You'll notice that the #1 ranked website for "weight loss story" is: (Side note: rankings can change in the search engines, so if this site is no longer ranked #1 when you view this yourself, chances are their competition simply has optimized their site better, and passed them up.) http://www.runwalkjog.com/weight_loss_success_story.htm which is not a top level webpage, meaning it's not simply http://www.runwalkjog.com/
This is good news for us because, typically, if a website's subpage is ranking well in Google, we have an immediate advantage if we choose to target the same keyword with our homepage (i.e. www.domain.com). For now, just take my word on this, as I will go into more detail why it's usually easier to rank well for your homepage than any other webpage on your website. You'll also notice that the website has a Google Page Rank of 5. 
Note: Here's a quick definition of Page Rank. Page Rank is Google's way of giving a specific value to how popular your website is. It is based on the number of "votes" other websites cast for your website. A "vote" is simply when another website places a link on their website that is pointing to your website. Generally, the more "votes" or links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank (PR) will be. Page Rank is 1 of the many factors that Google takes into account when ranking websites.Seeing that the #1 ranked website for this keyword only has a Page Rank of 5 is also good news for us, because a Page Rank of 5 should be reasonable to obtain. Remember, the ONLY way to increase our website's Page Rank is by getting other websites to link to us. Later, I'll teach you the right way to get thousands of links pointing to your website in a matter of a few days... and I'll go into more detail about Page Rank.
In order to see your own Google Page Rank, as well as others, you must have the Google Toolbar installed on your computer. You can http://toolbar.google.com/
View The Source Code
Next we need to view the source code of this website by clicking "view", then "source" within our web browser as shown below:
This will open up a text file for us to have a look at and see if this website is actually optimizing their "Onpage Optimization factors".Note: There are 2 types of optimization, onpage and offpage optimization. We'll cover offpage
optimization in the following lessons.
As we view the source file from this website, we need to look for a few things.
- Whether or not they are using "h1" header tags and are placing the keyword "weight loss story"
within those tags. In this case, they are not... AND they aren't even using "h1" header tags at all!
Another great thing for us - "title" tags "title" of the website. In this case, they are, which is one of the main reasons they're currently ranked highly for "weight loss stories". There title is "Weight Loss story stories" and the html code they used is:"title" Weight Loss story stories "title" Whether or not they are using their main keyword in the "title" tags of the website. In this case, they are, which is one of the main reasons they're currently ranked highly for "weight loss stories". There title is "Weight Loss story stories" and the html code they used is: "title" Weight Loss story stories "title"
- Whether or not they've bolded, underlined, or italicized the words "weight loss story" anywhere in the body of the webpage. In this case, yes... they have. They've actually bolded the keyword "weight loss stories" 4 different times throughout the webpage. At first glance, it looks as though this is another one of the major reasons they've managed to grab the top spot for this keyword. Bolding is something we can do right away, so now we know that we should also bold some of the keywords throughout our copy. Notice I said they've bolded "weight loss stories" 4 times, rather than "weight loss story" (singular). You should always look for both the plural and singular form of the keyword, as the search engines view them as "almost" the same word.
- Whether or not they are using
image tags and placing the keyword "weight loss stories" within that tag. In this case, that answer is easy because they're not even using any images at all! This is definitely something we can do when optimizing our website. And another thing we can do to "one-up" this #1 ranked website. It is best to add images that are actually named after our main keyword. For example, we could insert an image and call it weight-loss-stories-graphic1.jpg and soon. - The final thing we want to note is whether or not they've placed the keyword once at the very beginning of the copy, and once at the very end of the copy. In this case they have placed it near the beginning and also at the end. Not to worry, we can do this as well.
We should now know how to out optimize this #1 ranked website
... Atleast for all the onpage optimization factors that Google deems as important. The reason we know wecan out optimize them is because of the following things we've found out by analyzing their website:
Remember, the main idea behind ranking well on Google is to analyze the top ranked websites and then do those things that they're doing, BUT just a little better to one up them, which will lead to a better ranking.
We'll continue to go through the same process for the other 2 keywords we've found. It is best to analyze the top 5 ranking websites for each keyword. If the top 5 websites for a specific keyword have a Google Page Rank of 6 or higher, it's probably not best to shoot for that keyword until we build some momentum and get some initial traffic from the easier ranking keywords with less competition.
Earlier I mentioned that keyword research was very important in building traffic. Some other very good resources for building keywords and finding niche phrases include the following:
- The website is not using the keyword "weight loss stories" in an header tag.
- The website did not use
image tags containing the keyword "weight loss stories". - The website has a Page Rank of 5, which can be beaten. We can easily achieve a Page Rank of 5 or better. I'll show you the exact steps for this in the coming lessons.
- The website is ranked with their subpage (weight_loss_success_story.htm). By optimizing our index page for this keyword, we can one up them.
Remember, the main idea behind ranking well on Google is to analyze the top ranked websites and then do those things that they're doing, BUT just a little better to one up them, which will lead to a better ranking.
We'll continue to go through the same process for the other 2 keywords we've found. It is best to analyze the top 5 ranking websites for each keyword. If the top 5 websites for a specific keyword have a Google Page Rank of 6 or higher, it's probably not best to shoot for that keyword until we build some momentum and get some initial traffic from the easier ranking keywords with less competition.
Earlier I mentioned that keyword research was very important in building traffic. Some other very good resources for building keywords and finding niche phrases include the following:
- http://www.keywordelite.com (This is being developed as we speak)
- http://inventory.overture.com (This is the same as goodkeywords.com but is web-based)
