Keywords ARE traffic !!

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords... if your goal is to achieve success for your web site using organic search NOTHING is more important than keyword selection.

I sometimes imagine all keywords in the internet as an infinite variety of different sized pipes hanging from the ceiling of an ENORMOUS room. Each pipe has a spiral staircase directly underneath it where people can hold funnels to catch the falling traffic and channel it wherever they desire. The largest diameter pipes carry the most traffic and the height of each staircase is determined by the number of pages returned as results by the search engines.

I also imagine the SEO process as systematically climbing the staircase underneath the selected pipe (keyword) by pushing other sites down and stepping into the vacated positions. The largest pipes are the most attractive and most probably have the highest staircases with the strongest sites clustered around the top of the staircase with incessant jostling for the number 1 position.

Using these analogies helps in terms of targeting which keywords to go after in establishing a new site or in improving the rankings of an existing site. If you can find a large pipe in your niche with a short staircase, that is probably the keyword you should go after first. If such a situation does not exist you need to look for smaller pipes with short staircases that are close by the large diameter pipe as your initial optimization targets. These smaller pipes are, in the real world of the internet, referred to as "long tail keywords", since they are normally made up of the main keyword and some additional words (called modifiers).

An example of this could be a main keyword (large pipe) like "golf", surrounded by pipes like "golf swing", "golf course", 'golf ball", etc that are smaller in diameter. Surrounding those pipes would be pipes defined by "golf swing aid", "golf course in California", "titleist golf ball", that are even smaller. These concentric rings of smaller diameter pipes continue until it reaches a point where the long tail phrases contain no traffic at all and the pipes are invisible.

If I haven't lost you by now, the key point is to select a niche where there is a large diameter pipe, since it is sure to have a lot of smaller diameter pipes surrounding it that can provide traffic to your site if you optimize your money pages for long tail keywords. As your site grows in authority and acquires more and more incoming links it will become possible for you to target the inner rings of pipes(shorter key phrases), increasing the flow of traffic and further increasing your own sites authority. Over time, if you care to, you can eventually knock off one of the top 10 on the biggest pipe and commit yourself to a perpetual game of "king of the hill" to maintain and improve your position.

If you need a tangible example, let's use this site. One of the bigger pipes in the room is the term SEO, which has an exceedingly tough group of hard case sites clustered in the top 100 or maybe 1000 sites, since if they are trying to rank for SEO they probably know how to improve and maintain their pages' rankings. Obviously if you want to attract clients for your SEO services, the very BEST place to be would be number 1 on Google rankings for SEO. Some of the top ranked sites have been around for over a decade, with a massive number of pages and 1000s of incoming, high quality one way links. For me to go after number 1 spot in Google with a new, relatively small site, no matter how good the content is, would be tilting at windmills taken to a sublime conclusion.

So I started at the very outer ring of the "SEO" pipe structure by targeting the terms "Mississauga SEO", "Mississauga SEM", "Mississauga search engine optimization", "Mississauga search engine marketing" and "mississauga marketing". These keywords are very small pipes but they have very small staircases as well, which means I am ranking in the top 10 on Google for these terms and getting small amounts of traffic and clients from it. I am currently attempting to work my way up the "Toronto SEO" staircase since it is a much larger diameter pipe, but the staircase is much higher also and it is a long, slow process. However with consistent effort over time I will get there.

Now it's time for you to do some keyword research on your niche to try and figure out which pipes in your niche you should target for your initial SEO attempts. I use Keyword Elite and another tool that I will talk about in the future to do my research, but the free Google keyword tools work well if you can spend the time.

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