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Oh boy...this is brilliant! I got these Keyword Optimization Tips from a buddy of mine that works for a SEO - a Search Engine Optimization company. He said he shouldn't be telling me this stuff but I got it out of him anyway after plying him with drinks and a bloody big pizza. Here's what he revealed.

We all want to be on the First Page of Google or Yahoo and MSN - that's a given. 75% of people don't go past the first page of a search engine. So Poll Position is page one and preferably up the top of page one. How do you get there? With optimized keywords or phrases and good original content. There's no point in building a website or a webpage around terms that are going to be buried under a mass of opposition. So the first thing you need to establish is How Competitive is the Keyword? The more popular a keyword, the more tweaking you're going to have to do to get it ranked high.

Perform a Search
To find out how competitive a keyword is, first we find out how many other pages come up when you do a search for that word (or phrase).

Like this. Suppose we're building a site around the keywords Tattoo Removal.

When I enter those words into Google I get 2,190,000 results. This means Google is throwing up all mentions of tattoo and removal - whether they're relevant or not - sometimes those words are just used in passing so if you were seriously looking for tattoo removal treatments, that listing wouldn't be much use to you. BTW I found this YouTube video while I was on about Page Ten - it's very short and pretty funny. The tats still look crap though.

Refine the Search
So we can refine the search just by enclosing the keywords in quotation marks. Like this "tattoo removal". And now the number of results drops to 1,280,000. This means Google has found the exact phrase tattoo removal in that order somewhere on a page. But this is still a lot of potential competitors.

Narrowing the Search
So what we do now is further refine the search to see how many other punters are optimizing for that keyword phrase - optimimizing by using the keywords in their title. All we do is enter allintitle:"tattoo removal". Don't forget the colon or the inverted commas. And now the results drop dramatically to just 34,500. That's more like it. Suddenly we're not up against 2 Million odd competitors but 34,500. But it looks like there's still going to be too much competition to be able to get a high ranking easily.

Text Links & Anchor Text
So now we use another tool at our disposal - text links and anchor text - the clickable text of a link. These are Incoming Links to your website that search engines use to figure your site's popularity. If you add keywords to the anchor text it will increase rankings for the site that is being linked to - it's a good idea to build incoming links that contain your desired keyword phrase in the anchor text.
So now we can check for anchor text on our search. If we type in allinanchor:“tattoo removal" it will show only pages in which the anchor text on links to the pages contain the words “tattoo removal".
Google shows 28,000 pages that have linked the phrase “tattoo removal” pointing to them. This is the hard-core competition - the guys that know their SEO techniques.

So What have We Got?
Our Keyword Phrase is: Tattoo Removal.
There are 2,190,000 results on Google.
When we narrow the search with All in Title we get 34,500.
When we enter All in Anchor we get 28,000.

Going on these figures it would be quite hard to get ranked highly - at least on Google. My SEO buddy says you want no more than a Million mentions on Google and less than 1,000 “allintitle” and less than 3,000 “allinanchor.” And the formula to work this out is here -

The EF Ratio to Determine Keyword Competitiveness

The EF Ratio is the number of Exact Matches (searches with quotes around the keyword) divided by Find All Results (search without quotes) multiplied by 100 to give a percentage. The higher the percentage the more difficult to get a high ranking.

So "tattoo removal" (Exact Search in quotes) returned 1,280,000 in Google and tattoo removal (Find All no quotes) returned 2,190,000 results.
1,280,000 divided by 2,190,000 X 100 = 58.4 % which means this term is way too competitive and achieving high rankings will be pretty difficult.

How about that eh? Of course you could buy a Keyword Optimizer that will do all this for you - like this one. But that may only be viable if you have heaps of sites or are into this full-time. The rest of us can probably just get by with this free method. The secret, of course, as far as Adsense ads are concerned, is to choose High-Paying Keywords. So you might want to read this.

Malcolm Lambe is an Australian blogger/vlogger living in Paris and making a living online.