Posted by Editor Jan 22, 2010
Article by Titus Hoskins in SE Optimization
Keywords are ground zero. They are essential to your online success. You must get your keywords right or it’s game over before you even get started. Mainly because keywords are the most important element of your online marketing.
It can’t be emphasized enough, especially to beginning online webmasters or marketers, choosing the right profitable keywords will largely determine whether or not you succeed with your online endeavors. You simply must get this element right or your marketing will be in big trouble.
What Are Keywords?
Lets start at the very beginning, keywords are the exact words someone types into a search engine to find what they’re looking for on the web. Some keywords are valuable/profitable, while others are virtually worthless.
Profitable keywords are the ones that convert into a sale, a lead or potential client/customer for your company or product. These are the words someone is searching in order to buy a product or hire a service. Someone searching for “honeymoon vacation packages” is probably in the market to book a honeymoon vacation and could turn out to be very profitable for the right website or business.
Profitable keywords are the ones where the searcher is in the right “mind-set” or frame of mind to buy what they’re searching for on the web. Tailor your online marketing to target these profitable keywords and it can spell success.
So what’s the whole process for finding or choosing profitable keywords to use in your marketing? Lets look at some ways to proceed…
Number of Keyword Searches Made?
You need to find out how many searches are made for your chosen keywords each month. Simply use WordTracker or a site like SEOBook. These will give you a preliminary number of searches made each month for your keyword. Highly popular, well-searched keywords with hundreds of thousands of searches each month will be extremely hard to rank for because you will have stiff competition from major companies with limitless resources.
I like to pick less popular keywords that get only a couple of hundred of searches each day because my chances of getting on the first page greatly increases. But don’t get fixated on the number of searches, some keyword phrases that only get four or five searches daily, can still be very profitable.
For serious keyword research in a particular niche market I like to use Brad Callen’s Keyword Elite which is professionally designed software that makes all your keyword research so much easier. But there are plenty of free keyword tools you can use. One handy keyword tool is Google Adwords external suggestion tool which will help you find valuable keywords.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Commercial Intent of Keywords?
But how do you know if a keyword is profitable? Well, one convenient tool is from MSN which helps you with “Detecting Online Commercial Intention” of keywords. Just type in a keyword and it will give you a percentage or probability your keyword query has commercial benefit or intent.
http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx
Conversion Rate of Keywords?
Once you have your chosen keywords in place, next you want to have a landing page that converts those keywords or traffic from those keywords into buyers or leads for your online business. This is another crucial element of your online marketing - you must have a landing page or content/site that converts into a sale or you obviously won’t make any revenue.
Keep in mind, if you’re into affiliate marketing, you main goal is not to sell but to “pre-sell” your products or services. One effective way I have found to do this is to give potential customers/clients valuable information they can use in making their final purchasing choice. Comparison sites do well, as do review sites, top ten sites… potential customers use the Internet and keywords to not only find products but more so, to find information on those products. Your goal should be to provide this valuable information to make their task a little bit easier for them and they will reward you with a sale.
What are Long-Tail Keywords?
Long-Tail keywords are simply that: long three or four word phrases that searchers use to find what they’re looking for on the web. Because they are highly specific, long-tail keywords have proven to have better conversion rates than general keywords. This is also just common sense, someone searching for a “2005 ford mustang convertible” may just be in the right mind-set to buy such a vehicle; as compared to someone searching for a more general keyword phrase such as “sports cars.”
Study your website traffic logs religiously to find long-tail keywords that turn into a sale. Target these long-tail keywords in your marketing. Even buy PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising in the three major search engines - Google Adwords, Yahoo! Marketing and MicroSoft AdCenter - for these valuable/profitable keywords.
And build higher rankings in organic search for these long-tail keyword phrases. It’s really not that difficult for long phrases, especially if they’re related to your site; many times you can reach the top spot in a matter of days, especially in Google.
How To Rank High For Your Chosen Profitable Keywords?
Of course, the million dollar question is: HOW do you rank in the top spot for your chosen keywords? I believe the key to ranking high in the search engines (especially Google) is to be persistent in building your rankings for your keywords. Take a long-term view or approach, sometimes it may take months, even years, to rank in the top Five for your highly competitive keywords.
The best strategy is to “stick to it” and keep building relevant links to your keyword landing page. Create related blogs with valuable content linking back to your keywords. Write keyword related articles and distribute them all over the web. Create Google Alerts for your keywords and them place comments/links in the newly formed pages on the web that Google is indexing.
Be pro-active, download the SEOQuake toolbar and find your main keyword competitors. Check out their links and then go out and get the same links. Write better higher quality content than your main competitors because Google always rewards great content. Plus, use the free http://www.Addthis.com button and let your visitors bookmark your great content in all the social bookmark sites and build your keyword links for you.
Do keyworded Press Releases with your embedded links and spread them all over the web. Get these Press Releases into Google news and other important places on the web. http://www.PRWeb.com is really a great place for your press releases since you can embed your keywords in your links.
If you can try to get your most important keywords in your domain name. Many SEO experts argue the merits of this but from my own experience and marketing - it is much easier to rank high for your keywords if you have them in the domain name. Again, it is just common sense, if you have your main keyword in the domain, this keyword is obviously telling the search engines this is what your site is all about. I have even bought domains and created sites specifically around certain keywords just to rank high.
Always remember, you have to be persistent, I have been fighting some keyword battles for over four or five years! For really profitable keywords, it can be a constant struggle to remain on the first page, but the trick is not to give up, just keep fighting away at your competitors. Persistence usually pays off in the end and those profitable keywords will have your links in the top spot. Make ranking high for those profitable keywords your number one marketing strategy. Concentrate all your marketing efforts towards getting plenty of quality traffic for those keywords and you will succeed online.
Knocking on Google’s Door? Twitter Incorporates Search
Posted by Editor Jan 15 2010
By Jeffrey Smith in Google
Google beware? Twitter has just announced that it is incorporating search functionality into its site. This means you can now easily acquire popular trend data for keywords and look deeper into what people are talking about in real time.
So what is the significance of this? That of course is still up to debate. Some people think that Twitter is on the heels of Google already and others say that Twitter is no search engine at all.
Both sides of the argument have good points. Still, there’s no denying that Twitter is a race horse with a great future, especially with this new function. Twitter is getting huge and recently turned down an offer from Facebook for $500 million. And with its business model of Q & A features and search ads, you can see why. Not to mention the fact that Facebook is trying to keep pace by adding various Twitter like functions…
Some people can’t see much value in Twitter calling it just another social media site for friends to chat with each other. What people don’t recognize is the fact that Twitter is an extremely large pool of information based on our personal lives- which is invaluable to the marketer.
Despite the increasing value that Twitter leverages, it is still a new born compared to Google and may require a decade before being able to develop the technology and accuracy of Google’s search results. Still it has all the right stuff to get there eventually. Google’s market share is safe…at least for now anyhow.
Consider that Twitter communications are a true representation of the masses’ opinions. People can log on and get answers they can trust because they have their own network of people who they’ve already established relationships with. Google gives great results, but they are impersonal and often inaccurate. With people’s online lives enveloping more and more of their time, the personal touch works wonders. Corporate media and celebrity spokespeople only go so far.
In addition to that, information gathered on Twitter is more relevant to one’s location. With the personal profiles, and the ability to send messages from mobile devices, (enter GPS technology) Twitter can leverage this value and exploit what it can do and Google can’t.
Twitter is quickly proving it is the future of search. Its power lies in the fact that it enables people to get the opinions of others in regards to relevant current information. When searching, people want real opinions as well as the facts.
For example imagine typing something into Google and seeing all of the results pop up…They are put there from the businesses and individuals who want you to believe certain things about their product or service. Well, what if in addition to that, it had thousands of third party opinions that have no vested interest in those products or services? And imagine if all those opinions are from people you know? This is the dynamic that Twitter leverages, and if it plays it’s cards right, it will be siphoning off Google clicks in a few short years.
About the Author: Maverick Money Makers is a private society that will teach you how to build a six-figure a month business on the internet. If you want to make money online, join the society before it’s too late.
Google Webmaster Guidelines
posted by Editor Jan 9, 2010
article by Leo Emery (Google)
You probably already know that the majority of people will not go past the first page of the search engine results and even less people will go past the top 30 results. Therefore, your challenge is getting your website listed on the first page of the search engines for the keywords relating to your site.Ok here are the no, no’s of SEO.
1) Door Way Pages. A doorway page has been designed just for the search engines and not for human beings and is redirected to the goal page. The goal page is the page you ultimately want people to see. So what the webmaster does is makes minor changes to the page and resubmits it to the search engine over and over again.
So when someone finds that page he/she is redirected to the real page and this is usually done with a fast meta refresh command. Google no longer accepts pages using fast Meta refresh. Google see’s these page(s) as duplicates and exclude them from their listings.
Don’t confuse a doorway page with a landing page. Landing pages are ok as they provide a lot of information, have relevant links pointing to them and can be seen by both humans and the search engine spiders.
2) Hidden Text And Links. As the term suggests keywords and keyword phrases are hidden on the page. Usually this is done by having the text the same color as the page color.
Not only Google but the other search engines have the ability to recognize that white text is being displayed on a white background or black text on a black background and so on.
If you want to see if your webmaster has used hidden text, start by looking for large blank areas at the top, bottom or sides of your web page. Now simple scroll your cursor over the area any hidden text will appear. Or you can look at the source code.
You can also hide Hidden Text in your “ALT” tag. The “ALT” tag text will appear when you place your cursor over the image. It will also display the text if your image does not display.
If a few words or even a sentence appears that’s ok. If an entire paragraph appears or a lot of words that don’t read as a sentence appear, that’s bad. Your web master has tried to stuff too many keywords inside the image’s ALT tag. Get rid of them.
It is best to use 4 or 5 words or a sentence of 4 or 5 words long in your “ALT” tag.
3) Cloaking. This is where the content presented to the search engine spider is different to what is presented to the browser (you). By doing this a page that other wise would not be displayed is displayed.
So what happens is the information being delivered is based on the content on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page.
4) Link Farms. I’m sure you’ve heard of the term link farm. All a link farm is, is a system where all the members are linked to each other via a common set of link pages. The result is that all members have a links page with the other members’ web addresses on them.
Many of these link programs have several hundred or even thousands of members, so by joining you have almost instant access to hundreds of other web sites that point links to your site. This can lead to your site looking very “popular”.
The big problem with this is that you are artificially boosting the popularity of your site. You see when a spider from a search engine (Google) comes to your site it checks out your links. If it sees you have a lot of inbound links you can achieve a higher ranking because the more inbound links you have the better. However, it also checks out the quality and relativity of those links to your site.
So if you have a site about “dog training” and most of your links have nothing to do with dog training you will not receive a better ranking. In fact anyone using this type of linking will be penalized. Either your site will get dropped down in the search engines listing or you will be banned all together.
5) Duplicate Content. The search engines only want to index original content. They don’t want to index the same content 1000 times. If duplicate content/site is detected only one will be indexed. The rest will end up as supplemental context and won’t even rank.
6) Keyword Stuffing. Yes you need to have your keywords on your site and in your meta tags, but there is a delicate balance. Sure, you want to rank for a specific keyword and the more times you use it on the page, the more likely you’ll rank for it. Just don’t go crazy.
I have about 25 keywords in my meta tags and all of these keywords are used in the content of my site. But they are used only when the content calls for it.
Keep your writing natural and use the keywords as you feel suitable. Using them too many times will make your site look spammy, which doesn’t sit well with either your human visitors or the spiders that crawl your site. Might not get you banned but you certainly won’t get a favorable ranking either.
Here’s an update many search engines Google for one, do not use Meta Tags as part of their ranking system any more. However, some still do so that’s why I mentioned it.
7) Duplicate Sites. This is when you clone your site under a bunch of different domain names with the same content and then you have the pages linked together so the can get a better ranking and get the top spots for your keywords. This is a really bad idea, and sure way to get banned. Short and sweet, never do this.
About the Author: Leo Emery has been earning a full time living online for over 5 years and is a member of one of the most respected Money Making Coaching Clubs on the Internet. If you’re eager to discover how simple it is to earn a six figure income online visit
Google Basics
Posted by Editor Jan 1, 2010
When you sit down at your computer and do a Google search, you’re almost instantly presented with a list of results from all over the web. How does Google find web pages matching your query, and determine the order of search results?
In the simplest terms, you could think of searching the web as looking in a very large book with an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned (”served”) to you.
The three key processes in delivering search results to you are:
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Crawling: Does Google know about your site? Can we find it?
Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.
We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or “crawl”) billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.
Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.
Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.
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Indexing: Can Google index your site?
Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.
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Serving: Does the site have good and useful content that is relevant to the user’s search?
When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.
In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.
Google’s Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like our google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We display these suggestions only when we think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it’s because we’ve algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user’s query.
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