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What is SEO

Something that you hear over and over when you are looking for information about internet marketing and making money online is SEO, and it´s likely that you have figured out what it is, but it´s still probably not very well explained. I will try to explain a little bit about it here.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization in short means to make your website more attractive to search engines. This is done by a number of ways and I will mention the very basic things in this article.

A search engine and a person doesn’t exactly see the webpages the same way and there are things on the page that are supposed to only be read by the engines, one of these things are the meta tags. In the meta tags you can put things like keywords and description.

First off all you need to research what keywords are relevant to your site, but seeing as you started the site up already, you probably have quite a good idea about this. If you haven’t started the site yet and you are intending to make a site about a niche, just with the intention of making money, research will be good. And if this is the case, you might want to look into how possible it is to get a domain name that have the keywords in it. Keyword rich domain names will help your listings on certain search engines since extra weight might be put into the fact that the things people search for show in your domain name.

When you optimize your site for search engines you want to make sure you use the keywords in your title tag, the meta tags, possible image alt tags and of course in the content of the page itself. However, don’t overdo this. Trying to build pages only for search engines and not for people will most often just hurt you in the long run. I believe it is John Chow who once wrote that he always puts people first and Google second. To me, this makes a lot of sense. It´s the visitors who should come first and then the search engines.

That said though, you should always make sure you have your most important keywords mentioned here and there on the site.

If you are a blogger and you are able to install plugins on your blog, I would like to take the moment to suggest a plugin called All in one SEO. With this plugin you can edit the title of each post as well as add keywords and descriptions to the posts.

Did I forget any of the basic SEO stuff, feel free to add your thoughts.

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Backlinks matters

In some previous posts I talk about backlinks and I figure it´s a good time to talk a little bit more about what backlinks do for your site and traffic.

The concept of building backlinks is simply to get links that are pointing back to your site. This can be done in a number of ways and I will explain some of the most common ways and why you should make an effort in building links.

So, why should you build links back to your site. Well, the first answer would be that they can give you traffic back, people will see the links and click on them. But also the people you trade links with might find your site interesting enough to come back to. Getting your links out there will start the word of mouth or viral marketing a bit too. People notice your site and will start talking about it, which in itself will bring more people to your site.

Of course there are more things behind the reason to build backlinks. Search engines. It used to be that you got a good domain name and added some relevant search words to your title and meta tags, then put it a few times on the site itself and voila! AltaVista came to eat your site up and you got a placement in the top three links on your term. Obviously, that doesn’t happen anymore.

The search engines have become a little bit more complex than that (even if that was quite complex to figure out back then too). One of the things that add to the complexity of the search engines is popularity. The way search engines, and perhaps Google more than any other, is by looking at what sites link back to yours.

This does not mean that more links is better even if it might seem so at first. What you want to do is trade links with sites relevant to your topic and you want to trade links with real sites. If you try to submit your site to link farms you might end up getting penalized by the search engines.

Search engines see it as your site being more popular if popular sites link to you. Or in other words, if more popular sites link to yours, it will be seen as a link that weights heavier on the search engines ranking of your site.

To get started with the building of backlinks go out and search for sites that you like and find would bring value to your readers too, e-mail the webmaster and suggest a link trade. But, don’t get too carried away. You don’t want to turn your site into a linkfarm itself. No one will want to trade with a site that links to a billion other sites.

Apart from the old fashioned link trading described above remember the social bookmarking sites. These sites usually have very good popularity themselves and you can get your links up there without having to link back to their sites. This form of links will give you even more popularity with the engines since they don’t see it as a link trade but as people just linking to your site because it´s that good. There are a ton of social bookmarking sites out there, so you have a lot of work.

Something that is very powerful is to use forums to build backlinks. And no, I´m not talking about spamming forums here, that´s always a big no no. Find forums relevant to your topic. If you don’t feel comfortable diving into discussions right away then follow the forums for a while before you make your first post. This is generally a good idea even if you are familiar with the topic, just to get a feel for how the discussions usually go. When you do make your first post you simply have a link back to your site in your signature file.

Most forums are very strict about posting pure links in their forums but having a link to your site in the signature is a common and accepted way to get your site noticed without being pushy about it.

The last thing I will mention for building backlinks is directories. Directories are like search engines but the listings are checked by real people. If your link is accepted it will be listed without you needing to link back to their site, so again, it´s the better kind of links.

As a last addition I will just mention this, stay away from automated ways of getting your link submitted to a number of sites. It usually end up hurting more than helping.

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Build traffic with articles

Sorry about the slightly late post everyone, I’ve had a bit of a hectic day as I’m preparing for going away on my easter holiday (don’t worry, I will still post thoughts and tidbits here ).

If you have a site where your content is mainly written things, like a blog, then using article directories to drive traffic to your site might be something to consider. Article marketing works for any kind of site though but with blogs and similar, you have the opportunity to give the readers a ”sample” of your real site. And giving people a taste before they get the main dish is always good, in my humble opinion.

An article directory is a site that let people submit their own articles to be listed on the directory. Other people are then allowed to use these articles to reprint on their site or in their e-zines as long as the articles are kept intact along with the authors bio-box.

If you are a blogger and you do write your own content (which you should), with just a few changes to each of your posts you could turn them into actual articles and get them listed on some article directories. You should change the articles so that they are not exactly like your post on the blog or site since search engines try to avoid duplicate content to some extent.

The reason you want to submit your content on article directories is because a lot of them are quite big and the articles listed there will get good Google listings. Most of the article directories lets the author include a bio box at the bottom where you will link back to your own site.

This link back will give you visitors from the article directories, it will give you backlinks to your site, so that the search engines see that your site is more popular. It might also result in e-zines and other sites re-printing your article which leads to more traffic back and more backlinks.

For me this is a logical thing to do since the changes you have to make to the content you have already written will not be too big and you will get your content read by a lot more people. If the people like what you write, they will most likely visit your site and bookmark or subscribe to it.

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Free Website Promotion

Once you have your website up and running you need to get some visitors to it. Without visitors we can´t make any money, right. When we are starting up a business we would prefer if the traffic we can build up is free or at least very cheap. In this article I will list some ways that are completely free to build a good base of traffic for your site.

Search Engines
There are a lot of ways to get your website ”out there” and many of the good ways are free. The most obvious to start with will of course be search engines.

Search engines can still bring in a load of traffic to your site and this traffic will be targeted and most often of ”good quality”. With the amount of websites on the internet today, it´s not as easy to get good listings on the search engines as it once was, but you should still submit your site to as many as you can. A lot of the search engines work on different formulas how the rank the pages and you might get lucky with some search engine to get a good ranking.

Even if the engines you submit to are smaller it will help getting your site noticed, and one visitor here and there is better than zero visitors at all. When finding search engines to submit to, you could head over to Wikipedia, they have quite an extensive list to get you started.

Social Bookmarks
For those that are not familiar with social bookmarking, this is, simply put a way of saving your bookmarks online with the ability to share them with your friends and people who are interested in similar things. It´s like a community of bookmarkers.

Using social bookmarking sites can drive anywhere from almost no traffic to quite a big heap of traffic to your website. It all depends on how fast word spreads about the content your site is providing. Even if you get almost no traffic from the social bookmark sites, it´s a free source of traffic that will build up over time. The more people who visit your site from the social bookmarks, the more chance there is of the word spreading. And as with the search engines, even if you just get one hit here and there, it´s better than getting no traffic at all.

Today, there are a bundle of social bookmarking sites on the web and a lot of them work differently from each other. I will not go into any of the sites in detail here but just mention them as a source of free traffic that you should not overlook. Luckily, Wikipedia have a list on quite a lot of the social bookmarking sites out there so you can get started.

Article Marketing
Article marketing is when you write an article about a specific topic (preferably related and targeted to your sites content) and you submit the article to the article directories online. Most of the article directories will allow you to put a bio box at the end of your article that can contain a link back to your site. Using article marketing can greatly improve your traffic and search engine exposure, also it will bring you good target traffic that are already interested in visiting your site because they have already had ”contact” with your work.

To find some article directories to get you started, you could simply make a search on Google. The list you get back there should be enough to get you started.

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Mistakes with PPC

When people are starting up with PPC marketing there are a few mistakes that are commonly made.

One of the very common mistake is to not turn off the content network ads. The content network are all the pages that use Google´s AdSense and the quality of this traffic is usually not very good. To forget to turn off, or just not knowing about the content network ads being enabled by default can cost you quite a bit of money with very little or no return.

Apart from the low quality of the traffic, you will also get a massive amount of impressions on your ads. This will usually cause your Click Through Rate (CTR for short) to go way down. With a very low CTR, Google will think that your ads are not relevant to the search terms you have specified and will penalize you. This will result in a higher cost per click. All this is quite simplified but the important thing is that a low CTR leads to higher price for the same click. And a good CTR means a lower price for the same click.

The next common mistake is bidding too high initially. Start out with smaller cost per click, especially when you are learning how PPC works. Bidding high will give you top positions and a lot of exposure, but that will not help you if you are a novice at creating landing pages. Even if you get a bundle of hits to your page, it will be worth nothing if you can’t convert it into a sale.

So, start small and learn both how to get an appealing ad that pulls in a good CTR and polish your landing pages so that you have a high conversion ratio.

Both these things are done best by split testing two versions against each other. Run two ads for the same landing page at the same time, see which one gets the highest CTR. Remove the one with lower CTR and try to improve the one you have by making yet another ad, split test these against each other. Always try to improve your landing pages as well, but remember to keep the previous versions in case the new one is worse!

This brings us to a third common mistake that new PPC marketers make. Not using landing pages. You need to send the traffic from the PPC searches to a well prepared and very targeted landing page. If you run a big campaign, you might even need to have several landing pages for different niches within your topic.

It´s never a good thing to be ”general” when you are working with PPC. If you are selling a specific part for a specific model of cars, for instance, do not bid on just ”car” as search word. Be as specific as you can. It will generate less traffic to your site but the traffic will be better quality.

Working with PPC marketing is about always improving what you currently have in, my opinion. Test and test again what works and what doesn’t. It will pay off in the end.

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