Many local businesses around the world are looking to the search engines to help find customers.

The following steps will help these businesses increase the number of visitors to their website and therefore find new customers:

1) Get listed in the Google Local Directory

Google is the biggest player in the search world. When you use Google to search something like "eye doctor New York" or "dentist Fargo" there is typically a top 10 listing of results for local businesses at the top of the page.

Having your local business listed here is the cheapest and easiest way to attract new customers. You can sign up for the Google Local Directory here: www.google.com/local/add. It only takes a few minutes and it’s quite a simple process.

If you’re a bit more web savvy, David Mihm has a very thorough post on increasing your ranking for local listings.

2) Build a great website

What is the purpose of your website?

My guess is that you want more customers to contact you – therefore you should make sure that your contact information is very prominent throughout your website.

The web design on many local websites looks like it’s from the 1990s. If you’re serious about generating clients from your website you should think about getting a new design. In some cases that 1990s look will give your website a trusting “we’ve been around a long time” vibe. This could mean that keeping your current site might not be the worst option (but it probably is!). One thing you can do is look at some of your competitor’s sites and see what they’re doing.

Building out a lot of great features and content will also help your website rank and increase the chance of people linking to your site.

One thing you could do is start a blog and then contribute lots of quality content to it. Don’t just fill the blog with self-promotional garbage either – try to write about things that your customer will be interested in. If you wouldn’t read it, why would your customer?

And don’t forget that contact information.

3) Get the word out about your website

• Tell people about your site.
• Ask friends, family, customers, and suppliers to link to your site where appropriate.
• Add insightful commentary to blogs in your field.
• Submit content to related websites.
• Join a forum related to your industry.
• Submit to some of the better directories (Business.com, DMOZ, Yahoo directory etc)

4) Hire a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist

Professionals in this field can dramatically increase the rankings of your website and bring in highly converting traffic.

A few services they can provide include:

• Adwords campaigns – Adwords are the sponsored ads on the right-hand side when you search for things in Google. SEM professionals can help you decide the best words to purchase and will implement a strategy that will yield a high return on investment (if they know what they’re doing!).
• Website ranking – If you live in small or medium sized city it is usually quite easy to rank your local business for its main search terms. Dentists in larger cities like New York might find that ranking their website is a lot harder than pulling teeth.
• Google Local ranking – As mentioned above, there are a few strategies that you can use to improve your ranking in the local search listings. Implementing these strategies can take some time but finding lifetime customers through search could be a very lucrative way of building a successful local business.

Warning: There are a lot of very poor SEM and SEO companies out there that will do nothing but take your money. At present, word of mouth is the best way to find a SEM or SEO company that will help you generate high converting traffic for your website.

I guess the same could be said of finding a great local business but sometimes word of mouth moves too slow and that’s why we need Google.

Donald Farber works in the field of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). He has worked extensively with local businesses as well as life insurance websites like LifeCover.ca.

Donald lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Many sites completely rely on a few pieces of Pillar Content to rank well and position themselves as an authority.  It’s a really simple concept but maybe something you have not taken much time to think about.

Improve on Someone Else’s Idea

The great thing about Pillar Content is you don’t have to be a genius to come up with lots of great ideas on what you should produce.  My first project in a new niche is always to read through as many of my competitor’s sites as possible.  As I go, I jot down what content they are promoting most heavily and also what pages seem to pick up the most links (whether they are gained actively or passively).

After I’ve identified several pages that attract lots of link love, I drill down and figure out what makes this content so link worthy.  Oftentimes, it comes back to either a first-mover advantage or the fact that it’s the only place certain information is easily available online.  The next step is to come up with ways to not only attract the links that they have but also improve the content substantially. 

Once you have found the content, improved it, next comes the hard part–getting people to actually link to it!  But, since you did things the smart way and built off of someone else’s already popular content, you have a lot of easy link prospects.  Contact everyone who links to the page or tool that you improved and make the case for why you’re more valuable.  It should not be terribly tough for them to see the value if you have done your job properly and this way is a lot more effective than old school link building.

You might be in an industry where there is not clear Pillar Content on your competitors site.  In that case, you will have to be the trailblazer and figure out what is going to draw in the most attention.  Below are some mainstays to get you started:

Write a Guide or Ebook

Who doesn’t love a free ebook?  I personally download and read free guides and short books all of the time.  Obviously the content needs to be accurate and high quality but also remember to make it visually appealing if you pursue this route.  Half the battle in getting a link is looking like you know what you’re talking about so make sure your ebook or guide is professionally designed.  If you want to check an example out, view this Comprehensive FHA Loan Guide from a site I work with that has been downloaded over 40,000 times and garnered lots of free links.

Create a Widget

A viral widget is an amazing way to both build links and get some branding.  For instance, I help a Mortgage Calculator Programming Contest for a site that I consult on and we had numerous entries plus got a lot of "free" press.  It wasn’t free because we gave away $10,000 but it was definitely a profitable campaign.  People love calculators and tools that make sometime either easier to calculator or easier to visualize.  Webmasters love to jazz up their sites with pretty tools and resources.  Put those those together and presto!

Hold an Annual Contest

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of contests or pages with the top 100 blogs in XYZ niche.  Well, it may seem elementary but it works!  As a general rule people, bloggers especially, love to have their egos stroked.  An annual contest with awards going to the "top" blogger (judged on some metric of course) are a great way to build buzz and goodwill in your niche.

This post was written by online marketer Brandon Laughridge

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This gave me the idea to use it for landing pages. It will work for you if you are an affiliate or if you sell your own products and services.

On-Page SEO

The link structure of Wordpress makes it easy for your site to be indexed by the search engines. I have zero programming background background, yet I can rank well on search engines when I use WordPress because it is SEO-friendly by nature. With a few simple tweaks in my settings, my on-page SEO is done.

This is great for quality score when you are doing Google AdWords. Of course, quality score is not 100% about on-page SEO, however it does help you to get a much better quality score than if you skip your on-page SEO. Remember, higher quality score translates to cheaper clicks.

Dual Function

How about having your blog and your landing pages all on the same domain and on the same platform? This is what you can do with WordPress. For blogs, you create posts and for landing pages you create pages. Just make sure you do not have too many distracting links on your landing pages.

Multiple Modules

You can add additional modules with WordPress, they are commonly known as plugins. The good news is, most of them are free and they are very easy to install, once again, no programming knowledge needed here.

Would you like to run surveys? Maybe you want to add different title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords on different posts and pages? Maybe you would like rotate different banners? Yes, you can do all that and more with these free plugins.

There is a plugin that allows you to add Google Analytics code so that you do not need to paste it on all your pages manually. There is another plugin which allows you to add Google Website Optimizer code conveniently so that you can do split testing on your site.

Easy Editing

You can easily add new pages or edit existing pages, same thing, no programming knowledge needed, just use the WYSIWYG function within WordPress. You can scale up your small site to a huge site simply by adding new pages over time. In this way, you can build a stronger online presence for your business.

Professional Image

Many of the free WordPress web templates actually look very professional. You can strip out the dates if you want your site to look less like a blog. Most of the templates do load fast as well, if you want, you can tweak it to load even faster!

WordPress Themes

WordPress templates are commonly known as themes. For landing pages, I prefer single column themes and if I have to use a 2 column theme with right sidebar, I would add an subscription form and some testimonials on the sidebar.

Once again, you want your landing pages to have no distractions, so that you can convert more leads and sales which is why I always recommend that you use single column themes. You can download them for free or you can buy them at affordable prices. If you want a custom built theme, it would cost you much more.

Samuel Ng

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The success of Google in the Search Engine arena is down to its highly accurate search results.

These are due to its primary ranking system – PageRank. Now, while there is much debate as to how important PageRank actually is these days, there’s no escaping that it’s still one of the major factors in generating Google’s SERPs.

The idea of PageRank is a simple and thoroughly democratic one. The theory goes that in a network of interlinked documents, such as the World Wide Web, the pages with the most inbound links to them are going to be the most important, and most authoritative pages.

In simple terms a link from another web page to yours is considered a vote, a vote approving your content and recommending it to others. It is this “voting” system that is the key to Google’s results generation.

Essentially, the more votes you get, the higher your PageRank, and the higher your PageRank, the higher you will appear in the search results for keywords relating to your content.

There are other factors involved, such as the authority of the page that has the link on it, but for the purposes of this article we’ll be looking at the basic principle of a link equals a vote.

Firstly, let’s have a look at what the anatomy of a perfect inbound link would be:

• Keyword/phrases in link Anchor Text
• The link is on a page with good PageRank
• The link is on a page with relevant content
• There are few other links on the page
• The link is nestled within some relevant content

Now going back to our Rattan Furniture example, an ideal link for that site would come from a page about Rattan Furniture, or at least furniture of some description, the anchor text will be something like: Rattan Furniture Suppliers and will be one of few outbound links on that particular page and the page would have a high PR.

Realistically, a link that ticks all of these boxes will be difficult to attain at first. We’re going to start with a realistic link building campaign that will get us started, and get Google noticing our site.

We’re going to start building up a good amount of links that whilst not being great scoring links, will increase our PR slowly.

We are also going to bear in mind that getting links aren’t just useful for SEO purposes, but they are also promotional tools. Links bring people to your site, and hopefully a percentage of them will spend money with you.

So where should we start our campaign? We are going to start by building a good foundation of easily attainable links. So for this we’ll start with forums.

There are web forums for pretty much every topic and niche you could imagine. What we need to think about is the kind of forums where our potential customers might be using.

This would help promoting the site to future customers as well as bringing some backlinks from pages with relevant content.

For our Rattan Furniture example, we could target forums for realtors, interior designers, house wives and so forth.

Once we’ve searched in Google and found some relevant forums, we join them and make a signature for ourselves.

This will appear at the bottom of every post we make and can contain a link to our site.

We want this link to contain our keywords, and have some related text around it, and we also want to use slightly different variations for all the forums we post it.

For a start, we’ll aim for 5 or so forums, and our signatures could be as follows:

• Order Quality Rattan Furniture Online
• The Best Rattan Patio Furniture available online
• We supply Rattan Furniture at Trade prices
• Enjoy the outdoors in comfort with our Rattan Garden Furniture
• Rattan Furniture Suppliers

The anchor text in these links gives Google a good idea what content the landing page is going to contain and is also punchy enough to catch people’s eye in the hopes they visit our site and become a customer.

Now if you think back to our anatomy of a perfect inbound link, these signature links tick 2 of our criteria: our keywords are in the anchor text and it’s on a page with relevant content.

To get the most benefit from the forums it’s important to remember to join in the discussions and post frequently.

Don’t simply post advertising SPAM, this will get you banned very quickly. Join in debates, answer people’s questions and enjoy it – forums are social places and can be a lot of fun, and they can be a good way to get direct to your customers.

Don’t pressure-sell or just post a promotional link. Always remember to make all of your posts meaningful and helpful, and always respect the rules of each forum.

If you get involved it’s reasonable to expect to that a daily visit between your forums could bring in 2000 inbound links within a few months. 2000 low-grade links, from my experience, should be enough to get you a PR of 2.

This isn’t set in stone of course, but its good target to aim for. These links, provided they’re placed in relevant forums, should also bring in some traffic, and help promote your product or service to the right people.

Next time we’ll continue looking into building a good foundation of inbound links through blogs, directories and portals. Until then, get into those forums and get link building!

Editor Note: Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.

He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.

He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.

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Going back to our Rattan Furniture shop example, we’ve already optimised our home page, so what can we do to optimize our inner pages? The OnPage SEO techniques we covered last time still apply and should be used on every page on the website. But, do we want our inner pages to be targeting the same keywords in the same manner?

In a word, the answer is no. There’s no point for us to target the same keywords. Each page of our site is going to have specific and hopefully unique content which we will be optimizing in exactly the same manner as we did last time.

This time, however, there is a little more that we can do. We can build more SEO factors into our sub pages through navigation, file structure and file naming.

Let’s imagine that our Rattan Furniture site consists of the homepage, and about page, a contact page, and three pages each consisting of one particular piece of rattan furniture. The first thing to remember is that we want the content of all of our sub pages to relate nicely to our homepage, as well as the content on those pages themselves.

Firstly, let’s look at our navigation. Ideally, our links will be text rather than images, and the “anchor” text of them will relate nicely to what’s on the destination page. It is also beneficial for our page to be named with our keywords for that page in the filename.

Our navigation and filenames, including our 3 products, could be something like:

• Home (index.html)
• About Shop Name (about-shop-name.html)
• Rattan Garden Chair (rattan-furniture/rattan-garden-chair.html)
• Rattan Conservatory Table (rattan-furniture/rattan-conservatory-table.html)
• Rattan Patio Set (rattan-furniture/rattan-patio-set.html)
• Contact Us (contact-us.html)

As you can see, I’ve filed our products in their own folder called “rattan-furniture”. This nicely ties our products, such as patio-set.html together with the overall theme of our site. With this in mind, let’s look at the optimisation of one of our pages.

As before, our page title can take something like the following format:

Company Name | Keyword 1, Keyword 2

But this time we can just focus on the content of that particular page, rather than the general keywords. So, let’s look at our Garden Chair page. Our TITLE will be:

Shop Name | Rattan Garden Chair

We’ll keep it nice and specific here, there’s no need for us to put anymore in here. What we’ve done here is cover a nice variation to one of our original keyphrases. By creating variations such as these we increase the chances of us capturing traffic, which is what this whole process is really about.

The rest of the page will be optimised as before: our H1 tag will match our TITLE tag, our page description will contain the keywords in the TITLE, our images will have an ALT attribute with our keywords inside and the image filename will also include our keywords and we’ll have a few instances of our keywords in our body text, with one instance enclosed in <STRONG> tags.

This we can apply to all of our remaining pages. Remember not to just pepper the pages with too many keywords, keep it relevant to humans and Google will understand.

The Final Touches

Before we move onto promoting our website we’re going to make sure we’ve added an XML sitemap to our site. You can generate Google-friendly sitemaps here. An XML sitemap will just help Google that little bit more to trawl ALL of your pages, and if your site includes dynamically generated pages, this will be incredibly helpful to GoogleBot.

We’re also going to install Google’s Webmaster Tools on our pages and submit our XML sitemap to it. We should also install Google Analytics too. These tools are going to be very helpful when we start our impending link building campaign, as they’ll help us monitor our progress and see what’s working and what isn’t.

Editor Note: Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.

He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.

He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.

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Once Google understands completely what your pages are about, it can then start coupling this with your backlinks to decide where to put you in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

So how do we do this? When search engines were in their infancy, SE’s tried to understand the contents of pages by calculating things such as keyword density.

Techniques such as keyword stuffing could then be used to fill the page with the desired keywords and thereby raising the density for that term, and in turn ranking better for it.

Nowadays SEs, and in particular Google, are a lot smarter. They no longer look at your keyword density, and instead use other markers to understand a page.

These markers are semantic markers already built into HTML. HTML was originally conceived with the idea that the way a page was constructed would format the information, tag it, in a way that made it understandable.

The use of <h1> tags, for example, aren’t just there for styling purposes.

Semantics in HTML

These tags give you the chance of not only greater control over the styling of your pages, but also they provide good explanations of your pages. By placing our keywords in these semantic tags, we can put more emphasis on the words we want, and make Google’s job a lot easier by spoon feeding it the content of our pages.

These semantic markers include:

TITLE

META Description

H1 – H6

STRONG

Before we get placing our keywords within these tags, it’s important to remember that Google tries it’s damndest to be human. GoogleBot wishes it was human. And with this in mind, it likes pages to be relevant to humans, and readable by humans, so we’re not going to go overboard here – keyword stuffing is not acceptable simply because it’s not useful to humans.

Using our Rattan Furniture as an example, keyword stuffing in a title might look like the following:

<title>Rattan Furniture, Furniture Rattan, Rattan, Rattan Garden Furniture, Rattan</title>

This just isn’t necessary. Simply saying something many times is not going to make GoogleBot rank you better. GoogleBot isn’t in charge of rankings, it just parses and indexes pages. Remember, OnPage SEO generally isn’t going to shoot you up the rankings by itself, so there’s little point wasting your time doing this kind of activity.

Something more appropriate, something more human-friendly might take this format:

Company Name | Keyword 1, Keyword 2

So in our Rattan Furniture example:

Shop Name | Rattan Garden, Patio & Conservatory Furniture

This would be effective for our homepage – it’s nice and general about the content of our site, contains all of our keywords and isn’t unnatural looking.

The next place for our keywords is out META description tag. This text is often displayed in SERPs, so again, we need to make this human friendly, descriptive, and punchy too; this is our hook to get people to click on our site so it really needs to include a call to action. Keep it reasonably short, under 25 words if possible. Obviously we’ll include our keywords and phrases in here too, again, remembering not to keyword stuff.

As for the META Keywords tag, Google does not read or index this. But, Yahoo and MSN do so it’s worth including them. Keep it to one instance per word.

Next up we’ll be using our <h1> tag. This is our main heading for the page. I’ve seen many designers who are being far too clever for their own good using this tag to display the corporate logo.

Whilst semantically I suppose this would be correct, it’s a wasted opportunity if you ask me. We’ll use the <h1> tag here to re-affirm to Google the contents of this page by slightly reworking our TITLE:

<h1>Rattan Garden, Patio & Conservatory Furniture from Shop Name</h1>

After that we’ll try and include a few instances of our keywords and keyphrases throughout the body copy of our homepage. Remember that our keyphrases overlap nicely so if we just include 1 instance of each, we’ll have 3 instances of “rattan” and 5 instances of “furniture” without doing any stuffing.

We don’t want “furniture” to overtake “rattan” by too much, so we’ll try to add a couple of extra “rattan”s to even them out. It may be prudent to split the text up into a section for each of our keyphrases and use the <h2> – <h6> tags to emphasize each particular keyphrase.

We’ll also place the first instance of our keyphrase in the body inside a <strong> tag to emphasize it.

We must also remember to apply an “alt” description to any images placed on the page. The same applies to everything that went before – no keyword stuffing – a short description of the image is best, including 1 instance of our main keyphrase:

<img src=”images/rattan-furniture.jpg” alt=”rattan patio, garden and conservatory furniture” />

We can put variations of our keyphrases on other images, but remember to not keyword stuff, make it a good description of the image and keyword rich.

Apply all of the above and you’re on your way to having a nicely optimised page. Next time we’ll be continuing with OnPage SEO, and looking at optimizing the sub pages of your site, and what kind of navigation structures your site should have along with page titles and other naming conventions.

Editor Note: Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.

He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.

He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.

Ed lives in southern Spain with his two cats, his iMac and his beloved Martin guitar.

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It’s all well and good ranking number 1 for phrases such as “new and used vintage wine racks” but if no one is searching for that term, then your efforts will be fruitless.

By doing a keyword analysis, we can look at what keywords & keyphrases are being searched for the most, and also then we can check to see what the competition is like for those terms, and if we think we can stand a chance for ranking well for them.

First off, let’s suppose your online business is one that sells rattan garden furniture. Obviously we’ll be optimizing for the term “rattan furniture,” but should this be our only target? Let’s have a look.

Head on over to the Google Keyword Tool and let’s type “rattan furniture” into the box. Give it a few seconds and a long list of search terms will appear in order of relevance.

I would suggest scrolling down the list and clicking the link to download the file as a .csv file. This way we can open in Excel or any other spreadsheet program and sort our columns in descending order and remove any information we don’t need.

Further down the list we can see that there is a section headed “Additional keywords to be considered”, so let’s download this .csv file too.

When we open the file, we’ll sort these in order of Local Search Volume, because if you’re selling rattan furniture, chances are you’re selling to a local market in your chosen country.

We see our chosen term of “rattan furniture” as the top of the list, shortly followed by “rattan outdoor furniture” and “rattan garden furniture”. As you can see, these terms are really the only ones with significant search volumes.

We can do the same with the second spreadsheet we downloaded, which contains additional related searches.

By repeating the process we see “furniture”, “garden furniture” and “living room furniture” as our top searches. The top two are relevant to us, but the third isn’t quite in our niche.

But if we look down further we can see the phrases “patio furniture” and “conservatory furniture” that have very good local search volumes and relate nicely to what we’re selling.

Now we can search for these terms in Google and assess our competition.

Before we do this, we are going to install the SEOQuake toolbar into our browser. This will give us some crucial information about the sites we’re up against.

Once installed, now when we do a search for “rattan furniture,” and open the first few links, we will see the SEO information in the SEOQuake toolbar at the top of the page.

Our top hit in this particular instance is a company called Cane Direct. SEOQuake tells us it only has a page rank of 2, which is easily achievable in as little as a month so.

For a term with such high volume, this is not that competitive so it won’t be too difficult to get us on the first page for this and related searches.

Repeat this process for the other search terms in our list. If you see sites at the top of the results with very high PR (5 or above), or the first page being littered with high PR sites it might be prudent to avoid that particular term.

In that case, head back to our list of keyword suggestions and pick another, relevant phrase, and start the process again.

What we’re aiming for is a list of 3 to 5 keywords/phrases that we can then start to build into our site and finally use to promote our site through links.

In this case we’ve picked 5 keyphrases and a total of 6 words.

Our list might look something like this:

• rattan furniture
• rattan outdoor furniture
• rattan garden furniture
• patio furniture
• conservatory furniture

The thing to think of when picking keyphrases is that it helps if the words overlap – in our list we have furniture and rattan repeated across several phrases.

This helps because they’re going to be easy keywords and phrases to place around our pages without them looking unnatural or “stuffed”.

Next time we’re going to look at how to optimize your pages to target these phrases, and most importantly, help Google understand exactly what your page is about.

Editor Note: Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.

He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.

He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.

Ed lives in southern Spain with his two cats, his iMac and his beloved Martin guitar.

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A visitor from Google I never expected!

Anyway… Guys, meet Ed Gray. Our new guest blogger. I’m very glad to have him onboard. And I present to you his first article in a article series on SEO. Ed…take it away. Enjoy the article folks.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has long been a buzzword in the internet marketing industry. And in spite of that attention, it’s an often misunderstood practice.

Trawl the web for SEO techniques and you’ll be bamboozled by a myriad of conflicting opinions and contradictory advice.

In this series, I’m going to ignore all the waffle and give you a guide on how you can increase your traffic with some practical tips on how to get search results from Google.

I won’t even bother claiming to get you to the top position. Such claims are always nonsense and should be regarded with heavy skepticism.

The aim of this guide is to simply set you off in the right direction, increase your traffic and ultimately increase your revenues. Over the coming weeks we will be going through the following steps:

1. Understanding Google
2. Keyword Analysis
3. OnPage SEO
4. Link Building & Promotion

Follow the instructions and you’ll be well on your way to getting to grips with Google.

It is important to view SEO as an ongoing exercise – SEO practices should vary depending on results, if something is working for you, focus on that.

SEO is very much a trial and error process and should never be considered to be completed.

Understanding Google

Before we get started, it is important to understand how Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are generated, and what factors are important in having a well optimised page. No one but Google can fully understand exactly how it ranks web pages, but we do have a pretty good idea of the main factors involved. These include:

1. Domain/website Age
2. Keyword Usage
3. Host Domain Authority
4. Page Rank

The first here is obvious. Google prefers websites that have been around for a while. That doesn’t mean new sites cannot rank well, it is possible to do well without having this factor on your side.

But there’s no doubt having a site around for a few years certainly helps. This is why it often pays to use previously used expired domains.

The second here is the most misunderstood part of SEO going. I’m sure you’ll have heard people talk about the importance of keyword density, META keywords and the like.

This is all nonsense. Google simply doesn’t care what your keyword density is, and it doesn’t bother to read your META keywords. What number 2 refers to is more about keyword placement than anything else.

This will be covered in the OnPage SEO section and continued into Link Building as it involves how your web pages are constructed and how your inbound links are formed. Host Domain Authority refers to how important Google views the domain.

Good examples of this are sites like Wikipedia, The BBC, Ebay and Amazon. Pages within these sites rank well partly because of how authoritative Google views their domains.

These are important websites and so it follows that the pages within them will contain important information. The final factor, PageRank, is best thought of as a count of votes for a particular page.

As a page receives inbound links, these are considered as “votes” by Google. The more votes, from more authoritative sites, the higher the PageRank.

It was this factor upon which Google originally built their search concept and remains a pretty important factor to this day.

With these in mind, next time we’ll start looking at choosing and targeting the right keywords and keyphrases for your web pages.

Editor Note:  Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.

He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.

He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.

Ed lives in southern Spain with his two cats, his iMac and his beloved Martin guitar.

[tags]EMoneyMarketing, Search engine optimization, SEO, online marketing, page rank, keyword density[/tags]

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Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Getting to Grips with Google Part III continued – OnPage SEO
Getting to Grips with Google – Part II – Keyword Analysis
Getting to Grips with Google Part III – OnPage SEO
So you think you know Google well enough?

That’s right – selling other people’s product.

Now, while I don’t really recommend selling other people’s product as your sore revenue channel, it great for beginners starting out, when they have don’t have their own products yet.

And for me – one of the best ways – not to mention, cheapest and effective way of doing affiliate marketing is implementing the "niche marketing on crack" strategy.

Andrew Hansen was the creator of this strategy. The whole premise of this is to target niche markets and long tail keywords to promote your selected product.

The key was to build a website with a domain name that includes your product keywords.

So for example, you want to promote "Apple Ipod", you can register a domain name "AppleIpodReview.com".

This is to ensure, when people end up on your site, they are really targeted and qualified. Meaning they are much more likely to buy.

The trick was also to find good products that do not have heavy competition. For anything with less than 1.5 million competing sites, mean you are possibly in business.

When I did up my niche marketing sites, I rely a lot on search engine optimization and getting backlinks via article marketing, directory submission, pinging and social bookmarketing.

It was a lot of work, but the whole site plus marketing shouldn’t take more than 2 weeks to finish – max!

Now when I look back, I actually only did 2 of such niche marketing sites. And even though I stopped updating long long ago, it still gives me residual commission. Once it’s stuck on Google, buying traffic still comes in. That’s the power of niche marketing and long tail keywords. =)

Anyway the point is, if you ever want to start to build niche sites, there are currently a lot of easier ways to do it. Back then, I used WordPress blogs for niche sites.

But if you don’t want to fiddle around with the hassle of configuration, installing plugins and themes and just want to a quick way to get your sites up, you may want to try EZ Niche Builder.

http://emoneymarketing.com/EZNicheBuilder/

It comes with automated content distribution that is linked up with Amazon, Clickbank and Ebay.

You don’t have to create any products or write long articles reviews like I did. You just need to plug in and play with your own commission links. And you could revenue coming in within a day!

Of course, you still do need content. But you can easily solve it by getting private label articles, or quickly rewriting articles you find in article directory.

With EZ Niche Builder, you get to move faster and get profitable much quickly. Once you finish one, you just move on to the next. Rinse and repeat.

You can easily outsource this. And soon you can have a full army of sites that deliver you passive income on autopilot.

As for getting backlinks, if you want hands-off and be lazy, like me, then you will need SocialBot.

http://emoneymarketing.com/SocialBot/

I’ve written about this before. In a nutshell, it helps you do the tedious task of social bookmarking to hundreds of social bookmarking account. All on auto pilot!

If you have done social bookmarking before, you will know it is downright mundane, repetitive and time consuming. Real pain in the ass.

You have better things to do, such as creating more cash-producing sites or spending time with your family.

Why not automate the task and make your life easier? After all, probably 2 or 3 sales will more than cover your cost of any investment.

And after that, whatever backlinks you create for hundreds of other sites you make will lead to pure profit.

Remember, if you want long term scalability, profitability and growth, you must always always utilize automation.

But don’t take my word for it. Both Bill Gates and Tim Ferris (author of 4 hours work week) strong proponent of using automation to advance your business productivity and growth.

Enough said. If you want to find out more, hop on down to:

http://emoneymarketing.com/EZNicheBuilder/

http://emoneymarketing.com/SocialBot/

We will talk soon.

All success,

[tags]E-MoneyMarketing, ez niche builder, social bot, bill gates, tim ferris, automation, niche marketing on crack, niche marketing, affiliate marketing[/tags]

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A Successful Niche Marketing Experiment

While I do have some decent knowledge of SEO, that’s not really my core marketing interest.

But nevertheless, I got you a very very good article on SEO from EarlyToRise.com.

I’m sure you will enjoy it. So read on!

By Edwin Huertas

Keywords are the most basic components of search engine optimization (SEO). Once you know how to use them, you can drive your site to the top of the search engines… get more targeted traffic to your website… more sign-ups… and, eventually, make more sales.

Keywords describe your content – what your website is about. They should be embedded in each and every one of your Web pages to allow search engines tofind your site. For example, ETR’s website keywords might include business tips, business advice, home business, and so on.

Now picking keywords to help optimize your site involves a little more than just thumping out a list. You have to do a little research. But it’s not very time-consuming. And it can have huge returns.

In my experience, researching words that are suited to your product prior tobeginning your SEO work will give you a better perspective for performing yourSEO tasks. And you don’t have to optimize your site for the broadest, most popular keywords around.

Popular Is Not Always Best

I would NEVER begin my SEO process before carefully researching the absolute best keywords to use. After all, what good is it to optimize your website if your potential customers hardly ever search for the words you’ve chosen? Some website owners optimize for words THEY think are important. But the simple fact is that YOUR words might have a low search volume … or may never be searched at all.

I started optimizing websites over 10 years ago (before most people knew what search engine optimization was), and it always drove me crazy when a client would want to rank for a "single" keyword and nothing else. If, for instance, you have a website that sells hiking equipment and you try to rank only for "hiking equipment," you’ll miss out on a lot of targeted visitors. There are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of keyword combinations you could use to develop a good keyword list – like "snow shoes," "hiking boots," "walking sticks," "lightweight tents," and so on.

Limiting yourself to single keywords is not the way to go. Those keywords are likely to be highly competitive – so, by using them, you’ll have a hard time getting your website within the top 10 results of a search engine. As a result, they’ll get you almost no traffic. Instead, generate a broader range of keywords and spread them throughout your site’s Web pages.

When researching and developing a good keyword list, you can make your job much easier by taking the following into account:

The competition you will face for a particular keyword. Don’t be afraid to use keywords that are not searched for as often as the more popular ones.

Let’s use the keyword "mortgages" as an example. If you type "mortgages" into Google, you’ll get around 86 million results. So sites optimized for this single keyword are competing with over 86 million other websites for the same traffic. But sites targeting "New York mortgages" instead are competing with only 5 million other websites. And sites targeting even narrower sets of keywords have an even better chance of ranking higher in the search engines … and getting more targeted traffic.

The specificity of the search term. When people search for a single keyword, they usually get too many results – and not always the results they are looking for. So most fine-tune their searches by including more words.

Let’s say you own a bakery that specializes in cupcakes. If a potential customer for your cupcakes searches the word "bakery"on Google, they will be presented with nearly 40 million results. If they fine-tune their search to "cupcake bakery," Google will return less than two million results (which makes the searcher’s job a lot easier). At the same time, by being more specific with your keywords ("cupcake bakery" instead of "bakery"), you get less competition from other bakeries. That means your chances of attaining a good search engine position will be higher … and you’ll be more likely to attract a customer who will buy from you.

How to Pick the Best Keywords for Your Site

There are many free online resources you can use to find the right keywords for your site. Just do a search for "keyword tool" on any search engine and you’ll have plenty of options. I like Word Tracker (wordtracker.com), but you might prefer one of the following:

• adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• keywordspy.com
• keyworddiscovery.com
• tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/
• selfseo.com/keyword_suggestion_tool.php
• submitexpress.com/keytracker.php

I once took on a client who was trying his hardest to get his site to the top of the search engines. He manufactured prefabricated steel structures, and had been hoping to achieve high search engine ranking with a few variations of the keyword "steel buildings."

By doing my research, I found that many people were searching for relevant keywords that he had never even considered. For instance, more people searched for "metal buildings" than "steel buildings." And there were thousands who searched for "steel pole barns," "metal garages," and "metal carports."

We reworked his SEO efforts, focusing on the alternatives I had found. And in less than two months, his site was getting lots of new traffic and leads from people looking up those keywords. For one of them – "metal carport"- he ranked in the top 5 spots on most major search engines. And that, alone, brought in about 500 new visitors per day.

Remember… there are probably thousands of keyword combinations you can use for your website. Even if the keywords you choose aren’t the most popular… or don’t get millions of searches every day… they can still help drive thousands of targeted visitors directly to your site.

So take your time and do it right. Compiling the perfect combination of keywords for your website will help you immensely with your SEO efforts.

—————————————–

If you want more backlinks, juice up your PR and get more traffic coming in to your website to give you more sales…then you gotta have SocialBot.

http://emoneymarketing.com/SocialBot/

Put backlinking effort via social bookmarketing on pure autopilot. Press a button and watch the back links come in – FREE – and through no effort of your own…

Get your backlinks and higher traffic now:

http://emoneymarketing.com/SocialBot/

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[Ed. Note:

Send your SEO questions to AskETR@ETRFeedback.com. Include your name and hometown, and one of ETR's SEO experts just may answer your question in an upcoming issue.]

Let me know your thoughts on this article.

I’m all ears.

[tags]E-MoneyMarketing, keywords, search engine optimization, adwords, search term, SEO[/tags]

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