Three Steps to Write SEO Content and Still Sound Natural

When it comes to tactics and strategies to improve search engine results, there’s really nothing more important than the content on your website. Content, after all, is what the search engines analyze to determine the validity of a webpage and website. For this very reason, many webmasters focus their content efforts with the search engines in mind.

However focusing entirely on your search engine results is a mistake because search engines don’t buy your products or services, they don’t click on your ads and affiliate links and they don’t contribute directly to your bottom line – customers do.

This is why it’s essential that you write your content for your audience first and the search engines second. This, however, presents a conundrum because sometimes it’s difficult to combine the two. Keywords don’t always fit into an article or blog post naturally.

Here are three steps to write your SEO content and still sound natural.

Step One

Research your keywords and keyword phrases. Choose one to focus on in your article and then set it aside.

Step Two

Write your content, keeping your main keyword topic in mind, without even thinking about keywords and keyword phrases. For example, if your keyword phrase is, “How to housetrain a puppy,” then you’ll write an article about how to housetrain a puppy however as you’re writing it, you’re not worrying about if you’re using the keyword phrase or not. Your entire focus is on writing a quality article for your audience.

Step Three

Working in your keywords. Once your article or blog post has been written, then it’s time to go back with your keyword at the ready. Read through your article and insert this keyword or keyword phrase where it seems to fit naturally. Keep in mind the fact that search engines are also looking for relevant words so if you’re writing about puppy housebreaking, you can also use housetraining and potty training occasionally to break up the monotony and help the search engines recognize the relevance of your article.

When inserting your primary keyword or keyword phrase keep in mind the places the search engine spiders are going to look.

* Your headline
* Your subheadings
* Your first paragraph
* Your last paragraph
* In the body of the article

When using your keywords aim for a density of about three to seven percent. Anymore and search engines might recognize your content as being keyword stuffed. To determine percentage simply take the number of times you use your keyword and divide it by the total words. Therefore, if you have a 450 word article and you use your keyword 18 times you have a keyword density of four percent.

Once you’ve completed your article, read it aloud to see if it sounds natural. This is one of the best ways to evaluate it. Remember to keep your audience in mind first and the search engines second – this strategy will always pay off.

Five SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Whether you’ve been optimizing your web pages for quite some time or are new to the strategy, everyone makes mistakes. While the bad news is that these mistakes can have a significant effect on your page ranking, the good news is, they’re reversible. Here are five SEO mistakes to avoid (And if you’ve already made them, not to worry, you can make changes and move forward with your SEO strategy).

SEO Mistake #1  Not using keywords correctly.

Many webmasters are concerned about being banned from the search engines for keyword spamming or stuffing so they limit the use of keywords on their web pages. As long as your content sounds natural and reads easily, the chances are you have not overused your keywords.

Make sure your keywords are included in the first paragraph, in your headings and in your title and meta tags.

SEO Mistake #2  Trying to fool search engine spiders.

Search engines are a lot more sophisticated than most of us realize. They recognize, and penalize, hidden text, keyword spamming, and cloaking, which is showing different content to the search engine spiders than to your visitors. All of these practices only serve to hurt your page ranking and can in fact cause your website to be banned by the search engines, which means no one will find you and no traffic means no profits.

SEO Mistake #3  Using Flash

Flash is a great presentation tool and can be dramatic and effective if used sparingly. It’s particularly appropriate if you have a media related website and want to demonstrate your industry savvy however for most website owners, it’s just not necessary and can harm your page ranking. Search engine spiders cannot read content embedded in Flash files, which means they’re not recognized or indexed.

SEO Mistake #4 Using Your Company Name As a Title Tag

Unless you’re branding your company name, your company name shouldn’t’ be the only element in your title tag. Feel free to include it, however it’s also important to use your primary keyword for each webpage title tag. This is more useful for your customers and helps the search engines identify the various pages on your site.

SEO Mistake #5 Using A Splash Page

A splash page, in case you’re unfamiliar, is a web page with a large graphic or company logo, and a link to enter the site.  This is an ineffective strategy for a number of reasons:

* No keyword rich text on the page, nothing for the spiders to index.
* Only one internal link on the page
* These pages often have a redirect which often causes spiders to ignore them

If search engine optimization is important to your business, you may need to forgo the splash page. Your home page should be easy to navigate, content rich, and link visitors and spiders to other main web pages.

In general, unless you’re trying to outsmart the search engines and using nefarious tactics, the majority of search engine mistakes are reversible.  If you’ve committed a few of these mistakes, simply correcting them can increase your page ranking almost immediately.  Take some time to evaluate your SEO strategy and eliminate these SEO mistakes.

Discover The Answers To The Top 3 SEO Questions

Even if you know a fair amount about search engine optimization, or SEO, you may have questions. Because search engine optimization is an evolving technology, it pays to stay on top of the industry. Here are just a few of the most common SEO questions.

1. What are text links?

Text links are links that contain only text. The links are contained within a sentence and     when a reader clicks on them, they are taken to a different page on the same website.     Generally, the text included in the link is called anchor text and it’s a great way to     optimize the keywords on your page and link to an external or internal webpage.

2. What are link farms and link exchanges?

They’re bad news. While links to your website are important for a good page ranking,     search engine spiders don’t accept just any old link. The link has to be from a relevant     and quality website. A link farm is a Web page designed to profit from linking to web     pages and Google and the other major search engines will penalize you for participating,     paying, for links.

Link exchanging is essentially a link trade, “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” It’s okay to do this in small doses as long as the website you’re trading links with is relevant to your website. If your website sells dog-training products and you’re trading links with a furniture website then the search engines are going to discount the link.

3. What is latent semantic indexing?

When search engines find a keyword or keyword phrase on a webpage, they automatically search for other related words and phrases they would reasonably expect to see.  For example if you’re writing an article on snowboarding the spiders may also search for boarding, riding, skiing, free riding and so on.

If the search engine spiders find these related words or phrases they have more confidence the primary keyword is being used in context, and therefore they will judge the page as more relevant.

LSI has been an active part of search engine ranking for a few years and as more and more content is published online, it’s becoming more important for webmasters to recognize it and make use of it when writing their content.

Search engine optimization is part science and part art. The science comes from understanding the technology involved in meeting and understanding the search engine algorithms. The art, creating valuable content that includes your sometimes awkward keywords and keyword phrases. As your business grows and your web pages and content increase, you’ll want to stay on top of this ever changing practice.

Tips for Optimizing Your Video Content for the Search Engines

Video is an interactive and useful form of content for your website visitors. We each learn differently and adding this visual element holds a very strong appeal for many target audiences. Additionally, it’s also a way for you to brand your business and connect with your audience. Unfortunately, while many website owners are skilled at creating valuable video content, they forget to optimize this content for the search engines. This is a mistake as search engine spiders can index video content, if you know how to show them the way.

#1  Video Tagging

Most video-sharing sites allow you to create “tags.” Tags are simply keywords that describe video contents. This tagging makes it easier for people to find your content and it makes your content easier for spiders to index. Make sure to use all the tags you can.

#2  Video Titles

Give your video a title. Titles serve two purposes, like an attention grabbing headline they capture the attention of your prospect and when you use keywords, they can enhance your  search engine rankings.

#3  Categorize your videos

Video sharing sites typically require you to place your video in a specific category. The more specific you can categorize your video, the better.

#4  Create a relevant file name.

If you are hosting a video on your own site, of course still take the time to title and tag your videos and take your SEO one-step further by creating a relevant file name for your video with keywords.

#5  Only publish one video per web page.

Experts recommend only publishing one video per webpage with a simple text title and description. Optimize the page where you publish your video for both video search engines and content search engines by using meta tags for the content of the page. They also recommend creating separate video site maps, which can be submitted to video and content search engines alike.

#6  Use keyword optimized anchor text if you link to the video from other pages of your Web site.

#7  Consider Using You Tube Suggest to Generate Keywords

At this point you’re probably familiar with many of the content keyword tools, however for video optimizing, many experts recommend using You Tube’s Suggest tool. Because Google owns You Tube, it works much like the Google Suggest tool. Per the You Tube Blog, “A query suggestions option is now available for search. To opt in, click the “advanced” link next to the search button, then choose “Display query suggestions as I type” from the search settings. As you type in your search terms a menu will appear with suggested results to choose from to help you more quickly find the videos you’re looking for. On the search results page you’ll also get an additional list of recommended searches by clicking on any of the terms listed next to the new “Also try” menu.

Video content is interactive content and therefore highly regarded by visitors. When it’s informative and entertaining it can be one of the most valuable forms of content on a website. Optimizing it for the search engines just makes sense. Utilize these seven steps to make sure your video content is indexed by the search engines.

Seven Ways To Generate Incoming Links

Content, as you might already know, if the first item search engine spiders look for when they’re cataloging and indexing web pages. The second item they look for are links coming into and out of your website. The links coming into your site have more weight than the ones leaving your site, which is what makes generating incoming links a very important search engine strategy.

Here are seven ways to generate incoming links.

#1  Write and publish quality content. People, other website owners, link to relevant content. If you write and publish tons of quality content, you’ll receive tons of incoming links.
#2  Online directories. While there are many directories that charge for a listing, there are also several that will list your company’s site for free.
#3 Write articles for other sites, article marketing. Writing articles and publishing them on other sites including article marketing sites, is a great method for getting inbound links.
#4  Write press releases and submit them to online press release websites. Be sure to include your website link at the end of the press release so media representatives can contact you, but also so you have an incoming link and interested visitors can find your website.
#5  Reciprocal links. Some reciprocal links are good as long as they’re coming from relevant websites. The trick is to balance reciprocal links with one-way links. Mix up your linking tactics so it looks natural to Google.
#6  Blog. Blogging is a spectacular way to generate fresh content and guest blogging on relevant blogs works a lot like article marketing, you generate links to your site in each blog post you write. You can also include links back to each of your web pages and allow your readers to reprint your blog posts as long as they keep the links in place.
#7  Participate in social networking. Posting tweets, and Facebook posts create incoming links to your website. In addition, when you comment on forums and other blog posts you also create incoming links via your signature.
As you’re creating and implementing your search engine optimization strategies, take the time to consider and include these linking tactics. While you may not be able to complete them all at the same time, instead focus on one tactic at a time adding to your SEO strategy as you grow.

Flipping Sites To Targeted Niches Means Serious Profits

Obviously you are going to want to research what is popularly being searched online on Google to figure out a good domain name. The same is true for your web site niche. You can’t just put up a web site and have content that is not targeted to any particular market. The search engines won’t know what your web site is about or how to index it so people who might like to read it can find it.

If you develop a web site for something as obscure as broom handles, there isn’t a large number of people interested in that topic and you won’t get much traffic. So, there is a bit of an art to creating a niche for your web site content. You want something that appeals to a large number of people, but that is also focused on a specific topic that can be easily indexed and searched.

It’s highly likely that if you find PLR on a specific topic that this is a topic in demand on the Internet. Otherwise, someone wouldn’t have bothered trying to sell it. But, if you want to make sure that your efforts aren’t going into some topic that isn’t going to generate revenues, you should do a little research first with the Google Keyword Tool.

Google’s Keyword Tool

This tool is useful for so many Internet marketing research goals and you can use it to find out what keywords are most likely to be profitable to use for domain names and possible topics. Google really makes it easy to figure that stuff out. You can not only locate high-paying keywords in the Google Adsense program, but you can also find out which keywords are the most popular to search. All you have to do is log into the tool online at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

Here are the steps you would use to figure out a good niche to create a web site niche:

Think up some possible topics,See if PLR packages are available on those topics, If not, then find PLR packages that you can use, Take those topics and research them with the Google Keyword tool. Type in the word or word(s) you want to look up, Select the radial button that says: “Descriptive words or phrases.” Uncheck the synonyms box, Look at the Capcha image (security feature) and type in what you see, Click on “Get keyword ideas” Pull up results.

Once you get the results pages, you’ll have the option to add some additional columns to the results pages with the “Show/Hide Columns” drop box. You can try to see how that new information can help you make better decisions on what keywords are better than others for your purposes.

The four options in the drop-down box will be:

Show Estimated Ad Position
Show Estimated Avg. CPC
Show Search Volume Trends
Show Highest Volume Occurred In

The one you are most interested in is “Show Estimated Avg. CPC” which is the cost-per-click (CPC) associated with this keyword. That’s the average amount of money an advertiser paid when someone clicked on an Adsense advertisement on a website associated with this keyword. So, from that information you can tell that the higher paying keywords will generally be of more value to publishers and generate more income to advertisers too, otherwise, they wouldn’t be willing to pay out that much per click.

Once you have CPC column showing that’s when you get a real bird’s eye view of which keywords and topics are going to pay off for you. You want to find some that have a lower advertiser competition than others but a high paying value in CPC. Make a list of those and then buy the PLR package that matches that topic and you’re well on your way to creating a website that can generate a profit in very little time.

Competitors As A Keyword Source For Flip Sites

If you aren’t really interested in thinking things up on your own, you really don’t have to. Find a site that you know is generating a lot of money and then find out what keywords they are using to generate attention. Then, use the same ones. There’s no law against doing this and it’s a very quick way to have someone else do the research work for you.

There are a number of online web site analyzers that will allow you to type in a URL and find out what the keywords are that are being targeted based on the frequency of the word count. All you have to do is then check to see if those keywords are still highly profitable and use them in the content of your site too.

You can also use a competitor site to figure out new niches that you might not have thought of doing. Always learn from what others are doing, particularly if they are successful and making money. Maybe they have added some products on their site that are selling rather well. It may not be obvious, but they might be affiliate offers. There’s no law that says you can’t go and sign up for the same affiliate program and market them too.

Finally, pay attention to the backlinks going to successful sites. You can use www.backlinkwatch.com to find out who is linking into that site. Knowing this, you can find out how they generate traffic to their pages. You may find they are adding articles to Digg.com or an article directory that is producing great exposure for their site. Well, you can do the same thing too, using your articles and you can even save time by doing it with PLR.

After you get a good look at who is linking to your competitors, try to see how they are using those backlinks to generate traffic or income. Many times you will see backlinks coming in from blogs too. That’s because they might have visited a blog, commented on it, left a backlink, and that generated traffic and interest to their site, if the blog is hugely popular.

We’ll talk some more about the value of blogs for web site creation in Chapter 4. It is really the wave of the future when it comes to content, web sites, and even news media outlets. It’s changing much of how the web operates from HTML-intensive pages, to platforms like WordPress that require very little programming skills and generates a really nice web site.

There are so many ways to learn from what other people do without having to recreate the wheel. It always pays to have someone else do the work that you don’t or can’t do. It is called using other people’s time and it has been an effective technique to leverage your business so that you have time to do the more important things, like generate income.

Once you find several profitable niches, you can even start to churn out web sites very easily, using some of the strategies found in this e-book. Just pay attention to what you do, what your competitors are doing, and continue to try to reduce the labor involved by using other people’s time or products. In the end, if it costs you several hours to write a decent article and you can buy several articles and an e-book for $15 or less, it makes more sense to just pay for the PLR.

You do want to add some of your own touches to it and arrange it so that it seems more original, but it can definitely pay to use other people’s work, particularly if they’ve given you the rights to do so. This way, you have the content you need to continuously update the web site without spending your time on it. In the next section, we’ll discuss more about PLR, MRR, and RR and places to obtain this type of content to put you on the fast track to web site hyper-creation.

Why do search engine optimization?

Many new website owners ask what is the point of search engine optimization. Do I really need to spend hundreds of hours or thousands of dollars optimizing my site? Well the answer is no you don’t have to spend a lot of money or time, but you should spend some.

Ideally you should learn the basics of SEO yourself to save you paying someone else to do it for you. This requires simply reading about it (this website is a great place to start!) and learning which steps you need to take to ensure your site is well regarded by search engines. If you give the search engines what they want, eventually they will send you visitors.

SEO is important because if your site doesn’t rank well, then you won’t receive any visitors. This means no revenue or customers for you. The alternative is to use pay per click advertising or other advertising methods which can get very expensive very quickly. I am not advising against PPC or advertising however for a new website, it is easy to lose money in the initial stages with these strategies.

Many people prefer natural organic visitors to their site. That means people who have found the site through search engines and not through paid advertisements like Adwords. Imagine if you could rank on the first page for 50 or more keywords? That can save you hundreds of dollars per month on PPC as you would not need to bid on those particular keywords.

One of the best ways to rank well in search engines is to submit articles to places like ezine articles.com
Here your articles can be used by other webmasters with a link back to your site. This gives you an authority status as well as back links which in turn lead to better rankings for you!

Search engine optimization is not complicated and it is definitely something that you should pay attention to when promoting your website.

What is search engine marketing

People often confuse the two terms search engine marketing and search engine optimization. Although they may be similar in goals, they are quite different in execution and strategy.

Search engine marketing or SEM is a broader term that refers to all aspects of promoting a site in search engines including paid advertising. Search engine optimization on the other hand strictly refers to optimizing a site both on page and off page to rank well in search engines without paying for advertising such as PPC.

SEO concentrates on organic search engine results, that is the results that show up when someone searches for a keyword phrase in Google or another search engine. However search engine marketing must also take SEO into great consideration as organic listings can not be ignored. After all, why pay for something when you can get it for free? Or more precisely, why pay to get your website seen if you can rank highly for it in the organic listings?

Buying paid search listings is generally done with Google Adwords. They are the largest PPC advertising company. Others include Yahoo and MSN advertisements.

PPC can be expensive if you are not sure what you are doing. Many people hire professional SEM firms to run their PPC campaigns however it is entirely possible to do it yourself with some basic knowledge and trial and error. You need to learn the basics of landing pages, keyword groups and ads and then you just set a budget and you’re off. Yes it is easy to lose money in the initial stages however you will get the hang of it and realize just how fast you can gain visitors from pay per click advertising.

Search engine marketing is an extremely powerful method of promoting your website and gaining qualified and targeted visitors.

Search Engine Optimization – What You’ll Need To Know

As we move into the second decade of the third millennium, it is made all the more obvious to us all that moving with the times is essential, no matter how difficult we may find it from time to time. At the start of this millennium, marketing your business via the Internet was a very simple thing. Get a website up and find as many different places to put a link as you imaginably could. This has changed in the last couple of years, and now the big deal is SEO – Search Engine Optimization. What is SEO? Well, it’s a little bit complicated, but the important elements you need to know are as follows.

Google and other search engines read every site that they can find and rank them on the basis of how appropriate they are for people’s search terms. Therefore, to make your site turn up in people’s search results you have to think about what they’ll be searching for, and what kind of terms will be used by people who might want to use your business. If you have a business that sells knitting supplies, then you will want to make sure that people who search for “best knitting supplies”, “cheap knitting supplies” and “knitting supplies [your city here]” are shown a link to your site.

Therefore you need to make sure these terms are in your website text, and you need to do it while keeping the text readable. It is not as easy as it looks, but – when you get the hang of it – it really works.