Top ranking search engine position is something that everyone with a website desires. It is something that relatively few people achieve however. The people who are smart enough to get their site on the first page of Google definitely did their homework when it came to search engine optimization. A lot of researching, experimentation, and trial and error come into play.
When I first started search engine optimizing my site I didn't really know what I was doing. To me all I knew was "pick some keywords, and optimize my site for them", and that was that. Since then I've learned a lot, but I know I still have a lot of learning to do. One big mistake I made because I was a complete novice in SEO was:
1) Choosing keywords too competitive
Since my business is in the work at home niche, I chose keywords like "work at home", "make money online", "home business opportunity", and other similar keywords. What I did not know was that hundreds of millions of websites were competing for the exact same keywords. Not only that, the websites that were at the top of the search engine rankings had several thousand backlinks with those keywords and were top notch search engine optimized for said keywords. So of course for a while I pretty much wasted time and energy trying to optimize for these keywords. I suppose I was misguided and mislead by some of the articles I read but really I just had no clue what I was doing.
Another mistake I made while learning about search engine optimization was:
2) Choosing keywords that nobody searches for
Every now and then while looking at Google Analytics, I would see that I received a visitor for some string of keywords. I looked up these keywords and found that my site was on the first page for these keywords. This gave me a sort of false sense of hope, as I thought this was a sign that my efforts were paying off. In reality however, it was nothing but dumb luck because of the content on my site. I researched these keywords and found that there was no record on Overture for the amount of times searched that particular keyword was searched for. It was really nothing more then some random assortment of words related to my site, that the search engines decided my site just happened to be optimized for.
What I've learned since is that one must try to come up with keywords that achieve a balance in the scheme. Ones that are not too competitive yet still get a decent amount of searches every month. Picking good keywords, in a way, could be considered the foundation of all search engine optimization. Think about it, if you pick the wrong keywords, then all the links you create with those keywords will get you absolutely nowhere in the search engine rankings. So all those directories you submit your link to, all the articles you write, all the reciprocal links you create, will have all have been for nothing. Moral of the story is, research your keywords and pick good ones, or else you'll waste a lot of time, and time is money.
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