Archive for 'seo'

How To Get Backlinks Using Blog Commenting

Sunday, November 14th, 2010 at 10:08 pm  
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Here is a training video I made that shows a really awesome way to get good quality backlinks for free using blog commenting.  Blogs are a great way to get involved with other people in your niche and gain backlinks at the same time.

The other really great thing about gaining links this way is that you don’t have to write long articles and spend all day submitting them all over the place.  Just read a few articles leave RELEVANT and INTELLIGENT comments and you can gain high quality one way backlinks from other people’s sites. I emphasized relevant and intelligent comments because too many people abuse this method and are nothing more than a bunch of lonely spammers. Please don’t be this way. You’ll be surprised what could happen if you actually take the time to read what other people are writing and be ethical in your work.

Here’s the video, please leave a comment below if you enjoyed it:

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Determining Your SEO Competition

Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 10:25 am  
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So the next step that we need to take with our keywords is to figure out what kind of competition exists for getting our website to rank for the given term.

There are tools available to help us with this, some are paid and some are free, so for the sake of this article we are going to focus on the free tools, which are going to be all we need to get the job done.

The first step is to figure out what keyword we want to examine.  After you pick your most promising keyword, were going to go back to our old friend Google and just type it in to the search box.

After you type in your keyword were going to look at the amount of search results which is displayed in the top right hand corner of the page before any of the listings.  You should see something that reads “Results 1-10 of about (number) for (keyword term).

The total results is going to be one of the numbers that we look at to determine the competition.  It’s not the most important, however it does give us a general idea of how many websites have that term on their site.

The more important result that we want to find is going to be using an “exact match” search.  To do this type in your search phrase into google, just like you did last time, but now put quotation marks around it.  So if I’m going to search the term: beginner guitar lessons, it’s going to look like this “beginner guitar lessons”.

What this type of search tells us is how many website are targeting this term.   Without quotes, google will display a website as a result if that term shows up in any variation anywhere on the site.  When you use quotes it tells google to only display websites that use that specific term in the exact order you tell it.  This gives us a much better idea of how many sites are actively trying to get ranked for this specific term.

At the time of this article, beginner guitar lessons returned 12,500,000 results. That’s a huge number and if every one of those sites was trying to rank for that term, the competition would be fierce and not worth the effort.  However when I search for it using “beginner guitar lessons” it returns 130,000 results.  Although this is still a high number, it gives me a much better idea of the amount of websites that are targeting this term.

As a basic rule of thumb, anything that has an exact match result of 10,000 or less is going to be quite easy to rank for.  100,000 or less will most likely be moderately difficult and anything above 100,000 is going to be difficult and time consuming.

The last factor to determine your competition, and possible the most important, is to literally just go to the website and check it out.  Visit the top ten listings for your keyword term and get a feel for how well optimized these pages are for selling products or services.

You would be surprised to find some niches where the top results are there just because no one who truly understands SEO has gone in and dominated the keywords.

Before you disregard a keyword or think that it will be too hard to rank for, make sure you do all the steps listed above to determine your competition.

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Analyzing Your Keyword Research

Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 10:22 am  
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Now that we have a list of words and phrases that are relative to our target market, it’s time to dig in and figure out which ones to focus on.

Remember that the main goal here is to find action words that describe a person in need and wanting to solve a problem.  The first thing that you will most likely want to do is get rid of any terms that have the word “FREE” in them.  As you can imagine, if someone types into Google “free guitar lessons”, it’s not going to do me much good to try and focus on them as a person who is going to pay for my product or service.

As you go through your list try and find phrases that are as descriptive as possible and micro target your potential customers.  Remember that broad terms are not going to do you much good because they are #1 hard to rank for and #2 hard to turn into paying customers.

See if you can put together a list of about 30 or so words that seem like good action phrases.  Some good examples of action phrases would be “need guitar lessons”, “learn to play guitar fast”, “ease back pain”, “how to plan a wedding”. You can see how these phrases promote action and show a need to solve a problem or find a solution.  A good example of keywords that would NOT be good would be: “electric guitar”, “back pain”, “weddings”. As you can tell these are too general and don’t promote any specific need.

After you swift through the keywords that are not going to do you much good, the next step is to determine how much traffic is there and how much competition is there.

The answer to the first question “how much traffic is there” is a pretty easy one.  The search volume number is going to give you a pretty accurate idea of how many people typed that phrase into google during any given month.

If your wondering “how many searches is a lot?” we’ll that depends on what your looking for.  If your trying to target a local segment for a physical business or service that you offer in your town or city, having a low number is not a big deal.  If your promoting a product or service that can be distributed anywhere, such as an information product, then the more the merrier.

Generally speaking if you can work with keywords that have search volumes in the tens of thousands, your in good shape.  A big factor though in deciding which terms to focus on is what were going to talk about next…

Determining your competition.

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Knowing What Keywords To Target For Your Business

Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 10:16 am  
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One of the most important things to understand about keywords and how they relate to your business is that you should always start off by targeting very specific and detailed phrases which describe your ideal prospects.

This is because it helps you attract people that are looking exactly for what you have to offer, which will in turn make it much easier to close a sale and give them what they want.

Using what’s called Long Tail Keywords, which are basically words or phrases that are made up of more than 3 words, you will be able to bring in more targeted and qualified traffic to your website.

Another benefit to working with long tail instead of short keyword phrases is that they are usually much cheaper to advertise with and have less competition when it comes to SEO and getting your site to rank for the terms.

We’ll use “Guitar Lessons” as our example niche again. If I decide to try and advertise on the keyword “guitar lessons”, I will most likely find that it’s going to cost me more per click (pay per click advertising will be discussed in the near future) and I will be getting a very broad range of people to my website.  The other harsh side of working with short keywords is that they are almost always impossible to rank for using SEO.  It would most likely take years and tons of work to get my website ranked in the search engines for the term “guitar lessons”.

Let’s dig a little deeper into our example…

The product that I have teaches beginners how to play rock music. So you can imagine that if a person came to my site looking for “guitar lessons” and they are interested in learning acoustic folk guitar, then I have a pretty slim chance of making a sale.

So the smart thing to do would be to target the keyword phrase “beginner rock guitar lessons”.  You can instantly see how if someone typed that phrase into Google and my website showed up right in front of them, then I would have a much higher chance of selling them my product.

Of course there is going to be a much smaller amount of traffic available with long tail keywords but again, it’s going to be highly targeted and ultra focused on your ideal prospect.

The best thing to do for your business, product or service is to write down a list of all the terms and phrases that people would most likely type in to a search engine to find what you have to offer.  Then dig deeper and add words that describe specific aspects to what you have to offer.  Are you just a “doctor” or are you a “children’s dentist in New York City”. Are you a lawyer or do you specialize in bankruptcy law in Los Angeles California?

It doesn’t always have to be region specific but I’m sure you get the point.

In the next article were going to talk about researching your keywords so that we can get an idea of: how many people are searching on the terms and how much competition exists for SEO and getting your site ranked for the specific terms.

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The Importance Of Understanding SEO

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 10:16 am  
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Where To Start With SEO

If you haven’t already heard about SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.  If you have a business or product to promote and your looking to find new customers, getting visitors to the site can be a big hurdle for most people.

SEO is the process by which a website is designed and modified to be able to show up in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. I know that might sound a little vague and it’s because SEO entails many, many different variables and things to consider.

The goal of this article is to talk about the most basic and important things to consider when first getting involved with SEO.

The main goal for working on SEO is to get your website to show up in the search engines for specific keywords or keyword phrases.  Let’s take “Guitar Lessons” for example.  If I have a site where I give information on learning to play the guitar, then a good keyword phrase for me to target would be “Beginner Guitar Lessons”.  The ideal situation for obtaining a new customer would be something like this: someone wants to learn to play the guitar so they go to google and type in “beginner guitar lessons”. My website shows up as one of the top spots on the page. The person sees my website, reads the description and clicks on the link to check it out. They read the sales page and buy my product.

Having my website show up as one of the top spots in google when someone typed in “beginner guitar lessons” was a result of good SEO implementation.

Now that you understand the basic idea of SEO, lets talk about the first steps you need to take for your own website and customer base.

When forming a plan of attack for SEO, the first thing that you need to find out are what keywords you want to target and optimize your site for.  Keywords are what rule the world of Internet Marketing because they are what connect you to your prospects.  Whether you are paying for advertising or using SEO to obtain free traffic via having your site show up in search results, knowing which keywords to advertise on and build your site around is the first step to creating a website that is going to be marketable and profitable.

So the next question your probably going to ask is “how do I know what keywords to target”?

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