Is this like searching for the golden fleece? Does it actually exist?

Like many affiliate marketers I was brought up on the dream of the golden keyword.Once upon a time it was easy to find the odd nugget but it is getting a little trickier now.

I see many affiliate marketers falling into the trap of spending so much time looking for the right keyword, the one that has X number of searches, competition under Y, that they don’t actually do anything but search. And they make no money.

For years we have been told to check keywords out by putting them in quotes and searching on Google to find out how much competition there is, this is OK up to a point but it really doesn’t tell you what you need to know.

The “quote” search only tells you how many pages are indexed with that exact phrase on the page, it is NOT an indication of competition. In any niche certain phrases will come up time and time again and they will be on a web page but that does not mean that the page is actually targeted for that phrase.

Example: Listen to any conversation about golf, how many times will terms such as ‘driver’ or ‘wedge’ come up? Yet the conversation may really be about The Masters, or ‘Golf Bags’ Related but unconnected and therefore not competition, the same applies to keywords and web pages.

The most reliable way to find the competition you are battling is to use these terms:

inurl:”keyword”  Will return pages with the exact phrase in their url.

inanchor:”keyword” Will return pages with backlinks containing the exact phrase.

intitle:”keyword” Will return pages with the exact keyword in the page title.

If a web page has these features then it is a fair bet that it has been optimised for that phrase. This does indicate proper competition.

If, after checking the keyword for these factors you find that there is a lot of competing pages does that mean the keyword is no good? Not necessarily, you then need to check how strong these pages are by examining the Page Rank, the age, the number of backlinks etc.

Using a tool like SEO for Firefox this is a fairly simple procedure although a little time consuming. You can find keywords with seemingly thousands of competing web pages but on investigation the top ten results might have no pages with any PR or backlinks, these will be easy to beat.

On the other hand another keyword may have only a handful of competing pages but they are all PR5/6 with thousands of backlinks, you will spend years trying to get above those and possibly never will.

Keyword research is something you love or hate but it is a fact that you will not make money online without it.

Is there a golden keyword? Of course but you may waste months or even years looking for it, lower your sights and take action, find keywords you can target using the method above and then commit.

If you have the budget there is a tool that will do all this for you and more, it’s called MicroNicheFinder, it’s the one I use every day and I couldn’t live without it. See for yourself here

Related posts:

1. Does Google Need Our Content?
2. More Keyword Research
3. Keyword Research & Page Rank

The first one is called all in anchor. This looks for web pages that have the eyword phrase in any anchor text. This is the wording on the page that provides a hyperlink like this:

Good Keyword Research

Why do we want to know this? Well it is one way of finding out how many pages are being optimised for the keyword. If someone has produced a page with this phrase and hyperlinked it then they are obviously targeting the keyword.

Another way of finding optimised pages is the all in title search. Again this will find pages that are probably going after the keywords.

How do we find these pages?

Simply by opening up your Google and typing:

allinanchor:”keyword”

allintitle: “keyword”

By doing these searches you can really drill down and find the competition. Obviously the lower the number of pages that are returned the better.

As you do these sarches it is always a god idea to take a peak at the pages that are returned. This will let you know what sort of content Google is ranking and why.

A great tool for speeding up the process is the seo tool for Firefox. Are you using Firefox? No? Why not?

Download Firefox here and get the Seo tool for it here

Related posts:

1. Does Google Need Our Content?
2. Finding The Golden Keyword
3. Keyword Research & Page Rank

Google serves up results based on an algorithm which basically is a fancy piece of software that collects and sorts web pages. This software is highly secret or otherwise webmasters would just analyse it and find ways of artificially increasing their web sites rankings.

Like scientists who discover planets in the far off galaxies we can’t directly observe this algorithm, we can only measure it by the effect it has. Oh my god!!

There a few ways of determining whether Google will want the content we produce based on our keywords and although perhaps not entirely accurate it is based again on best guess.

So, we have found a keyword phrase of three to six words, now what? Well first we need to know how much other information is already out there that Google knows about.

The simplest way to do this is to go the the search engine and type in our keyword. Google will return a list of results with an indication of how many pages it thinks is relevant to the search. If you get a return of over two million you may want to start over.

Now to refine this very broad search is to enclose your keyword in quotes i.e. “keyword phrase” and search again. You will notice that now there are much fewer returns. This is called exact search and identifies pages that contain the exact phrase, hence the name. This gives you a much better indication of how many other pages you will be competing against.

As a rough guide I like to look for competition numbers of less than 50,000 and the lower the better. After you have done this there are a couple of other ways to gauge the work you will have to do but we will discuss them next time.

Related posts:

1. Does Google Need Our Content? Part 2
2. Finding The Golden Keyword
3. More Keyword Research

I hope we are all grabbing some coin, and starting to make a living online. This is part six, I think of my mini series on finding profitable keywords.

The point we are covering today is, does Google want or need your information? I read every day on the various forums that I visit, Google does not like affiliate sites!, Google does not want anyone to make money online! Google de-indexes Squidoo, Bans, PHPBay sites.

Let me tell you, this is complete b*ll*cks. Google does not hate affiliate sites, build a niche store sites or any kind of site per se. What Google does like is information, it eats it up and if you can feed it something it has not had before it is your best friend.

Hear what I’m saying? Unique content, people! I will yell that at you UNIQUE CONTENT!!!

Point two was ‘Does Google need your content? Think about this for a minute. Google is the number one search engine and it got to that position by serving up web pages to searches that it thought were relevant.

OK, it’s not perfect but then nothing is, there are many billions of web pages and trying to sort them into what is relevant and what is not is one hell of a job.

Let no one tell you they know the secret of Google. They don’t. ( unless they are Matt Cutts of course) We as affiliates work on what can only ever be, best guess because Google or Matt Cutts aint telling, so what is best guess. Lets look at it from Google’s point of view.

Google does not care if you earn money online, Google does not hate affiliates. What Google cares about is providing their customers with information about the keyword the customer provided. So all we have to do is feed Google with info that it has not had anywhere else.

This is easier said than done of course but by producing unique content we have a head start. We need to do a little research to find out what it needs….continued tomorrow….

Related posts:

1. Keyword Research & Page Rank
2. More Keyword Research
3. Keyword Research Baiting The Hook

I hope that you are all finding some benefit to my little series and leaving comments. Don’t forget the Rss feed to keep apprised of what is going on.

Now we go searching for the keywords. I personally use Microniche finder as it is a massive time saver but there are plenty of free tools that you can use such as:

Googles Adwords tool

Search based keyword finder

Google Insight tool

Wordtracker

Whatever tool you use remember what it is we are looking for:

Keywords of three to six words long

Searches over a thousand per month

I won’t go into the uses of these tools as they are all pretty self explanatory so I am going to divert a little bit and explain how I use MNF.

Microniche finder uses Google to return results on a keyword that input. So far so good. These are the same keywords that the Google adwords tool will return.

Now, the thing I like best about Micronichefinder is the ability to distill the keywords down by the various filters so that you are not wasting time going backwards and forwards through the Google tool and Google search trying to find a keyword with enough searches to be profitable and does not have loads of competition.

I put in a base keyword and search for broad matches, this will return hundreds or thousands of keyword phrases, copy them to the projects file and then simply input each one on an exact match. By doing this you can gather masses of data very quickly. I then filter results with the built in parameters, over a thousand searches and minimum three keywords. This list is then put through the SOC filter. This function gives you an indication of how tough that phrase will be to crack.

Delete any that have over 50 in the SOC column and bingo! Then I export that list into my Commission Ritual file and hey,ho! I have a months work of site building, in just a couple of hours I can have a full diary.

It is entirely possible to do all the things MNF does for free but it does cost you time. I prefer to be hunting down keywords and building the sites than endlessly gathering information.

Whichever way you go about finding your keywords you will still have to find out the information in point two from a few days back:

2) Google has to require the information. I say Google but it applies to all search engines, from now on I will say Google only because it is quicker to type than all the search engines.

Tomorrow we will discuss this…see then….

Related posts:

1. Keyword Research & Page Rank
2. Keyword Tools I Use Part 1
3. Finding The Golden Keyword

Right, how do we find out the right keyword to use as our bait?

I am going to point out a couple of rules now that will at least give you a way to make your decisions based on what I have found to be true.

1) A good keyword in the buying stage will be three to six words long.

2) A good keyword will have searches of over one thousand per month.

Ok for point number one lets look at why that might be true. Imagine you are a buyer and you want a widget, if you are ust deciding on buying a widget you will in all likelyhood type ‘widget’ into Google and look around to see what is available.

Moving on, you have already done this and you have decided that, yes, you want a widget but which one? A blue widget, a green widget? OK so now you type into Google ‘Blue widgets’ Now, you are narrowing it down and so you finally decide on a blue widget with fur on it.

Now you type ‘blue furry widget’ and buy one.

Now, lets look at the keywords:

Widget; 10000 searches per month, no sales.

Blue widget; 5000 searches per month, no sales

Blue furry widget; 1000 searches per month 10 sales.

Which keyword will you go for? 10000 visitors per month and no sales or 1000 visitors and 10 sales?

This series continues tomorrow….

photo credit: Ray Devlin

Related posts:

1. Keyword Research & Page Rank
2. Keyword Research-Why?
3. Even More Keyword Research

Let’s start with what we mean by inbound links, also called backlinks. These are links from other sites to your URL, which direct the surfer directly to your site when the link is clicked. The basic premise is that if you have high ranking sites linking to you, then you must yourself be important and have valuable content, and hence you should rank highly. The way in which Google ranks sites is called Pagerank and can be seen as a green line on the Google Toolbar representing ranks 0 to 10. As Google states

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

So, back to the question “Does having inbound links to your site help your site’s credibility”, and hence visibility when searched. The broad answer to this question is “yes”, but with a number of very important caveats which we will cover in the other sections.

OK, so backlinks are basically good, especially from high ranking sites, so how do we get them? The first way, and best way, is by having such great content on your site that all these high-powered sites want to link to you. Downside to this method is that it is slow and takes lots of time and effort on your part. But don’t worry, when anyone tries to build a level playing field there are always people out there that will provide work-arounds.

The first one was reciprocal links, whereby you say that you will link to a site if they also link to you. That’s stretching the original idea, but it’s not too bad because how many of these sort of links are you going to set up? Well, actually, some people have created thousands of such links between sites, maybe not what Google initially intended!

But then, due to the emphasis Google placed on link popularity, the concept of link farms was born. These are sites that link to other sites purely to increase the links to the site. Pay a few dollars and get thousands of links to your site. Too good to be true – you bet. Google hates link farms and sees these links as spam and will actively penalise sites that use such links. So, the first rule of linking is do not use link farms. The second rule is do not use lots of reciprocal links, Google can easily check this and the “Jagger” update that is currently rolling out seems to be particularly focused on penalising sites with lots of reciprocal links. The jury is still out on whether “themed” links will be treated in the same way. “Themed” links are links to sites that are very closely aligned to the same primary topic as your own site. If you think about this, it makes a lot of sense and is much more likely to be based on real content-based linking.

We believe another area Google is focusing on is how quickly your site gains backlinks. If your site is one month old, it is hardly believable for it to gain 100 real backlinks in that time. So, the third rule of linking is to ensure your links build in a realistic way. In all of these ways, Google is trying to ensure fairness and that’s why new sites are often held back in the results pages.

Finally, we should mention the sites that will improve your ranking – the Directories. There are many of these, but the most important is DMOZ, also known as the ODP. DMOZ is the Open Directory Project and is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. It gets the name DMOZ from the acronym for Directory Mozilla, as it is administered by Netscape Communication Corporation. It’s Pagerank is 9 and hence a link from DMOZ will help your site. We recommend that everyone visits http://dmoz.org and attempts to get listed, it’s free. The Yahoo directory is also important and free for non-commercial sites, but $299 a year for business.

So, in summary, by far the best way of getting links is by having a quality site that other people want to link to. So again, we are back to content. If you provide quality information, over time, more and more sites will link to you, and if they are in the same business sector as you, so much the better.

Related posts:

1. Keyword Research & Page Rank
2. Deep Link Engine
3. Site Building-The Number 1 Way

Let me illustrate the concept of the keyword. Imagine a time 10,000 years ago when Ogg settled in a valley, good cave, running stream outside and not too many dinosaurs. He  decided to set up a little business producing arrow heads. Now Ogg was a brilliant arrow head maker, sharp pointy arrowheads made from tough flint. The Poodles noodles in the arrow head world.

He makes his arrow heads, displays them on a rock outside his cave and waits. He is going to make a killing, he has the best arrow heads in the area, they will pierce mammoth skin and fly straight and true. Everyone will buy or barter for his product.

Ogg dies lonely, starved to death because no-one knew he was there. If only Ogg had a keyword!

Your website is just like Ogg’s cave. It may be great, it may be full of the info that everyone is looking for. But nobody knows it is there. This is where your keyword becomes the life blood of your website. Keywords, or signposts, have to point to your cave, they let people know you are there and what you have to offer.

Researching your keywords is important for a very good reason. Everybody is different. Now believe it or not, you do not know everything. Only I do…hee hee:-)

People all over the world will search the internet. Thousands, possibly millions will be looking for a red widget. A good proportion of them will search for a red widget, however another proportion will search for a red hairy widget or a red furry widget, or a red furry hairy widget. Get into widgets! Ha Ha!

The point is people will describe the same thing in a huge variety of ways and our job is to find the particular ways that will bring us the most visitors. To do this we have to know which search terms or keywords the majority of people are using. Then we provide them with the signposts to our cave. Er..website.

On these pages I am going to show you how to find the right signposts that you need to get as many people possible to YOUR website.

Related posts:

1. Keyword Research & Page Rank
2. Keyword Research Baiting The Hook
3. More Keyword Research