Welcome back to part two of my Google Keyword SEO project, right here on theNetFool.com. In case you missed it, in week one we talked about setting up the stage for our keyword domination. By exploring the best keyword phrases available, we can learn how to rank higher for more terms… and bring in more traffic through organic hits. After a bit of brainstorming, it’s time to start phase two of the process… so let’s get started!

Understanding The Reasoning

What we want to do here to maximize the chances that Google gives us a top spot on serach results is make a new post/page in WordPress that is dedicated to search engine optimization. But why on Earth would I want to go through the seemingly unnecessary steps of setting up a dedicated page for this, when I could just as easily direct traffic to my homepage? Google worships accuracy.

Accuracy? What the heck is he talking about, right? When you search for a term in Google, they are processing this keyword phrase through every indexed website on the internet to find the best result. Because of this, Google naturally feels that an actual webpage (as opposed to a website) is a far better resource than a generalized website. They give the “page” a lot more juice than the “site.”

The “Link Bait” Landing Page

I am a firm believer that the most effective way to rank well in Google is to direct targeted keyword traffic toward a landing page that you designate on your blog. Following from this, the most effective landing page, in my opinion, is a “link bait” page. What do I mean by this? Basically, we want to write up a page that is relevant to our targeted phrase that will perform well in social media websites.

What is a link bait page? I actually wrote up a killer guide on link bait pages over the summer, so if you do not understand the concept or simply want to sharpen your skills, I suggest that you check it out. To summarize for the purposes of this article, I like to use lists of “top tens” or “top fives” as an easy template to rank well in social media sites.

In addition to a section about the topic that you are targeting, you should feel free to add in a top section to promote your own website, product or blog. For my landing page, I decided to use a horizontal bar on my page to separate a top “promo” section of my actual blog from the bottom “content” section that has my link bait material. This one-two combo punch is a pretty neat way to provide a linkable section while not missing out on potential revenue.

Setting It All Up

Now that we understand what we are doing, let’s set up a winning landing page that will have us ranking higher than anyone else in Google search engines. As you can see, this has already worked for my other blog “Bullish Bankers,” as we have the #2 slot for the popular keyword “investing ideas.” I am fully intending on exploiting this again for the phrase “make money online,” and feel like I can pull it off.

I feel like it is much better to make a “page” in WordPress, than a “page.” Why? More static. In addition, I would go so far as to modify a custom page template just so you can have a wider content area to deal with. Not sure how to do this? WordPress wrote a nice walkthrough for just this purpose. Don’t forget that you can exclude pages from your menu if you don’t want them to appear when you publish with this neat “Exclude Pages” plugin for your blog.

For The Net Fool’s link bait landing page, I have decided to write about how to make money online called, “Ten Fool-Proof Ways to Make Money Online.” Notice how my targeted term is in the title, and how i have added my targeted phrase again to the page description via All-In-One SEO. By having your phrase in the title and page description, you are going to maximize your ability to rank well in Google. Getting back on track, I wrote about the best ways to make money online because it is a subject that i feel places like Digg and StumbleUpon will eat up once I start to promote it on them. Consider social media when you write your link bait post.

On top of writing about a popular and catchy subject, I have attempted to maximize the effectiveness of this landing page by adding an obvious newsletter subscription option to anyone who sees the page. Along with this is a list of reasons why subscribing is a smart thing to do, and I even offer a free eBook to boot! Offering an option to subscribe to the traffic that comes in could not only maintain a high search ranking, but could increase my RSS subscribers as well!

Bottom Line: The landing page could just be the most effective part of your marketing campaign. Understanding how Google looks at pages versus websites is quite important in determining the best way to attack this problem. Over the next few days, we are going to take a look back on our link bait page and find out how to maximize the value behind it to drive our success.

-The Net Fool

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