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What are web site keywords and how do I go about finding keywords that will work for me?

You may have the dandiest web site with eye popping text and graphics, but if you have missing keywords then you are going to be out of business quick.

Web sites revolve around traffic. No traffic = no sales. It’s a simple equation but one that many web site owners are unable to resolve. The good news is that it’s reasonably easy to select your web site keywords and deploy them, and I’m going to show you how.

Web site keywords are the words that people will use to search for your product or service. These are the words that people actually type into a search engine to find your site – so you can see how important they are.

So how do you go about selecting your keywords?

Selecting and finding keywords and phrases most likely to drive targeted traffic is THE single most important exercise that you can undertake when planning your web site deployment. Omitting this step will result in a marketing failure. Choosing good keywords is the basis on which all of your future traffic will flow.

You may have your own ideas about the specific keywords that people will use to find your site, however I can tell you from experience that if you are the business owner or proprietor then you are probably well wide of the mark.

Don’t believe me! Write down the top five keywords or keyword phrases that you think people will use to find your site now! Go and grab a paper and pen and scribble them down. Then compare them to what you are going to end up with at the end of this article.

Firstly ask your customers how they would search for your product!

This is important because these are the real human beings that will search for your product, service or information. Draw up a list of ten of the most popular keywords and keyword phrases that your customers tell you they would use to discover your web site and then put them into a spreadsheet.

2. Expand Your Keywords into a List of Key Phrases

Starting with the obvious keyword build your spreadsheet like this:

search

search engine

search engine optimization

search engine optimization Birmingham

search engine optimization Birmingham UK

3. Got to word tracker.

Sign up for the free trial and enter your one word keyword. In this case “search”. When you press the search button you are returned a list of related terms. The first term is the same as the keyword followed by a list of related terms – search, search engine, etc. Choose your main term “search” and in the right hand pane you will see the associated terms for your keyword.

4. Organise your workload

You can now see that you are beginning to build up a sizeable list of keywords, keyword phrases and search terms. Compare the results of your word tracker research with the results from your customer polling.

The Word tracker results are fact. These are the terms that are actually used in Real searches. Hopefully these should closely match. But they are probably different to the terms that you initially wrote down yourself!

Five keywords is a good workload to start with. If you are a beginner and you attempt more you will likely end up confusing yourself. Five keywords and keyword phrases is a good start.

Take the first keyword and then make a keyword phrase so that it looks like this:

search

search engine

search engine optimization

search engine optimization Birmingham

search engine optimization Birmingham UK

5. Prioritise your terms

There is a huge amount of competition for your primary keyword “search” but much less for the fifth ranked. Your word tracker results will tell you how popular each term is and how many searches are carried out for each keyword phrase.

It’s unreasonable to expect to get top search position for “motorcycle” as the competition is just too intense. However it’s perfectly possible for the last term and if you are serious about search engine traffic then you should be able to achieve good results for all of your other keyword phrases.

List your terms in REVERSE order and go to work. The reason I suggest doing them in reverse is that you should get good results from the less searched for terms and this will give you the encouragement to be more adventurous when you repeat the process for another keyword set.

Another keyword set!

Ah yes, I omitted to tell you that building traffic is a tedious and time consuming pastime, but hey! Someone’s got to do it!

6. Putting your keyword phrases to work

OK, so now you have your keyword phrases you can put them into action. Allocate each keyword phrase to a specific page and build the content around them.

What do I mean by this?

There are “hotspots” on your pages that search engines look for when they are indexing your pages.

These hotspots are the page title, the page description and the page heading. By incorporating your keyword phrase into these hotspots you are telling the search engine what your page is all about. Sprinkle in some eye-popping copy with your keyword phrase repeated once or twice and you are well on your way to receiving copious amounts of search engine traffic.

7. Repeat the dose

As I mentioned above, you need to build on your basic five keyword phrases and build up a stack of “keyword sets” Once you get to five or more keyword sets then you should be well on your way to a successful web site By allocating each keyword phrase to a page you will know that you need five pages for each keyword set. So five keyword sets will give you twenty five pages of search engine content. That’s a good target for a small web site

Summary

Finding keywords is a process that you simply can not afford to leave out of your marketing mix. It’s important that you target the correct keywords and build your content around them to induce good search engine traffic.

If you miss this vital step then all of your marketing efforts will crumble around you.

Start with five keywords and keyword phrases to make a keyword set. Use word tracker to sanitise your own research findings. Allocate each keyword phrase to a page and fill the hotspots. Sprinkle liberally with good, quality content and repeat your keyword phrases within the main body text.

Now go and service that traffic!

Labels: Generating Traffic

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Ok so the first way to get traffic is not particularly unique. But the fact is that you will get lots of traffic by writing articles. The traffic won't come immediately but it will come. Articles will also bring link popularity. I wouldn't be doing my job if I wrote about free traffic and neglected to mention articles.

If you write one article a week for the next year at the end of that year you will have an unstoppable flow of traffic and where there is traffic money follows.

So traffic source

#1 - Write articles

#2 - Post ads on other peoples sites. Now you're probably thinking 'tell me something I don't know' but think about this for a moment. If there is a site that has a lot of traffic, gets spidered frequently and has excellent page rank. Do you think pages on that site get good search engine rankings. You betcha!

Here in the UK there is a site called UK Free Ads. It has an Alexa rank of about 20,000 and, you guessed it, you can place ads on it for free. All you have to do is find your equivalent of UK Free Ads then find a keyword phrase without too much competition and write an ad optimised for the keyword phrase. I'm not guaranteeing a top ten listing but a percentage of the ads you write will place well in Google and other search engines. You might even get a number one position.

The best of these sites allow your url to be included in the listing. But better than that some of them allow you to upgrade your listing and have that listing redirect to the url you supply. Top Tip: Wait until the page has been spidered and ranks well then upgrade and have the listing redirect to your web page.

#3 - Get your site mentioned in mailings from complimentary sites in return for you mentioning theirs. You're going to need a list for this. But assuming you have one why not contact other site owners with a list and ask them to mention your site in their next mailing. In return you mention their site in your next mail. This doesn't have to be a heavy sell, just a mention of a friends site.

At worst this strategy will put your site url in front of a lot of people who may not have heard of you. At best you will get a lot of free visitors. This strategy should work out just fine if you partner with a site that isn't in direct competition with you.

#4 - Instead of just trading links why not trade home page links or ads. Next time you visit a site and they have a space for an ad and are inviting you to buy that space, why not contact them and offer to exchange the ad space for a similar position on your site. Or why not barter an ad for a mention to your mailing list. A lot of smaller sites have trouble selling their ad space, but these same sites still have respectable traffic flows.

#5 - The last free traffic tip is probably the hardest to pull off but also the most regarding. The strategy is to offer something of real value for free. If you use Adwords you no doubt know about Mikes Marketing Tools where you will find a 'keyword wrapper'. Or if you are into natural search engine traffic then you probably visit Market Leap to find out how many pages you have ranked. People need these tools and everybody recommends these sites. They offer a valuable resource for free. Once you do that, word spreads quickly . Mikes Tools has an Alexa rank of 5,000. Market Leap has a rank of 900. Yes it's in the top 900 websites online. Do you think you could make some money with that sort of traffic?

To pull this off you need a tool that is useful to your target audience. Maybe some sort of calculator or a data manipulator or converter. Although a software tool is an excellent choice it doesn't have to be software. Think what tool do I use that I could make available to others.

If your goal is to build free traffic to your sites then you need to be thinking about this all the time. As you surf keep this need in the back of your mind. Every site you visit think 'how could I get free traffic from this site' or 'what is this site doing to get traffic that I could copy'.

If you want to learn more about free traffic sources & other free resources then visit www.ireviewguru.com/freeresources.html

Labels: Generating Traffic

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When service at your web hosting company is lacking, or your web site grows in traffic so much that you outgrow your current account, you may find yourself needing to change hosting providers. It can be scary to think about everything you need to do. Here are some things you should keep in mind that will help make the transition to the new host much easier.

1. Backup all of your files and databases

Before you decide to transfer anything over, you need to create a backup of every file and database you have on the current hosting provider's server. FTP into your current hosting account and copy all of the files from your public_html directory into a directory on your local hard drive that you'll find easy to remember later.

As for the database, backup methods will vary according to the database vendor, the control panel being used by the host if any, and the operating system of the server. Most providers provide a backup utility that allows you to save a copy of the contents of all of your database tables. If there isn't a simple backup utility available, you will need to export the contents of your database in a comma delimited file or the standard file format for the particular database you use. Most backup utilities will convert the database into one long SQL file that is then easy for any compatible database engine to reconstruct.

2. Transfering to the new server

Make sure that your website is functioning properly at the new location before you change the DNS information of your domain name. While it may not be possible to fully navigate the site without the domain name pointing to it, you can still point to some individual pages to be sure they will come up. For this though, you'll need to use the IP address of your hosting account along with your username if you have a shared IP address. On a Cpanel server, you would enter http://61.36.149.221/~username and your main website will come up. You can use this address until the DNS information from the domain propagates throughout the web.

3. Tidy up the loose ends

Upload the backup file of your databases or execute the SQL file you generated in the backup. This should restore your database back to what it was on the old server. Change the nameserver information for your domain name. This is almost always found with the registrar that you registered your domain with or with your old web hosting provider. They almost always assign you a username and password that allows you to log into an account that allows you to change the nameservers. If you don't have a control panel, then simply email the company that registered your domain for you and ask them to change the nameservers to the new servers. Within 24 to 48 hours, your website will be served from the new server and not the old one. Once you can confirm this, it is safe to ask the old web hosting company to delete and discontinue your old account.

Labels: Web Hosting

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Blog or weblog is simply a website with frequent updates on a particular subject or topic. You can write a comment, review, suggestion or tip on a subject on your blog. You can also provide educational resources and advice if you are an expert at something. For instance, If your blog is about sport cars. You can post the latest annoucements from sport cars manufacturers such as BMW, Ferrari and so on, discuss about the latest models of sport cars and the best components used for producing sport cars.

Blogger.com allows anyone to create a free blog (free domain name and hosting) without any technical knowledge. Creating a blog with Blogger.com is easy and you can have you blog published within an hours.

There are several ways you can make money with a blog:

Become a Google AdSense publisher
You can join Google AdSense program and start earning advertising revenue from your blog. It is not difficult to set up you AdSense campaign as Blogger.com also provides Adsense tool and guidances to help you start an AdSense campaign. This can be a great source of revenue, though of course the amount of income you can expect from your AdSense ads will depend on the amount of traffic (visitors) to your blog.

Sell Other People's Stuff
You can promote your affiliate programs by placing the affiliate links and banners on your blog and earn commission whenever someone clicks through an affiliate link or banner to your merchant's website made a purchase.

Sell Your Own Product
Blog can be used to promote and sell your own products too. You can write about your products' features and benefits on the blog.

To make money you need to drive visitors or traffic to your blog. The more traffic you're getting the higher your earning will be. There are several free ways of getting traffic to your blog. Here's how ......
1) Introduce your blog to your family and friends.
2) Submit your blog to directories. You can find a list of blog directories by going to Google and entering the search term 'submit blog url'.
3) Write an article or more with a link to your blog and submit them to article directories. You can find a list of article directories by going to Google and entering the search term 'article directory'.
4) Post messages on community forums with a link to your blog on the signature of each message posted.

There are other ways (free and paid) to increase traffic for your blog. You can find a lot of free information and resources about blog promotion from search engines.

Labels: Blogging, Make Money Online

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