In this edition of OK to Make Money Online, let us take a look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO seems to be the hotbed of conversation on the net these days. It is really simple and yet seems to have such a mystique about it. Why? It is really not an art.

Take a look around, not in the blogs you know, but in general. Most websites do not even care about keyword optimization. Most are a collection of unrelated subjects. Take a cooking site for example. Inside the site, you will have everything from grandma’s breakfast recipe to a late night snack. So how does Google index this site? Cooking in general? Now this may be the author’s intent but it does not work for the internet-marketing person.

Take most sites: they are all over the place with the subject matter. One article may be about shoes, another about clothes and on the same site cooking utensils. So how does Google rate the site and what ads does it display? We have to help Google out here and in response, they will rate your page higher in page ranking.

We need to make your site single purpose. So let’s say you have a site that covers many categories or subjects. We need to break it up into niches, with each niche having a single subject or keyword. Then Google will be able to correctly categorize your site by keyword. So: one subject per niche.

After we have all your topics reduced to a few categories, we will next to build a website or blog for each one. How you do that? We will use a tool that Google supplies to the advertisers in the Adwords section of the Google website. It is called the Keyword Tool. This tool is available to anyone and is used to locate a term or keyword that has been entered in a search request. With the search request, we have a frequency and amount spent per month per keyword identified. This is how you can locate a keyword or keyword phrase.

Once you have found a keyword for each of your major topics it is time to create a blog or website. Remember; keep the website focused on a single topic or keyword. The topic or keyword should be in your URL name, the website title, privacy page, the about you page, etc. Use the keyword as often as possible but still make the pages enjoyable and readable. Continue doing this on each new website for the rest of your keywords.

Take any articles that were already on your old site and rewrite them using the appropriate keyword for the article. Make sure you use your keyword or phrase in the title, opening paragraph, body and closing paragraph. Copy that article to the new website and publish it.

If you have pictures or graphics on a page, make sure you work your keyword into the picture information area of the HTML code. This will assure the spider that the picture relates to the article or keyword topic. However, be true to your readers. Some of the black hats will put up any old picture so they can imbed the keyword text. Remember, at some point you want traffic, and you want your readers back. Don’t given them trash; give then something they want to come back for.

However don’t overdo it! Overuse was used by Black Hats to trick Google. Google now detects if you overuse a keyword, and will flag you for keyword stuffing.

To review: make your sites single-minded, research your keywords using Adwords, and use your keyword frequently to make money online. Remember you want Google to think you are the expert when you make money online.

Michael

In OK to Make Money Online today, let’s look at why your CTR (click through rate) just dropped to the floor. Maybe a friend, co-worker, or an article you read told you the latest thing was the new social networks, and that these networks could drive loads of traffic to your site. Then it occurred to you — more traffic, more money. But your CTR starting dropping just after you started getting tons of traffic from one of the social networks! Why?

Here’s why: Traffic generated from social networks is interested in socializing, not buying. They want to talk about life, their day, their boss, or whatever. They are not in a buying mood. Oh, they will look at what you have and maybe poke a few buttons, but they will soon get bored and click away and you will not make money. The traffic you want is purchase-driven or wanting the newest thing and ready to buy. They may be doing research or price shopping, so you will help them by directing them to their next purchase.

When you bought into the social network hype, you bought into the producers of social networks’ promotion of their product. What is their product? Socializing! However, is that what you are promoting? If so, great! You can stop reading now and go back to making money. If not, and if your keyword is not targeted on the latest “got to have it” craze, then you don’t belong in a social network. When Google detects your error, they will downgrade your ads until you get it.

Remember, your job is to promote your keyword, which is most likely a product or service to make money. While promoting your keyword, you help Google. How? By giving the buyer an entry or landing place for his search request, which you in turn points them to your site, and ultimately on to the advertiser. If we have all done our jobs, and the buyer and advertiser are happy, we get paid.

What can you do? Simple: give your readers good content and a reason to come back. Second, make sure you site is keyword-optimized on every page you write or display. Third, work on getting your name higher in the SERP by writing more articles with good content, but holding back some so the readers are drawn back to your site. Fourth, get more back-links. Fifth, if you don’t have a buzz or a new “got to have it,” stop sending social traffic to your site. Google will thank you with better-performing ads. And in the end, isn’t that what you want when you make money?

Michael

If you have a web based business you already know how important traffic is to the health of your business. The best way to get more traffic to your site is through using SEO, or search engine optimization effectively. Many SEO tools have been created with the aim of making this an easier process for website owners, who don’t always have the time to spend hours on making sure that their websites are properly optimized.

Only Tools Can Help You Monitor Your Rankings First of all, you’ll find that only good SEO tools can help you to monitor your rankings. It’s difficult to go around constantly trying to check out your rank for certain keywords. However, the right tools will actually do this for you. You can look at top search queries for your site and find out which keywords are performing the best and which ones really are not ranking well.

SEO Tool #1 – Backlink Checkers ? A backlink checker can be extremely helpful in getting more out of your business’ online presence. Backlinks (links which point to your website from other sites) are great for increasing your page ranking and of course, they provide another way for people to find your website. It can be useful to know who is linking to your site and how many sites link to your own. These tools can even tell you how well your competitors are doing when it comes to backlinks.

SEO Tool #2 – Keyword Density Checkers ? An incredibly useful SEO tool, these examine the keyword density of your website. Keywords are what get people into your website, by and large and are a big part of your search engine rankings. Using the right keywords in the right density will help your site to work its way towards the top of search results pages and bring in a lot of traffic along the way. A good keyword density checker will give you the data you need to ensure that your site is properly optimized.

SEO Tool #3 – Keyword Research Software ? A keyword research tool can be a huge help when deciding on the keywords to optimize your site for ? and just as importantly, your advertising campaigns, especially pay per click ads. Using the keywords which people use when looking for products and services like the ones you have to offer will dramatically increase your traffic and make your pay per click and other ad campaigns much more effective. Using the right keywords can make an enormous difference; a keyword research tool can take the guesswork out of this process and get your site higher search engine rankings.

As a webmaster or the owner of an online based business, you probably already know how important it is to make sure that your site uses search engine optimization (SEO) in the right way. However, what you probably don’t know about is that using the right SEO tools can make all the difference in having your site get the kind of ranking which helps potential customers find you easily and having a site which languishes on a seldom viewed page of search results. In fact, not having SEO tools can make it nearly impossible to properly use SEO to get the maximum benefits for your site. To learn more about how SEO tools are a necessity, read on!

The Right SEO Tools Help You To Monitor Your Site’s Page Ranking Everyone needs to keep an eye on their page rankings; good SEO tools will let you have an up to date view of your site’s progress. It can be almost impossible to know how well your SEO efforts are doing without being able to watch which keywords are doing the best for your website and which you would do better to avoid.

SEO Tools Help You Choose The Most Effective Keywords Finding the keywords which will bring the most traffic to your site is vitally important. Using SEO tools can make this process far easier. You want to optimize your site for keywords which are often searched for, rather than ones which are seldom used in search queries.

The Right SEO Tools Will Help You Check On Your Site The best SEO tools even let you check up on your site’s performance. You want to keep your site free of broken links and make sure that your site map is free of any errors ? something which would take a long time to do without the aid of tools. After all, ensuring usability for visitors will keep them coming back for repeat visits.

Track the Sites Which Link To Your Website SEO tools can allow you to keep an eye on the sites which are linked to your own. Knowing how many other sites link to your site is important and is a factor in determining page ranking. A good SEO tools will give you this information, as well as telling you about the sites which link to your competitor’s websites.

SEO tools are a necessity for maximizing the potential benefits of search engine optimization. Using the right SEO tools lets you spend less time on the hard work of SEO and more time building your business.

I think articles are probably the easiest cheapest form of marketing on the internet. To begin with they are free to post on as many directories as you can. There are people who actually read articles, plus webmasters publish them as content. They lend credibility to you and your business. The key factor to getting benefits from writing an article is to make sure it shares good information and is not a sales pitch.

Some of the benefits to article marketing include:

Online Business Credibility ” Providing information to your readers through articles shows people you know about your field or industry. This builds your reputation and raises awareness of your brand. The result of this is that people trust your products, or recommendations if you are an affiliate marketer.

Gets You Inbound Links – The professional SEOs use this method to bring one way links to your site. The search engines eat this link candy. Your resource box that concludes your article has information about you and directs people to your site. If another webmaster choses to publish you article, they leave the resource box there, building a link to your site. Several webmasters pulish articles on their site, therefore building a wide network of links to your site.

Better Search Engine Rankings – As you get published and the one way links increase to your site, you will see yourself in a better position on the search engines. The most important thing to do to make sure you get a good position is to use the right anchor text on your link in your resource box.

The proof of Effective Article Marketing:

I want to restate that the most important thing is that you write an informative article, not a pitch. If you want proof of your marketing and how often your article is published, just search for the title in quotes on the major search engines. This will tell you how many times it was published. Make sure you do this about 1-2 months after submitting or you won’t see all the results. Webmasters are more likely to publish informative articles, not sales pitches.

Once you have submitted a few articles you will see your marketing spiral if you article is done correctly. There are thousands of webmasters who use articles for content on their sites.

If you ever hire someone to do search engine optimization they will give you a report of submissions. Some of these services either submit one article for a flat fee, or as part of a subscription will submit multiple articles. You should go out right now and find these services, it is time to get your business noticed.

If you are interested in SEO tools, you’ll find that you have two options – free tools or paid tools. There are some tools out there that are free for everyone to use, allowing you to check out your back links, the measure various things on your site, and some that even do keyword research for you. However, in many cases, you’ll actually find that the paid tools are often much better than the free ones. Why? Well, here are just a few reasons that make the case for paid tools over free ones.

Paid Tools Are Generally More Reliable Than Free Ones – One of the important differences between free and paid SEO tools is that paid SEO tools usually are much more reliable than are free ones. This is because with free tools, the developers do not have nearly as much of an incentive to keep their tools properly maintained.

Paid Tools Offer More Accuracy – As far as accuracy goes, paid tools usually do a lot better than the free alternatives. The developers of free SEO tools are not as motivated as the creators of paid tools to keep their software finely tuned and providing optimal performance. If the developers behind paid tools are not providing accuracy, they are likely to hear about it from their customers and work t make the necessary changes.

Paid SEO Tools Are More Convenient – In general, users report that paid SEO tools are easier to use – there are all in one SEO tool suites available (but not for free). The convenience of having all of the tools you need in one place can more than make up for the small investment made in SEO tools.

Paid SEO Tools Offer Easier Integration – There are of course a lot of free SEO tolls out there. However, there are so many tools in so many places which all work so differently from each other that for the most part you can forget about integrating them with each other. This is one of the chief advantages of paid SEO tools.

Technical Support -Free SEO tools usually have little to no technical support. Paid tools of course do have some support behind them and in fact in many cases the technical support offered is excellent with turnaround times of 24 hours or less. If you run into any trouble with your SEO software, technical support is a big plus and can be well worth the purchase price all by itself.

There are of course some excellent free SEO tools out there, but the case for using paid SEO tools is very compelling. Technical support, convenience and easier integration makes paid SEO tools a favored option by many webmasters.

This article about paid seo tools is brought to you by webpositionexpert.