How to Build a Website Around Keywords by Justin Hallman

How to Build a Website Around Keywords by Justin Hallman

Everyone wants more traffic to their website. More website traffic means a larger audience of potential customers, which will equate to an increase in sales. A simple way to get better listings in major search engines and drive more traffic to your website is to build your site around highly specific keywords and keyphrases.

A very hot topic right now is poker. You decide to start up a site that offers free poker tips and poker articles, hoping that visitors to your site will signup for the poker affiliate program that you have just joined. The obvious keyword here is poker. Many webmasters will try and build their sites around the term "poker" and hope to get a decent search engine ranking, ignoring other keywords and keyphrases. Unfortunately, on a popular search engine there are over 35 million webpages containing the search term "poker". Even a search engine expert will have difficulty ranking well for such a broad term.

The answer to this problem lies in building sites with pages containing highly specific keyphrases, such as "Omaha High Low Strategies". (Omaha High Low is a type of poker.) There are less than 500,000 webpages containing the search term "Omaha High Low Strategies." That's still a large number of pages to compete against, but it's much more likely that you will eventually be able to rank on the first page of search engines.

Here is how to begin building your themed website around keyword phrases :
1. Start a keyword tree. Begin with the trunk, the most basic theme of your website. Branch out, come up with about 10 words that describe the original theme of your site. These main branches will have smaller branches and leaves, each containing keywords, keyword phrases, and other terms such as plurals and spelling variations.
2. Research your keywords.
A good way to measure your competition is by using free keyword tools such as :
Overture Keyword Selector Tool
Google Keyword Tool
3. Once you have done keyword research on all of your search terms, it is a good idea to select about 15-20 words (that you can compete with and will deliver the type of traffic you want) and begin to build individual webpages that include the targeted keyword in the title and description of that page. Include the chosen keyword as many times as possible in your page, while keeping relevant, interesting content.
4. Use links to relevant websites (such as your affiliate program) and include the selected keyword in your link descriptions.
5. You will begin to see a significant increase in the amount of visitors to your site within a couple of months. You should periodically check your websites stats and determine where your traffic is coming from and more importantly, why.
6. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Follow these steps over and over, while concentrating on adding new keywords. You may eventually break into the top page on broad search terms, like "poker".
About the Author
Justin Hallman writes for www.publishprofits.com