One of the most important parts of SEO is proper keyword research, without in-depth keyword research your SEO campaign will not be as effective as it could be.

There are three different ways to perform keyword research, I don’t mean tools you can use, I mean there are different strategies, and you need to use the correct strategy for your website.

Trophy Keywords

I personally do not go after these trophy keywords, especially with newer websites. By trophy keywords I mean just going after 1-5 main keywords which are highly competitive e.g. ‘car insurance’.

If you are a new site chances are you will never get ranked for that term no matter how hard you try. However, if you are creating a small micro site to just target one keyword that is fine, maybe you are selling a eBook or something in that market, but if you are going down this route you need to make sure it’s not too competitive, because otherwise even with an exact match domain you will struggle to rank.

I would suggest aiming for a keyword, which has low – medium competition, with at least 1000 searches per month. However, if for example you want to rank for ‘red mice’ then just because they keyword ‘red mice’ gets more traffic then ‘buy red mice’ it doesn’t mean it is better to target that keyword. As people typing ‘buy red mice’ have their buying hat on and are more likely to convert into a sale.

LongTail Keywords

If you are building a large site which you plan to make an ‘authority’ site then this is most likely the best way to go for you.

Large sites mean lots of content’ and if you target each article you write to a specific keyword, even if that keyword only gets say 200 searches per month, times that by say 1000 articles and you’ll have a lot of traffic.

Longtailk keywords are generally easier to rank for, and in a lot of cases they convert better as they are more targeted search terms.

No keyword Research

Believe it or not, some people still create sites without doing one bit of keyword research or SEO. Sometimes this can work well because out of luck their content targets keywords anyway, but most of the time this method will fail, and in time they will have to go over their whole site and perform SEO to each and every page.

Keyword research should always be carried out before performing any other part of SEO, without it you have no idea what to write for your Meta tags, titles, links and articles.

I was in the middle of writing a blog post about link building techniques that work, but having looked around the internet there are lots of articles that already explain how to build links.

The only problem I see is that a lot of them have ‘bulked up’ their list so it seems like they have more ideas then others, the problem is they mention doing some tactics which you really shouldn’t be doing and could be throwing you into the 70′s themed disco while doing the Google Dance, ugh platforms, flares and whats up with their hair! Or even worse these link building strategies could be throwing your site in completely the wrong direction!

So I bring to you my friends, the list of link building techniques you really shouldn’t be doing!

1. Directory links

   Seriously whats the point? The only directory you should try to get into is DMOZ, when the Yahoo directory was around that was worth the money but now, it is very rare to find a directory that is going to give you any boost in the SERPs.

   The website directory scene has been washed away by ammeter directory owners out for a quick buck and spammers.

   Saying that though, just so I do not annoy all of you ‘good’ directory owners, I am sure there are some decent human edited un-spammed directories out there, but still your time will be much better spent link building in other ways rather then hunting around for a mediocre directory link.

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In 2010 when Google released the Caffeine update people thought that the Google Dance was no more.

However they were wrong the Google Dance still very much exists.

How do you know if you have been hit by the Google Dance?

If your website is constantly bouncing from page one to page 5+ and then back to page one then you have probably been hit by the famous Google Dance.

You should not get this mixed up with the Google Sandbox, the Sandbox is fairly easy to overcome and it doesn’t last long, it is very common to see Google rank a new website highly for the first few weeks but then drop it down the rankings until finally it will place it in its correct position.

The Google Dance however will keep bouncing up and down for months!

What can you do about the Google Dance?

The best way to combat the Google Dance is by not getting it in the first place, this does sound easier said then done but if you play by the rules then this should be quite simple.

From research I have done, it seems you become affected by the Google Dance only when you have a dodgy backlink profile, or if you have major duplicate content issues.

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Using a good keyword density in your web pages and posts is a very important factor when trying to improve your on page SEO. I have seen many of my blog posts rank only on their keyword density and on page SEO.

In this blog post I am going to show you how to properly insert your keywords into your posts and what keyword density to use.

One very important thing you must do is to not use your keyword too much in the post this is ‘keyword stuffing’ and can harm your rankings!

Your keyword density should be around 4% – 5% (less if it is a short post) you may see other people say it should be more or less, but this is what I use and it works very well for me.

To check your keyword density you can use any of these sites:
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Personally I deal mainly in white hat SEO tactics but recently I was outranked by a site which was clearly black hat, I searched his links and a majority of them were spammy blog comments, the on page SEO was also pretty poor with a clear case of keyword stuffing.

However his tactics worked he was number one! Even though he stole my spot I didn’t report him, I wanted to see how long he stayed up there for. I thought he would be gone in a week of so but to my amazement he stayed number one for a good 3 months, he must of made some money!

I thought I would give this black hat world a try, so I started a new site (I won’t name it), I used black hat tactics to get it ranked including spammy blog comments, forum profiles, link exchange networks and Fivver.

I staggered each tactic per month, the first month I created well over 5,000 blog comments the following month 1,000′s forum profiles. By this point I was actually ranking ok on the 2nd page for a keyword that had medium competition.
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There is a lot of talk in the SEO community circling around the benefits or negative affects of hyphenated domain names.

I’d like to shed some light on this matter, and I’ll keep it short and sweet:

The company I work for has many hyphenated domain names and every single one of their sites ranks well in Google.

That doesn’t mean you should get a domain name like:

should-i-use-hyphenated-domain-names.com

When choosing a domain name you want it to be as short as possible and unless your trying to build a brand you should have some keywords in it. Yes hyphens do add extra characters to the domain name thus making it longer but it also means you may be able to obtain a domain name when the original without the hyphens is already registered, having the keywords in a domain name is more important then adding a couple of extra characters.

For me hyphenated domain names work very well I also think it is better for the users because its easier to read.

Google sees the hyphens as ‘spaces’ so in theory this is the correct way of writing the name, you may have read on the internet that hyphenated domain names are bad and will have a negative effect on SEO this is untrue, and honestly it doesn’t make a difference. However if you buy a domain name like should-i-use-hyphenated-domain-names.com it does look spammy to the user but it still wouldn’t affect your Google ranking. In-fact you will actually see yourself ranking for ‘Should I use Hyphenated domain names’ in no time at all. Google puts a lot of weight on exact match domains this is to prevent anyone out ranking a Brand name

I hope I have made things clear with this post.