Keyword Sniping for Beginners

If you are brand new to ranking websites, then this Online Business Marketing Strategy will be right up your alley.  Building a site and getting traffic via social avenues is easy.  However, if you are serious about your business you will eventually need to think about how to get your site ranked and get organic traffic to your site.

**This is a synopsis of a very popular article by Courtney Tuttle (whom I owe my life to for a great beginning) Make Money with keywords that, for one reason or another, was yanked by the author.  It is a summary.  The reason why I have posted this is because it is perhaps the easiest way for a beginner marketer to start to understand Search Engine Optimization, mainly the onpage optimization factors. If you are just are just beginning to understand SEO, check out my section on SEO for Internet Marketers.

Why keyword sniping is perfect for beginners

1. Keyword Sniping is dead simple to do.
2. It helps an online marketer who hasn’t figured out how to put search engine optimization together to get spoon fed how to get ranked.
3. If done correctly, it will help a webmaster rank for keywords quickly and easily, giving them the confidence to make more rankable websites.
4. It will help the webmaster understand the concept of Website Siloing.
5. It will help the webmaster understand how google works (google looks to categorize a page..what are you giving them to understand what your page is about?)

Keyword Sniping should not be a means to an end.  It should be the beginning of understanding implementing other more advanced SEO strategies. In other words, you should take this, test it out and then expound on it with future sites.  Normally, I would say that the next step would be to looking into siloing websites for SEO purposes.

When I was first introduced to this concept, I thought how on earth could this be that simple.  The reality is that google is actually smaller than you think and actually getting ranked for keywords isn’t rocket science.  Sure there are some pretty serious mathematics when it comes to SEO but the general thought process that a SEO smart webmaster should think about is this:

• Make your pages categorizable
• Get a good internal link structure in place.
• Make the link relevant to the page it is linking to.
• Keep your topics laser focused and add synonymic keyword theme.

As an aside, keyword sniping is really no more than building a single silo structure for an entire site.  Google loves the silo stucture for sites partly because Google itself is set up as a silo structure. However, building a silo structure is a bit more complicated than keyword sniping.  So let’s walk before we run, right?

Here is the rundown for a how to make properly keyword sniped site.

• A keyword that is not that competitive (less than 500,000)
• A domain that has your keyword in it (preferably)
• Title tags, headers, meta tags and description all optimized to your one keyword.
• Anchor text that all points to one page on your site (most often your index page)

First Step- Finding a non-competitive keyword to snipe-  The reason why keyword sniping works so well is because most big name companies aren’t going to build an entire site based solely on a long tail keyword. Instead, they will build a sub-page and link to it.

If you understand how google’s search system works, you will know that they are looking for the most relevant page to give to the searcher.  Keyword sniping will do this because the site will be tightly focused on that particular keyword.

I could go on and on about keyword research but it is for another lesson altogether.  That said, there are keys to finding the right keyword:

• Does it have market value? What I mean by this is can you sell something on it and make money?  The keyword should give you an avenue to sell something.
• Does it get some searches? Court’s original keyword sniping page says that if it gets <200 searches per day, then it is worth it.  The problem is that most keyword analysis tools are just estimates and sometimes you will get a keyword that tanks, search volume wise.  That said, I actually recommend running an adwords campaign on a keyword for about a week to cut down on the work involved.
• The keyword has less than 1,000,000 competing pages-  Once again, if you are brand new, I would aim lower…like >500,000 so that you can get confident that this is doable on your part first.  You can find out your competition by doing a search for your keyword in quotes.  This will reduce the incidental ranked pages that just happen to be your competition simply because they mentioned it in an article and didn’t actually optimize for it.

Next Step:  Set up your website

The next step is to set up your website.  Typically, you are going to want to have your keyword in the domain.  You can go with a free hosted account like blogger or you can host it yourself.  It doesn’t matter because google doesn’t care about whether something is free or hosted (they are looking for the relevant pages for the query).

Additionally, it doesn’t matter whether it is a blog or a static website.  Both have their pros and cons.  The one good thing about a blog is that it gets indexed in the blog searches as well AND has RSS capabilities coming out of the gate.  However it isn’t a big stretch to add RSS to static websites either.  And in the end, your ability to get ranked is going to be external links going to your site.

One of the best ways to getting ranked fairly quickly is to grab a pre-owned domain.  In a lot of cases, you can avoid the google sandbox and you get a pre-fab trust rank to boot.  Sometimes, you will get lucky and have some links attached as well.

Step 3- Create keyword focused content

Court actually recommends at least 10 pages.  I have ranked with 5 pages.  I have ranked with 20 pages.  It really depends on your keyword and its competition.

Start writing content and keep the content focused on your keyword.  Use Latent Semantic words throughout the text.  Don’t worry about keyword density.  Google has got more advanced over the years and can figure out what your site is about based on the accompanying text surrounding the keyword.

Court actually suggested 300 words per page.  Personally, I like to roll with it and write rolling and long winded posts like my make money online friend, Grizzly, who not only walks the walk, he knows how to make money online.  This way, you can throw together more keywords and get ranked for other things as well possibly.  Short, tightly focused content is fine but typically google likes pages with a lot of content (that is something to think about and a lot of times, ranks accordingly).

• If you are using wordpress, then remove the dates from the .php files.  You want this to be timeless and you don’t want someone visiting the site to think of it as a dead or forgotten website.
• Each page should have your keyword in it-  I like to use it in the last part of the first paragraph because, if it is scraped by a spammer, they have my link as well.  You can actually place it anywhere you want.

Now, anchor the keyword on each of your pages and point it to the home page.

This will look like this….

What you are doing is pretty typical SEO but is one of those things that most webmasters and online marketers fail to think about.  Basically you are funneling all of your page rank and authority into the home page.

You are essentially telling Google….HEY GOOGLE….This site is about {keyword}, but this page is REALLY about {keyword}

How to Optimize your website and get ranked by google-

Onpage Optimization is important and probably one of the things most neglected by webmasters. Here are some factors to consider:

• Your title tag should have the keyword you are sniping on every page. If you are using wordpress, you can accomplish this by using the SEO all-in-one plugin.  If not, there are other options.  Your title tag should show your keyword first, then the title of the article second.
• Your H1 tag to every page should have the sniped keyword on their as well. If you look at the upper part of your screen, you should see the H1 tag. (see example)

• Your Footer Link with the keyword anchored should be pointed at the page you are trying to rank. Once again, this can be done by inserting the HTML text in the footer.php part of your theme if you are using wordpress.  If it is a static website, you simply insert it into the template footer page.
• Your Keyword should be in the actual content text of the page you are trying to rank as well. Court recommends that you go with keyword density.  I think the semantic approach is better.  In other words, insert your keyword if it makes sense.  But you can also find relating keywords as well to bulk up the content and tell google that the page is indeed about {keyword}

That is pretty much it for the onpage optimization for keyword sniping.  Now, in rare cases this may be enough to rank for a keyword.  However, it normally isn’t as easy as this, even in the longest of tails.  So what now?

You get inbound links with the anchor text (or variation of the keyword).  This can be done several ways but the easiest way is to find do-follow blogs and directories and use article directories.

You could theoretically go natural but depending on webmasters to anchor the keyword that you are optimizing for will be a bit of a stretch.

• Write articles for the article directories
• Submit your site to site directories (this will become less effective in the future)
• Comment on do-follow blogs
• Bookmark your site on the bookmarking sites.

Of course, there is a more effective way to keyword sniping but this involves a bit of money and won’t be discussed in this online marketing technique article. (it may not be discussed at all in the open)

This works, folks.  My first site that I did this with had 500,000 competing sites.  I ranked within 6 weeks.

The point is that if you are a beginner internet marketer and you are struggling to get traffic and don’t know or understand how to make money online, then keyword sniping is the best place to start.  Keyword sniping will help introduce you to the sometimes complex methodology of SEO and give you the bits and pieces necessary to actually get you off the ground.

Next Article: How to get your site indexed quick in the Search Engines

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