Getting traffic from the search engines for a popular search term is very difficult. There is a lot of competition. Keyword laddering is a way to make it happen.

If your efforts in developing web traffic focus on keywords you know it is very difficult to get ranking in the search engine for very popular (and very high paying) keywords. A search of your keyword will reveal tens of thousands of other sites and millions of other pages that you have to compete with. So how do you establish your site as an important site that people should visit?

You do this by not going after the main keyword immediately. You should first establish your site as an expert site in the general realm of your chosen keyword. Let me explain.

Let's say you have a site that focuses on Fantasy Books. If you do a search engine check of this term you are literally going to get ten million results! To move your site up in this enormous listing of sites you have to establish your site as an expert in the area and to do this you ladder your way up the keyword phrases. Here is how to do it.

Using a keyword selection tool like Overture, Google keywords, or Word tracker find extremely long keyword phrases. Something like: "What is a good fantasy book to read?" Then write content that is extemely focused and solves that question really well. Give the web browser the absolute best answer to that question. When you are using a very long search term like this your keyword tool might only report that it gets fifty or a hundred hits a month but that's ok. Because this search term is low traffic you will be able to quickly get a good ranking with it - there is much less competition. The traffic you do get will be very targeted, and very happy because you very specifically solved a search need and the search engines will take notice of this.

You should do dozens, and if possible hundreds of pages that do this kind of very focused search term problem solving. And from there you ladder yourself up to the more valuable, higher traffic, shorter keyword phrases. Something like: "the best fantasy book" would be good. Eventually, over time, you focus on your highest value keyword like in the case of this article "fantasy books".

This approach is not the fast way to do it. It is all about establishing expertise with your chosen subject area and for it to achieve maximum results you should always try to find long keyword terms that include your ultimate keyword and always write the best stuff you can that really solves a searchers problem. This will establish you as an expert with the keyword and give the search engines reason to rank your site high.

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