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.

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:

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.

In most cases you will find local listings are harder to get ranked in then the organic results, this is because there has never been a sure fire way or getting moved up the rankings unlike the organic results where you usually just have to build links.

One of the most important parts of getting ranked in the local listings are: Make sure you listing is completely up to date and accurate. Also make sure you use the correct categories and you target the keywords you want to rank for in your description similar to the organic On-Page SEO.

Reviews and comments also help but sometimes these are hard to obtain, a tactic I use to get more reviews and comments is simply asking my customers to leave a review or comment after I have provided them with a service and most of the time (if the service was good) they will. You should also add in some pictures to your places listing the more content the better.

Try to avoid using keywords in your business title Google and other search engines don’t like this kind of keyword stuffing unless of course its your business name.

If you concentrate on the above steps, build your reviews up and be patient you will soon see your local listing page rise in the rankings.

If you have just signed up for a Google places listing and you cannot see your listing in the results then try waiting a few days then look again, Google can take some time to add your listing to the results. If you are still not seeing your listing anywhere in the rankings take a look at the business listings guidelines. If you are sure you have followed the guide lines then the next best thing is to report the problem to Google.

Remember anything that involves Google can take some time and you wont see results overnight so try not to beat yourself up too much if you don’t see yourself in the rankings after a day or two, just be patient.

OK so you want to increase your websites Pagerank for whatever reason.

Before I start you should know its not Pagerank that improves a websites SERPS rankings, infact I have PR0 websites ranking on the first page while my PR2 sites are ranking on the 3rd.

The main reason I ever want to build Pagerank is when I am selling or flipping a website as this will increase the websites value. I also try to increase the PR of a site when I want to sell links on a website.

OK so here is how I increase a websites PR:

I find blogs that have some PR in the articles generally these are the older articles since they have had more time to mature and build links.

This trick doesn’t work with every blog, and its not the same old comment spam your probably all to familiar with.

Search engine optimization or for short, SEO is the number one tool for all internet marketers all over the world. It doesn’t matter if you are just starting to learn internet marketing or if you work online for several years, SEO is the one tool you must learn how to use and sooner the better.

At the beginning SEO may look confusing and something only experts can do. You will see these SEO experts offering their SEO services, and it may look hard to do but everyone can do it, all you have to do it learn.

Here are 7 reasons why you need to learn SEO:

1- As mentioned in the last paragraph it is the number one tool. As you learn how internet marketing works, you will see SEO has a lot to do with it.