There are following 5 Rules
Avoid Single-Word Terms
Single-word terms are usually a poor choice for optimizing. That's because they're too broad, and they're too competitive.Most SEO's won't touch single-word terms for this reason. Two- and three-word phrases are not only easier to rank for, they send you much higher quality traffic.
Generally people don’t get results by typing single word and when you don’t get results then u began to type another two to three words to get the results. So it's funny that when it comes time to pick search terms for our own site, many of us magically forget that we don't use single-word terms in our own searches. But to have a successful website -- or a successful business for that matter -- it's important to put yourself in your customers' shoes, and think like they do. And most of them won't be using single-word terms.
Besides the fact that single-word terms are too broad, they're also almost impossible to rank well for, because there are too many competing websites. If you want to rank well for "writer" then you're competing with every site that uses the word "writer" anywhere on the page -- and there are 11.6 million of them. But target "real estate writer" and your competition plummets to only 1.2 million. Go with "freelance real estate writer" and now you're down to 48,700. You get the idea. (Of course, you don't want your search terms to be too specific. We'll cover that in a minute.)
Avoid single-word search terms because they're generally too broad and too competitive.
Avoid terms that are too broad
Terms can be too broad even if they're two or more words. But we'll use a single word in our example, because it's a pretty good example.
Let's say your business is decorating cakes in Portland, Oregon. You decide you want a top 10 ranking for "cakes". Will that be good for your business? No, because the overwhelming majority of your visitors searching for just "cakes" aren't potential customers. They're more likely looking for recipes or nutritional information. Even if they're looking for a cake decorator they're probably not looking for one in Portland. The bottom line is, it's not how well your site ranks for a given term, or even how much traffic you get from your ranking; it's how many potential customers visit your site. A thousand random surfers aren't worth as much as one qualified lead. Ignore the number of raw hits; you want visitors who are actually interested in what you have to offer. The raw number of visitors is meaningless. For you, one visitor searching for "cake decorator portland" would be worth more than 1000 people searching for "cake".
And not only is "cake decorator portland" more valuable to you as a keyword, it's easier to get a good ranking for. That's because there's less competition. The more specialized your keywords are, the less competition you'll have. A search for "accountants" on Google yields over 1.7 million results. Yet a search for "naked accountants in albuquerque" yields only 115. (And no, none of those results are for actual naked accountants in Albuquerque, but you get the point.)
In fact, adding the city name where your business is located to your web pages is one of the quickest ways to bring in more qualified traffic.
Going back to the cake example, and the idea of ranking well for the one-word term "cake" even though most people searching for that aren't potential customers, is there any harm in having visitors who aren't potential customers? Sure there is. You waste users' time if you put a highly specialized site in front of them when they were searching for something general. If you've ever been frustrated by having to wade through irrelevant sites to find what you were looking for, then you can appreciate that it's common courtesy to not put your site in front of users who likely have no interest in it. It's not how many people go to your site, it's how many actually buy something. his is so important it bears repeating: Untargeted traffic is useless. The number of visitors you get is meaningless. It's the number of qualified visitors you get that counts.
Avoid terms that are too specific
As we saw earlier, the more specific the search, the less the competition for the search term. And the less the competition, the easier it is to rank well on that term. Expanding on our example from earlier:
Number of Google Matches | Term |
11,600,000 | writer |
1,200,000 | real estate writer |
48,000 | freelance real estate writer |
9,000 | freelance real estate writer los angeles |
But of course there's a catch: The more specific the search, the fewer people actually search for that term. Whichis another way of saying that as competition goes down, so does the popularity of the search term.
Avoid unscrupulous SEO's who don't consider the popularity of the terms they suggest. Anyone can get a front-page ranking for "cheap freelance real estate writer in hollywood california". But since nobody searches for that, your #1 ranking would be useless.
Terms must be specific, but terms that are TOO specific are useless because nobody searches for them.
Avoid terms that are unpopular
If you pick unpopular keywords, your effort could be wasted. As an exaggerated example, just because the phrase "quadraphonic bluejay" is only two words long doesn't mean anyone's going to be searching for it. Ranking #1 on terms that nobody is searching for is just as bad as ranking #300 for terms that everybody is searching for. You can't get the traffic if people aren't using your search terms, no matter how well you're ranked.
That doesn't mean you should avoid optimizing for lesser-used keywords at all. As long as a rare keyword search brings in some qualified traffic, then it's useful to your business.
Of course, it might not be possible to find popular search terms if what your business offers isn't very popular itself. If your business is refurbishing pogo sticks, you can't expect to find a search term that's both relevant and popular. (Though if refurbishing pogo sticks is your only business, you've got other problems.)
There are many online tools that can tell you how many searches are being performed for specific keywords, as well as suggesting related keywords to optimize for:
Rank tracker is very good tool. Most of the companies are using this software
Avoid highly competitive terms
You might have found a term that's both popular and highly relevant to what you actually offer. But if too many other sites are competing for that same term, you might not be able to rank well for it, or you might rank lower than you'd like.
Let's look at a practical example. Back when I did SEO-for-hire, one of my clients who makes hand-crafted personalized wedding gifts wanted to rank well for the term "wedding gifts". I advised that "wedding gifts" was ultra competitive and that we should also target "personalized wedding gifts" to have a better shot of getting onto the front page of Google. Well, as it turns out, I was able to get "wedding gifts" onto the front page after all. But "personalized wedding gifts" ranked #2 while plain old "wedding gifts" ranked #10.
So even if you can get on the front page for a certain term, you might be able to rank even higher on the front page for a less competitive term. And of course some phrases are so competitive you won't be able to get onto the front page at all. In this case your solution is to find a less competitive term, usually by making it more specialized by adding another word or two to the search term.
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