Archive for 'December, 2007'

I write a lot of in-depth articles with techniques to get you more traffic to your web site and better search engine rankings. I think sometimes I give so many tips in one article that a few may fall between the cracks, so every now and again I’ll try to give you a post about one specific thing to help you. Today’s focus will be “Secret Link Juice Keyword Techniques“. I was reminded of this when I saw the post The name game – Using keywords in URL filenames.

Keyword Basics for Newbies or Those Unfamiliar

If you’ve done a lot of SEO or keyword research work you can probably skip this section and move on to the next part. I include it because when I was a newbie or not that good at SEO I hated it when articles assumed I knew all the “obvious” techniques. This is not a new concept – I’ve written about it before. But if you read that article I just linked you’ll find that it may be more important than you previously thought. I their example they improved their ranking and moved up some 70-odd slots in SERP’s by doing this. It’s a pretty simple concept. As an example – if you want to sell usb flash drives, you should probably try to get the domain name “usbflashdrive.com” or some kind of variation on it. They use the keywords also in the article and page names which become URL’s. If you are completely brand new to SEO work and keyword research – I highly recommend you read this Keyword Primer. No string attached, just click and read.

That’s the simple part. Now I’m going to teach you how to go a bit farther. You “might think you are using the right keywords”, but are you really? Are you using the best keywords? The most searched keywords? Are you using keywords there is the most competition for, or the least? You should do some very simple keyword research to find out what keywords you should be targeting on your web site or blog. You might even do this research before you buy your domain name and purchase a URL with the most searched for keywords. This the basis for all SEO work on your web site or blog and training yourself to do it as if it were second nature. There are many, many free and pay-for keyword research tools. I would get started with the free ones, and eventually pickup some of the paid ones as you need them (and can afford them). We’ll tackle the paid keyword research tools in another post.

My top 5 Free Keyword Research Tools

Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool
WordTracker’s free keyword tracking tool is pretty good. Just enter the keywords you want to do research on and you get a list returned not only with best suggestions, but also with the amount of searches performed in the last month (the top 100 in fact).

Adwords Keyword Tool
While the Adwords Keyword tool doesn’t give you an actual number, you do get to see how much suggested keywords were used in the last month vs. overall as an average. The other thing that’s nice is that you get a snapshot of what the advertiser competition is like, so you know how many others may be competing for the same words.

Browse Keywords
This is a really cool tool because it visually shows the keyword suggestions. You don’t get any numbers on how many searches though.

Keyword Research Tool
For some reason, when using Webmaster Toolkit’s free Keyword Research tool you get some phrases that I haven’t seen in the other ones. Phrases that seem to be more niche and sales related, like “1gb memory drive”, “1gb memory stick”, and “1gb usb flash drive”. These are really handy variations that seem to be shopping type keyword searches people would perform. Again – no numbers on how many searches any of these receives.

Good Keywords is a software download program that you can install on your PC to do FREE keyword research. That’s right – the software and doing research within it is completely FREE, this is a Freeware keyword research tool. I highly recommend downloading and installing this software, it does not contain any additional programs or adware – this product is very well known by those doing SEO work.

Now that you have some ideas of great keywords, when you are writing content for your site you can use these over and over again. First you have the best keywords in your domain name. They you make sure that you use the keywords efficiently in your paths and URL’s. What this means is, if you are using WordPress for example and have Permalinks setup right, the title of your post(s) will become that URL, like a page or post titled “1GB Memory Stick Sale” would become usbflashdrive.com/1GB-Memory-Stick-Sale. So now the keywords that were in the title of your article (and will be the HTML title as well as the page content heading) will also be in the URL. That’s why a better title for this page might have been “1GB Memory Stick Sale and Cheap Deals”. See – now with the 2 additional keywords you are going to pick up even more oddball search keywords like “1GB cheap memory stick” or “deals memory stick sale” or something. Vary the keywords in your title, and also different ways in your article. Do it without being spammy or tricky, just try different variations. Again – this is very basic stuff, but now for the…

Secret Link Juice Keyword Techniques

OK – first off these aren’t really secret. But I feel like they are because I don’t see very many web sites or blogs taking advantage of them at all. I know they work, in fact they work well – and you should make them part of your daily posting routine every time you write content.

Secret Keyword Technique #1: Images
Now you’re probably pissed thinking “that’s not a secret at all!”. Hold on big fella, wait a minute – I do have some techniques I use that you may not be aware of. First and foremost – every blog and web site should have images. I am COMPLETELY guilty of NOT using images to my advantage on this blog. I’m an idiot for not doing it nearly at all the first 6 months this blog was online. In fact, the last few posts are the only ones on this entire site (so far) that use images at all.

WHY you should use images: The most common answer to this question is because it makes people more interested. They stay longer, read more, look at more pages, and it even boosts your trust factor a bit with your audience (it makes you look more professional). The REAL reason (for me) is because it is not only aesthetically pleasing, but it gives you one more way to use additional keywords on your page to get better search engine rankings!

WHAT to do with images: A 4 Step Process:

1. FIND a good image.
   • Use Google Images, Stock Xchng, or visit this comprehensive list of free stock photo sites.
2. NAME the image using the best keywords.
   • Instead of file97a.gif name it 1gb-usb-flash-drive.gif
3. PLACE the images in a nice keyword-named folder.
   • groups your images in folders named with keywords, like usbflashdrive.com/flashdrives
4. INSERT the image into your page or post.
   • you want to take full advantage of the alt tag for every image your insert. If you don’t know HTML, it’s time you learned about the image html tag. You’re going to add keywords and keyword phrases to the alt tag of the images you’re inserting like this (**see code snippet below)
     Try to form a loose sentence that makes halfway sense using keywords and keyword phrases (don’t repeat) for the alt tag of every image your insert.

**code snippet

img src=”/flashdrives/1gb-usb-flash-drive.gif” alt=”perfect deal on a usb flash memory stick cheap price”

You may have been using alt tags for years, and YES – that helps your SEO and SERP’s (search engine result pages). HOWEVER…history and lots of experience will show that using good keywords in multiple locations DRAMATICALLY INCREASES the results! Having the keywords in the filename, directory name, and HTML code tags really helps! In addition, there’s one more side-benefit I hadn’t even talked about yet: Google Images! That’s right, Google Images has it’s own web crawler that does nothing but look for images. Of course images named with keywords and placed in keyword-named directories are going to be more relevant, and come up higher in search results than tens of thousands of others. I have had many sites that ranked rather poorly in google search for certain keywords, but DOMINATED google image results! I have one site right now where over half the traffic comes from google images. My biggest blogging mistake on this site was not using images to their full advantage in every single post.

Secret Keyword Technique #2: Links
Now you probably really think I’m stupid. Yes – links are a secret keyword technique. WHY? Because of the “title” tag. That’s right – the title tag. First of all – I do this and it works. Don’t believe me? Some may feel that the jury is still out on this one, but I know for a fact when I started doing this to key important links it helped my sites a lot. The weight it carries is different with each search engine. But with the number of crawlers and social search blog news aggregator headline sucking link harvesting crawlers out there – why not take advantage of all the keywords you can at all times?

Again – you’re going to need to go into the HTML code, and you’re going to be adding a “title” attribute to your links, like in this example:

a href=”/cheap-flash-drive-sale-deals” title=”find a deal on a cheap usb flash memory drive 1GB and bigger”
img src=”/flashdrives/1gb-usb-flash-drive.gif” alt=”perfect deal on a usb flash memory stick cheap price”

See how that works? As far as it’s function in the browser, it just creates a tooltip with that text when you move your mouse over the link. But it makes the page that much more relevant for those keywords. Imagine all the words on a page and in the HTML code of a web page were people. Every word was one person, and they were all in the same room. The words around a link say “that page is about usb flash drives”. The link title words say “it sure is, they have a cheap price too”. The URL words say “this whole web site is about usb flash drives”, and the directory words say “well my folder has nothing but flash drive images”. The image words say “my picture is about a 1GB flash drive”, and the link around that images says “yeah, but if you click it you’ll find a cheap 1GB drive”.

See the relevance? See how all the words, and links, and URL’s, and directory names, and image names, and link titles all become part of a relevant conversation? All the keywords in all the right places contribute as a whole to the end goal of bringing targeted traffic to the web site, and as much of it as possible. That’s the last thought I’ll leave you with. It doesn’t matter if you get 1,000 people per day to your “usbflashdrive.com” web site unless all 1,000 people are actually looking to buy or for information on a “usb flash drive”. In fact – I’d much rather have 100 people searching for usb flash drives than 1,000 people not! I have had no problem making $100 a month on a web site with only 100 visitors per day when the traffic was highly targeted. I have one web site that is now getting in excess of 10,000 visits per day, and I’m having trouble making $1 a day from it because they traffic is coming in from far too many keywords. Which leads me to the final…

Secret Keyword Technique #3: Laser Targeting
Like we just talked about – you want to make sure you’ve done your homework. Do some keyword research and find out how many people are looking for your product, service, or information. Don’t paint your web site with a wide stroke brush, laser target your keywords down to a very fine niche – so 90% of the time your visitors will be staring at exactly what they were looking for from the very first click. Your visitors will be greatful for saving them time, and you will be very happy because you can easily make much larger amounts of money from very small amounts of traffic!

Do you have secret keyword techniques that have worked for you? Be sure to comment now and share them with all of us!

So you want more RSS subscriptions? There are many ways on the web to get good backlinks and link love. The link juice you used to be able to get from link directories has just about dried up for good. What is now very popular is the social aspect of the web – the interactions, recommendations, reviews, clicks, and votes of people. One new thing I’ve seen spun a few different ways now is the “quid pro pro” game or “something for something”. Google hasn’t found a good way to fight this, and honestly I don’t know if they could (or should).

Basically you sign up at rsshugger.com, create a free account and add your blog. Then create a review on your site about rsshugger.com linking back. Enter your review URL in your profile – and you get a free page on rsshugger.com linking back to your site for 10 years! And not just any page, it’s an “RSS Page” which lists the links in your feed. What’s better than having a list of links to your site? In addition, they have a top 100 directory you can get listed in depending on how many views you get to your feed page. Unlike a lot of the little social link love projects this one doesn’t require much effort beyond the initial setup and review. Why not create an account and a review and get your free rss page today? Get more RSS subscribers (and a hug) today!

Oops….what I meant to say was “widgets like entrecard ‘suck my time’”. There I go with my fat fingers again! Hopefully the title will make for some good linkbait anyway. Check out Entrecard, which is what I call YAW or “Yet Another Widget”. You will see my Entrecard widget in my sidebar right now! Why is it there? Why is the blogrush widget back after I said goodbye to it over a month ago?

All good questions! The blogrush widget came back after I read ShoeMoney and others were doing alright with it. After all the initial “growing pains” it seems to be actually bringing traffic after all. I also first heard about Entrecard when Shoemoney wrote about it a few months back after he had seen their booth at a convention. I hadn’t thought much about it, and sometimes I am one of the last to jump on these “me too” widget bandwagons. I’ve always been a fan of “keeping it simple” on my site as much as possible. If you add a bunch of widgets and external calls to other web sites you can dramatically increase the load time of all your pages site wide. Then again, sometimes I forget that every little bit of promotion helps.

What is Entrecard? It sounds like one of those bad “Entertainment Books” full of restaurant coupons for $50 doesn’t it? I can explain it pretty simply – in a nutshell it’s just a rehashed modern day banner exchange system. Period. Create an account, upload a pic, add your code, show your pic on other people’s sites (with the code installed) based on the number of times they are served on your site. I guess the name makes sense, “Entrecard” sounds like “Introduce me Card” – like another site introducing yours with a little business card.

You’re probably wondering – what’s the twist, there has to be something that makes it different? Well there is. Entercard is just a bit “social” if you know what I mean. I told you earlier in very basic terms how it works, but neglected to give you the full low-down.

How Entrecard Works

• Signup for an account
• Upload your graphic (make a good linkbait style one)
• Click “Campaigns” and find other Entrecard sites. For every one you click “drop yours” you get one EC or EntreCredit
• Other sites will now find you in Campaigns, and when they “drop” their card at your site you get one EC
• When you “drop” a card your pic is displayed in the Inbox portion of that site’s Dashboard
• Once you get some EC’s you can ‘spend’ them to advertise for an entire day on another site in their widget

So the social aspect is the fact that you have to surf the Campaign directory a little bit to earn some credits. As soon as my account was created people were dropping their cards on me and I had some credits. I surfed about a dozen other sites in the directory and in about 5-8 minutes I had 20 credits. This widget was a no-brainer because I had an account created, added the widget to my blog, surfed the directory and was done in about 15 minutes. Now I can just go in there a few times per week and I should be able to advertise for a day on a few blogs using my credits in no time! I could spend some right now if I wanted to!

Now I’ll tell you what made me look at Entrecard today in the first place. I read a post on 45n5 about Why you should care about Entercard and it reminded me of a very basic principle: the idea is spreading. That’s right – you want in on this because the idea is ‘spreading’. It’s VIRAL! It’s hot. People are actively using it, and you can get the word out about your site by using it. Actually one of the reasons I’ve thought about getting rid of the myBlogLog widget is because it doesn’t seem to be hot anymore. Out of 3 dozen visitors a half dozen seem to be myBlogLog users. It’s completely ok to add and remove widgets, links, services, or basically anything based on current trends – if it benefits your blog or web site.

What was my blogging mistake this time? Not recognizing this early on as something that would virally catch on – I should have added the widget sooner! I would have started receiving traffic long ago! If you get an Entrecard widget, be sure to “drop yours” on my site! If you have a comment about Entrecard or widgets in general – comment now!

**UPDATE**
I wanted to talk a bit about the ‘social’ aspect of Entrecard. The cool thing about it is after you get your account people immediately start “dropping their card” on you. You’ll see their pics listed in your Dashboard. I figured out why people do this right away when you are basically “fresh meat”. It’s because you are new that they want to drop their card and signup for advertising with you, because your rates (the amount of credits they have to spend) for advertising are just 2 or 3 EC’s when you first signup until you have some activity. So you get a flurry of people wanting to get in on this action (cheap advertisement!). The more cards YOU drop, the ads you accept, and the amount of activity on your site drives the cost to advert on your site way up!

So people are dropping cards on you like mad! Every time this happens you are going to get an email and it’s going to have a URL to their site in it. Click the link, open their site, and “drop yours” on their entre widget. Every time you do you get 1 more EC. If you get a bunch of emails, this is a quick way to get more EC’s. You can do it once per day for every site as well! When I was looking at other sites under “Campaigns”, one of the things I was confused by at first was the “approved requests rejected” stat. I get it now, because if you approve a bunch of site adverts, and then the EC cost of your site goes way up, you can choose to “reject” sites waiting in line you already approved (who were approved at a lower EC cost), to get higher paying ones in their more quickly. So you can honor those committments, or piss off a bunch of people – the choice is yours.

You can also go to someone’s profile page and add a “recommendation” for their site. I’ve no idea what purpose this serves other than driving up the EC cost to advert on their site. I have to say though, beyond the advertising part of entrecard – the social part has been nice too. What I mean is, in order to get EC’s I was forced to visit a lot of blogs that I didn’t know existed. I actually did find some nice content and great articles that led me to other cool services and gave me future ideas as well. I found a few sites I’ve contacted as a result of this and have made some good blogging contacts. In addition, I have been getting some great traffic from it, and the CTR from the advert (for me) seems to be pretty good as well!

The year 2007 was pretty busy for me web site and blog wise. I expect 2008 to be even busier. If I have learned anything this year, it’s that in 2008 I need to learn to stay focused, work toward goals, and build on existing projects. The problem for me isn’t that I don’t have enough content to post. It’s that I don’t have nearly enough time to write it all up and monetize it to its fullest potential. I have way too many web sites and projects to do any of them to their fullest potential. But I’m too greedy to let most of them go for fear that the one(s) I drop will be the ones that would have worked. I have resolved over the last few months to rid myself of many that were never started and keep only the ones that I feel very strongly about. I am letting go all alternate domains like .net, .biz, and .info where I own the dot com, and getting rid of all domains not developed in at least one year. I think I own 50 domains and I may just weed that down to 25-30.

One of the things that came to mind recently is the amount of work I do on web sites vs. the expertise I share throughout my network of web sites. I think that 95% of web sites and blogs fail. I mean that they fail at meeting their goals. Whether it’s a goal of making money, becoming a “pro-blogger”, or getting 1,000 visitors a day – nearly all web sites “FAIL“. I can carelessly make this statement since it’s probably true. Alexa alone should show that the bulk of activity on the web worldwide comes from the top 5-10% of sites. Why is this? It’s just about the same as the law of wealth itself. Those willing to put in the time reap the rewards. Those that consistently work at it achieve results. Slow and steady wins the race, fast and sporadic loses at an uneven pace.

In 2008 I will sell and promote the hell out of 3 eBooks. These eBooks will show, in step by step minute detail, how to become successful creating, managing, and monetizing web sites. The first eBook will detail “how to become successful with a niche site“. The second eBook will show you “how to explode web site activity, growth, and backlinks by using social media“. The third and final eBook will teach you “how to become successful promoting and selling your own expertise“. I WILL BECOME VERY SUCCESSFUL SELLING THESE eBooks. I also predict that 95% of the people that will buy my eBooks will utterly fail and only 5% will realize any degree of success.

Why would I say this? It’s the law of the land: Survival of the Fittest! They most certainly won’t fail because they didn’t get quality materials from me. I will give the specific detailed steps and formulas including pictures and checklists to make them as successful as they “want to be”. The keywords are “want to be”. How many will take action? How many will get off their ass and do the work? Who will completely follow my directions and put in the required time to become successful? Success in any line of work or business is a full time job. If you expect to become successful online and only to “part time work“, the prospect of you becoming successful is only about as great as winning the lottery! It will only happen either by luck or completely by accident.

In 2008 I will concentrate on monetizing my expertise. I think that my biggest blogging mistake to date – was trying to become successful on adsense and affiliate revenue alone. I have gained lots of expertise and knowledge over the last 10-15 years that is worth ten times more than an monthly revenue stream I could generate. Stay tuned and subscribe to this blog if you haven’t already – and in the coming months I will teach you to do the same!

December Adsense pays more per click, learn how to PREPARE TO MAKE MORE MONEY during this time of year than all the other months combined!

Why is December so important? Because it’s the most profitable month of the year! Think about it – it all has to do with supply and demand. In December more people are shopping online than any other time of the year. There are hundreds of thousands of web sites competing for those online shoppers, and many will pay top dollar to get them! You can earn more money per click now than at any time of year!

Online Holiday Advertising Trends

I have had web sites and blogs online for the last 10 years. I am always amazed by this time of year. I am also amazed how it mirrors the brick and mortar retail store world.

• More Traffic: Your site should get more traffic this month than any time of year, regardless of niche – simply because more people are searching.
• More Clicks: Your site should be getting more clicks on ads this month than any other of the year since so many are searching for something (most to buy)
• More Money Per Click: Whether you’re using Adsense, AdCenter, or Yahoo you should be seeing a much higher rate paid per click. Personally, many of my sites are going from 3-8 cents per click to 35-50 cents per click.
• Higher Total Orders: If you’re using Commission Junction, Amazon, or LinkShare you should be seeing higher per order commissions this month due to the holiday ordering season.
• More Searches and Recommendations: You will probably see more weird searches on your site this month than any other. In addition to that, make sure your site or blog has some “recommended” items or articles at the end of each content block – because people will follow those more so this month than any other

What YOU should be doing to take advantage

Do you have a blog? It doesn’t matter what kind of web site you have to take advantage of the holiday buying season. If you have a straight blog monetized with adsense, just post more frequently to get more traffic this month. POST EVERY DAY! More traffic means more page views, which means more money in your pocket this month! If you don’t advertise in other ways, consider monetizing in some other way, like Amazon or Commission Junction. That way you could directly recommend and review products and / or gift ideas all month long – no matter what you niche!

Do you have a forum? Start a thread or topic “What do you want for Christmas” or “My Holiday Wish List”. If you monetize with adsense gift ads should show up quickly – or you can monetize with other ads. An eBay search box would even be good!

Do you have an online store? Start a “wish list” feature, recommend products, have an “email to friend” feature, have the ability to save the shopping cart for long periods of time, review new products each day, feature products, have a list of “hottest items” – take advantage of every opportunity you have to show more products and features! Whether your’re writing about your grand kids, how to train a dog, or how to earn money online – you need to be well aware of how advertising trends and seasonal changes will affect activity to your web site.

In closing, I will remind you that the holiday buying season DOES NOT END on December 25th! It usually continues right up until January 15th or so as many people receive cash and gift certificates and many don’t return to work or school until the first week of January. You can expect the high level of activity to taper off about mid-January for a winter lull until about mid-February or Valentine’s day. I have made the blogging mistake of not taking advantage of this time of year in the past – don’t you do it too! Do you have a comment on trends? Please – comment now below!