Where Long Tail Keywords Make More Sense

For search engine optimization purposes we are told to go after long tail keywords because they are easier to optimize our sites for and are less competitive

Apparently the big money is to be made in the primary keywords

This is true up to a point

As an internet marketer, you want traffic that is ready to buy, not just traffic.

You want the guys that are looking to solve whatever problem it is they have now.

The ones who have their credit cards in their hands


So when you think about it if a man wants to buy a sony laptop, does he type in 'sony laptops' in the search engines or does he type in 'buy sony laptop', or 'sony laptop deals' or 'Sony Laptop Outlet Online'
'

For a person wanting tips on article marketing, is it 'article marketing' or crucial article marketing tips or better still 'free article marketing tips'?

These are long tail keywords which may not get searched as often as our primary more competitive keywords but they attract traffic that converts.


And that is the key of success in affiliate or internet marketing. getting traffic that is targeted and looking to buy

Page One of Google

So in our bid for search engine domination, we can get caught up in the obsessive cycle of checking what page our marketing sites are on

So you build the site and do some search engine optimization.

And then for the majority of newbies there is the endless search in Google with your keywords to find what position your spanking new website is in. And you search page 1, 2....23, page 50 and so on

I urge you to forget about this practice.

All you should spend your time doing is searching page one of Google for your chosen keyword or phrase

If you are not in that page, does it really matter if you are on page 10 or 100.

It's time to wake up! No significant amount of traffic is going to find you unless you are on page one and preferably in position 1, 2 or 3 for your keyword phrase

Time better spent installing a traffic analysis software like Google analytics and analysing what keywords ARE bringing traffic to your site

Analytics is free to use so check it out. The link is Google analytics

Value of A Blog

It's funny how we all hop online and start building our blogs for the purposes of

• Driving traffic to our websites
• Promoting some product or the other

But something in the news recently made me stop and think.

We forget the value of the property itself, I mean, how much is the blog worth

I am not talking about the silly piece of software that you put on your site and it proudly proclaims the dollar value of your blog.

By the way, you can get the code to put that particular tool on your website from technorati.

I confess I do not put much stock in the tool because, it's estimate of the value of your blog depends on whether your blog has been submitted to technorati or not

The value of a blog should be based on

Age. The longer a blog has remained active online, the more likely it is to have u to date and useful content

Number of posts. A blog with a post every day should intrinsically have a higher value than the two posts a month blogs, surely

Quality of the content. I suppose this can only be infered from the number of backlinks a blog has and the amount of traffic it generates
I mean how much in cold cash can you actually get from it.

Authority. Again the backlinks thing [ by the way visit search engine optimization using backlinks for a breakdown on backlinks and authority]

So to get back on topic, what is the true value of your blog. What amount of cash can you expect if you put it up for sale today

Looking at the examples of

• Bankoholic which is said to have sold for 15 million [ and it is rumoured to have been a one man operation!! If he or she can do it, well so can you. Or Me for that matter!

• One man's goal which I understand went for a modest $10000

Just makes you understand the true maening of the term, virtual real estate

Till next time

No Follow Links. Any Benefit?

So the teaching is to try and get as many do follow backlinks to your websites as possible to improve your search engine performance and ultimately to increase website traffic

So does that mean that no follow backlinks are to be ignored?

Well, I was doing some backlink analysis on one of my smaller websites using SEO elite.

By the way SEO elite is one of the most useful analytic tools I have and has made a world of difference to my marketing career. You can check it out by clicking SEO elite.

I found that a website that generates about half of the daily traffic to this small site of mine has a no follow link to my site

Hey?.

But these links are not to be sort after.
They are supposed to be of no value to my SEO efforts

Ah!! No value to SEO does not mean no value for increasing website traffic.

So, by all means court the do follow backlinks to your websites

But do not snub the humble no follow link

Till next time

Stumble Upon Verify User Email. Scam?

So today I got an email from 'stumbleupon' stating that I should click on a link to verify my account.

Don't know why but I thought the email was odd.

Perhaps because I have had a stumble upon account for a really long time now and asking for a user verification 1 year later just doesn't make sense

So I opened another Browser and logged into my account and there are no pending emails. Nor was there a verify your account message

So it is a SCAM!

So how do these people do this. Could it be that they just scrapped stumbleupon for user emails
Or is it my own email account that has been hacked

Either way, the message is BE ALERT. If it looks suspect, don't click it

Ezine Articles And Keywords

Ezine articles is one of the article directories that I recommended for you to use for your Bum Marketing in a previous post

Ezine articles has just got better

When you submit your article to the ezine articles directory, if it is accepted, the article gets published.

The articles tend to get the greatest amount of traffic from people visiting ezine articles. Obviously for your article to get noticed, it needs to be on the front page of the ezine articles site or at least the category you have selected for your article

Unfortunately, because of the high volume of articles submitted every single day, most articles only stay on the front page of Ezinearticles for a few hours at best.

So is there another way to maximize your traffic from your article

A recent innovation in Ezine articles has made the answer to this question a definite yes

In the past, a small amount of traffic could find your article through the search engines, that is if you have a well written, search engine optimized article

But it is difficult to assess which keywords free search engine traffic is using to find your articles

Ezine articles has now included a keyword result to the authors tool kit.

This means that you can see exactly what keywords your articles' viewers have used to find your article

The bonus is you can then optimize the articles for the identified keywords and hopefully get more free search engine traffic through your search engine optimization efforts.

For more information on how to use article [bum] marketing to increase traffic to your website check out this training program

How To Get Traffic To Your Blog

So How do you get traffic to your blog?
Lets dive in because there is quite a lot of ground to cover here

On blog factors to help increase blog traffic:

• Post Often. You need to give the search engine spiders reason to come back to spider your blog and index your pages frequently. Post as often as possible. If you are a full time affiliate marketer then blogging daily should be your aim.

• Create authority posts. Posts that are well researched and full of useful information. Make sure the layout of these posts is reader friendly. With a few good posts on your blog, you will soon find other webmasters linking to you

• Try to stay focused with each post. This will help hold the attention of you visitors. General posts, talking about this and that, tend not to do as well as specific posts. For example this post is specifically about generating traffic to your blogs. There are no tangential ideas, no off topics. Stay focused.

• Try to be keyword specific. Decide what keyword it is you want to target with each post and build your post around it. Don't use only that keyword but try to include other words that are similar or variations of the keyword.

• Apply SEO. You must construct every post in your blog like you would a traditional webpage with regards to on page search engine optimization. Pay attention to your title, your keyword prominence and frequency, LSI and tags. If you are using a wordpress platform for your blog, get the all in one SEO plugin

• Allow Comments. No matter how great the content on a blog is, I just tend not to come back if they have a no comments policy. I find that in blogs, a lot of useful information can be found in the comments. Sometimes more useful than the post itself. Also comments help to generate more content for your blog. More content generally means more search engine spider food.

Off Page factor to help increase blog traffic:

• RSS feeds.Submit your RSS feeds to feeds directories

• Ping. Ping every post. Pinging is the process of letting servers know that you have new content on your blog. Once pinged, directories and sites that have your RSS feed on them get updated with your new content. A good pinging service, one that I use is http://www.pingoat.com/

• Submit to blog directories. Use variations of the keyword you want your blog to rank for as the title of your submission. Don't use the same title for all your submissions. Vary things a little. Most directories will use the title as the anchor link to your site. Now not all directories have do follow links so not all of them will contribute to your SEO efforts. But humans use directories as well and you can get direct human traffic this way.

• Bookmark your posts using social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us , technorati and digg. Also if it will not clutter your page, put a button for a few of these bookmarking sites on your blog. That way other people can bookmark your posts too

• Generate backlinks using article submissions and forum participation. Use anchor text in your links . Again the anchor text should include your keywords and variations of your keywords

Till next time

Thank You Coleen, American Airlines

So I recently flew to San Diego on a work do with American Airlines

Work sponsored gig so it was 'cattle class' better known as Economy

For those of you who have never had the 'privilege of flying economy, the seats are small and leg room, hmmm, what leg room?

And the tiny little TV screens, don't even go there

And yet when I got back home I had the most unbelievable feeling of having had a great flight

Why?

Because of Coleen.

Coleen is a flight attendant with a difference. Talk about customer relations, the girl has got it to an art form

I don't know where American airlines got her from but they really need to hold on to this chic

So how does this relate to affiliate marketing?

It is all about the little things. A little attention to detail. A smile, a pillow, a toothbrush offered just when you need it

Marketing as an affiliate is not about putting up as many ads as possible on your sites, there are loads of websites doing exactly that and not making any significant amount of money

It is about building relations.
Making your site visitors comfortable with you.
Making the majority of your email marketing be informative rather than a sales pitch
Offering useful freebies in your promos

So what airline will I be travelling with when I next fly abroad

You guessed it, American airline

Thank you Coleen

Till next time

Websites Hacked

Website hacking is on the increase

For those of you who do not know what website hacking is the process of getting access illegally to the control panel of someone else's site
Most hackers in the affiliate marketing world are into it for
Emails: They want to get the emails on your opt in list
Redirects: mainly targets high traffic sites and sites that rank well in the search engines. The hacker enters your hosting account and sets a redirect to their site. This means that all the trffic that would normally come to your site goes to their site

You need to be alert to this and be ready to take action

First you need a traffic tracking. Google analytics is a good free one. Monitor your traffic on a daily basis
If you notice a sudden drop in your traffic, that is not typical of the niche you are in, get suspicious. Inspect the code of your pages for any string that looks suspicious. Go into your user account and make sure that no new scripts have been installed there

Google alerts: Set up a google alerts profile and use it to monitor queries that would trigger your URL. Google alerts will email you everytime your search term is queried in the search engines

Check your sites manually regularly

Till next time