Step 4 – Reading The Data And Making It Work

I’m going to quickly go through some of the data inside Market Samurai to help you get your site ranking quickly with Google and the other search engines.

It’s been a few days since I set up the Wordpress site on the sample domain. I have done nothing with the site since then. It only has the first post I created on it. I will be adding to it down the road but for now I just want to show you where it ranks 5 days after the first post. It would be ranking higher if I had a better domain name but I decided to work with a domain I already owned since AZ and Arizona can be sometimes interchanged with the search engines (exact matching ‘Arizona’ and ‘Arizona’ will be better than how I have it now and is encouraged) and I’m confident of what to do here.

This screen shot below is from Market Samurai’s rank tracker section. I use it to track where my site, and all its pages, rank against the keywords I’m targeting (on the left cut off).

The Broad Position ranking is if you just type in the keyword by itself. The Phrase Position is if you were to type the keyword phrase inside quotes in the search engine. Ex. Broad – home insurance, Phrase – “home insurance.”

The G, Y & B are Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines. On the right it shows BL and PR. BL is the amount of links back to that page on your site from other websites (backlinks) and the PR is the Page Rank of the page listed. Page Rank is a level of authority Google gives sites. A PR of 10 is much better than a PR of 1 (or 0 like here) and if you get links from PR 10 sites to your site that means more to your rankings than a link to your site from a PR 1 site. I’ll explain more on this later.

As you can see, the homepage is at 162 (page 17) and 169 for two different keywords. I’m also in the 3rd (1st page!) and 24th (3rd page) on Yahoo for those same keywords. With Bing I’ve been indexed but not ranked. That’s indicated by the ‘+’ sign. The ‘-‘ sign means I don’t rank for that keyword (yet).

This is the power of a blog based site backed with, the more important, market research.

SEO Competition Analysis

Here’s a shot of the SEO Competition page from Market Samurai and I’ll walk through how you use it as your guide to getting your page ranked fast. I briefly talked about this in the market research videos and will show you how to use this page as your roadmap on how to work your site and make it search engine optimized.

The first 2 rows of this image are the two URLs from my home site listed above. The first is the homepage and the second is the post I created the other day. The next 10 are the 10 sites listed on the first page of Google for this keyword (I’m not on the first page for this yet).

First, some SEO basics. Your site is ranked by two major factors: On Page and Off Page factors. Off Page factors have more influence to your ranking than On Page but you have more control over On Page factors. These are very simple descriptions but important to understand so you can take action.

The Off Page Factors (listed in the columns above) are:

• DA – Domain age. Older domains are considered established businesses and will get better ranking if all else is the same.
• PR – Google Page Rank. This is Google’s authority index of a web page. Higher PR is better for you and will rank higher.
• BLP – Backlinks to the Page. Number of backlinks to the specific page ranked. ex: www.site.com/page.html
• BLD – Backlinks to the Domain. Total number of backlinks to the domain. Any page on www.site.com.
• BLEG – Backlinks to the Page from .edu or .gov websites. This supposedly have more authority and are harder to get.
• DMZ – dmoz directory listing. This is the largest manually updated online directory of sites. You can submit your site to get listed to their directory to help your rankings.
• YAH – Yahoo paid directory listing. Yahoo just stopped charging their $300 fee to be listed in their directory so I don’t know how this will play out in the future. It is still considered a ranking factor as of now, however but I expect will change soon.

The On Page Factors (listed in the columns above) are:

• Title – Page Title. Is the keyword in the page title? This is the title that shows up in the top of your browser. It is also shown as the title on a search.
• URL – URL. Is the keyword in the page URL?
• DESC – Page Description. Is the keyword in the page description? The description is what’s listed under the link on a search results page.
• Head – Header Tags. Is the keyword used in an html header tag on the page? These are generally the larger fonts on the page but a <h1> tag is generally the headline on the page and an indicator of what the page is about.
• CA – Cache Age. Number of days since Google reindexed the page. If Google gets sent to your page a lot from other site’s links to yours, this is a good thing. You want your site crawled a lot, if possible.

Okay, so that’s the definitions of what’s there. So what next?

You have control of the Title, URL, DESC and Head on each page of your site. Make those contain the keywords your targeting to get that page ranking for those keywords. Now, if you didn’t already, you see why it’s important to have the major keyword in your domain. This will allow the homepage to rank more easily for that keyword and give you the 4 – ‘Y’ across those fields, as I have with my first post.

If you’re using Headway Theme, it puts all these fields on each post page for you to update and make sure it’s SEO friendly. If you’re using the SEO plugin it will create these fields to work with for this.

Then, your next steps are to create content for your site. Create an About, Contact & Privacy page for your site. The search engines like these. You also want to create content on a regular basis to get the engines to crawl your site on a regular basis. In your Wordpress blog, use the supporting keywords as categories and write a post for each category over the next couple of weeks.

Last, you want to create links back to your site to increase your off page factors. This is easier than you think and I’ll go into it in much more detail later. However, you’ll be creating simple pages on other (free) sites that will link back to your site. These are very easy to do. If you have good information on your blog, other bloggers will link back to your site too. (If you want to learn more on Blogging and getting your blog out there Yaro Starak has a great program I went through last year and highly recommend called Blog Mastermind. It’s more for people that want to make money blogging but it can apply here too. I’ll be going through some of his information here if you don’t decide to get it.)

I’m guessing I’ll need only a couple dozen links back to my site to rank on the first page for this keyword. This is an easy target to shoot for and is the start of my process now that I have the On Page factors completed here.

If you have more questions on Market Samurai and want more explanation using the software they have some excellent videos walking you through almost every aspect of the program. Their team is incredible at showing you how to use this tool. I wish all my kids toys came with instruction manuals as detailed as their videos.

With that, let me know what you think below and any questions you have. Also, share with other agents you know that could benefit from this. There’s a I’ll be going over link building, blogging, social networking, more Market Samurai soon.