This way you won’t lose any of the data you’ve collected – it may be of value in the future.

This concludes Part 1 of "How to Build a Site to get Search Engine Rankings"

Go to Part 2

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