From my experience, I feel each page on a site can and should be optimized for a specific and different target key-phrase, in order to cover a wide range of related key words and phrases. A big mistake that people tend to make is that they concentrate on only optimizing their home page, and also try to cover ever conceivable keyword combination. Unfortunately the website usually then has a problem ranking well for any of the keywords, and doesn’t get much search engine traffic.

If you do a search on Google for a single word and you will see the amount of pages that are listed in the results run into the millions sometimes, because it is usually too broad a search term. Most people tend to use two or three word searches at least, so that they get good, specific results that are useful to them. You should think about this when optimizing your website, what phrase would you like your site to be listed number one for? Get into the head of your customers, what would they search for?

The best thing to do is to decide on the main and ultimate key-phrase that you want to target, then find all the sub-key-phrases that are related to that key-phrase. Now, build your pages with the home page targeting your main key-phrase, and the sub pages targeting the sub-key-phrases, making the content for each page as relevant as possible. Each page should be individually optimized to target a specific key phrase.

The content and information of your pages needs to be good to rank well on Google, especially so if you are targeting highly competitive key-phrases. If you want to out rank your competitors, your pages need to be more relevant than theirs for the same key phrase. Search for your target key phrase on Google, look at the sites of the first 10 results. How do they differ content wise from your site? Is there information on them that should also be on yours?

I am a firm believer that the biggest thing to be concerned about when getting ranked well on Google, Yahoo, or MSN, is RELEVANCE. How relevant is the key-phrase you are targeting to the content on your page? All the big search engines want to deliver the best possible results for each search term, so surely he more relevant your content is, the higher your site will rank, and if your site is the most relevant, you will be number one. I believe it is just that simple.

Things like link popularity and page rank, etc, do help a lot, but can never really beat relevance completely. Take a very extreme example, try and do a search for something stupid like ‘flying pigs’, and look at the results. What you will see is that your site is NOT number one, why, because it is probably not relevant to the search term. Now ask yourself, why are the home pages of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace or the Stumbleupon for example not number one in the same results page? If you think about it, those sites have thousands of inbound links, AND have high page ranks, yet they did not display in position one of the results?! How can this be? You know exactly why, you have always known, its because they are not relevant to the search term, and all the major search engines surely must focus on bringing the best and most relevant pages into the results for your search term, period.

As a website owner, you need to target a specific key phrase for each of your pages, and make that page the most relevant page for that key phrase. Now it has to be said that relevance to a search term is in itself relative, I mean if your site consists of a single paragraph containing your target key phrase, then it might be extremely relevant to the content. This approach though doesn’t sit too well with the big search engines, who are not ’stupid’, and will prefer a site with more relevant information to rank higher, so don’t even try and trick or fool them into giving you a better ranking. Your site needs to have a bit of substance to go with the relevance in order to perform well in the long run. If you are going to do something, why not try and be the best at it? Try to have the best and most relative information, and you will find getting to page one of Google, Yahoo and MSN a breeze.

There is no magic way to instantly get to number 1 on Google’s regular results overnight, using a highly competitive or popular key phrase for any length of time. Let me explain why I think this, I may be wrong, but this is how I understand it, and I am open to correction.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and other good Search Engines all have a top secret formula that they use to calculate the results for search topics. That formula is constantly being improved upon, changing results from time to time, and differs from engine to engine, as they all try to be better than the other. All these big search engines have one thing in common, they want to deliver RELEVANT RESULTS to your search term. The all compete against each other to deliver the most relevant results, so sometimes you get similar results across all the big search engines, but similarly you can and do very often get completely different ones.

All these search engines pay your site a visit every so often, to check for changes. If you have a high page rank, they like to come back more often than if you dont, but generally they visit around once a month or so. Every time a spider comes to ‘check’ your site, it is re-evaluated against the current formula the search engine is using. This is when your site will either move up or down in the search results against your competition websites. The interesting thing to note, is that while this is happening to your site, its also happening to your competition’s websites, but not necessarily at the same time. Each search engine doesnt visit everyones sites at exactly the same time, or at the same frequency, so while your site may move down two places today for a specific search term, your main opposition site might move down five places for the same term tomorrow. If you can imagine a magician shuffling a deck of cards, and each card representing the top sites in the results of a search engine, you will realize that your site and your competition’s websites all move up and down on a constant basis.

Search engines are clever! Remember that! Their mission is to deliver the most relevant results at that specific time. These results are influenced by the formula the engine uses, and some, like Google, are a bit too clever, the formula is dynamic, and changes from person to person. If I search for a specific term on google.com, I will get relevant results according to what google thinks I want to find. These results could be completely different from the results for exactly the same search term on google.com, but from a user sitting in Germany, the UK, or the USA. With this in mind, you have to then conclude, that all your checking and optimizing etc is more than likely for your own local search results. If your website is targeting the search results of web surfers in a foreign country, you have to rank high on their results, and not necissarily on the same results locally. So not only do you have to ask yourself “who is your target audience”, but “where is your target audience” too. Now you can understand why many websites offer their visitors a choice of language to view the site in. This is one way of targeting the same audience, possibly in a different county, or using a different language, effectively increasing the web footprint of the website. You can understand then that its quite possible that the german version of a website, will more than likely rank better in google.de, than the english version of the same site. Now think about where your site lists in google.com as opposed to yahoo.com, or msn.co.uk!

So if the formula for search results is extremely complex, and delivers ever changing results for the same search terms, influenced by many elements such as ip address and location, links, domain age, and search trends, to name a few, you will understand why it is not easy to get to position 1 all that easily, UNLESS, your site is the most relevant for that search term.

This brings you right back to the basics of website building, information. What information is on your website? Is your website an authority on its content? Old school marketing always asked “who is your target audience”, many people have forgotten this when building their websites, but this, combined with relevant information is key to having a website, and having a website that WORKS. If your site offers original, relevant information specific to your target market’s search phrases, then you are half way there. Just don’t forget about your competition’s website, if you think they are not all sitting around trying to figure out how to beat your site in search engine rankings, you are sorely mistaken!

I think if you want to get ranked well, you need to really deliver when it comes to your content, target market and your target key phrases you want to be found for. If your site can pass all the ‘checks’ needed, to be ranked at the top of search results, then you have done well. One thing almost every site that ranks high on google has is GREAT CONTENT, have that on your site, and you WILL do well. Dont forget to put yourself into the shoes of your web visitor, be objective and take a hard look at your site, ask yourself a few questions like:

• would you as a customer be satisfied with the information on your site?
• Would you come back to the site for more?
• Is it good enough that you want to refer it to a friend?
• Is it that informative that you would want to bookmark it?

Once your site has killer content, and you can begin to market your site online, to boost your google rankings.