Google Wonder Wheel Perfect Keyword Research Tool

In Niche marketing keyword research is crucial.
Here is a heads up on one of the smartest and yet easy to use keyword research tools I have used. It's free and the tool is by Google.

The Google wonder wheel. Absolutely a gold mine. If you know the general niche you want to be in e.g. fat loss that's a great start to setting up your niche marketing website. But what you want is the long tail keywords that command a lot of searches but as we know, are easier to optimize for than the top level keyword.

Problem is there are so many possible permutations and word combinations that constitute long tail keywords.

How do you know the ones that people are actually searching for. The answer is the Google wonder wheel.

So how can you use the Google Wonder Wheel?
Go to the Google home page and type in your top level keyword. For this post I will stick with Fat Loss

On the results page down the left side of the organic listings is a list of links.

Near the bottom of this list is the Wonder wheel link.




Click it

On clicking that link a new page loads with a wheel and spoke diagram on it. Your top level keyword is in the middle and Wonder wheel gives you a few long tail options in the spokes.



Already very exciting.

If you decide that you want to dig deeper, click on the long tail keyword of your choice. A new wheel is added with long tails of your long tail keywords



The Google wonder wheel is just so cool.

I am sure you can think of a lot of possible uses of the information you get from this.

But don't take my word for it. Take the Google wonder wheel for a test drive and please share your views in the comments section below

Backlinks To Avoid - Backlink Lists

Backlinks are good for search engine optimization. In fact backlinks are crucial for SEO, especially if you are after those lucrative keywords.

But there are a number of backlinks that you should seriously avoid. Simply because they could seriously hurt your sites performance in the search engines

In a rather old post on this blog we talked about link farms, bad neighbourhoods and blacklisted sites. These are pretty obvious and, unless you are a total newbie, you would already have figure this out.

But there is another sinister and apparently innocent source of backlinks that could seriously hurt your rankings

The Backlink list

You must have seen them in the forum

"List of 700 blogs with do follow links"

Or

" Auto-approved backlinks, 500 blogs"

Or

"List of do follow forums"

And on the surface of it they look great. And every man and his dog, at least every internet marketer and his outsourced link building guy in the third world will jump on these lists.

But these are websites that you really DO NOT want to get backlinks from.

In analyzing your website and the relevance of your websites in the search engines, Google looks at backlinks pointing to your website. And we all know that we want do follow anchor text links from websites preferably in our niche.

But it goes deeper than that.

From looking closely at how backlinks affect websites, it seems that Google looks at the type of sites that a website links to. If your website is getting a backlink from a webpage that links out to a whole bunch of spammy websites, then your website may generate enough suspicion for closer analysis.

Not a problem if that one site is the only website that is overrun by spammers pointing to your site.

But on analysis of all the backlinks pointing to your website, if the majority of the links are from websites that also point to other spammy websites then the case really is loaded against your website.

So back to those lovely lists of backlinks kindly provided by well meaning colleagues in the forums. Great idea but in reality, probably to be avoided.

Again I do not work for Google and my comments are based purely on observations.

Niche Marketing Statistics. How Often Do You Check

Internet marketing requires you to have your finger on the pulse at all times. especially when it comes to monitoring the traffic on our websites.

And before I launch into this, I just need to say that any serious internet marketer needs to have some method of analyzing the traffic to your websites and your conversions. Traffic analysis is crucial. If you haven't got analysis on your sites, stop reading this and go to Google analytics and set up your traffic analysis. It's free and will significantly help your business. No kidding.

Back to our discussion, for those of us that are smart and have website analysis, how often do we or should we check our stats?

As an affiliate marketing newbie, I checked my stats every few hours. By few I mean at least every couple of hours. I don't know what I was looking for. A sudden surge of traffic to my 6 page website with no backlinks. Wishes and horses come to mind.

And then I started getting traffic and the frequency of the stats review went up.

Then the penny dropped.

How much time am I spending [ or rather wasting] checking my website statistics? Loads.

So the mind change occured and the time was spent on building backlinks and content on my then 6 page website.

Then another penny dropped

My SEO efforts, the backlinks and the on page changes take TIME to have an effect on my websites traffic!

Hmmm. More evidence that maybe checking my statistics every two hours is a bit of a pointless exercise.

So how about now?

With websites getting anything from a hundred to a few thousand views a day [varies with the website] there really is not the need to check every two hours to see if that one visitor has been.

Yes, I do some statistics analysis on most days. But this is to see that the traffic generating campaigns that I have set up are still sending me traffic. And also to see the results of any new methods.

So in sharing my experience with you, I hope you realize that traffic analysis is important but do not let it get in the way of the activities that DO help you make money with your website

Bankerfox Trojan And Niche Marketing

Prior to last week I thought you could only get a virus infect your computer through downloads. And as a result have always been very careful about where I download products from. All those email attachments are carefully scanned before I open them, thank you

So I was absolutely stunned a week ago when one of my laptops suddenly flashed up a warning that I was under an internet trojan attack. What on earth is going on. And I have a fully up to date Norton package on board. Anyway I quickly turned off the WiFi and turned off the computer and after several exhaustive hours of booting and cleaning and deleting and all the rest of it, I found out my laptop is one of thousands that has become infected with a spyware protect 2009 virus

What this virus does is make you think that your computer is infected with the bankerfox trojan, a virus that hijacks your web browser and steals your bank details when you log in.

Basically the spyware protect wants you to buy it and protect yourself from the trojan

It took getting smitfraudfix from http://siri.geekstogo.com/SmitfraudFix.php to sort out the spyware protect virus

Why am I telling you this? As niche marketers we visit a ton of sites each day. And although the majority will be innocuous, some will infect your computer with viruses. I was lucky and it was only the spyware protect virus. It could have been worse and be the bankerfox trojan. Having said that I will not be accessing my bank accounts on that particular laptop in future

So the lesson is make sure you have a good antivirus package on the computers you do your surfing on. In fact make sure you have a good antivirus on all your computers.

Images And Search Engine Optimization

Images and SEO is one of those posts that I have been thinking of sharing with you for a while now but didn't. Why? Because I thought the value of Images and optimizing your images for the search engines is very much in the 'well known' folder

But looking at some websites and some of the questions on the forums and which I am asked personally, perhaps This article on SEO and images needs to be written

The bottom line is the images on your websites should be independently getting traffic for you, search engine traffic.
Google images is a search engine that is often used by a lot of people when they want to see an image. And when I think of it, Google images is something I use on a daily basis, not related to my internet marketing business

So what you want is for your images to rank well in Google images for keywords relevant to your site and obviously relevant to your images.

So how do you get your images to rank well in the images search engine

File Name. I the old days it was okay to name our images image 1, image2, image3, .... and that's okay. but won't do you much good if you are trying to rank for 'search engine optimization'. So give the images names that contain your keyword or a variation on the theme

Alt Tag. When you add an image to a webpage, you have the option of adding an alt tag to it. The initial purpose of alt tag was so that you have a descriptive text of the image if viewing the site on a browser that cannot load images.

But the alt tag is words on your page. Words that can be read by the search engine bot and can therefore contribute to the keyword density of the page the image is on. So include your keyword in your alt tag. Make it short and to the point. Try not to be too spammy with it or the search engines could red flag you. Not a good thing

Words next to the image. The words around your image are relevant, especially the words immediately after the image. SO if you want one f your images to come up high in the Google image search engine for a particular keyword, have those words appear in the sentence immediately after the image

Okay so I have given you a few tips on how to optimize your images for the search engines

A gentle warning. DO NOT ABUSE THE ALT TAG. Having the same alt tag for all the images on your page, or worse still repeating your keyword in one alt tag over and over again could get you a penalty with Google

So use these tips but be sensible about optimizing your images for the search engines

Get Your Backlinks Indexed

Building do follow backlinks is the core of search engine optimization ... for now
And if you are like most niche marketers you spend a lot of time looking for new ways of getting backlinks or building backlinks to your sites
And be it forum profiles, guest blogging, article marketing or building content on free blogging platforms, you probably have been there and done that

One key ingredient that can take these efforts up a notch is getting these backlinks indexed

We all have been there. You write a post, spin it and submit it to a bunch of article directories. And then wait and wait for the articles and their contained link to your site, to get indexed in Google. And it sometimes takes ages for this to happen.

So give your backlinks a little help. get them indexed by using RSS

You can create an RSS feed for the pages that contain your backlinks i.e. those profile pages or articles on article directories.

To create the feed use http://rss.icerocket.com or dapper.com

The both allow you to add URLs and create a feed that you can then distribute to RSS feed directories

Till next time

Canonical URLS www vs non-www

Canonical URLS is something that had me confused for a long period of time. And it adversely affected the way my websites and blogs performed in the search engines

You upload a website and throw content and backlinks at it. All well and good.
But in the process of assessing your home page you find that the address is displayed variably as
www.yourdomain
yourdomain
www.yourdomain.com/index

and so on

And for me initially I did not understand what the problem with this was.

Duplicate content. The search engine treat the three examples given above as three different domain names. Three domain names with exactly the same content and layout. Smells of duplicate content to me. Not really great for your search engine optimization

Backlinks. Major problem. You build backlinks to your site. And sometimes you copy and paste the URL and at other times you type it in manually. Problem is instead of getting a ton of back links to one URL, you end up with a bunch to the www domain, some to the non-www domain and others to the /index.html domain. Totally dilutes out your efforts

Is this important. You bet. In fact it is crucial.

Just do a backlink analysis of your own website using the www.domain and then the domain without www. yo could even try the /index.html

You'll find that if you have not canonicalised your domains URL, the results will not make for good viewing

So what should you do now

Decide which version you want as your homepage URL. I tend to go for the www.domain version. This is the version you want Google and the other search engines to index and this is the version that you want your backlinks to point to.

Once you have decided what version you want, do a permanent redirect i.e. a 301 redirect of the other domains to your main domain i.e. the www.domain version

The 301 redirect in my opinion is the best way of handling this problem because it redirects all traffic, human and robot to your desired domain URL

Another option is to use the canonical URL tag. This is a piece of code you put in the header portion of your html code.

The code reads like

<link rel="canonical" ref="http://www.yourdomain.com">

This means that all other formats of the page should be treated as the www version. This is an instruction to the search engine bots and therefore does not impact n human visitors

If you are using Wordpress, canonicalization is easily accomplished. Go to your settings page and type in the version you want as your domain's URL

Blog Commenting Useful Or a Waste of Time

Is blog commenting useful for creating do follow backlinks and getting traffic to websites or blogs?
I am sure you have come across this question as often as I have in the affiliate marketing forums.

And it's a valid question. Because it takes time to compose a blog comment that will pass scrutiny and get approved by the blogs moderators. You have to read the post first and some posts are just long and then compose your comment. So if it does not work then blog commenting could be a total waste of time.

Before I go further, I must admit that blog commenting is not my main method of generating do follow links to my sites. it's not even a method that I spend a lot of time on these days.

I tend to do a lot of competition analysis and take my cue from there.

or analyze backlinks of the websites that I know are run by SEO 'gurus' and see what they are doing

Anyway during one of my 'guru' analysis I found a webpage that is doing pretty well in Google for a few decent keywords

And doing some backlink analysis found that the majority of the do follow backlinks to that page were.... you guessed it, blog comments

What really amazed me was some of the blog pages the comments were on had decent page rank. No not the home page, the specific post page.

So I think maybe blog commenting is not a total waste of time after all.

See you on the blogs :)