A Fitness Professional's Guide To Improved Search Engine Ranking

8 Easy Steps To An Improved Search Engine Ranking For Your Fitness Website
Looking for a way to get an improved search engine ranking for your fitness web site? Want to bring in more traffic so you can sell more of your fitness services and products?...
If you've spent any amount of time investigating the search engines and listening to what the search engine optimization "experts" have to say on the topic, I'm sure you're a little (or a lot) confused about what you really need to do.
As with most other things in life, the so-called "experts" tend to make getting an improved search engine ranking SO much more complicated than it really is.
If you're struggling to drive traffic to your fitness website, here are 8 simple steps you can follow that are guaranteed to wake you up from your search engine nightmare...

1: It All Starts With Picking The Right Keywords
If you want an improved search engine ranking, the first thing you need to do is brainstorm a list of high profitability keywords that are related to your fitness business and that fit with your fitness web site design.
Start by making a list of the obvious keywords first. If you offer online personal training on your site, add "online personal training" to your list. If you offer information on weight loss, include that too.
Don't get too hung up on the exact keywords yet. For now, just list every possible topic you can think of that's related to your fitness business and what you offer (or could offer) on your fitness website.
Exhausted all the obvious keywords?...
Click here for a free search engine positioning tool that's guaranteed to help you find tons of additional keywords for improved search engine ranking...

2: Develop A Blue-Print For Your Online Success
One of the most important things you can do to ensure your success at improved search engine ranking is to develop a solid plan of action.
Your Master Keyword List is that plan.
Once you've made your list of keywords and researched them using the search engine positioning tool listed above, it's time to turn that list into your blue-print for online success.
Your Master Keyword List will help you decide which keywords you'll design your fitness web site around and it'll also make it much easier to decide exactly how to structure your fitness website for the best results.

3: Focus On Your Highest Profitability Keywords For Improved Search Engine Ranking
Now that you've made a list of keywords and built a fully researched Master Keyword List, it's time to get improved search engine ranking by selecting your highest profitability topics.
Take a quick look at the Supply and Demand information (the info you gathered using the search engine positioning tool above) contained in your Master Keyword List.
Try to find keywords that are related to what your site is about (and the products/services you offer) and that also have a HIGH demand and a LOW supply.
Select the 5-10 keywords that have the best demand-to-supply ratio. These will be the first pages you build for your fitness website.
Since they have a high demand (i.e. are searched for frequently) and a low supply (few competing web pages for that word) they'll give you the best change if getting a high ranking at the search engines.

4: Build Your Web Pages So They Focus On One Specific Keyword
Many fitness professionals make a common mistake when they design their websites. They try to focus a single web page on as many related keywords as possible in hopes of getting an improved search engine ranking for multiple words.
Instead, focus each page of your fitness website on a single keyword from your Master Keyword List. This tells the search engines EXACTLY what your page is about and improves your chances of ranking highly at the search engines.

5: Keep Finding New High-Profitability Topics To Add To Your Master Keyword List
Once you've decided on (and built pages about) the highest profitability keywords related to your fitness website and the services you offer, start building pages that focus on the remaining keywords in your Master Keyword List.
Once you run out of keywords on your Master Keyword List, repeat the steps outlined above to develop even more high profitability keywords related to the services you offer on your fitness website.

6: Manually Submit To All The Major Search Engines
Once you've build those first 5-10 high profitability pages and linked to them from your fitness site's home page, it's time to let the search engines know about them.
First, do NOT use one of those automated submitting services or submitting software. The search engines hate those things and at best, you'll be penalized for using them. At worst - you won't be included in their index at all.
To have the best chance at improved search engine ranking you should manually submit to the major search engines. Each has their own set of rules for doing this and you should read those rules before you submit your site.

7: List With The Important Directories
Search engines are automated computer programs that scan, index, and determine your relevancy ranking thru a complex math equation. Directories, on the other hand, are completely run by humans.
Listing with the major directories will get you a much better search engine placement because the search engines give your site extra "weight" if a major directory links to your fitness website.
Once you've listed with the big ones (like DMOZ and Yahoo!) be sure to check out the secondary directories for an even more improved search engine ranking.

8: Don't Waste Your Time On Developing Link Exchanges
There's a lot of talk nowadays about building link popularity and exchanging links with other sites to get improved search engine ranking for your fitness website.
The general understanding (or is that MISunderstanding?) is that having other sites link to your fitness site will tell the search engines "Hey, I'm important... Rank me high!".
On the surface that seems logical. But the truth is, it's not so much the number of sites linking to you that matters -- it's the QUALITY of those sites that will boost your rankings with the search engines.
You'll do much better by focusing on developing a huge Master Keyword list and building your pages as described above. And by all means, do make an attempt at building link popularity by getting listed in the major directories and sub-directories.
Just avoid trading links with every fitness website you run across. More often than not it will actually hurt you rather than help.
Does getting an improved search engine ranking sound like a lot of work?...
It is. But the time you invest here will pay off in spades!

About the Author
Allen Hill Jr. is the author of "Fitness Website Profits", a free e-zine showing personal trainers, health clubs, and fitness professionals how to market themselves on the Web. For more information about boosting the leads, referrals, and profits from your fitness business visit www.fitnesswebsitedesign.com