It is a well known fact: all webmasters are running to rank higher for those short keywords that could bring a massive amount of traffic/prospects/sales but most of the time this seems like an impossible thing to accomplish. However, with the right keyword strategy anyone can rank for some really competitive keywords – of course, this should not be seen as a “rank quickly without any work” formula.

The most important part of this strategy is, yet again, keyword research. We all know that long-tail keywords are probably the best “targets” for any niche/website but above this there is yet another way of getting higher rankings for competitive terms, through “keyword pyramids”.

Let’s say your main keyword is web designers, a term that gets thousands of searches each month within the UK and you are targeting a certain area (for the sake of this blog post, let’s say London). Although you might be inclined to work hard on web designers keyword, you should be probably creating first sets of keywords that incorporate that term (in order of their easiness). So we have:

-          Layer 1: web designers

-          Layer 2: cheap web designers

-          Layer 3: cheap web designers in UK

-          Layer 4: cheap web designers in London UK etc

As you may see, the deeper we go the lower the competition we get for a certain keyword. Once you have got your set of keywords (you should not limit yourself to only one set, the possibilities are endless) you should try and rank the keyword from last layer, then the 3^rd layer and so on.

As many keywords you rank related to your “goldmine” phrase/word, the more chances you have to grab the highest spots for the most searched/competitive one. So basically this is again related to long-tail keywords but with a twist – search engines will give you credit for the related keywords and after a while you will notice gaining rankings for the main key phrase without any particular work on it.

More and more searching is now taking place in real-time. These types of searches are based on time/date and the user’s query.

This kind of search is far more basic than Google, for example, as you’re not ranked by relevancy. Really, this type of search is more viral than anything else but it is a useful way to get your articles/content/blogs found “right now”.

Here are a few tips to get your content found in real-time searches.

Keywords: The most important place for keywords is in your titles and updates. If you’re writing an article you should think about what people are going to include in their updates if they share it on a social network, for example Facebook or Twitter.

If the right keywords are in the title, then those keywords are also more likely to appear in follow-up tweets. And if someone searches for the keywords, they will be more likely to find your content in a real-time search.

Make it up-to-date: Write about current events so that any searches to do with that topic, provided the right keywords are used, will come up in the results.

Make pals:  The more followers you have on Twitter or the more readers of your blogs the more likely it is that people will share your content. The more people sharing your content, the more chances you have of your content making it into real-time searches.

Get chatting: A great tip is to start new chats or conversations that people will be interested in. You’ll have more chats, more tweets and more impressions on real-time searches.