Thursday, January 31, 2008

Planning Out Your Basic SEO Strategy With Keyword Research, Content And Links

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most talked about topics online these days. Every webmaster is looking to crack the secret code that will land their website in Google top 10. It seems like there exist many experts who know some kind of secret seo strategy, but does one really exist?

Back in the day it was really simple to rank for competitive keywords when black hat and spam techniques still work like stuffing tags and keywords into web pages and feeding spiders cloaked pages with junk content only to push the real page to the visitor the way you wanted them to see it.

Planning your seo strategy is not as hard as you may think.

It is really not necessary to hire someone to do it for you. Many of these simple techniques can be done in a couple of minutes and will have you getting organic search traffic in a couple of months or even weeks.

Here is a list of some basic things you can do to start optimizing your website or blog for the search engines.

1. Keyword Research


This is where you begin your journey. Every search engine needs to find relevant content on web pages and you will begin by deciding which word is going to be used to base the content of the page around.

It is best to try and target three to four phrase keywords at first. They are easier to rank for and have less competition. They also tend to be people who are looking more to buy and not doing research with a one or two word phrase.

Here is a really cool free keyword research tool that I use daily at SEO Book:

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php

Play around with it a little bit and see how many times people are searching for something. Find a keyword in your niche that gets a couple of hundred hits a day.

2. Content Building

When you have found the keyword you want to rank for it's now ready to build your web page. Don't worry about having to write a page for every keyword. Just one keyword optimized page can bring in traffic from different variations of the original keyword also.

The only meta tags that you need to worry about in your page is the title, keywords and description tags. I think sometimes that all search engines care about is the title of the page and description since these are what shows up in the results.

Your title should be clever and have a call to action in it. It is important because this is what visitors will see when they search for your keyword. If you just name it a boring keyword it will not get as many click throughs as a call to action headline. The same applies to writing the description. Remember your keyword will show up bold in the result pages, so try to use it more then once for extra attention.

Finish building your web page or blog post now by adding the content and placing your keyword naturally in the body copy, but don't over use it.

3. Link Building

This is the final phase of your basic seo strategy. In this part you just want to build links back to your web page or blog post using the keyword and variations of it in the anchor text.

There are many places where you can get free back links to your page like Digg, Craigslist, MySpace, Facebook, directories, forums and blogs. Start off by writing an article and blasting it out to a couple of article directories like ezinearticles.com which has a high page rank and will get you indexed quickly.

Content and links bring natural search engine traffic it is that simple. Sometimes you do not even need links and can make a blog post and have it start to rank in a couple of weeks.

Good keyword research combined with content and links is your basic seo strategy that you can start today and get results with.

If you want to learn more about seo I highly suggest you check out SEO Book. Buy it once and get free updates for life every time there are major changes in the seo world. It's recommended and used by college professors in MBA level courses around the world. Click here for the #1 ranked SEO Book and the only current SEO book in the world.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Top Three Reasons Why You Must Be Using Ad Tracking Software

One of the most vital pieces of software that you should invest in before anything in Internet marketing is a good ad tracker. If you are serious about making money with Internet marketing and want to get the biggest return on investment, you have to track your ads with a good ad tracker.

Without one you are basically marketing blindly and will never know if anything you do is effective or not at converting sales or building a mailing list. One of the best ways to lose money real fast, especially when it comes to placing e-zine solo ads is to send out your ad without having some type of tool to track results.

Below are my top three reasons why you must be using ad tracking software in your daily Internet marketing routine.

1. Learn Where Your Traffic Is Coming From

It is important to know the source of your traffic to your lead capture page or website. You can save a lot of time during your day if you are able to concentrate more on marketing in places where you can see you are pulling more traffic from.

If you do a lot of article marketing or forum marketing with an ad tracker, you can see if one directory or forum pulls in more traffic then the other one and you will be able to concentrate your marketing efforts on source with the higher click-through rate.

There is no sense in promoting an affiliate program and then asking yourself if it is working or not when you do not know what places are more effective in marketing your website.

2. Split-Testing Different Ads For Maximum Click-Through Rate

If you ever used Google Adwords you will notice that there is a section in the account area where you can put different variations of ads and run them in one campaign rotating them evenly so you can see which one performs better. This is what it means to run a split-test.

When you split-test your ads or website copy, you have the ability to see which copy converts better. This is important for people who advertise using Adwords, solo-Ads, classified sites and sales pages where just changing one word could mean the difference between a sale and someone passing it on.

After you split-test your ads for a long time, you will start to see a huge increase in your income when you know which ads people are clicking on more than others. Always run at least 3-4 different variations on an ad and then determine which one is performing better and drop the rest. You can even take it a step further and take your best performing ad and change around word placement and optimize it even more.

3. Tracking Your Return On Investment

Most ad tracking software gives you the ability to track how many sales you get or how many leads you make. This is done by simply placing a hidden code in the thank you page or confirmation page of a website which registers in the ad tracker as an action or sale.

Usually the code is a simple hidden pixel that is embedded in the page that tells the ad tracker that someone has visited and what they purchased. Some ad trackers can even track sales of affiliate programs of products you do not own, although the webmaster of the program would have to agree to place the code on his site which he should not object to because you are only helping him make more money.

When you track your return on investment, you can always re-run campaigns that have made you money and drop ones that don't convert so every time you spend money you will minimize your losses and maximize your gains. This is how everyone online does it.

So you can see without an ad tracker, you are pretty much shooting blindly and hoping to hit a target. If you are interested in ending the frustration of online marketing and not seeing results, you first need to install some ad tracking software before you go about doing anything.

When it comes down to buying an ad tracker you can wither get a web based service for a monthly fee or install it on your own server. I prefer to have my own and be in control.

Click here for an affordable ad tracking software with link cloaking technology.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Instant Targeted Traffic With Expired Domain Names

One of the best methods to get targeted traffic to your website right away is with the use of expired domain names. This is a method that is very rarely used by website owners and can literally send thousands of visitors to your website overnight.

Before you go out and buy an expired domain name you have to do some research and find out if it is worth picking up. Everyday thousands of domain names expire and are available for you to pick up at market price. Some of the really good names are snatched up by auction houses and sold for a higher price starting at $60 and up.

This is much different then buying expired traffic online from traffic brokers. This traffic is very untargeted and brings you no results. When you find a good expired domain, it can bring you very targeted traffic depending on what kind of website it use to be. Many times people have websites that they owned for years and have existing page rank and thousands of backlinks in Google. You can seriously buy it and redirect it to an affiliate program related to the content and have money pouring in. It is also an excellent way to build a mailing list.

Other things that you can do with expired domains are flip them for a higher profit on eBay or sell them on sedo.com which lets you park them and earn money from advertising. You can also develop the domains into new sites and monetize them with affiliate programs and Adsense.

Where do you find expired domains?

One place where I find domains that are about to expire is at Premium Drops. They provide a list of domains about to expire and domains expiring at this moment and also give you vital stats like Alexa ranking, page rank, backlinks and Overture TLD which gives you an estimate of the type-in traffic a domain name will receive.

Good names that are about to expire are very hard to get. If you don't have a drop catching software it is probably going to get picked up by backorder sites like SnapNames. All you have to do is register with SnapNames and put in a request to backorder the domain name. If nobody else wants it you can pick it up for $60, but if other people request it, the domain goes into a private auction.

You can check out other sites like Sedo, GoDaddy, Enom who all have public auctions for expired domain names.

What do you need to look for in an expired domain?

When shopping for names about to drop, there are a couple of indicators that it is a good domain with lots of traffic.

Does it have Alexa ranking?

Anything under 1,000,000 is amazing. This is a good indicator that the site gets a lot of hits. You can go to Alexa and see charts to see if the traffic has maintained itself since expiring.

Does it have page rank?

If you can pick up a domain with existing page rank of 4 or more, you can instantly put up a site and have people pay you money for advertising. All you have to do is go to a forum and advertise one way PR4 links for sale and you will make monthly income.

Does it have a high link popularity?

You want to see that the site is well spread across the Internet in all of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. You also want to make sure that the quality of links is from good authority sites like directories and blogs and not spam links.

If you want to learn more about the opportunity to profit from domain names and picking up expired domains for traffic I recommend checking out these two courses:

Domains Into Dollars


and

Domain Profiteer

They will provide you with everything you need to get started in the domain business.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Using Free Classifieds For Traffic And Leads

One of the quickest ways to get started with driving targeted traffic to your website or blog is through the use of free classifieds. Many of these sites get millions of hits every month and can bring you some serious traffic if you post the right ad.

One of the newest additions is a website called Gumtree.com which is kind of like another Craigslist, but not as plain looking. Craigslist is still great and also has a very high page rank. If you are first putting up a website that is not indexed, just put up a quick ad on Craigslist and you should be indexed in 24 hours becuase Google crawls this site everyday.

It is not unusual to see your ad appear in the search results after posting to Craigslist in as little as one week as long as the search term does not have much competition.

Another site which I use regularly is USFreeAds. This is one of the most visited free classified sites on the Internet and is also crawled by spiders on a daily basis.

Here is a basic outline of what I do for getting my ads to show up in search results when using USFreeAds.

First you want to research what keywords you want to target. For this you can use the free keyword tool at Wordtracker. It gives you up to date results of daily searches for any term you want.

Next we will put in a broad search term like "Make Money Online"

Here are the results as of today:

964 make money online <== (This means that 964 people search for "make money online" every day!)

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Though you might be tempted to go compete with the term "Make Money Online", just know that it has 31,000,000 competing pages in Google and will be next to impossible to show up in USFreeAds on page 1. We need to go through each keyword and check how much competition their is. We need to find something that has about 100,000 or under pages with the phrase in it.

Bonus Tip: An even better way to drill down your research even more is to find out how many people are putting the keyword phrase in their anchor text. To do this simply enter this in the Google search box ==> link: "your keyword here"

Just because their is a lot of competition does not mean many people are optimizing their pages for that keyword. You can find keywords with 1,000,000 competing pages and only a couple of thousand people linking with that keyword. This is what we want to look for.

Let's take the phrase "make money business opportunity online". It gets 19 searches a day, has about 4,500,000 million competition in Google and only has 25,300 people linking with that word in their anchor text. I think that this will be a good phrase to target.

Next we will go to USFreeAds and sign up for the premium account for $10 a month. This allows us to put HTML in our ads and anchor text in the links.

We would then place a new classified and put the keyword in the title. After this write a decent ad describing your product or service and make sure to place the keyword again somewhere in the body of the ad, but don't overdue it.

At the bottom of the ad make sure you link to the target with the keyword in the anchor text. With the premium membership you can also put pictures in your ad and put tags on them which can show up in search engine image results.

That's it your done! Now all you have to do is get a couple of backlinks to your ad from other free classifieds and social bookmarking sites. Go to Craigslist and Gumtree and put up ads their linking to your USFreeAds ad. Next you can sign up for Onlywire.com and submit your ad to a bunch of social networking sites for even more backlinks.

You can even go further and write articles and put up PPC campaigns, but it won't be neccesary. In a couple of weeks you should start to see your ad in Google when you search for that keyword. If it does not show up just do some more keyword research and move on.

Go to USFreeAds and sign up for your premium account and get started with classified advertising to generate traffic and leads for your business.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

The TAS Network: A New Kind Of Article Directory

One of my favorite ways to get traffic to my website is through article marketing. In the coming months I am going to talk about the different ways that I use article marketing to drive tons of traffic and backlinks to my sites and blog.

The usually way to market articles is to submit them to high traffic article directories like EzineArticles.com and SearchWarp. You can also use a service like Article Marketer which automatically submits your article to hundreds of publishers.

Up until recently the only benefit you got out of submitting articles was the free traffic and backlinks from high page rank websites. These directories make their money by selling advertising on their website and they get a lot of traffic because everyday people are submitting fresh and unique content to feed the search engine spiders with.

Just the other day I ran across the coolest thing I have ever seen yet in article marketing. Now authors have the chance to get paid to submit articles and get huge amounts of backlinks and traffic at the same time.

An Internet marketer named Peter Drew has created a network called The Article Sense. This is in it's early stages of development and is sure to give the big boys a run for their money.

What Does The TAS Network Do?

When you become a member of the TAS network, you get your own article directory that you can submit your work to, but you get a share of the advertising revenue generated. It's a revenue sharing article directory, but this is only the beginning of the possibilities.

When you submit an article you can also embed video and your resource box. After this you can click one button and submit to a bunch of social bookmarking sites for even more traffic and your site also comes with an RSS feed to submit.

The TAS network also lets you invite friends for extra earnings and exposure. If you invite somebody to join The Article Sense network, your Google Adsense publisher ID gets displayed on 10% of the articles that they write. Also when you submit an article to the directory your article is shown on 33% of the entire network with your Adsense code embedded in it.

The forum that they provide is absolutely priceless also. It provides a entire 10 step plan of how to get started and market your articles for maximum exposure. The TAS network is absolutely free to join and you get the benefit of submitting your articles and making money at the same time.

I think that this is going to get pretty big. You should try to get in now and start submitting content and build up a nice referral list. It is some easy money.

You can learn more about the Article Sense Network by clicking here: TAS Network

Go and get paid to submit your articles!

Thursday, January 3, 2008

The Idiocy Of Accepting Second Best

I found this online the other day and found it very inspiring. Read this and maybe this year will be the one in which you will transform yourself and start living your life to its fullest potential. It is a long read but well worth it. It will get you thinking about yourself and what has been holding you back from success.

The Idiocy Of Accepting Second Best

By Ted Twietmeyer
12-30-7
www.data4science.net
www.bookonmars.info

I have agonized for some time over writing this, but thought it was past time someone did. Much of this essay is redundant for many readers. But it presents new concepts for others.

America was founded by men who never settled for second best. Despite their flaws and imperfections, they were all men of accomplishment and self-study. Thomas Jefferson was personally trained by George Wythe (1726-1806) to be a lawyer, who himself was a lawyer.

It was a time when life was tough for there was no central heating, air conditioning, electricity or running water. Walls in homes were painted with paint made of sour cream, lead and charcoal to provide a grey color. Ancient Rome had running water and central heating in some buildings, but America in the 1700's did not to the best of my knowledge. Even the church where Patrick Henry gave his famous speech is still standing today and can be visited. The people of 1776 had none of these luxuries we take for granted today.

We tend to think in compressed terms that a relatively short time passed between the time the colonies were established and America's Declaration of Independence in 1776 ­ but this is far from true. In 2007 the state of Virginia celebrated its 400th anniversary. When the Constitution was signed, 169 YEARS had passed under the thumb of the king. It was time for a change so American could be free from the tyranny of England. No more subservience for America............

Read the entire article here: http://www.rense.com/general79/second.htm

Hello And Welcome To The Internet Marketing Den!

Hey everybody, what's up!

My name is Daniel Cassidy and let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am a Musician/Singer/Songwriter and also work full-time as a Graphic Artist in a printing shop. When I am not busy with my band or working, I am always on a mission to make some money! I love making money and especially making money online! I have been at this hard for about two years and have spent a lot of money learning and making mistakes, but now I have it all figured out.

I started this blog to share with you some of the things that I have learned in the IM and affiliate marketing world. I want to share with you my success stories and secrets. Feel free to comment and tell me about your own experiences also in the IM world or with affiliate marketing.

One of my favorite ways to make money and the way that I think is most profitable is with network marketing. I love the idea of residual income. I believe that multi-level marketing is the best way to leverage your income and make passive income. I have been involved with some companies in the past that have not worked out, but I finally found something that I love. You can check out my website

http://www.MoneyFlowForLife.com


This is my primary business and system for recruiting up to 20 new reps a week! It is really powerful and can be operated on a shoe string budget! Be sure to sign up for the free 7-Day e-course on Internet marketing secrets or get a free trial to the primary business I am involved with.

Best regards,
Daniel Cassidy