Internet Marketing Solution

You do realize links are where it’s at, right?  With links you can take a business that barely gets enough traffic to pay for the webhost to one that pays your mortgage.  Watch this new video and learn how to gain 100’s of links without ever asking for a link exchange. 

Click here to view the Directory Submitter video!

Technorati Tags: link campaign, search engines, web site optimization, link building, SEO, advertising, internet marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, SEM, online marketing

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Links may count as much as 70% in Google’s algorithym (or more).

So which links count the most? Reciprocal linking is still worth your time, but it probably isn’t worth as much as a one-way link. You want to use reciprocal linking in your link campaign, but don’t only use reciprocal linking.

The idea is to not put all your eggs (or links in this case) in one basket. Spread them out. Don’t just just get reciprocal links and don’t just get links from directories.

Get links from all over. And make sure that all your links aren’t coming from one c-block.

Get one-way directory links (but don’t just stop there).

Make sure that you vary your anchor text. You don’t want the same anchor text in every one of your links or your linking campaign will not look natural.

You want a broad link campaign so that if the algorithm changes, your rankings won’t drop.

Sitewide links are probably not a good idea to implement unless there’s a good reason for linking from your site to another on every page. If you can get traffic from the link then it might be OK. You can get a penalty from sitewide links if you are doing it just for the PR boost (i.e. the sites have nothing to do with each other).

Optimize for on-page factors first. It is very easy to get to the top of MSN as they seem to give more relevance for on-page optimization. Once your site is optimized correctly on-page and ranks fairly high in MSN, then go after getting links.

Remember not to go after the most general key words in your anchor text. This is the biggest mistake I see so many doing. Go after some of the less competitive key phrases, for these, you may only need a handful of links to get to the top of the search engines.

Articles are a fantastic link resource. Not only do you get a little link on a site, you’ll get the whole page. You can get quite a bit of traffic to your site this way and build some links.

Technorati Tags: link campaign, articles, search engines

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Let’s suppose for a minute that you’re hungry (maybe you are now that I’ve mentioned it?). You want something new and different to eat. So you connect to the internet and type in the word “recipes” at Google. Your search result will include millions of websites all related to recipes.

But let’s say you had a specific type of recipe in mind; maybe a dessert dish or a Mexican recipe. So you don’t want to search through all the random recipes you found using a vague search term like “recipes”. You want to narrow the playing field. So let’s get more specific. You now type in “Mexican dessert recipe” and the search engine finds far fewer possibilities. Now the results are geared more toward what you really wanted.

I’m sure you already realize all this, but let’s think about it for a minute from the stand point of your business. We already know that most people only look through the first few pages of any search result.

Realistically, that’s only about the first 30 listings per search. Therefore, you need to get listed on the first few pages of the results for keywords related to your site. How much harder do you think it would be to get listed in the top 10 for a search result of 10,000,000 (like recipes) than one with only 50,000 results (like Mexican dessert recipes)? You do the math! Based on that, which goal do you think is the most realistic to set?

One common misunderstanding with search engines and web site optimization is to try to be something for everyone. Many people think this will be the key to more sales. So they optimize their website for keywords that are most frequently searched. These are usually really general keywords that may be difficult to get a higher ranking for.

Alas, as you can see, this just doesn’t pan out on the internet. Broad sites tend to get lost in the shuffle.

If your site revolves around a general topic, it will be buried within the 10,000,000 other related sites.

No one will ever find it.

And no one will ever buy your product no matter how wonderful it is if they can’t find it.

Worse yet, the people searching using these really broad terms usually aren’t out to buy anything. Now this is just a generalization, but it tends to hold true. The more specific searchers tend to be the people looking for something specific to buy and the general searchers tend to be looking for info and nothing else. Remember, this isn’t always the case, but it seems to be a trend.

So rather than building a site revolving around general topics like “recipes”, “cooking” and “food”, you should build one around a tightly focused niche. The less competition, the easier it will be to find your site.

Would you like a tool to help you with your site’s search engine optimization? Look no further. Click here to learn more.

Technorati Tags: keywords, search engines, web site optimization

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Did you know that one of the best ways to get free traffic to your wordpress blog is through Technorati?

You don’t even need to do any search engine optimization to get your blog posts to rank high in this popular blog search engine.

You can start getting traffic through Technorati quite easily by simply tagging your posts.

What is tagging?

Tags are basically keywords. A tag can be a category or a subject. When we talk about tagging, all we are basically referring to is how you summarize what your webpage or site is about.

Is it about dogs?

If so, then you might want to use the tag, “dogs”.

What else is your site (or blog) about?

Perhaps German Shepherds, Golden Retrievers, dog training, and puppy toys.

Well, then all these would make great tags as well.

So the concept of tagging is not really that much different from your standard keywords.

If you’re interested in learning more about flooding your blogs with free traffic from Technorati, you may want to check out my Tagging Secrets ebook. There is also a free blog (with content) at the site, just visit http://www.taggingsecrets.com/blog/.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, tagging, Technorati, tags

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Find hot new trends to create products or services in. That’s the latest from Google with their launch of Google Trends, a unique, new trend searching tool. Here’s a little about how it works…

When you type in a word (or words) Google Trends reports back with a chart that shows how often the keywords or keyphrases are searched for over time. You may see some sharp spikes or a flat plateau depending on the “trend factor” of your search.

Obviously, a keyword that is searched for steadily over time will show a plateau, whereas a keyword related to a passing topic (like tax extensions) will show a sharp spike about the time of its peak (probably right after the tax deadline in April here in the U.S.).

One interesting point to make is that under the graph, Google Trends will show the top 10 cities that searched for the term. Very useful if you’re going to pursue offline marketing techniques.

It will also display the top few regions (i.e., U.S., India, Canada, United Kingdom) and the top languages.

Off to the right of the screen, you will see a few links to news articles pertaining to your topic. They have letters by them that correspond to the peaks on the graph. So you can see how the news relates to the searches.

So how can you use this information?

Well for starters, if you have a news site (or one in a niche market where you like to think you’re an authority), you can quickly find out whether or not people are searching on a particular keyword. You can also find some relevant news articles to write about on the topic. Just quickly summarize the news and supply your readers with a link to the full article.

One nice feature about Google Trends is that you can compare keywords and phrases. Just type in a few related words (separated by comma) and you will see a graph that shows both terms pitted against each other. That way you can see relationships. This feature is unique (that I know of) to Google Trends.

To show you the power of this new tool, you can type in “blogging, podcasting”. The graph supplied shows how people are searching for both terms almost equally.

Since podcasting and blogger are intertwined, you would think one would follow the other in popularity, and it seems that they have. When one peaks, so does the other.

This is excellent market research for you if you are in the blogging market. You know without a doubt that your bloggers will be interested in the latest news in podcasting. You can even see the major news stories that correspond with the peaks and provide your bloggers with similar information.

You may try Google Trends out for yourself here…

http://www.google.com/trends

I don’t believe this free tool will replace the popular keyword research tools (like Wordtracker), nor is it meant to. For one, Google Trends does not list how many searches there are for any given keyword … all you see are the peaks, plateaus, and valleys. For another, it doesn’t return any related results. All this is fine, Google Trends is a great resource in its own right.

But if you want to research keywords and phrases for building a website around (and SEO), you will still want to use a tool like Wordtracker.

Technorati Tags: Wordtracker, Google Trends

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I’ve had a few people come to me with a mini-site asking for advice on how to optimize it for the search engines. As you probably already know, most mini-sites are just one page sales letters. They’re great for getting a sale, but they don’t work so well for ranking high in the search engines.

So how should you optimize your sales letter or mini-site for the search engines?

My reply is simple…

DON’T!!!!

Now, I’m sure you’re probably wondering why I’ve even brought this up if that’s all I have to say. But, like I said it’s simple. Absolutely, never optimize your sales letter for anyone or anything other than prospective customers.

Now, I can hear what you’re saying, “How will I get anyone to look at my sales letter if I don’t rank well in the search engines?” … “I can’t afford to pay $4.67 for every stink’in click.”

No worries, you won’t have to. Here’s what you do instead.

Build a second site that is optimized for the search engines and then put ads for your mini-site product (or service) on it. Before you fly off the handle with all the extra time and money this will cost you, hang on a second…

If you want to be an internet marketer, you’re going to have to be comfortable using the internet. This also includes putting up sites. You can definitely outsource this, but it’s really not that hard to buy a domain name (BTW these are about $8.95/year so this isn’t much of a cost) and then just put up a wordpress blog. You don’t need to know HTML, PHP, or any other coding language if you don’t want (honestly though, using Dreamweaver is about as easy as Microsoft Word once you give it a try - but I understand if you don’t want to).

You can even use a reseller hosting account if you want to keep things simple. Put both the mini-site and the SEO site on the same account and pay less than $25 a month. Reseller accounts usually come with CPanel which allows you to install wordpress or a few other content management systems with a couple of mouse clicks. All of these free CMS’s have free templates that you can change with just a few clicks of your mouse. There are so many free templates with wordpress that I don’t think anyone knows what or where they all are.

So if nothing else, set up your SEO site with a wordpress blog. Wordpress works great for SEO anyway. Then use Wordtracker to get some low competition/high key phrases and optimize the site for them. Write several posts using these key phrases and start a link building campaign. If you do this right, you’ll get free search engine traffic to your new site within a few weeks. This trickle can grow to a flood of traffic — funnel all of it over to your sales letter.

If you have an opt-in list (which you should) then send people over to a page set-up just to get people to opt-in (a namesqueeze page). Give them a teaser on your SEO site (or even let them sign up right there). Test different advertisements for your product and get people over to your sales letter.

With a little work, you’ll have a highly optimized site for the search engines that serves to send potential customers over to your highly converting sales letter. Now you have the best of both worlds!

An added benefit to this way of doing things is that this particular income stream is not dependent on just one site. If something happens to one of them, you still have the other. You can easily sell your product from the SEO site if you have to. And you can still send traffic to your sales letter site from paid advertising if the other one gets bumped from the search engines.

Anytime you can add in a “safety feature” like that to your business, it’s worth a little extra work!

Technorati Tags: link building, SEO, blog, advertising, content management systems, Wordpress, Wordtracker, namesqueeze

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I’d like to share with you exactly how I use Wordtracker in my link campaigns (and more, but we’ll start there).

Here’s a fast, easy to follow tutorial on what I typically do…

I go to the Keyword Universe tool within the Wordtracker admin. From there, I type in my main keyword. For example, let’s say I built a niche site around dog food. In this example, my main keyword would probably be “dog food”.

Type in dog food and Wordtracker will find about 300 variations on the word. This isn’t every last variation on the phrase dog food, but it’s a great start. What I’ll do next is click on the words or phrases that actually fit my niche site.

Dog food comes up first so click on it. Over in the right-hand side window, under “Popularity Search” about 300 more niche terms related to dog food show up. Terms like “solid gold dog food”, “nutro dog food”, and on and on. All these terms are phrases people actually type into the search engines. Wordtracker will also provide you with a count and prediction for each.

Add every last one of these terms into your keyword basket. From there you can click dig, to really expand on the terms or you can go back to the left side of the Wordtracker admin and go down the list. It just depends on how much time you have.

For help with my link campaigns, I don’t usually use the dig feature. Instead I’ll just go down the list on the left and click on relevant terms, let Wordtracker find me the phrases that match and add them all to my basket.

For a phrase like “dog food”, if I go through all the relevant terms on the left side of the window, I’d imagine I could get 4,000 or more key words. Just collect them all in your basket.

When you’re done, click on the bottom where it says “Click here for step 3″. Wordtracker will assemble a list of all your key terms. At the top, you’ll see 3 navigation icons. The third one is the “Competition Search”. You will be asked to select two search engines. Since I want as much free traffic as I can get, I usually select the Google and Yahoo_eng search engines (you could also add or substitute MSN in there - these are the top 3 search engines).

Then click proceed to allow Wordtracker to perform the KEI analysis. Next you’ll see a list of the top 100 low competition keywords from your dog food list. The term in the #1 spot will be the one with the least amount of competing websites per search count. The #2 spot will be occupied for the second best phrase to use and so on, all the way down to the #100 spot.

The more words you have in your basket, the more likely that even the 100th spot will actually be a key phrase worth targeting (not that you need 100 different key phrases for your link campaign — but you might use these valuable key phrases later on).

Wordtracker will compile data like this for both Google and Yahoo (or whatever search engine you selected in the previous step). Out of these lists, select the search terms as high up on the list as you can go that would make sense for you to use as your website title.

For example. I collected about 800 terms for this sample run (there are many more I could have chosen, but I didn’t want this to take all day). From my trial, the #1 spot is taken up by the phrase “dog rawhide bones chews treats”. It has a very high KEI analysis. You could actually make this into the anchor text for your dog food site quite easily. If you don’t like the way it sounds, then go with #2, “Guaranteed dog treats”, or #3 “Dog treats and cookies”. Even better is “Savory dog food”.

Actually, any of the top 10 terms Wordtracker returned for this niche would be a great choice. So pick a few and then use a tool like Directory Submitter to create a few different profiles for your link campaign. Start getting links to your dog food site from the directories in Directory Submitter. Since these words get traffic and are fairly low in competition, it won’t take too long for you to show up high in the search engines for them.

Use a service link Link Metro to get some reciprocal links with these search terms. Just start with one title and then switch it out for another one a few days later. That way, not all your link partners from Link Metro will use the same anchor text and description for your link.

Write a few articles with different text in the resource box. Submit them and you’ll start getting backlinks with the different anchors from all over the internet.

Doesn’t this make more sense then putting in the anchor text “Dog Food” for every last link you go out and get? Imagine, with a highly competitive term like that you would need hundreds upon hundreds of links to get anywhere. But by choosing the terms that are searched less, you can start getting traffic much quickly. I know I’d rather have a little traffic than none at all.

If you’re interested in a Camtasia video of the exact strategy I use to get these fantastic keywords from Wordtracker, just let me know.

Technorati Tags: keyword, Wordtracker, link campaign

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Here’s another tool I use all the time to help with my link building campaigns. This one’s called RSS Submit. You’ll love it because all you need to do is find your rss url, copy and paste it into the software and click “Submit”…

Now go take a 5 minute break and get yourself some chocolate, a drink, whatever.

When you come back, RSS Submit will have a nice little list of all the RSS directories it submitted your feed to. It’s about as hand’s free as you can get. This tool will submit your feed to about 50 RSS directories on auto-pilot. You can also buy the RSSTop55 plug-in to get another set of RSS directories that you will have to submit your feed to manually.

Now don’t get too upset… I should say semi-manually. What you do is enter in your feed’s details (like author name, email address, feed title, feed url, description, etc) once and then click on the RSS directories one at a time. The software will fill in the details for your feed so all you need to do is select the category and hit submit.

There are over 100 directories in this plug-in. And the best part is, virtually no one takes the time to submit to these (since they have to actually do something) so your feed will get quite a bit more exposure. I estimate that you can submit to about 20 directories in 10 minutes time.

Getting your feed into these RSS directories will give you one-way backlinks. As you know, this will raise your rankings in the search engines for the key phrases you use in your anchor text. Just make sure before you submit your feeds that you have crafted a good title and description for your feed.

You will also get some traffic just from the directory itself. There are people who search for feeds through these directories. If they’re interested in the type of information you write about, they might visit your site and even subscribe to the feed. This can bring you traffic on an ongoing basis.

Click here to learn more about RSS Submit.

Technorati Tags: link building, RSS, RSS Submit

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In one of my other posts, I mentioned the tools I use in order to get a high page rank in just one update and more importantly, a steady stream of free traffic from the search engines.

One of those tools is Directory Submitter. At the time of this writing, Directory Submitter will help you submit your site to over 300 directories. All of these directories accept links from other sites … in fact, they want them.

That’s why submitting your site to directories is a much easier task than trying to get one-way (or even reciprocal) links from regular sites. The whole point of a directory is to maintain an ever-growing resource of websites. Directories may be general in nature, like Yahoo and DMOZ, or they may be niche directories.

Most of the directories listed in Directory Submitter are general, meaning they will take all the high quality sites they can find. All you have to do is enter in your site information, find the right category, and click submit. You can do this by hand, or use Directory Submitter to save yourself some time.

With the software, you just enter in your information once and click on the directory you want to submit your site to. The software automatically fills in the information for you so all you have to do is find the right category and click submit. You can easily submit your site to about 20 directories in about 10 minutes.

The best part of Directory Submitter is that it keeps track of all the directories you submit your site to. So even if you just submit to 20 directories at a time, you’ll know where you left off. In addition, you can use it for more than one site.

Directory Submitter has a built-in profile manager for you. Just enter in your site’s name, the title for the link, description and a few other details and it will store it for you. Even better, it will allow you to enter in several different anchor text titles and descriptions and will rotate through them as you submit your site to the different directories. In my opinion, this is the most powerful feature of Directory Submitter.

Just find a few low competition/highly searched keyword phrases, load them into Directory Submitter and start submitting your site to various directories around the internet. These one-way backlinks will be picked up by the search engines who will catalog them by key phrase. This will boost your rankings for these low competition/highly searched phrases and you’ll start getting some free traffic.

Learn more about Directory Submitter.

Technorati Tags: page rank, Yahoo, keyword

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I’ve written about link building campaigns in several previous posts. I do have a method for building links to each of my sites that works very well. In fact, I have been able to go from a PR 0 up to a PR 5 in one update. I’ve heard of people going from 0 up to 6 or even 7 in one update (the time between an update is usually about 3 months in case you’re wondering) so virtually anything is possible.

While Page Rank itself isn’t such a great measure of anything relevant; like how much money you make or how much traffic you get, you can get high rankings in the search engines with a link campaign (which will in turn boost your Page Rank). To do this, all you really need to do is select your anchor text carefully. So rather than get 100 links to my site with the text “Internet Marketing” (and get absolutely nowhere because that term is way too competitive), I would use Wordtracker to find about 5-10 low competition/highly searched key phrases and interchange them as the anchor text.

That’s really all there is to it. The benefit of this technique is that you will start to see some traffic from the search engines fairly quickly. And faster results (even if they aren’t phenomenal) will propel you to do more work and achieve even better results.

So go out and find these golden keywords, write a short title and description of your site using them and then get some links. It’s not really any more difficult than that.

You can create an Excel file for all your keywords, descriptions, and your links to keep it all handy if you want. Here are a few other tools (in addition to Wordtracker) that I use…

I use Directory Submitter for submitting my sites to directories, Link Metro for getting reciprocal links from relevant sites, and RSS Submit for submitting my RSS feeds to the RSS directories. If you use those 3 tools, you can get hundreds of backlinks in no time.

If you write even just one or two articles for your site and submit them using Article Marketer or iSnare then you will really generate an absolute ton of backlinks.

You can very easily get a high PR in one update with these methods. In addition, you’ll move up in the search engine results for the terms you use in your anchor text. I’ll write up a review explaining exactly how I use each of these tools later for your convenience. You don’t need to go out and buy them all (or any of them), but they can simplify your life.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, link building, page rank, RSS, keyword, Wordtracker, RSS Submit

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