Keyword Research Skills That Help Pay The Bills
If I had to pick one skill that I acquired over the years that helps pay the bills in more than anything else it is getting good at doing keyword research.
Developing Good Keyword Research Skills
Getting good at keyword research really isn’t all that hard. I know it seems like a daunting task at first, that involves a lot of number crunching and market analysis, but the good news is that it really. There are plenty of tools out there that will make your life easier and using them is just a matter of jumping in and giving it a try.
Here’s my step-by-step approach to keyword research. Copy it, then modify it until you find your own style. Then just get into the habit of doing keyword research before you write just about any new piece of content.
Read the rest of this entry »
Social Media Marketing Gone Too Far
Don’t get me wrong, I love social media. I’m an active participant and it sends me traffic, subscribers and clients every single day. I do think you have to target it right though or it’ll just make you look bad. Let me explain.
Two nights ago we received a pre-recorded message from our daughter’s elementary school principal. We get these messages about once or twice a week, usually reminding us about some school event or an upcoming holiday. Not that night tough. Instead the principal rambled on and on about a facebook contest a local car dealer ship is running. The dealership set up a fan page with a short survey that includes a question about what your favorite local school and what your favorite Toyota is. The school with the most votes wins $1,000 from the dealership – thus the call from the eager principal.
Read the rest of this entry »
Free Ways To Increase Website Traffic – The 2010 Content Marketing Challenge
If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you may remember that I participated in the content challenge by Trish Lindemood from WebCopyResults.com. Trish is running another challenge this year and I am proud to be a part of it.
While last year’s challenge mainly focused on getting 90 new pieces of content up on the site in 90 days, this year Trish is focusing on a more long term approach. During the 90 days she will walk us through creating search engine optimized content that will help increase traffic to our websites both short and long term. Along the way, I’ll also be sharing some link building tips with you to help further boost those search engine rankings and get free traffic.
I hope you will join Trish and me and spend the next 90 days discovering free ways to increase website traffic and more importantly learn how to make sure you are getting traffic that converts (into new subscribers, customers etc.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Keyword Strategy – A Keyword Research Crash Course in 90 Minutes
I mentioned in a previous post that I was part of a keyword research panel at the Niche Affiliate Marketing Conference in Atlanta a little over a week ago. This morning I finally got a chance to listen to the recording and found myself furiously taking notes about all the different keyword research tips and tools that the other 3 experts on the panel shared. Those “other” experts are Karon Thackston, Lynn Terry and Dan Morris.
I still can’t believe that we sat up there for 90 minutes and in essence created a crash course in keyword research that takes you from very basic to more advanced keyword strategies.
Here’s a little preview video with some of the content from the audio recording of our panel discussion.
Read the rest of this entry »
Link Building Strategies That Are Fast And Easy
I had an interesting conversation about fast link building strategies on twitter this past week. It all started when I asked my twitter followers what they were planning to do this week to increase traffic to their website.
My goal was to get them thinking about different ways to increase traffic to their sites including article marketing, SEO (search engine optimization) etc. In the middle of building websites, writing content and either promoting other people’s products via affiliate programs or working on products of our own, it’s sometimes easy to forget that we need to be driving traffic to our sites.
Read the rest of this entry »
NAMS Wrap Up
I mentioned in my previous post that I spent the past weekend in Atlanta for the 4th Niche Affiliate Marketing Systems (NAMS) workshop. Now that I’ve caught up on sleep and laundry, I thought I’d share a few highlights of this 3 day conference with you.
The conference is put together by David Perdew who does an amazing job. He invited me to attend as an aide this time which helped me realize just how much work goes into an event like this. Here he is with Nicole Dean, instructor, friend and my roommate. I recommend you take a look at her blog at http://www.nicoleonthenet.com/
Nicole and I have been friends for years and had a great time brainstorming during the event. Which brings up a good point:
Read the rest of this entry »
SEO In A Nutshell
I am down in Atlanta this weekend for NAMS 4, a 3 day conference for Internet Marketers. There are always some great presentations and workshops that teach me something new and I’m sure this go-around won’t be any different.
But one of my favorite aspects of attending this event is connecting with other marketers and “talking shop”. It is particularly rewarding if I can teach a little something here and there in conversations.
Yesterday for example I shared lunch and a great conversation about beginning SEO with Nicole Dean and Lain Ehmann. Lain piked our brains about a few topics but most of it focused around SEO. Her biggest problem is information overload. There are so many different articles, reports and products about SEO out there and everyone seems to have a slightly different strategy.
I broke it down for her into “SEO in a Nutshell”, which is just enough info about how you can optimize your pages and blog posts and get some rankings without getting too complicated. I thought I’d share with you today what I told her over lunch.
SEO In A Nutshell
Writing SEO Descriptions For Higher Click-Throughs
I’m wrapping up another lesson for the Easy Link Love course and am talking a bit about On Page SEO Factors. The page description used to be factored into search engine calculations, but it hasn’t for quite some time.
For a few years, people just stopped taking the time to write good descriptions (myself included), but as it turns out that can be a costly mistake. Here’s why.
Let’s take a look at a search engine listing. Here’s one for one of my niche sites:
Each search engine listing includes a title, a description and a link as you can see. Let’s think about this for a second. On average, there are about 10 listings on each search results page. They are organized in a why that allows the searcher to quickly scan through them.
Do you think writing a compelling description could get them to click on your listing instead of someone else’s? Sure it does. And that is why you want to put some thought and time into crafting a good description for each page on your website.
If you are going after a specific keyword, make sure it is in the title and if possible in the description. As you can see in the image above, the search term will be bolded on the search results page.
Other than that work on good copy. Make it inviting and include some benefits where you can. In the example above I included the terms “fun dessert” and “dish to bring”. Both of these show how the waldorf salad recipe can be used.
You can even change your description from time to time and check how your click-through-rate changes with each new one you write. If your search results position stays the same, you should see an increase or decrease in traffic for this keyword depending on how well your description performs.
Of course you don’t need to test each description on each page. Reserve the testing for your big money pages, but do take some time to craft appealing descriptions for all your pages.
P.S. There is still time to join my link building class at EasyLinkLove.com … Find out how building links can get you more free traffic.
SEO Management Tool – Track Your Progress With SEO Elite
We’ve been talking a lot about link building this past week and how we can use links to move up in the search engines. One of the challenges when it comes to search engine optimization is to keep track of what works and what doesn’t over time. The only way to do that is to keep an eye on where you are ranking for keywords, how that changes over time and what your competition is doing.
You could check your rankings by entering your keywords into Google and scrolling through the search results once every couple of days and then chart your progress in a spreadsheet. While that works fine for a handful of keywords, as your site expands, it becomes a lot of work.
Instead I like to automate the process with a piece of software called SEO Elite. It allows me to enter a keyword as well as the url of the page I want to rank for. It then searches my rankings each day and charts overall progress for me.
Read the rest of this entry »
Checking Your Search Engine Rankings
We’ve been talking a lot about link building and search engine optimization over the past few days and I realized that we haven’t really touched yet on how to check your search engine rankings.
The first thing you need to know is the keywords your site is starting to rank for as well as the keywords you would like to rank for.
Keyword research will provide you with a list of keywords you want to rank for and you can use a website tracking program like Google Analytics to find out what your site is ranking for already.
Read the rest of this entry »
