While search engine optimization is a massive topic, the most important aspect of it is often overlooked entirely. You’ll find information about link building, social marketing, domain names and even siloing, but “on page optimization” or the art of writing keyword targeted content is like the red-headed stepchild in the SEO family.

Time to change all that!

How do we communicate to Google and the other search engines what we are writing about? Google is after all only a computer program. It only has math to determine the topic and meaning for your article. A human may understand our article completely, but if we get the underlying keyword structure wrong, the intent might fly right over Google’s Linux-brained heads.

To look at it another way, our goal is to align the words on our page to what Google is expecting for an article on a certain topic – we’re writing to be found by searchers!

If we can do that and support is with some social proof in the form of back links to our article, then it should only follow that Google will reward our efforts with a top ranking for our chosen phrase.

Step 1. Choose Your Primary Keyword

Every article must have a primary keyword. This is the keyword that you want to rank for in Google with this article. Remember Google ranks pages not sites, so one keyword equals one ranking opportunity.

It is beyond the scope of this article, but for more competitive articles it takes a pyramid of themed articles to rank for a top level highly competitive keyword phrase.

I mention this just so you realize that it is better to begin with less competitive keyword phrases, where you have a chance to rank. Especially if you have a newer site.

For the examples in this article I’m going to use “search engine optimization software” as my primary keyword phrase.

Another thing to consider is how important is this topic to my entire site. If I have a site about SEO, the “search engine optimization software” could be a fairly major topic, therefore it requires a comprehensive article. If my site is about making money online, the “search engine optimization software” may be a sliver of my topic and may only require a standard length article.

Step 2. Find your Primary Synonyms

For this process I use the Google Adwords Keyword tool. Simply enter in your primary keyword and check “use synonyms”.

Sometimes Google will return more than just synonyms, but you’ll easily be able to tell. For example for my phrase one of the results was “search engine optimizing software reviews” which I dropped, as it wasn’t a synonym.

• best search engine optimization software
• search engine optimizing software
• software for search engine optimization
• search engine optimizer software
• search engine optimisation software

Step 3. Find Theme Related Keywords

This step involves zooming out on our topic to get an overview and possibly plan out a series of articles or adjust our topic.

The free and easy way to do this is to go to Google.com and search for your primary key phrase. Then on the results page, click the “Show Options” link to view the menu on the left of the page.

From here click “Wonder Wheel” to see what Google considers the important related topics to your primary keyword.

SEO principle - Get Information from the Source

There are lots of people on web selling information on how to get great rankings on Google. I say whenever possible, go to the source for your information. If you want to rank highly in Google, use the information Google provides to achieve those rankings.

For my example topic the wonder wheel reveals:

• seo training
• seo companies
• seo tool
• search engine ranking optimization
• seo submission software
• inbound links seo
• free seo software
• seo link popularity

From these I am already getting lots of great ideas for my article. Notice how each of these keywords is related in different ways to my primary keyword. Some are broader (eg. seo tool), some are tangential (eg. free seo software), some are merely related (eg. seo training).

SEO principle – Build Webs to Catch Surfers

My ideal is to create an article for each of these related topics. Make sure each of the 9 articles (one for my primary keyword, and one each for the eight in the wonder wheel) contains all the other keywords and then interlink all the articles.

To recap, up to this point we have the following.

Primary keyword:

• search engine optimization software

Primary Synonyms:

• best search engine optimization software
• search engine optimizing software
• software for search engine optimization
• search engine optimizer software
• search engine optimisation software

Thematic keywords:

• seo training
• seo companies
• seo tool
• search engine ranking optimization
• seo submission software
• inbound links seo
• free seo software
• seo link popularity

Step 4. Find Related Keywords

For this step Google is giving away the farm again (sort of) by offering us a sneak peek into the mind of the Google bot.

Go back to your Google results page for your keyword and directly above Wonder wheel, click “Related Searches.”

At the top of the page you’ll see four columns of five keywords each.

For my topic you see something like this, Column 1:

1. search engine optimization software reviews
2. free search engine optimization software
3. best search engine optimization software
4. search engine optimization software for mac
5. search engine optimization software download

Column 2:

1. seo elite
2. web position gold
3. fantasy football contest
4. google adwords
5. seo tool

Column 3:

1. link popularity software
2. keyword research software
3. search engine ranking software
4. search engine submission software
5. seo software comparison

Column 4:

1. search engine optimization tips
2. search engine optimization software open source
3. seo company
4. seo elite torrent
5. seo studio

The first set are your long tail keywords. This means that they contain my primary keyword phrase but have more words added on. In general these would be easier to rank for than your primary keyword phrase. But if you do it correctly (and if you follow my methods, you will) then you should be able to rank for several of the keywords on this list just by properly theming your articles.

The second list is actual example results. As if you entered “examples of <your keyword> into Google. This is very handy information!

The third list is a drill into your topic or a presentation of the sub topics. In my example these would all be types or categories of search engine optimization software.

The forth list is broadly related keywords. These may or may not be closely related enough to your theme, but at the very least they should provide some ideas for filling out your article.

Now we have a list of 29 possible keywords that Google has told us relate to our primary keyword. In other words Google is telling us, that if we want to rank for this primary keyword, we might want to include these words in our article. Yes Google is winking when it provides this information.

Step 5. For Diehards – Harvest One Level Deeper

There is a method even better than the ones outlines above, and it goes perfectly with my tip of always going to the source.

For this method again we go to Google.com and type in our primary keyword phrase. This time we visit each of the top 10 results pages and scan the page for *interesting* and important phrases.

The idea is to find phrases related to our primary keyword phrase that are showing up on several of these top ranking pages. This indicates that Google is seeing a correlation between our keyword and these other interesting keywords.

This is where we find the real gold that allows us to create über creditable articles with massive keyword diversity and real expertise.

The downside is that it is very time consuming. If you are just starting out, so it manually and just scan the pages quickly and find 5 interesting keywords to use in your articles that aren’t already in your lists.

Once you can afford it you can use a tool like I use ( Ultimate Keyword Theme Extractor ) that fully automates this harvesting process.

Here are some keywords that I gathered for my primary keyword using the Ultimate Keyword Theme Extractor:

• seo software (65, 7);
• internet marketing (27, 4);
• seo tools (17, 6);
• promotion software (18, 3);
• ranking checker (11, 4);
• money-back guarantee (7, 3);
• top ranking (7, 3);
• web site promotion (19, 4);
• search engine marketing (7, 5);
• ppc campaigns (3, 3);
• time consuming (3, 3);

The numbers in quotes are how many occurrences of the phrase are found in the top 10 Google results and how many of the top 10 pages contained the phrase.

(btw, the latest version of Ultimate Keyword Theme Extractor will perform the same analysis on Yahoo and Bing and on many country specific search profiles… perfect if you are targeting local search phrases).

These are very valuable phrases (aka SIPS or Statistically Improbable Phrases); they make writing a quality article much easier and they indicate comprehensive topic knowledge. Terms like “money-back guarantee”, “internet marketing” and “time consuming” add tremendous depth to our articles.

Step 6. Write Your Article

Finally! If you can, try and use all of the keywords you have discovered. It is unlikely that you will be able to and still craft a human friendly article, but the more the better. If you have a lot of them like I do for my example, it indicates that you will need a longer article to properly cover the topic.

SEO principle – Always Write for Humans

It’s easy to over-do this reverse engineering of Google stuff with keywords.

Once you get good at it, you’ll find the list of keywords is an inspiration more than a restriction, but don’t distort your writing to *stuff* in keywords. You’ll be better off forgetting everything I’ve written than writing a turd article full of all the right keywords.

Step 7. Review for Theme Density

Obviously you’ll check for spelling and grammar, but also check for keyword density.

Rudimentary density checkers can be found online. The problem with checking keyword density is that Google doesn’t just look at the primary keyword, Google is into THEMES and LSI (latent semantic indexing which is using the relationship of words to determine their meaning) and related keywords (think I’ve beat this to death by now right?).

I use a tool that is included with the Ultimate Keyword Theme Extractor package and it’s a tool for measuring “theme density.”

The screenshot shows how the tool works. You load in all your keywords and your article and then score them. It also shows you which keywords have been used and which are unused and underlines them in the output on the right. This helps you make sure that you have achieved proper keyword spacing.

SEO Concept – Keyword Spacing: Accepted wisdom it to make sure you keyword is in your title (duh) and at least in the first and last paragraph of the article. If you follow the rules you learned in Grade 6 composition class, you know introductory paragraph and a proper conclusion for your subject matter – you’ll nail this SEO writing stuff; funny how life works like that.

What’s a Good Total Theme Density?

Keyword theme density is the percentage that all of your keywords appear in the article. So if you’re wondering why it’s way higher than the standard 1-3% figure given for primary keyword density… well you have more keywords to include in the calculation.

Remember the first SEO principle I told you about? Of course, we aren’t going to guess, when can go to the top three results in Google, leave our keywords in place in the boxes on the left, but put the text from the Google results in as the article.

Also, it’s a good idea to just take the article area of the page and leave out all the menu text and ads.

It turns out that anywhere from 5 to 10 percent is pretty good for proper keyword theme density percent. But trust Google!

Don’t get too bogged down in details here, you don’t need have a fancy tool like this until you are ready and it will make a difference to you. Start out by making sure you have your primary keyword 2 or 3 times in your article. Then make sure you’ve used a least a couple of the primary synonyms and sprinkled in as many as possible of the other keywords IN A NATURAL MANNER.

If you do that you’ll be way ahead of most web content in terms of attracting search engine love!

Step 8. Formatting & Scannability

The step is more for humans that SEO purposes, but it helps for Google rankings as well. The reason for this is that you’ll be emphasizing the important words in your article and Google will follow those clues.

SEO Principle – I’ll let you in on a secret… people don’t read on the web! It’s true, they don’t read, they scan.

If you format your web writing in the same manner as you would format a book or a magazine, no one will read it.

Web content must be scannable.

• Short paragraphs, two sentences is ideal, three max.
• Lots of headings and subheadings.
• Lists, quotes, bold, italics.
• Lots of white space.

A reader should be able to scan top to bottom and pick up the gist of your article in a few seconds.

From there, if you’ve got their attention they will dive and pick at your writing. Don’t fool yourself into thinking they’ll read top to bottom. Ain’t gonna happen.

You need to communicate with this in mind. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself in a long article or at least say things in a couple different ways. And get tot he point… quickly!

Step 9. Construct your Title & Tags

You must use your primary keyword phrase in your title tag; preferably at the very beginning. The reason for this is, supposedly, Google gives greater weighting to the words at the beginning of the title tag, but an even better reason is that if/when the article is bookmarked or spread virally, people may lop off some of the words in your title to shorten it. If you use the keywords at the beginning these are most likely to remain which is good since they’ll be in any incoming links.

SEO principle – Write Magnetic Title Tags

While it’s great to get all the right keywords in your title, don’t write title tags for search engine robots. If we accomplish our goal and get our article onto the first page of Google, it just means we have it in front of a human who is interested in our topic.

The site they are going to visit will now be determined by the magnetic power of the headline. In other words a great headline (title tag) in the 7^th position on the Google results page can get more clicks than the site in position 2.

To summarize, use your primary keywords in your title tag, but make sure the title really gives a human reader a compelling reason to click through to your site.

From there, use your entire list of keywords in your meta keywords tag, and at least the primary keyword phrase and a couple other main ones in your meta description.

If you use tagging on your site, use the main keywords in your tags.

If you are using WordPress, you can implement meta tags easily with the All in One SEO pack. This plug-in also gives you the ability to create a post title which is different from your title tag that will appear on the search engine results page. Very handy since the article title tag that appears on the page is for people who are already on your site: it should however still contain your primary keyword phrase.

Step 10. Linking Up Your Article

Now that you have this awesome list of keywords for your article, make sure you use it in your link building to support the article.

Internal and external links should use your primary keyword about 50% of the time and a sampling of the primary synonyms the rest of the time.

If you are social bookmarking, use the primary and other keywords to tag your bookmarks and sprinkle them into Twitter or forum post titles.

SEO Principle – Diversity is King

When building links always demonstrate diversity in the anchor text you use for your links. Google’s algorithm tries to mimic human perception and humans don’t create 100 links using the same anchor text. Don’t forget to use the occasional “click here” and “this site” in your anchor text.

You get the idea; we are trying to give Google every opportunity to associate our article with the list of keywords that we extracted from Google’s own association with our primary key phrase.

If there is one thing to garner from this article it is that reverse engineering is the way to success with writing content for the web. However reverse engineering can only take you so far.

Once you get the list of keywords, marry it with a concept that goes beyond what all the other sites are offering on the topic. Ask yourself “what more can I provide” or “what are they missing” then write your article and provide that information using your killer keyword list and you’ll find top rankings will naturally follow.

Resources: Search Engine Optimization Software

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