Welcome to SEO Bacics, Part 6. Today’s topic is : Your Five Steps to SEO Success.
In the last 5 parts of SEO Basics we talked about SEO, what is is, why it is important, etc. In part 5 we touch upon the perceived SEO roadblocks that you may have, not knowing which way to go, not a techie, no time, no money, don’t know where to start, etc. In part 6 I am going to show you the five steps to your seo success. Simply watch the video below.
Learn Strategic Internet Marketing for free by subscribing to Progressive Wealth Academy’s Monday news letter. Simply enter your name and email address in the opt in box to the right and get more free video tutorials like this… for FREE. Value $$$$$.
Welcome to SEO Bacics, Part 4. Today’s topic is : Why SEO.
In the last 3 weekly issues we talked about SEO and the importance of keyword research and proper keyword selection before you begin working on your website and optimizing it, on-page, for Google or any other search engine to ensure relevance recognition. We covered the topic of off page SEO and the importance of building links pointing to your website to help increase your website importance and hence its page rank. Last week we also talked about the criticality of competition research prior to making your final keyword phrase selection.
Now that you know what all these terms mean, I want to explain why they are all important. Therefore, the topic this week
is why SEO. Well, there are many reasons why each one of us should be worrying about SEO, but I want to point out 2 reasons only
1. The main benefit of SEO is that when our websites are SEO optimized and therefore rewarded with placement on page one of Google, let’s say, we are going to get traffic. No matter how fabulous your website is, if you don’t get traffic to it, you may as well not have it. Traffic is key. No traffic, no visitors, no sales. It’s that simple. That’s the main reason why you need SEO. If you want to make sales online or find more customers for your business, generate leads, etc., you need traffic and SEO gives you traffic.
2. Another major benefit is that the traffic coming to your website from the natural placement in the search results is free.
If you have already paid for advertisement, you know how expensive it can be. Well, with SEO this traffic is now FREE.Not only that, if your website is SEO optimized, your paid advertising cost will be lower. Either way, you are going to save yourself money for advertising.
Watch this free webinar SEO Basics recording for more detail. Enjoy it.
Learn Strategic Internet Marketing for free by subscribing to Progressive Wealth Academy’s Monday news letter. Simply enter your name and email address in the opt in box to the right and get more free video tutorials like this… for FREE. Value $$$$$.
Did you know that you can start making money on the internet even if you don’t have a website? Sound crazy? Well it’s true. On top of that you don’t have to lay out a penny in order to take advantage of this opportunity. I’m talking about an affiliate marketing strategy using free affiliate programs, where you get credit for products or information that is sold as a direct result of traffic that you send to the program’s site.
Affiliate marketing is absolutely huge on the internet. Giants like Amazon.com, Yahoo.com, Barnes and Nobel and others all have affiliate programs to promote their products and millions are paid out each year to affiliate marketers.
So how does a free affiliate program work? Basically there are two ways to become an affiliate, deal directly with the advertiser or go through an affiliate network. The idea is you drive visitors to their sales page and if the visitor purchases something you earn a commission. So how can you do this without owning a website? How can you drive traffic to that sales page?
There are two ways; one is easier than the other. The internet is full of free classified ad sites. Some of these are ranked fairly high by Google which means if you place an ad on their site there’s a good chance that it will rank high in a search if it’s properly optimized. In your ad you give a short sales blurb and then have the link to the advertiser’s sales page. If people click through on that link and purchase something, bingo, you’ve just earned a commission.
The second way to drive traffic is through article marketing. This is becoming trickier because more and more of the top article directories will not allow you to use a direct link to the affiliate sales page. However there are still some that do so it still can be done.
Let’s say you are promoting an outdoor rabbit hutch for Amazon.com. With article marketing you would write a short story talking about the reasons a rabbit hutch makes good sense and what to look for in one. You can’t pitch the one you are representing directly. The article has to be informative about the subject. However you are able to pitch the product in what’s known as the resource box at the bottom of the article. In this box you’ll have a link to the sales page.
Of course you can use a website to promote these affiliate deals as well. You can get free websites and blogs at Squidoo.com, Weebly.com and Blogger to mention a few. Having these sites link to the affiliate sales page also gets around the article directory ban on direct links. Simply put the link to your site or blog in the resource box and your good to go.
You should take care in selecting which free affiliate programs you select. Find out how often they pay. Is there a minimum pay out amount. Do they offer any kind of free marketing tools? How do they track sales? Just like in anything else, there are good reputable affiliate programs and there are less respectable ones. Do your due diligence before you commit to anything but do use this great affiliate marketing strategy.
Whatever technique you are using to get traffic to your site be it SEO or article marketing or social networking or PPC or anything else contextual, you know how important keyword research is in getting visitors to your site don’t you? There are a bunch of products that can automate this task but you’re on a tight budget and you want to get free keyword research to optimize your efforts.
Well free is a relative term. There are free tools but it means you have to put the time into using them and your time really has a cost. But when you’re first starting out it makes sense to use the free keyword tools just so you understand how the process works. It will help you evaluate the pay for products when you finally decide to go in that direction.
Over 80% of all traffic starts as a search which means you want to do whatever you can to be on the first page of that search engine, preferably above the fold because that’s as far down as 70% of the visitors go. Getting to that position is not only about using the correct keyword optimization but it is an important starting point.
So how do you rank on page 1? It starts with an idea for content. That content can be for the website or an article but this is the stuff that you want to rank for. Decide on a broad keyword for the article and then run it through one or two of the free tools to get keyword phrase ideas.
So where are these free keyword research tools? There are two that are very popular, Google’s External Keyword Tool and the free version of WordTracker. The two big differences between these tools is that Google will undoubtedly have more keywords listed but they will not have that great a list of long tail keywords. The second difference is Google will express the number of searches monthly while WordTracker shows daily.
So let’s say you have a site that promotes dog supplies. You might consider a piece of content on dog training because you have a number of products that fit into that category. Go to Google External Keyword and enter the general term dog training.
You’ll notice you get a long list of keywords and that dog training gets over 1.5 million searches each month. If you then open another browser and Google dog training you’ll see there are over 45 million results. Two things are important here. First broad keywords are not buying keywords, they are used by people looking for free information. Secondly, this keyword just has way too much competition with 45 million returns.
If you scroll down a little further you’ll find electric dog training collar wit a little over 5,000 monthly searches. Do a Google search on that term and you’ll get 45,000 returns. Now we’re talking. The longer tail keyword is looking for a specific need to be filled, one that might be filled by your products. This is a better buying keyword.
Now if you did that same drill on WordTracker you would likely find even longer tailed keywords. The search volume won’t be as much but the keywords are buying keywords.
The last thing to check is the competition for the keyword. Some people will tell you to place the keyword in quotes and find the results of pages that have that exact keyword phrase. You can do that if you like but how many people do you know that search that way? None right?
What’s important is to see who is on the first page and if you have a chance to bump them. Firefox has a free SEO plugin that will show you the page rank and much more for each return.
If the first page is dominated by .gov, .edu or Wikipedia returns, you probably will not stand a chance because those will be considered authority sites. If however, you see articles from article directories or sites with a PR of 2 or less, give it a shot.
Yes all this is time consuming but that’s the cost of free keyword research.
If you have even sniffed around the idea of building a website you’ve probably heard the name Wordpress mentioned by any number of sources as being the best and easiest website software available. If it’s that fantastic it must be kind of pricy right? Wrong, it’s absolutely free. As you read this article you’re going to find out how to use Wordpress to get your blog up and running in a matter of hours and start taking advantage of the amazing features the platform offers.
But first why is Wordpress so popular and how to use Wordpress?
The quick answer is it’s a professional open source platform that is incredibly easy to use by non-technical people. No code writing, no CSS or HTML, no geeky stuff at all really. If you can point and click you can design and administer a Wordpress website.
Functionality, flexibility and automation are also key features when using Wordpress. What would take days to put together using static HTML design is done literally in minutes. The automation features not only make your site more receptive to search engines but saves you an enormous amount of time as well.
Did I mention Google loves Wordpress. It loves the ease and simplicity that the software offers the web spiders. It loves the permalinks. It loves the fact that each page has meta tags for easy recognition of keywords. When Google loves you it pays you back with quick indexing and good ranking for a keyword.
So just how easy is it to set one of these up? We’re going to give you five quick steps that will have your blog up and running in less than two hours from start to finish. There’s not enough space here to cover all the options but this will get you started.
In order to effectively use Wordpress, and own the real estate you are going to have to buy a domain (about $10.00) and get a hosting service (about $10.00 a month). There are two steps here that are going to slow you down because you really want to think about them.
The first is selecting a domain name. If you’re a local business and the name of your company is Smith and Son Plumbing, and you service Kansas City, it probably would be better to get plumberskansascity.com rather than using your company name.
Think about that for a minute. If you live in Kansas City and your tub backs up and you use the internet to find a plumber, what would you enter in the search? Probably Plumbers Kansas City right? Remember, the domain name does not have to be the name of your site. When visitors go to plumberskanasascity.com they will arrive on a site whose name is whatever you make it like Smith and Son.
So now you have a domain and a hosting service. Go to the hosting service control panel or C Panel and find the red icon for Fantastico and click it. A menu will come up and you want to click Wordpress. You’ll be asked for the URL for the site, site name, create a user name and password and enter a valid email. Click install.
Boom. You have your blog. Okay it’s a lumpy looking blue thing that is the default but we can fix that. What we want to do first though is clean up the default. There are a bunch of categories that will not be relevant to your subject so we just go into the dashboard and start deleting with a click of a mouse, those headings that we don’t want and adding the ones we do.
Now to get rid of the default design or theme as it’s called. There are over 1,000 free themes available for you to choose from so this is the other time killer. Switching themes, once you selected one you like is a snap. And if you don’t like it no worries, you can swap it out for another.
The only thing missing now is content so we need to add a post or article. You’ll find that the tool for this resembles Word and you can simply cut and paste an article into it or create it in the tool. What’s really cool is you can add meta tags to this page and that goes a long way to making it Google friendly. Click a button to publish and your blog is up and running.
This doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the cool things you can do with plugins and other features. It just gives you an idea as to how to use Wordpress and how easy it is to create a professional website without any design skills. If you need a site you need Wordpress.
Need some extra cash? Who doesn’t in these tough economic times? But there is good news. Thanks to the internet almost anybody can make at least a little something on the side and some people can make a ton of dough. You’ve heard that before right? You’re afraid of scams right? Wel, there are legitimate home based businesses and as you read through this article you are almost certain to find something that seems like a fit for you.
Don’t believe me? Read on.
The idea of being able to work from home is so appealing to most people. No commute, no dry cleaning bills, time with the kids, no boss or office politics. All that sounds great but that only applies if you go whole hog and decide to make a full time living at home. If you’re like most people you don’t want to give up the security of a full time job and its benefits but you’d like to make some extra bucks. Well if you’re good at what you do full time, or you have a hobby that your passionate about, odds are you can convert that to cash.
Check out these ideas.
- Blogging
The easiest and fastest way to get online is to start a blog. You can get the website free at Blogger or any number of other sites. This is a great option if you have something that you’re passionate about. Now if you want to make money, your blog should have some value and not just be about you and your life. You can add Adsense ads, Amazon ads or links to an affiliate program to monetize the site.
- Freelancing
If you have a technical skill, administrative support skills, finance or management experience, are an engineer or have experience in advertising then you can probably freelance and make a nice side income. There are several sites that specialize in matching up freelancers with firms looking for their particular skills either for a one time project or on an ongoing basis.
- Virtual Assistant
Does a small legal firm really need a full time bookkeeper? Can a small sales office really afford to hire somebody to organize and track leads? There are all kinds of administrative duties that are being outsourced to virtual assistants. It’s not just limited to traditional computer skills like typing, excel sheets, accounting etc but more and more answering phones as customer service reps or help desks is being accomplished by work at home assistants. You can Google the term and find resources to get jobs or you can advertise yourself on the free classifieds.
- Writing
If you have a knack for writing there are a ton of opportunities. Web sites need content and often will hire freelancers to provide it. Other content sites will let you write about whatever you like and then give you a percentage of the advertising revenue they earn from the page your story runs on. Writing can actually become a full time gig if you’re any good at it.
There are actually a ton of work from home ideas that are available on the internet. Take the time to carefully research the subject and you will be certain to find one right for you.
Are you at your wits end? You’ve been at this internet marketing thing for months and you just aren’t making the kind of money that you expected. You’re looking for that “Aha” moment when you finally get it but it just can’t be found. Well get ready because you are about to learn the best kept secret to making money on the net and internet selling.
You probably already know this, but the very reason that makes internet marketing so attractive is the same reason that makes making money on the net selling anything so difficult. It is a huge market place and it doesn’t cost much to get started. And guess what. That’s no secret. Millions across the world are trying to do exactly what you are doing and the competition is absolutely fierce.
You’re probably getting some traffic to your site if you’ve been doing any of the standard traffic generation strategies. The problem is turning those visitors into buyers. If you don’t have Google analytics installed on your site that’s the first thing you have to do. If you don’t know where your visitors are going on your site, where they are coming from and how long they stay, it’s going to be tough to figure out what to do. Google analytics is free and takes about two minutes to install. Get it if you don’t have it. Oh, and that’s not the big secret I was talking about.
The best kept secret of making money on the net isn’t really a secret at all. It’s a relationship that we experience every day but as soon as we sit down behind a computer we completely forget that it exists. It’s called human interaction. That sale that you got was the result of a human hand, driven by directions from a human brain, to type in the credit card number to buy your product. That sale is more than just a line on a sales report. It represents a conscious human decision that your product filled a need and was worth the price.
Because there is no face to face contact maybe it’s easy just to think about clicks and page views and not who’s doing the clicking. We spend so much time optimizing the site and the traffic campaigns so they can be seen by machines that we forget we really want humans to be motivated to visit.
Each visitor is a potential customer and each customer is a potential future sale. So how do we “interact” with these visitors? How can you develop a trusting relationship? If you have the answer to that then you have differentiated yourself from 90% of the competition.
The secret is to give before you take. You need to understand your market and what they are concerned about and what they are thinking about. Once you have that, their first experience when they hit your page is you giving them a solution to their concerns. They don’t care about you, they don’t care about the name of your product they just want to know the answer to their search question. Give it to them then sell further down the page.
In fact offer them free information. If you sell dog supplies, how tough would it be to come up with a 4 page report on how to train your dog to stop barking? Make it a PDF and offer it as a free report. All they have to do is give you their name and email address. List building is critical.
So the secret to making money on the net is simply to remember that you are serving people. If they feel they are getting bad service, or as is more common, no service, they are gone and so is your opportunity.
Do you have a business, large or small, that has a specific geographical service area? If you do, then you are probably using traditional methods to market your firm right? Have you ever considered using local internet marketing to drive new business?
For many companies the answer is no and the reason for that is they believe that the internet has too broad a reach to be relevant to their service area. And until fairly recently they were correct. However today, more and more resources are being put to use to “localize” the internet, particularly in search, to make it a more useful source of information and that’s important news for internet marketing of local businesses.
Why is that?
Let’s take a look at some very surprising statistics.
- According to the Kelsey Group, 70% of all American households are using the internet to research information when looking for local services and products. That is a huge number.
- If you are in a B to B business, 31% of all businesses looking for local products search for them on the internet.
- And perhaps the most surprising statistic, product information and price comparisons are done online but 61% of those products researched are actually purchased offline. That coupled with the fact that 90% of all purchases are made within 50 miles of the consumer’s home speaks volumes to the importance of internet marketing for local business.
This data is not lost on the search engines, social media sites and cell phone providers. There is a continual effort to bring local data to local users. The more this trend develops, the more users are going to rely on it. Shouldn’t your company be a part of this?
Think about it a moment. With GPS technology, a user can query an application on his or her mobile device asking for specific directions to “whatever”. “Where’s the nearest drugstore?” or “Where’s the nearest Wells Fargo ATM?” The application will deliver specific directions based on the GPS location of the user and the GPS location of the search results. Do you think this kind of instant information technology is going to go away?
If you are still not impressed with these statistics and examples consider this. 43% of all the searches done on the Google network include a geographical identifier. That means hundreds of millions of searches each month have either a zip code, city, state or other identifier to make the results relevant to a specific geographic area. That is pretty awesome.
Try this little experiment. Go to Google and enter [keyword tool] and click the “I’m feeling lucky” button. This will take you to Google’s External Keyword tool. Put in the type of business you are and then add your geographic location and hit enter. What you get back will be the number of searches made each month for your type business in your service area.
For example if you put in “plumber Redondo Beach” you’ll get back a little over 300 searches made. Now Redondo Beach is a town of about 63,000 so those are not bad results. Imagine if you could convert 10% of those searches into service calls. At an average of $150 per call, you would be increasing your monthly revenue by $4500.
Armed with this information, is there any reason you can think of that would cause you to believe you shouldn’t be involved with local internet marketing for your business? Now it’s a matter of laying out a plan and getting your name in front of those local searches.
If you are really, really passionate about something, be it cooking, politics, auto repair, fly fish lures or even worm farming; you can turn that passion into profit with a blog. Blogging for profit is a relatively new phenomenon but it’s growing fast thanks to two things. Access to the internet is now truly global and still growing bringing in millions of new users each year. Add to this huge market, blogging platforms that are SEO friendly and don’t require any technical skills to run and you have a perfect mix for a passionate blogger to be heard.
And here’s the really cool thing. You can do this and make a couple of extra bucks a month or you can replace your day job. It’s really all up to you and how much you want and how much time you have to devote to it.
And I was serious about blogging about any subject. When you have an audience in the billions there are at least a few people out there who have the same interest as you do. For example did you know that the phrase “worm farming” is searched over 12,000 times a month? Worm farming, go figure. So the lesson here is whatever your interest there’s a way to get visitors and if you can get visitors you can make some money.
So how can you do that? Well it really depends on what your motivation is. If you look at the blog as a hobby, something that you really enjoy but don’t want to put more than a few hours a week into, and it’d be nice to make some extra cash each month but you’re not counting on it, then running simple to install contextual ads like Google’s Adwords or Amazon.com’s network is probably the best bet.
With AdWords Google will run text ads that are closely tied to the text on the page. When a person clicks on that ad you get paid. It may not be much or it could be substantial, it all depends on the subject of your content. If you’re blogging about pharmaceuticals for coronary patients you’re going to get Adwords that pay more because they are very competitive. If your subject is dog training, not so much.
With Amazon your visitor has to click through and actually buy something and then you get a commission. The plus side of these two is that they are fire and forget. You put them on the site and then never have to touch them again. The down side is there isn’t a lot of money to be made.
If you want to get serious about blogging for profit there’s a couple of things you need to do. First you’re going to have to learn a little search engine optimization. If you’re using Wordpress for your blog this is already done for you. You’ll have to learn basics for keyword research so your articles will rank in the search engines and drive traffic to you.
But most importantly, you have to deliver that passion you have for the subject. You have to provide that visitor with value. You want them coming back again and again.
One way to do that is give away free information using an auto responder program. Put together a little 4 page report and tuck in onto a password protected page. Then offer it to your visitors in return for them giving you their name and email address. You email them the URL and the password and bingo, you have the start of a list and the money is in the list.
Using that list you can send more good information and become a trusted source. You can also provide links to products you have or promote. This is where the money really is.
Just always remember that blogging for profit does not mean your ultimate job is marketing. Your ultimate job is to give value and build credibility with your visitor.
