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

There are only a handful of concepts you need to grasp to start optimizing your pages so you can rank for some keywords. Here they are…

Keyword Research

You can’t start to rank for something unless you know what you want to rank for. The “key” to keyword research is to find a term that strikes a balance between the amount of traffic you get and how hard it is to rank for it.

Let me give you an example:

I’ve been doing a little research recently on article marketing. Trying to rank for “article marketing” would be almost impossible. Yes, this keyword is getting a lot of traffic (it’s searched about 250 times per day), but there are  also a LOT of people trying to rank for that term.

By comparison let’s look at “best article marketing tips”. It’s only searched about 5 times per day, but there is so little competition for this keyword phrase, that you could probably write an article or blog post titled “My 3 Best Article Marketing Tips” and rank on the first page of Google with minimal work.

Find that balance between how often a term is searched and how hard it will be to rank for it.

If you want to learn a little more about Keyword Research, listen to this panel discussion I was involved in along with SEO experts Karon Thackston, Lynn Terry and Dan Morris. Here’s a picture:

Title Tag

Now that you have your keyword, you want to make sure it appears in the title tag of your new web page. If you are using blogging software like wordpress, just make sure your keyword is in the title of your post or page. If you are creating static html pages, make sure you add the meta title tag.

Our keyword example above was “best article marketing tips”, so I may use a little like “My Best Article Marketing Tips Revealed” as the title of my new blog post. If you can include your keyword as early as possible in the title, but also make sure it reads well and is interesting.

It is also a good idea to use the same keyword again somewhere in the first 100 words of your content.

The rest of this simple way to do SEO (search engine optimization) is all about links.

Internal Links

These are the links within your site and you want to make sure you use the keyword in the anchor text when you point to this new page. If you are using wordpress as your blogging software, it will automatically do this for you. If you are creating a static html site, make sure you are linking from your homepage or article page to this new page with “best article marketing tips” as part of the text that links to the page.

External Links

Now that we have the internal linking set up, it’s time to go out and get some links from other sites across the internet that have our keyword in the anchor text. For a long tail keyphrase like “best article marketing tips”, it shouldn’t take more than a few links to get it to rank. For a more competitive keyword, you want to spend more and more time building those backlinks.

By now you’re probably wondering where you can get those external links. Here are a few simple ideas.

• Write some articles and submit them to article directories.
• Write a guest blog post or two for a blog in your market.
• Submit your new page to a few popular social bookmarking and social networking sites.
• Comment on popular blogs in your market and link to the new page or post.

Yes, you can get a lot more complicated than that, but there is no need for most of us. If you can implement just these few things, you should see your traffic and ranking improve.

P.S.  If you are ready to learn more about backlinks (both internal and external), I would like to invite you to join my link building class at EasyLinkLove.com

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.

But that’s just one of the 8 different things SEO Elite can do. There is a total of 8 different projects that can help you with your SEO. They are:

• Analyze backlinks using a specified search engine
• Get links to your website
• Analyze AllInAnchor, AllInTitle or AllInText
• Verify that link partners are still linking back
• Find where your site is ranked for a given keyword
• Find out how many pages are indexed
• Find possible authority websites
• Submit your articles to article directories

As mentioned, I use the project that allows me to see where my site (or any given page on my site) ranks for a particular keyword the most. Being able to analyze backlinks and check on AllInAnchor and AllInTitle are also quite useful when I’m trying to figure out how hard it will be to compete for a particular keyword.

You can also use analyze backlinks to look at a competitors incoming links and then go out and try to get links from those sites as well.

Finding out how many pages are indexed can be useful in two different ways. The first thing you want to do is run this report on your own website. Compare how many pages the software shows you have indexed to how many pages you think you have. If your number is a lot bigger than what the software shows, you may have a problem with your site not getting indexed properly. Usually a sitemap and some proper internal linking can take care of those issues.

Next you can also run the same report on some of your major competitors. Larger sites tend to rank better. By spying on your competition this way you’ll see how large you may want to build your site over time.

And I’m not the only one who likes this software. Here’s what Dan Thies from SEO Fast Start has to say about it:

“There are a lot of tools available for managing and checking links, but SEO Elite fills a great niche. It has a very simple interface, it’s very fast, and it has proven quite useful in researching our competition.”

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.

Once you have Google Analytics installed and have a few days of data, click on “Traffic Sources” and then “Keywords”. This will give you a list of keywords that you are already ranking for.

To check your search engine rankings, open a particular search engine (I mainly focus on Google.com). Type your keyword or keyphrase in and then look through the search results until you find your listing.

You may want to track your progress for each keyword over time. To do so, open your favorite spreadsheet software (like Excel or open office). Add the keyword in the first column, and the search position for Google in the next. Repeat with any other search engines you want to track.

Come back every few days and search through the listings for each again and note any changes in position. This will allow you to see which of your optimization efforts are working.

It’s a little bit of tedious work, but well worth the effort. You can also use software to automate this process. Keeping track of your rankings over time and seeing how you start to move up in the search results as you build more links and develop a more authoritative site is very motivating.

Grab your keywords, open your favorite search engine and check your rankings.

Free Wordtracker Tool

If you’ve been doing this for a while, you may remember the old overture/ yahoo keyword tool. Once it stopped working, wordtracker stepped up with their own free version. It can be found here. You simply enter your keyword and click the “hit me” button. Here’s what it looks like:

Wordtracker will then go out and give you the top 100 searches that include your keyword as well as how often the term is searched per day. I used crockpot cooking in the search I did for the the picture above. If this is a niche you may be interested in, take a look at my crockpot niche pack.

Use the steps outlined in the Google keyword tool post to research your competition for each keyword.

Or if you don’t want to do all this by hand, consider using the ….

Paid Wordtracker Tool

What I like best about this particular tool is the fact that it does the analysis for me and presents me with a list of keywords that I can sort by how hard it will be to rank for them. More on that in a second.

By the way you can check out and try wordtracker here. They offer a free 7 day trial that I highly recommend you take them up on. Set some time aside during those 7 days to run some keyword reports for your niche.  You can export them and save them to use them later.

Where the free version of wordtracker only gives you the 100 most popular terms and the Google keyword tool about 150, the paid wordtracker version gives you 1000 keywords. In other words, you get a lot more long tail keywords to work with.

You can also save your keyword lists and organize them by project right within the software interface. This makes it easy to spend some time doing keyword research one day and end up with a huge list of terms to go after by creating website pages, blog posts and articles.

As I mentioned, my favorite part of this software is that it does the competitive analysis for me. I don’t have to check each and every keyword by hand. Instead I click a button and it does it for me. I can then pick the best keywords at a glance.

Here’s what a wordtracker keyword report looks like:

As you can see, you simply enter your keyword (we’re using crockpot cooking again as our example) in the box at the top, and click search. This will result in a list of up to 1000 keywords as well as the amount of searches (in other words how often that particular term is searched for in 24 hours).

Next you can click “Select All” and “get additional metrics”. It will take a few seconds and the end result is the data you see in the last three columns. I like to use keywords that give me a high KEI value, while also paying attention to the “In Anchor and Title” column.

If you are serious about attracting a lot of search engine traffic, and your website or blog is already making more than $100 a month, I would recommend getting a wordtracker subscription. If you’re not quite at that point yet, use one of the free tools, but also consider signing up for the free 7 day trial and make sure you sit down and generate quite a few keyword lists during that time. Then be sure to use all that data (no matter how you collect it) to great more optimized content for your blog or write some more articles that rank high in the search engines.

Before we move into reviews of the various free and paid keyword research tools I use, I thought we should talk about the difference between long tail and short tail keywords. The graphic on the left gives you a pretty good idea of how this works, but let’s look at an example as well.

In the weightloss and diet market that I am currently researching for a new Affiliate Niche Pack, obviously weightloss, diet and even terms like losing weight are short tail or main keywords. They are very hard to rank for and should only be used as your main site keyword – the one you optimize your home page for. In the weightloss market, I would even go so far as to say don’t go directly for the main term at all, but use a modifier instead like weightloss for women, weightloss for kids etc for your term.

The next batch of keywords will still be used quite frequently, but the competition to rank for those terms will be a little less. Those terms make great category keywords. Examples of these types of keywords in the weightloss market are:

• weightloss programs
• weightloss centers
• weightloss surgery
• weightloss pills

The last group of keywords are true long tail keywords. These are not searched very often each day, but the reason I like them is because they are very easy to rank for. I use them for my blog posts or articles on my own sites, but also for articles that I write and submit to article directories.

Here are some examples of long tail keywords:

• benefits of nuts in weightloss
• weightloss recipes for juicers
• quick weightloss cardio workouts
• weightloss after three months

Long tail keywords are usually 3 or more words long.

Last, but not least, let’s talk about when you should use what keyword. If you are mostly writing articles to submit to article directories and promote an affiliate product in the author resource box, stick to long tail keywords.

If you are building a site, pick your main keyword for your home page. Next, pick 4 or 5 medium tail keywords for your categories. After that’s done, spend the rest of your time at first adding more articles or blog posts using long tail keywords.

Once you have 30 or so articles up, put some time into link building as well as creating more content. I like to split my time 50/50 between those two tasks.

P.S. Wondering how to find all those keywords? I’ll go over the various keyword tools out there over the next couple of days, but by far my favorite is the Wordtracker Keyword Tool.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the topic:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Allow me to translate :)

You want to create your webpages in a way that will allow them to show up on the first page of “Google” for example when someone searches for a particular keyword or keyphrase. SEO or search engine optimization is a broard term for all the little things we do to accomplish that.

There are quite a few different factors that determine where you rank for your keyword. Let’s divide them up into onpage and offpage factors.

Onpage factors are things on your own webpage and that you have direct control over. Please not that we are optimizing each individual page not just the site as a whole. Let’s look at some of the most important on page factors:

Title

The title of your page is the most important factor when it comes to ranking. Choose a title that includes your main keyword or keyphrase. Use it early in the title, but also make it title appealing and interesting since it’s the first thing the reader will see when they look at search results. For the same reason you also want to include a good description. Let’s look at a search result to illustrate.

My keywords (in this case keywords and keyphrases) are in the title and it sounds pretty interesting (at least I think so). The description is the littel bit of text below it, which in this case isn’t perfect since it repeats the title and then has some infor on when it was posted, both of which don’t really help the reader. It would have been better if the description would have been “One of the best skills you can learn when you are starting your affiliate and article marketing career is how to do keyword research. Today I’ll share how I go about doing just that.”

My homework for this coming week is going to look for a plugin that will help me craft better descriptions.

Content

This one is pretty straight forward. You want your keywords and keyphrases in the content of your page. Whenever possible I try to use main main keyword somewhere in the first 100 words of my blog posts and articles. After that just sort of naturally sprinkle it in there.  You can also use them in your H tags (H1, H2 etc), in bolded or italizied text (which gives them a little bit more weight than just plain normal text) and even as the alt text of your images.

A Word Of Caution – don’t overdo this. It’s known as keyword stuffing and can actually hurt you. Just use the keywords naturally in your content.

Internal Links

These are the links within your website. For example, when your main article page links to an individual article, that link is an internal link. Internal links are important. It is through links that the search engines make their way through your website. Always make sure that you are linking from somewhere on your website to each piece of new content you create on it. That’s why I like to use a wordpress blog – it automates that part for me.

The anchor text is also important. It’s the text you use to link to the page in question. Here’s an example:

Picking keywords and keyphrases

The link above links to the article right here on this blog about choosing keywords and keyphrases (the same one we talked about in the graphic above). The anchor text in this case is “picking keywords and keyphrases”. Note how I worked both of my keywords into the anchor text.

Technically this last point could be counted as an offpage factor since it isn’t on the actual page but a different page of the same website. I kinda think of it more as an onpage or a better term would be onsite factor that I have direct control over.

Now let’s move on to offpage factors. The main offpage or offsite factor to consider is external links. Let’s take a look.

External Links

External links are links from other pages that point to your website and they are a major factor in search engine optimization. After you’ve gotten all your on page factors in order, this is were you will spend all your time and focus on.

A very simplified view of a search engine looks like this. The search engine looks at your page and uses the onpage factors to determine what your page is about. The more of them you have in place, the more relevant you are on that particular topic. Then it looks at all the other websites / pages that link to your page. Again it is important to note that this applies to the individual pages of your website not your entire website. The more links you get to your website, the more “votes” you get… in essence, the web is a democracy and the more “votes” you get the higher your site will rank.

Of course it isn’t quite that simple. Anchor text again plays a role and not all votes are created equal (stronger websites who are on topic, get more powerful votes). Let’s get back to anchor test for a minute here. Ideally you want your keywords in the anchor text, but you also don’t want the extact same anchor text in every link, a little variety is good. When you have a little bit of control over the incoming links from other webpages (for example when you are submitting an article to an article directory), keep those two things in mind.

That’s about it. I’ll work on another post about how we will go about getting those external links shortly. For now, get your onpage stuff in order and then write and submit an article or two for your webpages / posts and get those submitted to places like ezinearticle.com