How do you get ranked for a "big" keyword?

Most of all I would try to make my site an authority site.

Having a 1 page minisite and then pointing thousands of articles to it will not be as effective as building a huge site around the keyword.

So, you build a site with many articles about your topic, then you apply backlinking strategies.

Ralf

Yes, On page SEO would improve rankings. But to climb up the search engine rankings to the first page, you need to build backlinks.

I'd suggest you not to try for keywords like Diabetes etc. Single word keywords are almost impossible to rank unless the keyword has no meaning.

Go for keywords with two or more words. They are longtail keywords.

Longtail keywords gets less people but they are targeted in most cases. They are also easier to rank.

Always check the first page of Google for the sites that are ranking. If authority sites like wikipedia are there, don't go for that keyword, unless second or third position in first page is okay for you. Also remember to check the number of backlinks that a page ranking number 1 has.

You would need to build lots of backlinks, but for keywords like that we are talking 10's of thousands of backlinks. SEO won't help a lot for rankings.

When going for big money phrases, domain & site age is key. The quailty of inbounds is more important than the quantity.

It is sort of like ranking for 'Alpaca'
You might do it, but most of that traffic is student or other researchers anyway that have no intent to buy anything.

what you'd want to rank for is 'Alpaca baby blankets' Lol. Less searches, but more sales. I Think.

Trust + Authority

Google actually weighs some sites higher "by default", so called authority sites. Thats why you get allstate and statefarm on #1 in Google for "insurance", and not some SEO optimized site. Other authority sites are wikipedia, medline etc...which i think would be VERY hard to outrank.

Thats only one factor, and then of course nr. of backlinks, domain age etc.

I agree that you have to build an authority site for the best chance.
Put those big keywords on your site along with long tail keywords.
Also, don't forget misspellings.

Eventually, once your site has built up authority, you'll find it can rank for those big keywords - and even get first page positions.

Main thing is the content of your site, in general, must be very relevant to the niche.
You'd be surprised at additional keyword phrases an authority site can rank for that you've never even thought of.

This takes time, of course, but once you have an authority site, they are golden.

Probably would take 2 years of SEO

ALOT of links, authority site (tons of good content), domain that has age. If you had a proven cure for cancer on the site, I would think links would be easy. And if you did have a cure for cancer, a membership site might be the most profitable way to go. A cure is waiting behind that paypal subscription button.

You're thinking too much with an article writers mindset and not an SEO mindset.

This is something I never understood about article writers... why are you spending your time and effort to boost an article on another site when you could put the same efforts into your own site. I get submitting articles as a means of building backlinks to your own site but building 2000 backlinks to an EZarticle just seems retarded.

Pick 5 keywords, write an article for each keyword. Build backlinks to each of those pages on your site. This is no different then what you would do to boost your EZarticle except you are pushing that backlinking firepower to your own site.

Quality content, word count, keyword density... bleh... googlebot is not your high school english teacher. Knowing how to properly SEO a page and knowing where to put your keywords on a page will trump all.

Writers don't want to hear this but search google for anything and your not getting the best content, your getting the smartest SEO. This doesn't mean 'write crap', it just means that you don't have to put so much effort into the quality content myth... that will never help you rank for anything.

you would be better doing a video on the subject and talk on it as i heard google picks up on voices for keywords.Your site needs to be update as often as possibly so google thinks it has new content

Heres a question, say I want to create a authority site in lets say the wedding market, and I want to rank Number 1 for I dunno, wedding dresses.

Would a plan like this work?

Find 300 keywords around the wedding market, long to short tail keywords.

Pick the top 3 keywords you want to get ranked for as the end goal, eg wedding dresses.

Segment your keywords into easability to rank for each phrase.

Post content daily going up your keyword list, easy to medium to hard keywords, starting with the easy ones to get started.

Every other day post an article into the article directories and on the other day forums, bring in them drips of the traffic, Chinese drip method we will call it

After about 3 months of simple and easy keywords, you gained some nice traffic, constant content and thats when you start hitting up the medium keywords.

Pay people to get your back links as you generate content each day and maintain good reps in the forums.

And I guess the method just kinda repeats from then on, keep creating, pay people for backlinks and content, focus more on the forums, social media etc...

Hows that rough plan ? Would it work?

Getting links from high PR pages, I would say.