The World’s Second-Best Search Engine Optimization Secret

You might have the best website ever, but if nobody knows about it, who cares? If people aren’t visiting your site, what’s the point of having one?

Well, there’s tons of stuff you can do to help people find your site. As we’ve discussed many times, optimizing your site so the search engines — especially Google — can find it is a key factor, largely because 50% of all website use begins on search engines.

(To me, fifty-percent is a MIND-BLOWING number!)

So what can you do to help your site become more popular with the search engines?

Writing good title and description tags; posting fresh, relevant content; and getting lots of incoming links from other important websites are the traditional strategies.

But what’s the world’s #2 Search Engine Optimization secret?

Keywords.

Not keywords as in meta-tags. We already know Google doesn’t even consider those anymore.

Instead I’m talking about keyword content sprinkled throughout your website … and that precisely matches the words and phrases your prospects input into Google.

It’s not hard to do. You already know your keywords by rote. But just in case you need some help, here’s what you do.

You pretend YOU’RE a family — a mom or a kid — who’s looking for summer camps online. What words or phrases would YOU use to conduct your online search?

Fantastic, THOSE are the keywords and keyword phrases you need to put in your web pages and group together in the same word string a user would enter into Google. That’s it.

When I first started my camp, I kept coming up on the third or fourth page of Google. It was frustrating as heck. But now Aloha Beach Camp comes up on the first page every time. And not just for one or two keywords, but for many different keywords and keyword combinations.

Now here’s something else to consider. Instead of going after the keyword phrase “summer camps” — which is impossible to get because it’s too general and there’s too many camps competing for it — instead you must concentrate on very specific keywords and keyword phrases so you can OWN them.

For me, specific keyword phrases like “LA Summer Camps,” “Summer Camps Los Angeles,” “Los Angeles surf camps,” “surf camps Los Angeles,” and many others are mine and mine alone. I OWN those keywords. And if I want others, I can get them whenever I want. Why?

Because:

1. I used the traditional search engine optimization strategies I described above;
2. The keywords and keyword phrases I just named are the same ones people enter into Google everyday; and
3. My website content is loaded up with those very words and phrases strung together.

You can do the same thing for your site. It just takes a little time and creative thought. But if you’re really having trouble, you might put a question on your camp application form that says, “If you found us online, which keywords did you use?” That way you’ll get the exact information you need, right from the horse’s mouth.

One more thing.

Considering the title of this post, I imagine you’re wondering what the world’s #1 Search Engine Optimization secret is? Well, you might be able to figure it out because I’ve given you lots of clues here.

No worries if you can’t, though. I’ll post the #1 secret real soon : )