You can say I’m either getting lazy or getting old but doing blog comments is not something I enjoy that much. Thankfully I’m now using a new and faster way of posting blog comments. Instead of searching for all sorts of blogs to put my comments, I now let Google tell me for a change. Yes without lifting a finger, Google tells me which blogs I should head to, complete with their clickable links, via email to me. Does this make me a spoilt brat? Nah, it’s about working smart.

Ok, I’ll spare you the mystery. I’m talking about me setting up Google Alert. I’ve known about it for a long time but never realize how much it means to me and how much time I can save just to be on its “alert” notification-until now that is.  The reason why I do this?  I’m at the stage where managing more than 20 sites is becoming quite a handful but I know blog commenting is still an essential routine work that I have to do, although it often is a question of how much and how often we can do, isn’t it?

Ok this is how I do it….

Let Google Tell You What Is Relevant

Now if you have a website or home business blog, we all know that it is better for SEO to search for relevant sites with similar niche and theme to do your blog comments and link back to your site.  You can set up many such ‘Google Alert‘ by indicating your targeted keyword that your blog or website is ranking or trying to rank.  You can even put 1 primary keyword and 2 secondary keywords when you are setting it up.

Once these ‘alerts’ have been set up, you’re pretty much done and you just sit back and wait to receive Google’s daily emails sent to you on all blog posts that have just been published that target on the same keywords as yours.  Then start heading to these blogs to put your best comments. The reason why this is beneficial to you is that you are now associating with blogs and websites that Google just indexed and obviously placed a lot of trust in them which is awesome information. You cannot pick a better way to know just how relevant these blogs are and how Google accords which blogs with more trust.

The best part of it is, it tells you straight in the face by sending you a Google Alert email notification. Now go get some blog comments this way but don’t forget to give your best and most intelligent comment on all the niches like home business, work at home, Make Money Online ,  Make Money Blogging while at it.

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Here’s how I improved my SERP ranking for my newest niche site from Google’s page 7 to page 3 in 18 hours. As in all my new micro niche adsense sites, the process I follow is pretty routine since I’ve now created 16 websites. A quick summary of what I do for each new site is this: 1. Keyword Research 2. Purchase Domain with main keyword 3. Write Homepage content 4. Get new website indexed in24 hours 5. New website in SERP on Google’s page 2 or page 3 My Results: Well the good news is that my newest niche site got indexed within 12 hours but the bad news – it appeared on Google’s page 7 somewhere at the 67th position. I was expecting it to be on page 3-5 as the main keyword I was ranking was a little more competitive with more search volume. I have to admit it’s a little harder nowadays to get higher ranking because of Google’s ever changing algorithms like the recent May Day update. (by the way, for this new niche I chose to use WordPress because the techniques I used, described below work better with a WordPress blog) Well there’s no rest for the wicked and off I went to work on my SERP and this is exactly what I did that finally moved it to page 3, at 27th position within 18 hours.  Here goes:

1.Google Wonder Wheel

I used the Google Wonder Wheel to find all my LSI keywords. You probably know that when you write articles for any topic, you should include LSI keywords in addition to your main keywords. With Google Wonder Wheel, it just makes your job much easier to find them. These are the steps I used:  (I’ll just use an example of how to find LSI keywords for “how to make money blogging” as my main keyword since I cannot share with you my niche keyword. The process is the same anyway) (a) Do the search for “how to make money blogging“  in Google as usual. Then click on ‘Wonder Wheel’ just below ‘All results’ option:

(b) You will be presented with a display of the Google Wonder Wheel for the main keyword you just typed in as “how to make money blogging” with all the accompanying LSI keywords like “make money wordpress”, “how to make money fast”, “how to make money online”, “how to make money from home”, “how to start a blog” etc:

Now for my niche site I made sure some of these LSI keywords can be found on the second post I wrote making sure there were both H1 and H2 tags in the content as well as my site description. By doing so, it tells Google what is the theme of my site.(Check my post:“Wanna Know What Google Sees in your Blog”)

How Google Wheel Can Help Your Ranking

Depending on how competitive your keywords are, Google Wheel can help in many ways to expedite your search engine ranking even without any backlinks just like my case.

(c) It also helps you plan all your future posts as to what topics you should be writing about. That just sort of cement your theme and you know that’s a perfect way to give Google what it wants.

2. Put ‘Google News’ RSS Feed

I added Google News RSS feeds for my main keyword to my new site, so that I start getting news content relating to my keyword automatically on my site. Besides providing more content on my site, I will get some long tail keywords ranked too.

3. Provide a Resource Page

I did a quick search for good websites with similar topic as my niche and created a short blogroll. For each of these sites I used the LSI keywords from Google Wonder Wheel as the keyword I want to show on the link page. Again this helps to tell Google what your theme is all about.

As part of link building for this niche, I will later contact the blog owners to link back possibly from another website or blog.

Latest Update: My niche site has moved up to Google’s #1 position since Aug 30, 2010.  I followed Brian Johnson’s Commission Ritual to the T and that made the difference.

Final Thoughts

What I have done is just improved my SERP higher and its all on-page SEO techniques. Probably not earth shattering news. The real work starts with more link building for this new website to moved it to Google’s Top 3 positions.

start

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Guest Post By Bryan Beckstead

Starting a new internet business opportunity is an exciting prospect. We have high hopes for success and we know that there are millions of people on the internet and if we can just get a tiny percentage of those people to visit our new web site, we will be home free. Sounds like a plan, right? The internet can be a confusing place to start a business, take it from someone who has over 30 years of on-land experience; the transition to the internet has its own set of new and unique problems to overcome before the money starts rolling in.

The first and most important tip I want to offer you is this one: the internet highway is not paved with gold, it is paved with obstacles that, if you are not aware of them, will trip you up on your way to what you may think is an easy way to make money. There is no easy, simple way to make money anywhere, least of all on the internet. The only people that I know of who are making easy money on the internet are the ones who are peddling the scams that say there is easy money to be made on the internet!

My experience has shown me that the reality of making money on the internet is this; it’s harder to make money on the internet for a similar land line business for the simple fact that there is a middle man between you, the business owner, and your potential customers, all of those millions of people zooming around the internet. Out in the real world, all you need to do to open up a business is to open a store and, if you were on a busy street, you would have customers in your store in the first 5 minutes. Not so for your internet business opportunity.

You set up your web site, you turn on the switch, you are live and open and then what? Where are the millions of people zooming around the internet, where are your customers? This is where that middleman comes in that I mentioned at the beginning. That middleman holds the key to your success and your traffic. The middle man that I am talking about is the gate keepers to the traffic on the internet, the search engines. Like you, I was obviously aware of what the search engines did, and was fairly familiar with how they did it, what I was not familiar with was how that all fit into me opening up my first internet home business.

A mistake that I made was not sitting down with someone who understood this relationship with a new internet business and how I needed to get set up properly to make sure that I would get a least a tiny fraction of all of that internet traffic. It does not matter how many millions of people are on the internet, if they do not know you exist, and visit your web site, you might as well be in the middle of the desert for all the good they are going to do you.

You need to zero in on any internet business opportunity you may be considering and ask yourself this one vitally important question;

“Who is going to know I am in business and how am I going to get them to visit my web site?“

You could end up with the best business on the internet, you could have the most amazing web site, none of that will matter unless you can solve the issue all internet businesses have, getting that all elusive traffic to your web site. I wish someone had written an article like this when I first started out. I wish they then would have stapled it my forehead and made me read it every day for a month BEFORE I did anything about starting my first web site. If they had, I would have done things 100% differently. Take my advice; address the traffic generating steps you need to take before you think about starting any internet business opportunity.

The best place to look for getting good solid free advice on this topic is the blogs and forums on the internet. There are hundreds of them out there, all of the advice is up there to read for free. The information in almost all of the cases comes from people who have gone through this situation and have advice on how to overcome this problem.

My advice on this topic is simple and direct; the way to get real organic traffic to your web site is to make sure you have the freshest, most original content on your market and the search engines and the traffic will find you, eventually! Have a great day.

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No pun intended, but hopefully I got your attention. Do you own a Blogger Blog for your home business blog or do you own some micro niche sites or intend to create one in the near future? If you do, then do spend the next 5 minutes to read some important revelation. It could well make a difference between keeping your blog – or losing it for good.

Why You May Lose Your Blogger Blog

From what I have been reading lately, Google is on a crackdown of spam Blogger Blogs using an automated classification system to identify them for their deletions. However this system seems to be totally unreliable and Google openly said so too in a reply to one deleted blog “…If your blog is not a spam blog, then it was one of the false positives, and we apologize.” Such audacity, such ruthlessness.

I went to check out 2 such blogs just to confirm how flawed their system was and how frustrated and angry the blog owners were made to be by the mother of all search engines. One happens to be my good friend Chandan who lost his PR 3 blog due to this ‘false positive’ and all 170 blog posts built over the last 18 months. He is now rebuilding his new blog after saying goodbye to his blogger blog. The other blogger is someone I found at random on the Internet who suffered a similar fate as Google labeled as “spam”. Believe me, he wasn’t amused at having to reconstruct his lost blog and a full year’s posts at a new wordpress blog.  This is his reconstructed blog and you can judge for yourself if this blog is spammy : “The Job Seeker’s Blog”

What we suggest you do…

If you value your blogger blog and have painstakingly created 100s of posts over the years, you really ought to think about moving it to a self-hosted wordpress blog. It’s for complete peace of mind and it costs about 7 dollars a month to do so at Hostgator. (yes you only pay 1-cent for the first month if you used the coupon code “wordpress”.)

The Micro Niche Adsense Site – Any Danger Lurking Ahead?

There has been much debate over the risks of creating Micro Niche Adsense sites even before the recent Google’s de-indexing saga came into the limelight. Is Google targeting small niche adsense sites next? Grizzly seems to think so in his post Making Money Online in 2010-A Facelift and warned about this in his post:Don’t build “thin sites”, he says. These sites are focused on Made for Adsense (MFA) as they are usually short, badly written posts in which adsense takes centrestage and predominantly fills up the better part of the page.

I sent an email to John Xfactor, the creator of Xfactor’s Micro Niche Adsense to find out his thoughts on whether his micro niche adsense sites are in danger of getting de-indexed by Google. He said ” …..I stick with unique content and do not do any backlink practices that is considered unethical. Also, I grow all of my sites. All of my micro niche sites are nearing 100 pages each (and I have 100 of them).”

There is actually nothing wrong with anyone wishing to focus on building micro niche adsense websites. In fact, if you learned the right strategies, it can be a very profitable online business to go into. However many Internet Marketers looked for short cuts to making good adsense profits and behold the one page niche website was born.  Perhaps that’s why Google seems so firm to get rid of the trouble makers, even if it means having to injure a few innocent law abiding ones. It may be adopting a “Shoot First, Explain Later” kind of policy which many of us do not appreciate.

What we suggest you do….

Gone are the days when you could easily set up a one page website, get it easily ranked on Google’s page one and start making money online. Then continue building an empire of these one page wonders and continue making more money blogging. As Google seems to be on a crackdown on them, first and foremost, stop making MFA sites and start growing your niche sites by adding more pages for every one of them.

If adsense has been giving you a nice online income over the years, this may be a wake up call to find out if you are in violation of Google’s TOS. Spend the next hour or so to review all your adsense sites and do your bit to protect your adsense account.Similar Posts:

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If you have been following this blog you would know that I’ve focused a lot of effort on Micro Niche Adsense and have achieved good success so far. While I’ll still continue to grow my adsense sites, since I follow the successful XFactor’s Adsense Master Course I’m now working to create my first micro niche affiliate marketing website.

Is  Affiliate Marketing Over Saturated?

There are many Internet Marketers who feel that the affiliate marketing industry is over saturated at the moment, but I prefer to see it in a different perspective. Affiliate marketing is not over saturated, it’s just that your niche market is too competitive for you to make any real money.  You have to seriously re-look at your ‘how, where and what’ to promote. So if you have a make money online niche or a make money blogging niche, it can be an uphill task to promote your affiliate products successfully in them.

Here’s the solution:

Micro Niche  Affiliate Marketing

This just means creating a micro niche website which specifically targets at a smaller niche market. The truth is that every market has its problems that need solved  and people are willing to pay good money to get rid of the problems that affect them. If you can identify what kind of problems are affecting them and provide them the means to solve their problems, you just had it made. In an affiliate marketing perspective all that you do is use your keyword tool to look for specific products and market to these people so that they get to fix their problems fast.

Here is the plan…

Step 1 – Find products you think can solve a problem or lots of people search for

There are many places that you can go to but the most obvious one would be Clickbank since it is well established and there are thousands of top quality products to choose from. The key is to find products that you are really interested in and you know that people are ready and willing to put their money in .

Step 2 -Keyword Research

• You can use any free tools to do your keyword research but I used Micro Niche Finder since it has successfully found the right profitable keywords for me in all my micro adsense sites.
• For every product that you chose in Step 1, enter the most appropriate keyword that relates to the product.  So if your choice was a stop snoring product then your keyword to be used is “snoring”. The micro niche will list down all the suggested keyword ideas for you. It’s that simple.

Step 3 – Evaluate who are your competitors

• Your keyword research is not complete until you know what competition you are up against with in your niche. For more details on how to do this you can refer to my post “Micro Niche Finder Makes Keyword Research Fun” and how it tells you the ‘strength of competition’.
• The strategy as you might have guessed is to find keywords that have low competition and yet have sufficient traffic searching on these keywords.

Step 4 – Pick Your Domain Name

• Your domain name should contain the main keyword you have selected om Step 2.  Not only is this good for SEO but good for visitors’ experience because it is also the name of the product.
• Personally my domain name extension preference is .com, .org and .net in that order

Step 5 – No more one page website

The one page website wonder is probably a thing of the past when people could create in hundreds these one page websites and still make money from them no matter how skimpy they may look to the visitors. I figured you must have a minimum of 5 pages (excluding your required pages of privacy, about, contacts).

Step 6 – Link Building

Needless to say you have to do your backlink building to your new website to ensure you rank not just on Google’s page one but top 4 positions before you can get any decent traffic.

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My Google Adsense earnings in March grew by more than 43% over last month. But do you think it is because of the recently launched Google-Certified Ad Networks?

Did you see any spectacular increase in your Google Adsense income this month? No I am not referring to any new adsense strategies you’d learned recently but something you have very little control of.  I’m actually referring to a recent Google announcement advising Adsense Publishers it has allowed many new advertisers from approved third-party networks to compete with Adwords advertisers to display ads on Google Content Network.

What does this new change mean for Google Adsense Publishers (mostly bloggers like you and me)?

1. When new advertisers from these third-party networks compete with existing AdWords advertisers for the right to display their ads on publisher sites this will lead to more ads appearing on our websites or blog. If you have very relevant traffic coming to your websites it just means people are now presented with more information. For publishers this translates to more adsense clicks and make more money from adsense.

2. You will have control over which of the 90 Google certified ad networks you want to appear on your web pages with more to be added by Google over the next few months. You can see them by simply going to Google Adsense Setup>Ad Review Center page. By default these new ad networks are automatically activated in your account until you decided to block them. If you feel more comfortable to prefer to only show Adwords Advertisers’ ads, just look for ‘Allow and Block Google Certified Ad Networks’ section to block them from showing.

Why I am not overly excited about this change?

1. Well firstly, the announcement from Google Adsense I received 10 days ago does not say much. Who knows perhaps there is more to it than meets the eye.

2. Perhaps the move by Google to partner networks is it’s latest strategy to expand their adsense revenue.  But there is interesting speculation that adsense enthusiasts view this move as Google taking swift action against too much competition from other ad networks eating a little too much of their Google pie. What do you think?

3. These changes apply solely to image ads and do not include text ads although this was never clearly communicated to publishers, which supports my no. 1 point. Advertisers paying CPM (cost per thousand impressions) are not known to pay that well at least for me although I’ve read of other marketers earning more in CPMs than CPCs.

4. Almost all of my adsense ads placements are text ads so my Google Adsense 43 percent increased revenue for this month most certainly was not as a result of this change. I’ll probably share some of my tips I used in another post.

What do you think?

So what do you think of this Google Adsense change with New Google-Certified Ad Networks It may not have impacted me much but I am sure many others with different niches may be thrilled with this change. Is this true for you? Share your thoughts by dropping a comment below.

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A month ago, I would never have dreamed of associating “Keyword Research” with the word “Fun”. It would be unthinkable! But let’s just say Micro Niche Finder and launching of my first Micro Niche Website helped put things into perspective.

I digress:

It’s really funny how in my IM journey how I discovered things that sometimes changed completely…my thinking, my understanding, my perception, my mindset….my hopes

Does This Blog Really Need Micro Niche Finder?

The short answer is NO, not specifically, but as an internet business owner, it helps me look for new profitable niche markets.  This blog is a communication tool I used to share with all my readers and visitors what I’ve learned in my IM journey. I was happy using all the free keyword research tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool and this free tool has served my needs in all my work on this home business blog. It’s only when my IM journey took a slight detour to the adsense route that I found these tools could no longer serve some of my needs or new ideas I have. Yeah like Micro Niche Website. I’m sure you may have encountered such experiences in your business as well and either wished you could do your keyword research faster OR have a better tool.

So What Can Micro Niche Finder do?

Just type in your keyword into MNF and you have loads of relevant keywords displayed in mere seconds including:

Keywords/long tail keywords: The main keyword is on the left side.

Search Count: This is the search volume as taken from the Google Keyword Tool
(exact phrase).

Exact Phrase Count: This is the number of competing websites.

Ad Cost: This is the approximate Ad Cost that company’s are bidding on this
word.

SOC: This is the “strength of competition”, along with a rating number and green
color light.

My favorite features:
1. The strength of competition (SOC) for each keyword phrase/long tail keyword is displayed with a rating number (see below). The higher this number the stronger your competition. A green “tick” means less of a fight to get top search engine ranking and a red “cross” tells you to forget it unless you know what you are doing ) You can see further breakdown into inanchor count, intitlecount and inurl count by just clicking a link.

2. When you are doing keyword research for a particular niche that you are interested, Micro Niche Finder has an excellent feature that allows you to either “broad dig” or “narrow dig” this keyword along with a host of other options. I have not seen any free tool that allows such flexibility with just one click.

Why Do I Need Micro Niche Finder

• Many people who do not know keyword research enough will choose a keyword which has a low number of competing websites. This is really not necessarily accurate because there could be many niche keywords that have a high number of websites competing but with very low strength of competition. You could easily outrank many sites if you had such information – information that only a good software can give you. You don’t necessarily need MNF but something close to what it can offer should do.

• Calculating the numbers of ‘inanchor/intitle/inurl’ counts is really hard work for someone looking to build many niche websites. It would be a worthy investment to simply purchase this software and save yourself some misery.

• I made a mistake once when I chose a wrong niche – all because I wasn’t equipped with a good keyword tool. The niche is a real estate niche, a highly competitive one and I intended to choose a keyword phrase which is not too competitive. The result was disastrous. Here take a look at what MNF now tells me about this keyword:

Well I won’t make such mistakes again with my Micro Niche Finder. To sum up what I think about this tool is this. Before I purchased MNF, whenever I bought a new domain specifically for a niche that I wanted to go into, I go like “well well I hope this is a good niche for me”. Now with my MNF (and I just found my second micro niche website), I exclaimed “haha , I got a good one!”

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It is no secret that search engines love fresh quality content, and thus are more inclined to index and rank your page well if the quality of your content is worth it.

Today, I’m going to try to explain you how content that is search engine friendly should be written.

Write for your Readers, not the Search Engine

This is the very first point and by far the most important.

No matter what you do on your site, always do it with your visitors in mind first.

Although it is the search engines that will index your content, ultimately it is real people who will read and judge it.

Beyond this consideration, search engines like Google recommend you themselves to write content with your visitors in mind, so by doing so not only you’ll be pleasing your visitors, but also the search engines.

Do not focus on Keyword Density

This used to work very well, but nowadays it’s much less effective than it used to be.

Again, Google doesn’t like so much to be played and thus keep improving its algorithms to filter unnatural content patterns.

Instead, Google is much more interested in the associated terms you are using in your nearby content, as well are your linking network too.

In fact, we could say that related search terms carry even more value than a mere repetition of a single search term throughout your copy.

Also, beside the fact that search engine like Google doesn’t value keyword density much, such ways of optimizing your content all too often results in having your readers wondering why you keep repeating the same words over and over; which does affect your visitors experience on your site.

Do use Related and Suggested Search Terms

Almost each time that you are making a search on Google, you’ll be offered additional suggestion, just like when you do some researches using the Wonder Wheel.

These terms are very valuable to you, not only because they are related in nature, but because Google not only think that they are related and relevant, but so do your visitors too. And to make it even better, since those terms are suggested, it demonstrates that they also carry sufficient search volume to be worth mentioning.

Use Heading Tags

Heading tags are used to structure your content and make it easy for the search engine to skim through your content.

Although it is possible to use up to 6 different levels of heading tags, it is very unlikely that you’ll be using more than 3.

The common practice would be to have your content title enclosed in a <h1> tag while containing your main search term or keyword within it.

Then, each sub-section of your content should titled with a <h2> tag, and possibly containing a suggested keyword by Google.

Lastly, you would eventually have to add a sub-category title within your sections. For this one I would recommend to use a <h3> tag.

Not only doing this will facilitate the crawling and understanding for the search engines as to what your site is all about, it will also help you have  more structured content, which in turn tends to increase your visitors experience on site.

In Conclusion

Writing a good optimized content for the search engine is no longer a difficult task by itself.

More importantly, your ability to write a content that will draw and motivate your visitors to become readers and come back over and over to your site, or even possibly recommend your content to someone else is one thing that search engines love and value a lot.

In the past, writing optimized content was sufficient to rank well in the search engines; unfortunately it is no longer the case. Today your ranking will be obtained by your offsite optimization work, which honestly is much more easily done when you have written a nice quality content.

Since the search engines give less importance to the optimization of the content itself, it is important to use this one to further enhance your visitor’s appreciation of your site and work.

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Whether it’s through backlink building or something else, achieving top search engine ranking on the major search engines especially Google must be the greatest desire of every online business owner. Well certainly since everything that you hope to achieve in your business depends very much on it. Web traffic, online profits, marketing strategies, brand marketing, website popularity among others.

What I learned from my recent backlink building success

While I certainly won’t call getting to Google’s page 1 for three keyword phrases over 3 weeks a major milestone in my Internet Marketing journey, I do relish a moment of satisfaction. I guess it’s these little things that keep us going.  But what have I learned? I learned:

• that quality of backlinks is more important than quantity. Getting 10 links from PR6-PR9 is of greater value than getting 100 links from PR1-PR2 sites.
• Google’s page rank does not mean much since I was able to outrank many sites which had higher page rank than my homepage – due to my high quality PR sites’ backlinks
• A common mistake many new marketers make while searching for backlinks of  their  website is to run the query ” link:domain.com” in the Google search engine. This is totally inaccurate. A better option is through the use of the Webmasters Tools section.
• you get the benefit of a site with high page rank even if your link appears on any of its many pages with ZERO page rank.
• it doesn’t bother me even if bad sites link to me, including spammy ones, gambling sites etc. I really cannot control people who choose to link to me but it’s important to know that it won’t hurt me. But it would be a different story to link back to these sites, so I absolutely don’t link to such sites.
• that Angela Edward’s backlink building program really works. Perhaps I’ve been barking at the wrong tree but it helped me achieve in 3 weeks what I could never did in 2 years- at least for these 3 keyword phrases.

how many backlinks do you need to outrank other websites?

• there is no cast-in-stone magic number. It depends on how competitive your niche is. For very competitive ones like Internet Marketing, Weight Loss or Dating Service, you should do about 100-200 high PR backlinks.
• it also depends on where your keyword phrase ranking currently stands. I mentioned in my recent post “Link Building: Taking Backlink Building To a Higher Level“, it took me about 50 good links to move keyword phrase ‘online business opportunities’ 22 positions to #2.
• I would say for niche marketing sites you would need about 50-70 high PR links to see good results.

my most used and reliable tool in backlink building

• A firefox addon’ which identifies dofollow links by the color purple (red signifies nofollow links)

Keyword Research – Knowing Your Competitors

When you are trying to outrank other websites in your keyword phrases to get top search engine ranking, you should spend some effort sizing up your competitors. Finding out what’s their SERP on the same keyword you’re trying to rank for, how many incoming links, page rank etc are critical information you can use to beat them. There are many tools which can do this job but lately I was pretty impressed with Keyword Spy Tool which helps you spy on your competitors in seconds. Well go take a look and try it out for yourself when you’re doing some keyword research.

Get Angela Edwards’ Backlink Building Subscription here

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• Diversify Your Backlinks For Top Ranking

It’s not all about ranking!

The very first mistake and assumption is ranking. People tend to think that it’s all about your ranking position in the search engines. People become so overly mesmerized about it that they lose focus about everything else. Sure, ranking is important but it’s not everything in SEO, far from it. Search Engine Optimization doesn’t mean getting a high rank in the search engines, it means leveraging on the search engines to get the best results possible for your site/business! There’s a huge difference between both statements. I don’t think that I need to tell you again why it’s worthless for your “Shoe store” website to rank number one for a keyword like “low quality and dirty shoes”… Ranking in the search engines, anybody with basic SEO knowledge can do that, so it can’t be a criterion to decide on your SEO/SEM consultant.

There’s always a why!

A professional SEO/SEM consultant won’t just be able to rank for a keyword, it will be able not only to tell you which keywords your site or pages should be optimized for, but even more importantly why it is so! And when I mean why, I’m not talking about saying things like this one has low competition, or this one is easy to optimize for. What I’m referring to is strategic and analytical skills here. A professional SEO/SEM consultant will be able to decipher your site and its visitor’s behavior, then from such information, he’s able to devise a plan of action as to which keywords your site should be optimized for based on:

1. Your Traffic Sources.
2. Your Visitors Behavior.
3. Your Conversion Rate.

This, I can assure that it is not something that a person with limited skills or experience can do for you. But let’s look even further…

PPC Knowledge

Again, this sounds like something overly simple. Anybody can launch a campaign, so what’s the big deal about it? If you are considering hiring someone to take care of your PPC work, then whenever you talk to that person, he or she should ask you the following question beyond your maximum budget: “What is your customer lifetime value?” Just like SEO is not about having a top ranking for a keyword but rather making sure that the right page is presented to the right people at the right time, PPC is not about writing some ads and letting people click on them until your budget is maxed out. So beyond writing good ads that get clicked through, your consultant should know about and being able to estimate the cost limit for your campaign per bid and not just seeking to max out the budget. Without consideration of ROI, even if your ad gets 11% click through rate and you can boast yourself of another excellent 6% conversion rate, your campaign may still be losing money or being worthless if your cost per acquisition exceeds your average customer lifetime value. Not only that, but since performance is involved too, your SEO/SEM consultant should be very experienced in split testing knowing exactly how to test and optimize not only your ads, but also your landing pages. Remember, you don’t need to be an expert to get ads that get clicked on and maxing out a budget, so you can’t base your decision on that!

In Conclusion

There’s more to a professional SEO/SEM consultant than just basic stuff. He or she’s your partner in business to help you succeed as much as possible. For those reasons, such consultant knows more than just keywords and clicks, but he’s really capable of doing thorough analysis, planning and suggestions to you that will really contribute to your business success. If you ever need a consultant, referring to such skills will help you screen out “fakes” and “unskilled” people, increasing your chances to get your money worth!

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