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Yes, swine flu and natural treatments can teach you SEO Basics …. well, to be precise …  the phrase “swine flu and natural treatments” can.

This post is a continuation of a forum post in the Irish Business Women’s forum, where I saw a  post about a member ranking number 1 for the phrase “swine flu and natural treatments”

In the forum post, I didn’t correctly show the point I was trying to get across, as I was distracted, I was in the middle to finishing up work for the long weekend, so I decided to do it here.

The point I was trying to make is that, being first for any keyword or keyword phrase in Google.ie is not necessarily a sign of good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is because getting to number 1 in Google is partially based on how many other websites also have pages for that Keyword.

In the case of the keywords, “swine flu natural treatment”, when I wrote that forum post, no other Irish web site was using the words “swine flu natural treatment” … so if your web page was about “swine flu natural treatment” and you have used basic SEO principles …. you have to show up first in Google.ie.
Here is a screen capture from the day of the forum post.

The phrase swine flu and natural treatments on May 1st

If you look at the text in Blue, you can see, the listing for www.naturesnexus.org is the only listing with “swine flu natural treatment” in the Title text.

You can learn a little SEO from this, by understanding that in order to rank high in any search engine, you need to look at how many competitive pages are in that search engine, for the keyword you want to rank for.

If there are 200,000 competing pages, you will have a slow, difficult job … if there are only 100, then your job is easier … so pick your fights carefully, go for low hanging fruit first.

In this case, the Title of the page was targeting “swine flu natural treatment”, so with no other competing pages, if someone typed in “swine flu natural treatment” into Google in Ireland, this web site would show up first.

To prove my point, I posted a message in the the Irish Business Women’s forum, about this topic, using some basic SEO.
This is a fourm that I have no control over, so getting listed in Google was going to be based on the content of my post and the fact that there was only one page competing against me for the phrase “swine flu natural treatment”.

Here is the result today, May 5th.

The phrase swine flu and natural treatments on May 5th

As you can see, my post is number two, so using the same principles that made the first post go to Number 1, got my post to number 2.

Just to be clear, I am in no way saying that the member that wrote the article for www.naturesnexus.org was bad at SEO, in fact I think it was an excellent example of how to write articles, using SEO to get traffic.

The Author saw an opportunity to contribute to a worldwide discussion on Swine Flu, I’m guessing that she did keyword research and also found the phrase “swine flu natural treatment” had very few competing web pages and then she wrote an interesting article about Swine Flu, using SEO, to make sure it got listed.

That’s how to do it, pick the low hanging fruit.

So here is what this can teach you about SEO basics.

If a phrase  has very few competing web pages in Google, your Title is very important.

Of course, it aslo shows that no matter how many competing web pages there are in Google for a keyword you want to get ranked highly ranked for, make sure you get your Title right.

So for every web page, article or blog post you want to write.

• Do keyword research to find out what people are looking for in Google.
• Take a look at the number of competing pages and look for a phrase that has very few competing web pages in Google.
• Write an interesting article or web page.
• Use basic SEO

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.