Work From Home

Choosing the Right keywords to target your intended audience with is more than vital, it’s the whole ball game. The best way to do this is by using a large-scale keyword generation software & services such as Wordtracker or Keyword Elite.

However, if you take the time to do it right, you can find all the same keywords yourself, albeit more slowly, by using an excellent free web-based tool offered by Digital Point Solutions, simply called the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. It actually queries both Yahoo’s (Overture) data as well as Google’s AdWords keyword data, for each and every keyword search you run. Better yet, it let’s you drill down to be as specific as you want. The only thing this doesn’t tell you is how much people are willing to pay for each
term in PPC engines like AdWords and Y!SM. This is valuable data I suggest you use for in-depth campaigns, especially for AdSense Publishers, however at this point it’s not necessary. SEOing your website is strictly the art of choosing the MOST RELEVANT keywords to your desired audience. All else needs to be forgotten at this stage.

Build up as big a list as possible, keeping all keywords on your list relevant. I suggest using a spreadsheet like MS-Excel to store them, so you can sort them by demand as well.

The way you get lots of people to your site is by choosing the highest-demand keywords on that list and using them in your site often. After you’ve built your whole list, sort by demand, and use those with the biggest numbers the most across your website.

Technorati : keyword selection, keywords, seo

Technorati, Del.icio.us, Fark, Furl, Digg. Web 2.0’s hottest trend has created over 100 of this new breed of “Tagging” websites in fact, where humans share their online bookmarks with each other. This is essentially just a way for us to duplicate Google’s work to the same end.

Why would we go through such trouble? Because computer algorithms still just don’t “know” their resources the way humans do. Having another person select a website and “tag” it as relevant to your keyword is much more intuitive for us to find resources with. It has its problems too, mainly when combining keywords, but overall it’s becoming an extremely popular way for people to find other websites. This of course means that you, too, need to be Tagging your website for others to find.

Essentially the way these things work is that you set up an account with each of the ones you want to use, add a little button or two to your browser bar, and “Tag” any website instead of bookmarking it the traditional way. Those tags could be kept for personal use (Who in their right mind would want to do that…?) but as a default they are shared on that bookmarking website for others who search for the term. The websites that have been tagged the most for a certain keyword come up the highest on the list when that keyword is searched. It’s actually a very simple & elegant system.

From a marketing standpoint, however, it is chaotic. First of all there are too many of these sites! Submitting to Google and Yahoo! is one thing, but could you imagine opening an account in all 100+ of these things and hitting the “tag” button for all of them? How about providing a review in each of them? Second, people still go to google.com to search unless you make it easier for them to search a Tag elsewhere. It’s still not quite worth our time. Finally, the problem it has with multiple keywords (Search engines handle keyword phrases as a single query… Bookmarking sites handle each word as a query and add them together) leaves a lot up to interpretation. The end result Is that you need to be supplying MUCH MORE keywords to a bookmarking site than you would to a search engine.

The best tool I’ve seen to date to alleviate these problems is a very simple web
application at:

http://www.socialbookmarking.marketersgiveaway.com/

There’s still no way to get around having to stuff in all those keywords, but at least this creates a way to allow everyone visiting your website to Bookmark your site in as many of these sites as possible.

Technorati : Social Bookmarking, digg, fark, furl, tagging

These great tools act as duplicate websites that are extremely easy and free to set up. All you need is some content, not even very good content, and you’ve got a great “Second site” for the search engine to follow your links to and from.

Ever since Google bought Blogger.com, Googlebot has paid a lot of attention to what’s happening in “the Blogosphere.” Search engines still love to spider Blog content more often than other types of websites, since blogs were invented to be easy for SE Spiders to traverse in the first place. A unique feature of even the free blogs like Wordpress & blogger is that you can set them up to automatically “ping” certain Search Engines or even social bookmarking sites to request that the spider comes out for another visit every time new content is added.

However, the hype about blogs is mostly overrated now. At first it was well justified, and then a method of website marketing called “Blog and Ping” was overused in early 2006 by most of the Internet Marketers of the time.

It involved making tons of blogs with almost no content in them except a link to their website, and then setting them all to ping immediately… This caused Google to hold an emergency war council and now the Ping feature is only marginally better than not at all.

Much like Forum Marketing, commenting on other people’s Blogs is a great way to build incoming links and also network in your niche.

Finding blogs that are on your niche topic is as easy as going to Blogger’s search at: http://search.blogger.com, to a great tech head’s site called Technorati: http://technorati.com, or directly to Google’s whole web Blog Search at: http://blogsearch.google.com.

Once you’ve found a blog that is on your topic, I recommend bookmarking it and the others you find into the same folder so you can watch them from time to time.

What’ you’re looking for is a question that you can answer. If you simply make a posting that sounds like an advertisement, they you’ll be spamming the blog, and surely the blog’s owner will delete it, and may even ban your IP address. The trick is to answer a question someone else asks with your business being part of the solution. You want to show off your expertise without sounding too arrogant, and of course you want to get a link in. Always offer help and advice, and only market yourself when it’s part of a solution to someone else’s question.

The real benefits of this method are long term, as you want to be found by both SE Spiders and humans alike, talking authoritatively on your niche subject. No one blog posting will bring in tons of visitors, however, and you aren’t going to find the ‘ripe’ questions out there every day.

Technorati : back links, blog comments, blogging, blogging for money, blogs