Blog Keyword Strategy

Keywords play a major role in failure or success of any website as well as link building campaign. To run an effective link building campaign, you should research about the best keywords for your website. These keywords will be used in your site content as well as in anchor text of the incoming links for your website. But the question is how to choose the best and effective keywords for your website? Lets start our keyword hunt…

Remember that If you don’t choose the right keyword in the very first step, then it will undermine everything else you do later. Well, you are right! Why is your keyword so important?

Basically targeted visitors use search engines to find information using keywords. Choosing an effective keyword will help ensure that you targeted the right topic that someone actually wants to read. Here targeted visitors are the people that you most want to find and read your website. They are the internet surfers who are most likely to be interested in the service or product of your company and the most likely to respond by clicking through to your site.

Most of your targeted visitors will find your website by performing a search in one of the search engines. They will search for the keyword or words that make the most sense to them when they are looking for information. Your goal is to find the keyword that your targeted readers will most likely search under to find the information or the product that you are offering at your website. Use words that people are searching. Choosing a right keyword will ensure that your targeted visitors will take real interest in your website..

The basic and first step in finding effective keywords is putting yourself in your visitors’ shoes. Think about who they are and in what they’re interested in. If you run a website dedicated to pet food, then you wouldn’t want a visitor coming from the term online dating. Once you make a list of all the term you can think a visitor can use to find a site like yours, move to the second part of keyword research.

You can make your keyword list bigger by exploring your service or product with different angles. Let’s say you are selling Leather jackets. You can explore the need and objective areas of the product. Why anyone wanted a leather jacket? What exactly is its purpose and what purpose its fulfilling. You can also increase your keywords by categorizing your product in terms of color, size, etc.

Once you got a complete list of keywords that you can think of, go to keyword tools like wordtracker and Google Adword Keyword Tool. See the search counts of your keywords and competition against it. Your sheet may look like this after this work.

Keyword WordTracker Counts Google Adword keyword Tool Competition Target Page

Word 1

Word 2

Remove the low count/searches keywords. Target the three worded keywords or phrases first. The two worded keywords in the mean time will get some rank automatically and then it will be easy to rank them on top positions. Consider the competition and competing sites. Once you finalized your keyword list, you can then move on to utilize these keywords as per there respective target page.

In the upcoming article we will discuss on how to utilize these keywords effectively. So stay tuned.

Increase Web Site Traffic

Have you been searching for the best ways how to Increase Web Traffic and you just end up more and more confused? There are so many online marketing solutions out there making endless claims that they will increase your website traffic with higher search engine rankings and a flood of visitors. The truth about getting web site traffic is that you need a very diverse tactic to outpace your competition. Avoid tuning in to the “experts” who have got some brand new method that they are promoting each and every week. Many of the self proclaimed experts are only experts at promoting a new product launch every week and not so much on true ways to increase web traffic. Don’t focus too much on any one method. Learn a variety of useful methods to assist your search engine rankings as well as your immediate traffic.

Increase Web Site Traffic with Variety

If you are trying to achieve success in the internet marketing industry you will have to outpace your competitors and find every source of traffic that is out there. When you can squeeze more targeted traffic and increase the visitors to your web site with a variety of methods you can end up on the top. One of the better strategies is by using strategies that will improve your serps with SEO and also drive traffic directly to your website. Article marketing is an example where one can not just submit your articles for syndication but you will also gain valuable backlinks that can improve your search engine rank for your keywords.

Increase Traffic with Article Marketing

Using article marketing to increase web site traffic is one of the best ways to start out. Creating original content and then submitting to top 10 article publication sites will get immediate traffic from the articles and will help your long-term strategy to gain better rankings in the search engines. Make sure to submit to the top article publication sites that have a high page ranking domain as these will get the most traffic, they get indexed faster, and these articles will give you a more powerful back-link. By utilizing article marketing to increase your website traffic there is definitely strength in numbers, so use an article submitter to send out to hundreds of directories.

Increase website traffic with Social Bookmarking

Social bookmark submitting to increase web traffic is an absolute must these days. The only issue is most internet marketers don’t know how to apply it correctly. One of the best uses of social bookmarking is not spending all your time bookmarking your main site, but bookmarking your articles and backlinks. Use social bookmarking to build deep links which will increase the PR of your articles and backlinks adding more overall SEO power to increase web site traffic. Social bookmarking is important but don’t get caught up all day bookmarking sites as you will not be making the best usage of your time. Increase website traffic with social bookmarking by putting aside no more than 10% of your total time for this task.

RSS Marketing Website Traffic

RSS is the most powerful and most underutilized method to increase website traffic. When most people think of RSS they think of a directory full of submissions that can be read. The benefits of RSS are a lot more complex if you use it correctly. RSS may be used to create thousands of backlinks, can be used to create fresh content on your websites, and can be used to create affiliate product feeds mixed with content. The power of RSS is amazing but and if you neglect it you will be missing out on absolutely enormous potential to make money and increase web traffic using RSS strategies.

Increase Web Traffic with Blog Comments

The ability to leave comments on blogs has made it easier for the average internet marketer to get some quick backlinks. The only problem is that most people fall into the trap of spending way too much time searching for blogs and doing Google searches looking for blogs that allow comments with dofollow. Using blog comments to increase website traffic is a great strategy but not if it takes up more than 10% of your time. Go for either high traffic relevant blogs that can give you some immediate traffic or find high PR blog comment pages where you can leave an SEO optimized anchor text. This will give you an SEO boost but eventually it will lose its juice from other people posting. Use blog comments to increase website traffic directly and with offsite SEO backlinking.

You can make some great money online with organic search traffic from Google but you might find your greatest challenge is finding which methods to use and how much time to spend on each one. Form a concise plan that you will follow so that you don’t get sidetracked spending an entire day social bookmarking when you really needed to create more content for syndication. Finding a balanced strategy is the best way to increase search traffic and make money with your internet marketing business.

Do-It-Yourself SEO

Do-It-Yourself SEO with a Foolproof Twist

As the founder of an independent SEO firm I am asked almost daily "What is the easiest way to optimize a web site?" It is harder to answer than you might think. It depends on who is asking and what their knowledge or experience level is. But last week I read an article written by the person who taught me search engine optimization ten years ago, and I now have an answer... Learn the secret recipe, then use it.

There is no magic bullet that works on every web page like so many SEO 'miracle' books and programs would have us believe. Each page has its own unique 'secret recipe' that has to be discovered and then applied because every single page it is trying to outrank, is unique. If this seems confusing, just remember my new favorite quote that I borrowed from that author's website: "Think about it. Anyone could bake Mrs. Fields famous cookies - possibly better than Mrs. Fields herself - with the secret recipe. And that's all SEO is; knowing the secret recipe for any given web page."

And it really is that simple. We will look at how to discover the secret recipe in a moment, but first there is one crucial thing to understand about search engine optimization before you go any further:

SEO means making a web page as highly visible as possible to search engines... for a given keyword.

Just about everybody knows the first part; but too many people forget the second.

Remember that your soon to be visitor types in very specific keywords (search terms) on search engines like Google, because they are looking for something very specific.

If you know your most important keyword that is great! If not, do not waste your money on expensive keyword software that SEO professionals use. Use a free keyword tool like Google's, found at:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Just enter in the keywords that you think people are searching for to find your product or service and then check the search numbers for those and related keyword suggestions.

So what about the secret recipe? Once you know your main keyword or keywords you need to see how well your site is optimized for that term already. This is called getting your SEO Quality Score.

What you do is make a list of the most important optimization aspects of a webpage, for the search engine of your choice (because Google looks for different things than Yahoo or Bing.)

Here are ten critical factors for Google, but there are nearly 140 to be aware of...

• Keyword use in document title

• Keyword use in body text

• Link texts of inbound links

• Global link popularity of web site

• Keyword density

• Keyword position and proximity

• Number of words

• Readability level of web page

• Keyword use in H1 headline texts

• HTML validation of web page to W3C standards

Once you have all of this information for your webpage, you need to get it for the pages currently occupying the top ten positions for that keyword and then see how your page compares.

You can buy software that does a lot of this for you but it generally costs $500 to $2,500 for the ones that really work and even then you might need to buy an hour of an SEO consultant's time to help you really understand it.

Doing it yourself is very educational. You will be an SEO pro after a couple of these. So if you have the time, I would not hesitate.

In my case I did not have the time - or let's be honest, the patience - to invest what would be 20 plus hours doing this manually and not really understanding what I was looking for. At the time I was a lawn sprinkler installer looking to optimize my company webpage and knew nothing about SEO, except that it was too expensive for me to hire someone else to do it. So I went the cheap and easy route paying a company called DotCom Pirates $50 for something they called their SEO To Go package that reviewed my site for all 140 SEO factors and provided plain English instructions to fix every aspect of it. I did most of them and hit number two on Google.

Here's my dirty little secret... Realizing this was much easier than breaking my back in irrigation, I picked up a couple local shops as SEO customers, ordered reports for those sites, followed the directions and my SEO business was born. I no longer need their help, but it made for some easy success when I needed it most.

Knowing the secret recipe is the foolproof answer to DIY SEO. Once you have the secret recipe it's easier than you ever thought possible and you'll be laughing all the way to the bank with the money you saved.

SEO Vs Pay Per Click

Most business owners today are advertising to the fullest of their capacity. The most successful businesses usually have money in their budget set aside for marketing and advertising. Those with bigger budgets are able to spend money advertising in all kinds of different ways. But many small businesses don't have the money to advertise on a large scale. Some of them can only afford one way and must choose which way this is to be. If you're thinking about advertising on the internet, then this likely comes down to a question of SEO vs. pay per click - a brief discussion should help you to decide which option is right for you.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a way to make your website search-engine-friendly. When finding search results, search engines are looking for pretty specific things. By making sure that your website fits as many of the search engine's criteria as possible, you'll make sure that your site comes up first in searches for keywords pertaining to your business and the products and services that you offer. If it's more important to you that you rank higher in search engine results, then you should definitely invest in SEO. In the battle of SEO vs. pay per click - a brief discussion about your advertising goals are in order.

Pay per click is a type of internet advertising that allows you to pay a search engine for ad space in searches for keywords pertaining to your site. You'll often notice this sort of space at the sides and top of a page of search results. The placement of your ad will depend on your business' relevance to the search term as well as the amount of money you're paying for the service, as premium spots cost more. But when it comes to SEO vs. pay per click - a brief discussion will show you how much you're willing to spend for prime real estate on a page.

But since the placement of your ad also depends on the relevance of your search term, SEO is relevant even when you're using pay per click advertising. Because of this, you may want to use both in your hunt for the perfect internet advertising campaign. So, bottom line: SEO vs. pay per click - a brief discussion may show that both of them are worth the time and money, and that you may want to figure out a way to fit both into your budget.

Link Wheel

Typing "Link Wheel" as a search query into Google returns 381,000 results. Search in web hosting forums for keywords "Link Wheel" and you'd get lots of varied opinions. So what is a link wheel and how does it relate to SEO? And is it a white hat or black hat SEO tactic? Could it lead to search engine penalties?

White Hat?

To a lot of webmasters and SEO experts, link wheels are a valid SEO strategy (white hat). Link wheels are essentially a wheel of linked websites (all yours), designed to improve the SERPS (search engine results pages) of your main site. In this multiple sites are developed with each linking back (one-way) to the main site, and linking to another related site (within the same niche).

Black Hat?

To take this even further, some SEO experts recommend using IP addresses from different class C IP allocations for each site. My take on the IP's? This seems to be a black hat strategy to avoid Google penalties. Why? Because a lot of link wheels are composed of one-post blogs that offer little or no relevance to a search query. Their intent? To trick Google into seeing multiple links back to their main site. Many say this works, but only until you get caught, and then all that effort goes to waste.

Relevance is the key

I don't think I'm all that different from most folks searching for information on the Internet. When I search for colocation, I expect to find sites with great content related to colocation. It's frustrating to find sites with no real content, or simply links to other websites. The same applies for Google. They have a ton of advertising dollars at risk, and have developed very sophisticated search algorithms to emphasize and reward relevance.

Getting Indexed

Search Engine Optimization Methods

Normally, search engines, notably Google, Yahoo or Bing employ crawlers, some times also referred as Bots, to find and index Web Pages in order to feed their search results. However, these crawlers do not index all the web pages of a website.

They do not index all the web pages because of various reasons. The reason they are unable to find may vary from simple to complex. For example, simple reasons as a broken link may leave a web page un-indexed. Similarly, a variety of these simple reasons may combine to cause a complex hindrance to these crawlers.

This is where search engine optimization steps in. They identify why a web page is unindexed and incorporate the necessary changes. However, this can attract the crawlers only to a certain extent. In order to ensure indexing, search engine optimization techniques swear by submission to search engines and directories.

Submitting a website to search engine directories creates links and that in turn enable the crawlers find pages through these links. Once these crawlers arrive, they then proceed to crawl and index all the pages by finding them through the internal links. (Now do you understand the value of having a Sitemap?:)).

The above scenario is a simplistic one and given as an illustration. The truth is even if crawlers do index your website (homepage), there is no guarantee that it will crawl all the pages. (There are many reasons why this happens, but then that is beyond the scope of this article).

Google PageRank

Getting to the top of Google for search terms related to your industry is one of the main goals of many modern businesses. There are many crucial factors which can determine how high you appear in SERP (Search Engine Results Page), one of which is Google PageRank.

Now in order for you to understand and visualise how Google PageRank works as we discuss it, it would be a good idea for you to first install Google Toolbar. Once installed then simply go into 'Options', then 'Tools' and tick the PageRank box.

Google considers links to web pages to be like votes and values some votes as being more important or having more weight than others. PageRank in simple terms is a system Google uses to count these votes and then determine which web pages are most important based on these votes.

The way PageRank works is best explained in the following way. A link from Page A to Page B is classed as a vote and if Page A is classed as a highly reputable source of information and already ranks well in Google PageRank, then it is classed as a good vote and therefore Page B benefits from this. This makes it more likely that Page B will then begin to see an increase in its PageRank.

To see PageRank in action go onto Google's homepage and if you look at your newly installed Google Toolbar you will see a little green bar. If you hover over it you will see that it gives the page a ranking out of ten. A page with a ranking of zero will fair poorly in Google, whereas a page with ranking of ten will be the most prized of web pages. The more 'votes' you receive from others, the more that page is seen as being supported.

Although PageRank does not just rely on how many times a search word is used on a page it does help, as do visits to a page and updating pages frequently. Such analysis and techniques are employed by Google as they strive to be the perfect search engine, one which "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want."

Successful Vertical Marketing

While defining their markets, most vendors do the analysis based on what they think. However, the ideal situation should be where they take into consideration how their target customers think. It is here that the concept of vertical marketing comes into existence that champions the cause of doing business based on the specific and specialized requirements of the customers.

Since vertical marketing concentrates on niches or specific vertical markets, you can plan a focused marketing effort to convey the message that's tailor-made to suit what your targeted customers want to hear. So, for successful vertical marketing, your first step will be to find out the customers belonging to a specific industry or discover what your niche markets are. Remember - it always pays to market your products or services to some targeted groups who are likely to buy from you rather than taking it to everyone, most of whom may not have the slightest interest in your offerings.

While doing the research for your verticals, try to learn some basic demographics about them, which in turn will help you to find out the highest concentration of prospects. After you have identified your verticals, develop a common language for your executives in particular and business in general that can address people across the various verticals. Remember - you won't be able to match the vertical market leaders within a few days. So, plan well and start working on your marketing strategies with perseverance while you are positioned lower on the maturity curve.

You next step should be to develop an engagement level between your customers and your offerings. You can do this by achieving a deep understanding of what works the best for your targeted customers and what drives them away. With such a deep understanding of the needs of your verticals, you can design products or services that are bang on target, so much so that even your customers consider your solutions to be the only viable option for their requirements and don't mind paying a premium for procuring the same. So, you not only stand to gain a loyal clientele but can even market your offerings at a higher price tag than your competitors.

If you are wondering how vertical marketing can bring loyal customers your way, here's the catch - unlike traditional marketing where products and services are mixed and matched to serve a wide variety of customer segments, without any of them offering a total solution for the customer, vertical marketing does just the opposite. So, it begins with the process of choosing targeted customer segments, understanding their needs intimately, and delivering a total solution for each of these targeted segments through a vertical marketing system. So, each customer segment gets a total solution and need not shop at multiple places to get all that they need. No wonder that they will find it much easier to stick with a vendor that gives them such an advantage and meets all their needs under one roof.

Art of SEO Writing

Website owners around the world have one thing they all want when it come to their respective websites: web traffic. And how do these website owners improve this? By using SEO techniques. And to do well in SEO, one must understand how to do quality SEO writing. To learn SEO writing, the best way is to read up on the subject. Learn from the SEO experts that abound, and find out what it takes to start writing for SEO. If you think it's difficult, think again. Because writing for SEO is a relatively easy task, especially if you know what to do.

The basic concept of writing for SEO is optimization. You optimize the content of your website, article by article, to make it searchable by keyword using the search engines. For example, your website is about "electric razors." This is how you should approach writing content for your site: the title should include the keyword, which in this case is "electric razors." Then, you write your article the normal way. A good benchmark for number of words is about 350-500 words. Be sure to write quality articles, and not gibberish just to fill out the word count quota. After you are finished with the article, you then try to edit the article so that it includes the keywords that are peppered throughout the article. A good rule of thumb is to include the keyword in the first paragraph, once or twice in the body (depends on the number of words), and in the last paragraph. this would make it seem natural looking and not forced. Be sure to not overdo it, or else it will look like spam to the search engines. Remember, too much of a good thing can be harmful and the same applies to SEO writing.

Basically, that's it. You optimize your articles in a way that doesn't seem forced. Make it look as natural as possible. This is why it's good practice to write the article normally, then include the keywords after. Because from my experience, if you are conscious about the use of keywords in an article, one tends to overdo it. Be sure to avoid this trap and try to be as natural as possible.

This is of course just the basics of writing for SEO, and there are a lot more to learn about the subject. Try to learn all you can about it and implement it in your website. Combine this with other SEO techniques and pretty soon, you just might see your website on the top of the search engine rankings.