What are Key Words

Some SEO experts and internet marketers spend a majority of their time on this subject because if you find the right key words to be searched for you can save hundreds if not thousands of dollars on PPC advertising. Key word research is probably the most important step required in SEO. Key words are the main topics about your website and tell search engines when your website is relevant to be shown in the search results. The more relevant your website is for a specific key word or phrase than the higher ranking position your website will have.

For instance if I used the key word “Loan” for a banks’ website than we would obviously be competing against millions of other banking sites. However if I focus on using more niche targeted key words such as “Small business loans” or even more specific products such as “SBA 504 Loans” these key words are not only more relevant to your website, but they also have thousands of local searches with low competition.

What Key Words Should you focus on?

Key Words with Commercial Intent rather than informative intent are suited for producing sales rather than attracting traffic looking for knowledge. Try and think about from a consumer perspective about which key words you would type in Google to find a product that you want to Buy. The next two pre requisites are targeted search volume and relatively low competition. If you are selling a product that is a common term than your search volume should be in the hundreds of thousands. I suggest if you do have a common term to search for key phrases that have 50,000 or less instead.

This will cut down the competition immensly and easier for success. On the other hand if your key word is trying to sell a specific machine or type of equipment then low  thousands to hundreds of monthly searches is more relevant to your niche. I always use Google Key Words tool to check the competition for my Key words. I tend to choose low competition key words with sufficient search volume.

How to do Key Word Research

Now here comes the more interesting statistical side of Key Word Research. SEO experts use Key Word Research Tools that are and invaluable asset to have. Here is an explanation of  the most commonly used Key Word research tools.

Market Samurai this tool is used to idenitfy what backlinks, domain age, and directories your competition has to rank on the 1st page of Google. Then it provides a scale on how easy or difficult it will be to reach the top page of the search results. Traffic Travis is a free version that does similar things as Market Samurai but isn’t as powerful.

Market Samurai Key Word Research Tool

The next free key word research tool is Google Key Words tool. This tool provides Global and Monthly searches for specified key words, estimated traffic, key word suggestions, and the average CPC (cost per click) for your key words. There are other key word tools out there that can bring you “Laser targeted traffic” but the price sometimes isn’t worth it with Market Samurai and the free tools I suggested.

How to use Key Words

Think of Key Words as a sign or logo to a store. This is your marketing advertisement to attract customers into your digital store and the more relevant your sign is to your store and society the more popular your store will become. Now for utilizing key words within your website. Not only do they have to be relevant in the content within your web pages but they also need to be placed in several areas throughout your website.

First you need to add Meta tags to your website this is your key words with a description that tell search engines what your website is about. Only search engines can see what your Meta tags are unless viewing your websites html source. The next step is to place key words in your <Title> tags and <H1> header tags.  The anchor text  that link to your website should not say “Click Here” but the actual Key words you are referencing.

The key words should be placed within your content about 3%-5% density which means if you content is 500 words than 15-25 of those words should be your key words. If you are using images within your content add <alt> image text to your picture to describe to search engines what your image is about (hopefully your key words).

By implementing these Key Word research techniques your website will be fully optimized with on page SEO. The next step to move up the ranks within Google are the Off page SEO techniques

Creating a Sitemap for Blogger is Easy

This article is about how to create a sitemap with Google Webmaster Tools.

Example of a Sitemap

What is a sitemap? A sitemap is basically a plain text hyperlink that displays all the web pages on your website. Kind of like a word document with just hyperlinks to all your web pages.

The benefits of creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google is not difficult and will optimize your website in several ways.
1) Once you create a sitemap Google and users will easily be able to find pages that would otherwise be hidden within the content of your website. A sitemap is basically a plain text hyperlink map that displays all the web pages on your website.

2) If your site is new and Google hasn’t crawled it yet (this process could takes months) submitting your sitemap to Google will get your website Indexed and crawled much quicker (usually within a few days).

3) If your site has interactive and dynamic content or is frequently updated than a sitemap will let Google know that your website has been updated.

4) If your site has a lot of separate web pages that are not well linked together (inbound links I will talk about this in another post) then a sitemap, will make navigating your site simple for search engines and visitors.

How to create a Sitemap

To create a Sitemap you should have already have a Google Webmaster Tools (click here to create one) account first.
All you need to do is have a gmail account to sign up and then be able to verify your website by creating an html file or inserting a new meta tag. Just like verifying your Google Analytics tool.

Once your webmasters tools is verified go to Audit my PC to automatically create a sitemap for you. Follow the instructional video to create the sitemap.

When you finish creating your sitemap login to your Webmaster Tools account and click on the Sitemap tab.
Next, on the “Add a sitemap” tab select General Web Sitemap from the drop down bar and enter the URL of the sitemap that was generated for you from Audit my PC. Then click on Add sitemap to submit your sitemap to Google.

With the sitemap created and submitted directly to Google you will greatly reduce the amount of time needed to index your website as well as decrease the risk of having hidden web pages.

1. Key Words in the URL
This is probably one of the top 5 most important parts of SEO. The reason being is because if your URL (website address) has the exact match domain for a key word or phrase, then you have a much higher chance of showing on the 1st page of Google. For example if you want to make a website about canine dog food, then register to your domain name as www.Caninedogfood.com Once your website has just a few backlinks and content about canine dog food your website will most likely show up on the first page once indexed. All you need to do before you register a domain name is do a quick key word research with Google Key Words tool, and find which key word or phrase relating to your website has the most traffic and low-medium competition.

2. Register Domain Name and Selecting a Host

Domain Name -Once you have completed step 1, register your domain name. This will usually cost you $7-9 a year which is relatively inexpensive. I suggest Godaddy.com because it is quick and easy.

Hosting Service- Next, choose a hosting company and select a service plan based on the amount of traffic or domains you want to register. If you think you are going to have a large amount of traffic which takes bandwidth than go with a more premium plan. I use Hostgator.com  for my sites because the customer service is actually helpful. Hosting services should cost about $4 a month for basic plans to $12 a month for unlimited bandwidth plans.

3. Know Your Competition
Type in a similar key word or phrase to your website and see what shows up. Are your competitors paying for PPC (pay per click) campaigns with Google Adwords? If so, that means that your niche is competitive and you may have to work a bit harder for organic (natural) search results. However you can check your competitors sites and see who is visiting them and leaving comments. How is there website set up and is there anything your website can do better? Is there a forum on this site that has a large community built around it? See what makes these sites show up in the top results page and try to out do them.

4. Build Anticipation

Think of your website as opening up a new store because essentially it is a digital doorway to your business. Think about how retail stores generate a “buzz” in the local news when they are opening a store because they want the community to visit the opening day. This is the same model you should use for your website.

If you have a Twitter account start hinting that you have a site being constructed and even offer free promotional gifts to the first 100 visitors! Don’t just stop on Twitter, use social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to promote you website to your friends and family there too. If you really want to start off on the right foot have a press release ready to be sent out the moment your site goes live. Make sure that you don’t submit your press release before your site is actually up because you would be missing out on potential backlinks and visits.

Google Analytics Chart

5. Track Your Website

Once your website is live, I would immediately install Google Analytics to begin tracking your website traffic. Knowing how and where your traffic is coming from is vital information to marketing a website!

Follow these easy steps before your site is created and this will save you a lot of trouble with SEO.

Leave a comment if you have any other suggestions

The first thing you need to do before you start all that other search engine optimization stuff is, you want to be able to track and analyze your current website traffic. A free and very useful tool provided by Google Analytics does much more than that.

Google Analytics shows you where your website traffic is coming from by country, what key words (very useful) visitors are using to find your website, the average time spent on your website, your top 10 landing pages (first page people view), referring traffic sources and much more. Here is a picture of what your Dashboard will look like;

Google Analytics Example

In order to access the power of Google Analytics all you need is an email address and someone who can input one html code that Google will provide for you. You can even do it yourself it is literally copy and paste. All you need to know where in your html coding to place it. Google suggests to place the code above the </head> tag which can easily be found by clicking ctrl+f and typing in </head>. Just paste the code right above that header tag and you now have successfully installed Google Analytics. Visit Google Analytics to sign up. From their the program will automatically run itself and all you have to do is analyze!

Google Analytics utilizes some cool graphs and features to show you how your website traffic history is progressing.

By clicking on visitors over view, you can track how many visits your website receives per day/week/month and how many unique visits (individual IP address visits).

In the content over view,  you can analyze which web pages on your site are receiving the most traffic and the entrance pathways there. This is beneficial to check because if you have a “squeeze page” which is the sales page that says “CLICK HERE!” or “SIGN UP NOW!” you can see if it is the most frequently viewed page, how visitors are finding the page, and the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage % of visitors that will view one single page of your website then exit. So the lower the bounce rate the more interested people are with your website.

Another great feature of Google Analytics is the traffic sources overview, this page lets you see how much traffic is coming from direct URL entries, search engines, and referring sites.

This helped me market my banks website by finding out which websites refer (backlink) to the banks website and what reviews they wrote about. This shows you more insight on what kind of traffic (hopefully quality) your being sent by other websites.

Detailed view of California Analytics

The last main feature of Google is probably the most interesting one. Click on the map overlay and it will provide you with a map of the world that you can click on to get to what city your visitors are coming from. All you have to do is click on the country, then state/province, and that will bring up little orange dots that will show you the specific city your visitors came from. Cool right (almost scary).

These are the main features of Google Analytics. I highly recommend using this program not only because its free but because big G knows there stuff and provides great information (they are the worlds largest information resource).

Let me know if you have any questions or comments about Google Analytics and I will be happy to assist you. Also if you know of any other note worthy website traffic reports then feel free to suggest them.

Hello fellow Bloggers!
Once you finish reading my blog you will understand advanced SEO techniques that cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars to pay someone else to do, and you will be able to Make Money Online!

My name is Andrew, and I am currently an Internet Marketing Intern at a bank in Irvine California. I have decided that I would like to share with you all the information that I have learned over the course of this Internship. The reason being is because I feel a need to give back to the Internet Marketing community, especially those that write about search engine optimization (SEO).
A lot of free and valuable information has been posted on the Internet about SEO, but there is one major problem. The information on How to SEO is scattered and limited in the amount of valuable information.

You literally have to search for days to find the valuable information that you are looking for and when you do it usually leaves you with just enough information to be asking even more questions. I was lucky enough to be able to do paid research on this specific topic 6 hours a day for months.

I realize that most people/businesses don’t have that kind of time or money to hire someone to do that, therefore I have created this blog to solve this problem for you. Not only will you be able to find all the valuable information on how to SEO and do a majority of internet marketing yourself here, but I will also be providing free information that companies pay thousands of dollars for so called SEO “gurus”.

Why would I do this though?

There are actually several reasons; the first being that the “How to SEO” information that I have gathered can all be found online for free anyways. The other reason is that I plan on pursuing this career as an Internet Marketer, and having a blog is an important asset to have in this business.

I am hoping that you find the information here valuable and follow my blog or bookmark it. Also don’t be afraid to ask any kind of question you may have about learning how to SEO or start an Internet Marketing career!