Achieving #1 rankings on Google for your main keywords is the target of just about every webmaster. While you would be dominating your competition, you would also receive the bigger traffic “slice”, and more traffic generally means more sales.

There’s a proper way and there’s a wrong way to optimize your site for certain keywords.

Here is a step by step explanation on how to do keyword search engine ranking:

1. Develop a keyword list

Let’s assume your site is in the popular “lose weight” niche. I’m sure you would love to occupy the #1 spot for the main keyword, “lose weight” but that can be difficult to obtain, even more so if you’re starting out from scratch with a completely new website. The term “weight loss” receives about 9 million searches per month but has 78 million competing websites - ouch!

The right way to approach this niche would be to first develop a detailed keyword list starting from the main keyword. Google’s free keyword tool is perfect for this type of research. You are looking for keywords related to the main one, but have less competition, and as a result, are less difficult to dominate.

2. Create content using found keywords

The next step is to create your site’s content and focus around the keywords you found. Do on site page optimization: Use the keywords in site’s title, in H1 and H2 tags, link titles, picture’s alt text etc. Add content regularly and make sure to properly use the keywords by having a keyword density somewhere around 5%-6%.

3. Do off page optimization

Now you should start promoting your site. The most important thing you should do is link building. Start getting inbound links and make sure to use your keywords as link title. Do link exchanges, post quality comments on related blogs and useful posts in forums you find in the niche. Do this on a regular basis and also don’t forget to keep adding content.

If the steps are properly applied, your site will begin to grow in rankings and in several months you could well occupy the top spots for your chosen keywords. Now is the time to start optimizing for higher searched keywords. Do all the steps again, only this time select 3 new keywords that are more competitive. You should have an established site by that time, achieving high rankings for that type of keywords is a lot easier in this case.