Let’s continue from before. If you know what section of the market you are looking for, you need to lay some bait (like in fishing). You need to choose a good keyword, and there is plenty of instruction on the web on how to do that. Picking the right keywords is extremely critical to making money online with SEO.

Let’s suppose your keyword is “raise my child’s reading skill”. Note that keywords can be more than just one word. They can be a short phrase, which we would call a “long-tail” keyword. You certainly know what’s in a person’s mind who types in this phrase, right?

If – and ONLY IF – you can answer that person’s needs, then you can go fishing.

First stop might be to register the domain raisemychildsreadingskill.com. If you can secure a keyword related domain name, that’s great. Don’t forget raise-my-childs-reading-skill.com. That could work. In fact some people think the hyphens make it easier for the search engines to “read” your domain.

Then there are all the .net, .us, .biz and .info type variables. Even if you don’t live in Canada, .ca might work. There are not many people living on the island of Tuvalu, but hundreds of thousands all over the world use their .tv suffix!

Then there are variations on the phrase, like improvemychildsreading.com and so on. There’s always a best domain but innumerable variations that come close and are workable, if not exactly what you wanted.

Some people even get serious and register misspellings of important domains. If you had “reddhotsex4me.com” you might get a lot of visitors thinking they are going to redhotsex4me.com (neither domain is in use, I checked, but you get the point?)

Next you place your keyword in your titles and meta tags. You may not own the domain name but there is nothing to stop you giving your home page the title “Improve my child’s reading skills by Betty Jo” or just “How to improve your child’s reading skills”.

Then come the meta tags. These are hidden in the code. If you can’t write metatags, you have 2 choices: find a friend who can or get one of the wysiwyg html editors to do it for you. Good programs, like Dreamweaver and FrontPage, have a button you click that says “type your keywords here” or similar. Folks say they are not important these days. Common sense says do every possible thing in your favor.

So make sure to put your keyword and others like it in your meta tags.

Then we come to the headers in the body of your page. Again, these are special designations. You might think of just writing like you would with a word processor; you know, capital letters and bold, maybe a different color, because this is my heading!

That’s not what a header is in a web page. A header is a little tag or special selector which marks out a word or phrase as IMPORTANT! The visiting web bots (robot crawlers) don’t care about grammar or text formatting. They just look for the little tags that say “This is my header 1” and this is my “Header 2” and so on. Headers 1 through 6 are decreasing in importance. But they are all more important than just the text.

Finally, in the text, you can use your keyword. Use it a few times but not too often. Not only will your writing seem wooden to the visitor. But the search engines don’t like you to try and cheat by pumping too many keywords into clumsy prose.

“Stuffing” keywords like that, as it’s called, will get you penalized (a much lower ranking). Don’t expect to get away with it, just because some people do. These ‘bots” are computers and you can’t fool them forever.

You’re allowed to set out your shop, they don’t even mind a but of exaggeration. But if you go too far that’s called the “black hat” approach. Remember, the cowboys in the black hats were always the bad guys.

Well, Google and Yahoo are gunning for the guys in the black hats.

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