Hello SEO Optimise For Website Traffic

How’s your SEO?

If you are trying to make money online you will have heard the term SEO, but do you really know what it is?

SEO or search engine optimisation is the flavour of the month or should I say, past couple of years and it is considered a vital skill to have in your business armoury but you need to know how to use it to your advantage otherwise it can bite back.

You read so many articles saying optimise your page, use your keyword over and over, let the search engines know what your page is about and you will rank higher. This is true to a certain extent but it is not search engines who are your paying customers, you need to write the content on your page so that humans can read it and understand it.

There are a few accepted ground rules when it comes to SEO and they are fairly easy to grasp. If you follow the basic rules but write your articles for your readers then ranking will follow, it may take a little longer but it will also last. Writing content for the search engines will possibly get ranked in the results faster but it will also drop out of the listings like a stone, never to be seen again.

The basic rules for SEO are:

Page Title; That’s the bit at the top of your screen in the blue bar. Obviously if your page is about red dog leads then you would expect the page to be called red dog leads.

Meta Tags: There are two main meta tags, description and keyword. If you construct your own HTML you put these in the header, if you build with wordpress and use All In One SEO which you do, don’t you? you fill in the boxes at the bottom of the edit post page.

The keyword meta tag is pretty useless now except for keyword spy programs and Matt Cutts at Google has said that they ignore it, fill it in or don’t your choice.

The description tag is a different matter, this tag is about 160 characters long and is the snippet that shows in the search results. It is vital that you put a meta description in your page for two reasons.

1) When the snippet is shown any words that the searcher has entered into the box will be bolded, if they search ‘red dog leads’ and your meta description has ‘red dog leads’ in it the words will be bolded, this makes it more likely that a searcher will click on it.

2) The meta description is your little sales page, if you write a compelling description even if your page is down the page a bit it is again more likely to get that click.

Heading Tags: There is one tag that is vital and this is the h1 tag. This tag is your headline and the words within it do get attention from the search engines. If a page has a headline that says’ Red Dog Leads’ the SE’s will use that in their algorithm to decide what your page is relevant to. There are a descending list of tags,
h2, h3 and so on and these should be used to format the page, readers like it because it chops the page into smaller parts and SEs like it because they ‘see’ how the information is arranged.

Image Tags: Search engines cannot read images, you could have a picture of Cheryl Cole on the page but if you use the image tags the search engines will think it’s a picture of red dog leads. It would be pointless for your readers and so keep your images relevant but use your keywords in the tags.

Link Titles: If you have a link on the page give it a title, this is just extra information but it can be used for getting a keyword on your page.

Keyword Density: If you are targeting a keyword or phrase you need to make sure it is on the page in its exact form so, ‘red dog leads’ and ‘dog leads red’ are different keywords, related but different. Ensure your keyword is included about once for every 100 words or 1%, no more than 2%. Any more than this can mark your page as spam and it will get slapped.

All this seems a lot to remember but there are tools that can help you and one I use for just about every page is Traffic Travis, there’s a free or paid version but I only use the free one for double checking my posts. It’s quick and just catches the odd error here and there.

One more point, and it’s related, is off page SEO, this is primarily aimed at the guys that do link building with articles but everyone should be aware of it.

If you submit an article to EzineArticles for instance, you get the chance to put a couple of links to your site in the resource box at the bottom. These links can be very profitable if you use them correctly.

Always use your keywords as the anchor text, do not put something like ‘ Find out about Good SEO Here‘ unless you want to be ranked for ‘Here.’

Finish your article with a couple of sentences that follow on from your article seamlessly and find out about good seo and keyword research and how it can bring you more website traffic.

Finding Profitable Keywords | The Right Bait

OK so yesterday I said that profitable keywords are defined by at least two parameters :

1) There has to be a good number of searches for a keyword to be profitable, if no-one is actually typing a keyword into a search engine what is the point of it?

So, how do we go about finding these profitable keywords?

First off I am going to qualify that statement by breaking it down a little bit more. To make a keyword profitable it has to be searched for in Google and it needs to be a word or more usually a phrase which is at the buying stage of the visitor cycle.

I am going to take a shortcut here because it will save time, me and you. Any purchasing decision with the exception of sweets at the checkout will go through a cycle of three or more stages.

1) General research: The buyer will do some research on the widget they are thinking about buying. Note the ‘thinking’ part, no decision has been reached as to whether they will buy or not.

2) Product research: Having made the decision to buy a widget most people will have a look at what widgets are available. This is still not a buying stage, they may well purchase something but exactly what is still undecided.

3) Buying stage: Hoorah! The person has decided that they want a widget, model xyz and the wallet or purse is out. This is the visitor we want.

Now, all we have to do is place our baited hook in front of them and with any luck they will bite.

Tomorrow, finding the right bait. Stay tuned!

Using The Right Keywords

Keywords are not created equal and you could be wasting hours and hours of your precious time by picking the wrong ones.

I think everybody is aware that in order to make money online you will need to put in the work to find and qualify your keyword research.

No brainer, huh? Yes and no, I read pages and pages of articles on keyword research because it is my thing! I love it, creating content, boring, designing web pages, yawn, CSS, What???

But keywords, I love them. I like to picture myself as a fisherman and each of my keywords is a little baited hook in the ocean of the internet. Each and every one has the potential to make me money.

But, and it’s a big but, some bait is a lot more attractive than others, some will catch a few tiddlers, some will catch a big bass and just a few will get the marlin.

The question that arises is what is good bait?

A good keyword has to be defined by at least two parameters:

1) There has to be a good number of searches for a keyword to be profitable, if no-one is actually typing a keyword into a search engine what is the point of it?

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 these points in greater detail so stay tuned.

photo credit: Blyz

Keyword Tools I Use Part 1

Anybody trying to make money online or just get their web pages seen needs a couple of keyword tools. Here are some I use and one I don’t.

There are numerous keyword research tools available some free, some very expensive but the cost or otherwise is not neccesarily an indicator of how good they are. I use several different things to help me decide which keywords to target.

The Google Keyword Tool

This is a good first choice if you are starting out. Although free it will give you a headstart in the search for keywords that you may not of thought of yourself. The drawback is that you then have to flip backwards and forwards between the keyword tool and the search pages to get the competition numbers. The Google Keyword Tool is here

Mozilla Firefox and SEO Extension.

If you use the  Google Keyword Tool the Firefox browser with the SEO extension is a must. It allows you to get so much information at one place it is priceless. Firefox and SEO

Those are the free tools and they have their place on your computer however if you intend to get serious there are some paid tools which are worth considering. The best thing about them is not the information that they get you, you can get that for free as I have said, the best reason for buying them is the enormous amount of time that they can save.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a subscription tool that charges a monthly fee for access. It is a very popular keyword research tool for affiliate marketing and avoids the pitfalls of many desktop based tools in that you are using their bandwidth and proxy servers. You have a variety of tools in one and it is quite quick, the drawback for me was the monthly fee. If you are researching keywords a lot then this is a great tool and worth the money. Personally I look for a bunch of keywords in one go and then concentrate on content so I wasn’t using it to the full, however if you are into bum marketing or article writing this is heartily recommended. Find out about the free trial here

Microniche Finder

This is my favourite keyword tool at the moment. There, I said it, for the price this research tool is incredible. I am an affiliate niche marketer at heart and MNF allows you to get to keywords and search terms so quickly it is worth twice the price in my opinion. This is a one off payment keyword research tool that sits on your computer,I will be putting some posts up about how to get the most out of it but in the meantime check it out here.

Keyword Elite

In my opinion-Don’t bother! Sometimes hype and advertising overcome actual product. Think Windows v Mac, if your’e old enough think VHS v. Betamax. I did use this keyword tool for some time and occasionally it worked very well, but, most of the time it locked up, required captcha codes to be entered every 30 seconds and frequently got me banned by Google. This very expensive tool in my opinion is a waste of time.

Keyword Research & Page Rank

I would like to expand on the previous post regarding keyword research and the methods of determining the quality of a search term or keyword.

As I said Page Rank is a factor in deciding on whether you want to target a particular keyword.  Now perhaps this is not as clear to you as it is to me, but I have been doing this for quite a while and sometimes forget that other people have not got to the same stage .

When you perform any keyword research part of the equation is the competition and how strong is that competition. If you find a search term that has a lot of searches and few results pages, is that a good keyword?

On the face of it, yes, high search/low results= Good! But there is another factor and that is the PR (page rank) of the sites that are listed in the return. Lets research the term ‘fuzzy red widget’ Hey there are 120,000 searches a month, thats a lot of searches, lots of people want fuzzy red widgets!

Lets say there are only 5000 results for the term ‘fuzzy red widget’, this looks promising but if the PR of each page is between 7 and 10 you will have a lot of trouble getting your page anywhere near them. Remember PR is a measure of importance determined by Google and so a high PR is harder to beat than a low one. It may have 120,000 searches but you will never get any of them.

Lets try again, ‘red hairy widgets’ has 50,000 searches each month and there are 50,000 results. This does not look brilliant, fewer searches and more results. But, hang on, the PR of the sites on the first page never gets above 2, this means that you have a very good chance of beating any one of them. This would get you on the first page with a term that is searched for 50,000 times a month. Excellent!

Before you go checking up on me, the figures above are imaginery.

There is a tool that can speed this whole process up and it is free. The best browser around is Firefox, if you haven’t got it go get it now. You can download it for free here. Once you have that head on over here to get the seo Firefox extension. This allows you to view PR, back links, page links and much more. Once again it is free!