Have you ever thought about how small internet websites are competing with sites like Wal-Mart and Target? Well friends let me inform you that 99 percent of the time the answer to this question is search engine optimization. Today I am going to teach you the basics, and give you a solid foundation on what search engines and SEO is all about.

If you ask any pro what the most important part of SEO is, nine out of ten will say that the most important thing is building backlinks . However I disagree, I believe that research is by far the most important concept when conducting a SEO campaign. Brad Callen says it best; compete for “the Wrong Keywords and You’ll Likely Never See Results.” In fact it is the title of one of the chapters in his free e book “Search Engine Optimization Made Easy,” which I highly recommend.

Really there are two parts of research that everyone should study , keyword research and competition research. Again as Brad Callen, a leading professional in SEO says if you compete for the wrong keyword you will never see results.


But what is a “wrong keyword” really? A “wrong keyword “ would be a keyword with a large amount of competition . There are no actual numbers that make a keyword a “wrong keyword”; as it is relative to your current industry.

If you have no advertising budget and know next to nothing about how to prepare a website for search engines, I would recommend starting with keywords that have less than a million competitors. On the other hand if you have thousands of dollars to spend and know a lot about search engines, then the sky is the limit I would say. I just would not recommend competing with Wal-mart or other major corporations, unless you are at the top of your game.

When I look at keywords I use three different tools to get a good estimate of all my keywords. I use Keyword Elite by Brad Callen, SEO Book’s free keyword tool, and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You can use SEO Book’s tool to create a large list of keywords that relate to your website. Then you can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to analyze the results of every keyword. Or if you are like myself and own a copy of Keyword Elite, you can create the list using project one and then analyze the entire list with just two clicks ( this is the cadaliac of programs ).

After you have your list of keywords (I recommend using three keywords to create a foundation for your campaign), it is time to dive into competition research. Along with most people I would like any site I work with to be inside the top three spots on Google for their keywords, therefore most of the time I research the top three spots for each of my keywords (see why I told you to keep the list small).

I analyze the on page characteristics by just going to the website, right clicking on the page and clicking “view source.” You can then search the site for tags that are such as the “h2” . These are the general tags that search engines look at, along with the meta-data of the website (anytime you see meta-data, it equals search engine data).

Then to analyze the off-page data you can go into Google and type “links: the websites URL” to view their links. Or again if you’re a fan of Brad Callen like I am, you can use his other great program SEO Elite to analyze all the backlinks pointing to a particular website. I am not going to get into working with SEO Elite today, but be on the lookout for its very own article.

This research is the key to any campaign like I said. This will tell you what keywords you can quickly dominate, and what ones you will need an army to even get into the top ten pages.

This article was brought to you by Spark Solutions, where we always want to “spark something together.” Spark Solutions offers a wide variety of services including Affordable Ecommerce, Affordable Seo, and many more. But above all we strive to teach the everyday internet user how to find their own success. If you have any questions you can reach us at Support@SparkSolutions.net or call us at 1-518-596-6893.

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