Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to methods of making web sites “friendly” to the different search engines, and many consider it the best strategy for long-term traffic generation. Optimizing your site doesn’t necessarily guarantee high search engine placement, but you’ll have a much better shot at it than those whose sites aren’t optimized. And the core of search engine optimization — the foundation upon which you’ll base your entire optimization strategy — is keyword research.
Anyone reading this article probably realizes the futility of just guessing which keywords to optimize for. It’s possible to do everything else right but still fail miserably. You might optimize your site for keywords that don’t get any searches at all, or — what’s more likely — you’ll choose keywords that are too general and nearly impossible to rank highly for. The answer? Use keyword research tools.
The tool that I use and recommend is called Wordtracker. Wordtracker is a keyword research tool that uses metacrawler information to pull keywords and keyphrases from a search query database. (Don’t worry if you didn’t understand that — neither do I.) What it means is, Wordtracker helps you find relevant keywords and then tells you how often they get searches. Here’s how to do it:
First, you’ll need to sign up for an account. You can get a free trial, or you can get a paid membership for a day, a week, a month or a year. The free trial is severely limited and not very helpful; it shows results only for MSN, and it allows you to research just 30 keywords at a time. You’ll want results for Google and Yahoo! most of all, and you’ll have to go through hundreds or thousands of terms before you find the really juicy keywords you’ll want to optimize for. That’s why I recommend signing up for a one-day membership at first. You’ll get to try Wordtracker with all the features enabled, and a day’s membership only costs around seven bucks.
Once you have your account, log in to the members area. Click on “Keyword Universe” (top left) and you’ll get a screen prompting you to enter a search term. Enter a generic term as a jumping-off point. For example, if you run an online dating site, you should enter a term like “get dates online” or “internet dating.” It doesn’t matter if the term is incredibly broad; we’ll narrow it down in the next step.
Let’s go ahead and use the dating example for this exercise. I’ve entered the term “online dating,” leaving both the lateral and thesaurus match options checked. This gives us a lot of different related terms we can expand upon, including a bunch that we might not have come up with on our own.
I’ll now click on “online dating” in these results, which brings up a new box on the right side of the screen. This is a list of all the search queries for the term “online dating” that appear in Wordtracker’s database. The first column (”Keyword”) shows the search query; the second (”Count”) shows the number of times the search query appears in the database; the third (”Predict”) predicts the number of searches for that query in any given 24-hour period; and the fourth (”Dig”) lets you “dig deeper” to find even more specific variations of that query (click on the shovel icon to dig deeper). Clicking on a search query in this list will add it to your keyword basket, or you can choose to add all of them at once. I’ll add them all, and then click on the blue arrow in the bottom right corner (”Click here for step 3″).
Now we have a few options. “Export Keywords” sends the list to a text file that you can print out or cut-and-paste. “E-mail Keywords” lets you e-mail the list to yourself or anyone else. “Competition Search” is what we’re really after, so click on that. This will bring you to a screen that lets you choose two search engines to check for competing sites. Definitely choose Google, and you’ll probably want to choose either Yahoo! or MSN for your second one. Leave “KEI Analysis” and “Quotes” set to “Yes,” and then click “Proceed.”
We now come to a page that ranks our keywords by KEI, or Keyword Effectiveness Index. You’ll notice that each search term has been assigned a KEI value. The higher this is, the better the search term; i.e., pick a search term with a high KEI value, and it’ll be easier to optimize your site for it. Each term has a different KEI depending on the search engine, so be sure to check the same terms in different engines, depending on which ones you want to rank on. (Also, remember that you can only perform a competition search for 100 terms at a time. If you have more than 100 in your basket, you’ll have to go back and do everything again for the next 100.)
According to Wordtracker, KEI is determined by comparing the number of competing sites for that term with the number of times it appears in the Wordtracker database. A KEI value of 10 or less means a poor keyword, between 10 and 100 is a good keyword, between 100 and 400 is an excellent keyword, and 400 and up is practically a gift.
The results for “online dating” don’t look very promising. Our best term for Google is “dating agencies online in somerset,” with a KEI value of 84.941. If this happens to be your niche — that is, online dating agencies in Somerset — then this is a fantastic keyword. For most of us, this would be pretty useless. We can see that the next one down is “top online search adult dating service hiv positive dating” with a KEI value of 22.091. Again, probably not quite the niche we’re in, and the KEI isn’t nearly as high as we’d like it to be.
At this point, you’d go back to step one, choose a different result, and repeat the process all over again. With some patience, you’ll uncover those juicy niche keywords with high counts and low competition, and these are the words you’ll optimize your site for.
About The Author
To see a version of this tutorial with screen shots illustrating each step, and for more articles by Ryan Cole, visit http://www.theinternetmarketingblog.org/2006/09/09/using-wordtracker-to-improve-search-engine-ranks/.
Written by SEO Tipster on September 25th, 2006 with no comments.
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Ian CanawaySo you’ve got a website setup but you’ve got no one visiting it; that’s the dilemma and reality of many people who come online and think ‘hey I can setup and website and make loads of money online’. The thing is this scenario is far from a reality for most people who embark on online ventures.
You need to treat you online business like any other business, you need to do research on your market, set targets, goals and form a strategic plan to follow to guide you on your way and to keep you on track. Once you’ve got this in place your life will be much easier.
There are many different ways to get more traffic to your website; here are some simple strategies and proven online techniques which I use to drive traffic to my website:
- Article writing and distribution - Link exchanges - Submit your site to online directories. - Posting in targeted forums and discussion boards - Joint ventures - Recruiting affiliates - PPC search engines such as Google Adwords - Basic search engine optimisation - Writing and submitting press releases - Write great content that people want - Using feeder site such as a blogs or a Squidoo
There are also other techniques such as using traffic exchanges, posting on classified ad sites and using safe lists, however the one I’ve listed above are the ones I primarily use.
I’ll briefly discuss each one and how you can use it to get the best results for you online business.
Article writing and distribution – This article itself is and an example of this; I write the article and distribute to thousands of websites across the internet and at the bottom of each article I have a resource box with a link back to my site in it. Now if I’ve done my job, the resource box at the end of this article should grab your attention or induce your curiosity so that you click the link and check out the great free ebook I’m promoting. Article distribution is also a great way to get more links back to your site which should help your search engine ranking.
Link exchanges – Find websites that are related to your own and contact them to do a simple link swap. The key here is to find good quality sites that are directly related to your site but not competing, this way your products or services will complement each other, not compete.
Submitting your website to online directories is a great way to get back links and generate traffic to your website. Just do a search on google and you’ll find thousands of sites to which you can submit your website.
Posting in targeted forums is a great method to raise your profile and credibility within a niche and in turn attract people back to your website. Use the search engines to find forums related in your niche, answer questions, help people and give good solid information. Don’t spam the forum by posting ads you’ll kill your credibility and reputation.
Joint ventures - Contact other website owners in your niche and set up some simple joint ventures to cross promote each others products or services. Or offer them a good percentage commission on clients they refer. There are many ways to set up joint ventures so I suggest you do your research before trying to set one up.
Recruiting affiliates is a great way to rapidly and dramatically increase your business, I used this to double my sales on one of my products. Offer them high commissions and provide loads of promotional tools to. I created an affiliate ‘mini-site’ for one of my products and gave it away with great success. The more you help them and the more incentives you give them the greater the results you’ll experience. Another strategy you can use is to encourage your customers to become affiliates, as they’ll have intimate knowledge of your product or service and should be more than happy to recommend it.
Basic search engine optimisation – When you build your webpages incorporate the keywords and phrases you uncovered in you market research into your pages. Try to put your primary keyword into at least your title and header tags within the page. But remember you’re creating the site for people not search engines.
PPC or pay per click is search engines such as Google Adwords or Yahoo search marketing are good way to get traffic to your site, but you have to pay for it. As the name suggests you pay per click. With Google Adwords you can set up a campaign and be receiving traffic inside of 10 minutes. Write compelling ads; I also find that if I use the keyword I’m targeting within the ad I get best results. Also if you only want really targeted visitors disable your ads from being shown on the content network as they will not nearly be as targeted.
Writing and submitting press releases is a great strategy and is one which I use very often. If you haven’t used this strategy before I suggest you go to PRweb.com and read their tips on writing press releases. I submit my press releases through PRweb.com and PRleap.com but there are a lot of other sites out there though so make the most of them.
Write great unique content that people want. The key here is to give people what they want, if they have a problem give them solutions. There is an expression which you’ve probably heard before, ‘content is king’, and it’s as true today as it ever was. Give your visitors great content, let them interact, share their views and give them a reason to come back and tell their friends about your site.
The last method we’re going to look at in this article is using blogs or a Squidoo as feeder sites for your main sites. You can set up free blogs at Blogger.com or use Wordpress; you can then use these blogs to link back to your other sites and generate you more traffic. Search engines love blogs at the moment as they are usually updated regularly with fresh content You can use a technique called blog and ping to get your blog picked up and found quickly, it’s really easy, every time you make a post go to pingomatic.com or pingoat.com, send out a ping and your done I’ve found this strategy works very well.
You could also setup a Squidoo and become a lensmaster to raise your credibility within your niche and send more people back to your main websites. In fact if you pick up a copy of the free ebook in my resource box I show you how I got my Squidoo lens ranked #14 in Google in just a few short weeks.
There are a few strategies to dig your teeth into, try and incorporate as many strategies and techniques into your marketing plan as you can, there are many more out there other than the ones discussed, but these should get you started down the right path.
About The Author
Discover a free ebook which shows you step-by-step a quick and easy way to drive more traffic back to your websites so you can make more money and give your business a boost and best of all it’s free. Click below to download now: http://www.iancanaway.com/squidoo/squidooreport.pdf
Written by SEO Tipster on September 18th, 2006 with no comments.
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Here’s a cool web application which pulls search results from the Big 4 (Google, Yahoo, MSN & Ask). Not only that, it shows you urls which have been indexed by the engines and it has a stats bar which shows you the backlinks, alexa ranking, page rank, total pages indexed and many other stats. If your site is a blog, it shows you links on technorati and it pulls results from the internet archive.
Its rather cool, I did a search on my site and found out that there are some interesting backlinks. Try searching MySeotips.com or do some other searches for fun.
Written by SEO Tipster on September 12th, 2006 with no comments.
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You’ve published a website right? You realize that it’s a
meaningless endeavor unless you get some good traffic. You
have absolutely no money for expensive advertising
campaigns. In fact, your advertising budget is virtually
non-existent. Read on to discover some simple methods to
get good free traffic.
Good Seo
This cannot be emphasized enough. Good Seo is your starting
point to any free advertising campaign. Before you even
consider any other methods for free traffic, get your
website user and search engine friendly. Put on quality
content in line with the objective of your website. Make
your content interesting, fresh and unique for the user and
the search bots will come crawling. If word gets around
that your content is great, webmasters may voluntarily link
to your website. This one-way linking will increase your
link popularity, search engine rankings and get you good
free traffic. Ensure your site is well designed, your html
is clean and compliant, your pages load quick and there are
no dead links. Your users should be able to get what they
want within three to four clicks. Avoid excessive use of
graphics and animation unless absolutely necessary. I don’t
recommend you use pop-ups as most users get irritated by
them.
Articles
Writing articles is another great way to get free traffic.
Webmasters are constantly looking for fresh, quality
articles to put on their website. When you write an
article, you are allowed to describe a little about
yourself and your website in the resource or author bio
box. It is in this box that you are allowed to put a link
back to your site. Submit these articles to article
directory sites. If your article is relevant and exciting,
webmasters will put it on their websites. In this way, you
can improve link popularity by getting a one-way link back
to your site and free traffic from readers who read your
article. Write articles that relate to your website. For
example, if you have a website on growing roses, write an
article that has something to go with growing roses. Submit
your article to as many article directories and relevant
websites as possible.
Forums
Every niche on the internet has a plethora of forums. Do a
Google search and find relevant ones in your niche. Join
these forums as member and contribute to the community by
making useful and thoughtful posts. You are allowed to put
your link in your signature line. This also counts towards
your link popularity as search engines also index forum
posts. Fellow forum members may also click on your link to
visit your site. A word of caution - every forum has a
different set of rules, especially when it comes to links.
Make sure you read and obey them at all times. If you just
go in and put up links, you will be banned almost instantly.
Link Exchange
The great granddaddy of free traffic, link exchanges are
still very relevant and effective today. Make contact with
sites that are in a similar niche as your own. Offer to
exchange links with these sites. A word of caution - choose
the sites that you link to very carefully. Avoid linking to
spammy, black-hat sites with questionable content and
motives. Make sure that these sites are not banned by the
major search engines.
Newsletters
You not only need to get a continuous stream of new
visitors to your website, you need to make sure you keep
the old ones coming back all the time. The best way to do
this is by providing fresh valuable content and by way of a
newsletter system. Put in a newsletter subscription form on
your site and invite visitors to subscribe to a newsletter
that you can email to them either weekly or monthly. You
can put some content, some special offers, ads and a link
back to your site in your newsletter every time you email
out. Also provide them with an incentive or reason to click
on your link and visit your site. In this way, you remind
your visitors about your website.
Submit to directories
There are many directories available on the web that allow
ads or links free of charge. Some are general and some
specialize in a particular niche. Choose relevant ones and
submit your link or ad to them. Make sure you choose
quality directories that are indexed by search engines. In
this way you get a one-way link back to your site. You
benefit by getting free traffic and improved link
popularity.
Email this page
Another great, yet simple idea is to add an “Email this
page” feature to your website. It’s a simple form where a
visitor fills in the name and email address of another
person that he/she wishes to recommend your site to. You
set the form to automatically email a link to your website
to that person. That person will then receive an email with
a short message that says that so and so person had
recommended that he/she visit your site, etc.
If you follow these simple ideas, you should start to see
an increase in traffic to your site. Please note that
building traffic takes time and won’t happen overnight. All
the best!
—————————————————-
Anwar Ally operates http://www.super-clix.com This site
provides websites with free traffic by serving free text
ads to thousands of sites.
Written by SEO Tipster on September 7th, 2006 with no comments.
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