5 Points To Target Keywords

Have the keyword in your title (the nearer to the start the better).

Include the keywords in your page headings (these have more weight to google than regular text).

Have the keywords in the Page description (once again feature near the start of the description).

And obviously have the keywords in the post (about a 2-4% keyword density is good).

Make sure you interlink with keywords (eg when linking to the page from another post don’t say “click here for more about keyword”, say “check out keyword for more info”).

How To Choose Keywords To Target

Go to Google Keyword Tool and type in your terms.

Then click “show estimated average cpc”, and then match type by “exact”.

Now you have a list of keywords and an idea of which ones pay well for advertising (if you click on “Estimated Average CPC” it will arrange the results so you can see the highest paying keywords first”)

Here are the two factors you should consider when choosing keywords to target:

Competition

If a keyword has a lot of searches but there is extremely tough competition it will be hard to rank well even if you effectively target the keywords. So once you find the good keywords type them into google and see how many results there (less is better, 1 million is bad). Also have a look at the quality of the top page results, tips on how to do this can be found in How To Dial In Your Keywords – Part 2.

Look for key-phrases. 3 word phrases are much easier to target than single words. Although there might be less total searches for these keywords you will find it much easier to rank on the top page and will get more traffic quicker.

The CPC

If you are targeting a bunch of keywords with a low CPC (cost per click for adwords ad) you might be able to get a lot of traffic but you wont make much from your adsense. So if you have adsense on your site and want to make more money have a look at targeting keywords that pay well. The trick is finding high paying keywords with a lot of searches and low competition.

Related Posts

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• How To Write Headlines For Google Vs Twitter Vs Digg

How To Write Headlines For Google

I recommend you have a read of How To Dial In Your Keywords before you write your next Google headline. The first 5 or so words are the most important in a Google headline. So make sure your headline features the keywords near the start.

Although having the right keywords will get you in front of potential visitors you still need to get them to click! Have alook at How To Write Article Titles For Traffic for tips on writing catchy headlines.

When targeting Google remember you can also add a description (Use the All In One SEO plugin to write a custom description. The default is the first 160 characters of your post). The description should include the keywords and also make the reader even more interested. Leading text and dramatic claims (if you can back them up) are good in the description.

How To Write Headlines For Digg

Headlines for digg are all about reader appeal. Having a great headline will draw in more readers and thus more diggs and thus more readers. Its a great cycle but it all starts with the headline. Digg also has descriptions like google. Keep the description relevant, short and sweet.

Digg and other social bookmarking sites have a search function that gets used by some users. So although keywords are fairly insigniciant compared to Google, I would reccomend you still drop in the kewyord somewhere.

How To Write Headlines From Twitter

Twitter headlines work on the same laws of appeal as any other headline. Keywords are not a big player in twitter as the chance of someone stumbling across your page in twitter search is VERY slim! So forget the keywords for now and just focus on what will get peoples atttention. If you are stuggling at finding inspiration for great headlines check out How To Write Article Titles For Traffic or google it, there is tons of great advice and examples to help you.

Remember when you are writing for twitter that there is no supporting description text so the headline should give a good indication of what the page is about.

Another thing to remember when writing titles for twitter is the 140 Character Limit. You need to work out how long your titles can be. I do it like this, I know the longest URL will be 30 charaters, and my tweet title looke like post-nam | Blog-title. So I add | Timscullin.com 17 characters. 140-17-30 = 93 characters max title length. If I go over this I run the chance of retweeters accidently cutting the link URL short.

Combine All Three

First try and come up with a catchy headline that ties in the keywords. Often this gets really tricky, so if yor stuck try this. Add your keywords followed by a dash then the headline. For example “Writing Post Headlines – 20 Tips For Killer Titles” or “Training German Shepherds – 5 Essential Training Tools”.

Remember to have enough information for it to work without a desciption, tie in the keywords and keep it under your twitter character limit.

I have also seen another post where they suggest you target the social media channels first, then once the traffic drops off after a few weeks change your titles to more google friendly ones. I think this is a good option if you have the time. Check out Winning The Web for more on what they call the “One Two Punch”.

What are your thoughts?

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How To Increase Blog Traffic

Over the time I have seen quite a few videos which have helped me get my head around different blog subjects. A common challenge for all bloggers is figuring out how to increase blog traffic, so for your benefit, here are three videos that cover some very foundational elements. I hope you find them useful too.

6 Tips For Increasing Blog Traffic

So many people focus on increasing blog traffic so much that their content starts to suffer. I liked the way David ties producing quality content and increasing traffic to your blog as a long term strategy. Plus he has some other great techniques which all produce traffic for me. I highly suggest you watch.

Blog Marketing: Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

90% of us use google to to find what we want online. This is a natural targeted source of traffic and too many bloggers don’t pay enough attention to targeting google traffic . Watch this video and learn how to significantly increase blog traffic by doing some simple SEO and keyword targeting. For more on targeting keywords check out 8 Essential Strategies To Improve AdSense Cashflow and How To Dial In Your Keywords – Part 1.

Increase Free Blog Traffic In Seconds, Increase Blog Traffic

An essential key when optimising your blog for search engines and targeting keywords is your URL. Daegan covers the topic of changing your permalinks to a more search engine friendly version. Follow this and watch your search engine traffic increase.

Did you find something useful in the videos?

What are other blog videos you have found useful?

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Getting traffic to your blog is one thing but turning that traffic into loyal readers is another. If you haven’t yet, I would recommend you read Do You Capitalise On Your Blog Comments? as it is another strong techinique to maximise your current readership.

If all of your visitors read one more post your pageviews would double and that is the intention with this tip. Want to know how to do it?

Interlinking Posts

Interlinking is adding links to other posts within your blog. You will notice the example in the first paragraph. Bet you were tempted to click through to find out whether you capitalise on your blog comments. That was a part of my sneaky plan. Once you did that and found out how good my other posts are, you would be my next loyal reader. Glad to have you :-D

Why is interlinking a good idea? I’ll give you 3 reasons:

Makes Loyal Readers

Dropping hints to a new reader about where they can find more information is the key for interlinking your posts. If you do it right you will transform a visitor who came for one page into a reader who found 4 interesting posts, added you to their RSS feed and is the latest member of your loyal readership club.

Increased PageViews (ad impressions)

Obviously if a reader clicks through to more pages on your blog you have a better chance getting them to click on your ads. Not only that, but any CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) advertising keeps clocking up in value. Interlinking creates more pageviews today but by also increasing customer loyalty it increases the future pageviews as well.

Better SEO

Search engines like pages with internal links. It helps the google bots find their way around and also shows the website is well maintained. For more tips on SEO read Google Ranking: Making Friends With The Spider and Google and SEO: The Real Story (see those interlinks?).

A Useful Plugin

The related posts plugin is the perfect compliment for interlinks within the post. Its also much less time consuming!

The plugin I use is WordPress Related Posts and can be found in the plugin search. To edit the options just go to Settings>WordPress Related Posts in the WordPress Admin panel.

Using related posts makes it easy for readers to find more posts they might find interesting. Because the related post plugin adds links at the bottom of the post it catches the readers who don’t like opening more pages while reading.

Start Making Readers Loyal Now

So what are you waiting for, dive into your archives and start interlinking your posts today!

Sponsored Resources

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The Blueprint Of A Blogging Millionaire. The Best Blogging EBook On The Net.

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This is the follow up post to How To Dial In Your Keywords – Part 1. If you haven’t read it yet then go back and do it now. You want to make sure you have a list of good keywords before you start checking out the competition.

The Competition

Once you have found your keywords based on the pointers I gave you in the last post you need to test them out against the real competition. If your competition is really darn good for a certain keyword then I would recommend you drop it and focus on the other ones.

How to check out the competition.

Install FireFox (I like to use Safari for my regular browsing but switch to FireFox for any SEO work).

Then install the SEO For FireFox plugin.

Once installed you will see an ‘SEO’ in the bottom right hand corner of your browser. To toggle it on and off just click the logo (color = on, duh). Then right click, or command click and choose on options. Change the following options to Automatic and the rest to Hidden: PR, Traffic Value, Age, Digs, Y! Links, Y Page Links and Yahoo Position.

Then go to Google and search for you keywords.

When the results come up you will now see a list under each result with the information we just specified.

This is what each means and how to interpret it.

PR – Page Rank

This is the popularity of a site with google. Basically the weight of the site. If your competition has a PR of higher than 4 or 5 then try another keyword. It is too much work for a new blog to beat these pages. However if there is only one site with a PR of 5 and the rest have a PR of 1 then you will be fine because you will easily be able to get on the top page for that ranking.

Traffic Value

Basically the higher it is the harder they are to outrank.

Age

Older sites rank better.

Diggs

Another test of popularity with the trendy social bookmarking website digg.com. The more diggs a site has the harder it is to outrank.

Y! Links

The amount of incoming links Yahoo shows for the site. Yahoo generally shows more links than google. The more incoming links a site has the harder it is to outrank. The quality of links is also important. If a site has a ton of inbound links but is not very old then these links are probably not very high quality and it may be easier to outrank than you think.

Y! Page Links

These are the number of pages inside the website, or the size of the website. Once again Yahoo has better data. Search engines usually like bigger websites so you may find it hard to tackle massive sites that are very keyword rich.

Choosing Keywords To Target

If you find your keywords are very heavily competed then drop them. Pick the keywords that get the most traffic for the least amount of competition and you will find it easy to rank well in google and the search engines. If you implement your keywords well you will have a good flow of traffic in no time.

Also read 8 Essential Strategies To Improve AdSense Cashflow for tips on finding high paying keywords.

Resources (sponsored)

PPC Bully: Let Your Competitors Work For You!
Uncovers Your Competitors Winning Combinations Of Keywords, Ads And Landing Pages, And You Can Dominate The Pay Per Click Playground.

InstaCash Keywords – I recommend you at least watch the YouTube video near the bottom.
Membership Site That Delivers Niche Keyword Lists In A Daily Basis.

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The two biggest factors for getting a good search engine ranking is having backlinks and having great SEO of your site. Getting the right keywords for SEO can be tricky but here are a few simple tips to help out beginners. 

This is a two part post. The first part of the post is about finding good keywords and the second part is finding out about competition.

Finding your Keywords

You should already have a good idea about your blog and what you are talking about before you start looking for keywords to target. Sometimes good topics to target are the ones that you have already had success in. Othertimes they are new topics, or if your blog is brand new you can start from scratch.

Tool Number 1

Adwords Keyword Tool

Type in your topic as the main keyword to search for. You can be as broad as you like here.

The once your results pop up click the Approx Avg Search Volume button to order them in terms of popularity. Then change the match type to ‘exact’ (the option next to Approx Avg Search Volume) for more accurate results. Now you want to be working a keyword that has at least 50,000 searches in the main topic (the keyword at the top of the list). If you scroll down you will find another list of words under Additional Keywords To Consider. Between these two lists you should be able to find a good amount of keywords wit enough traffic.

Tool Number 2

Word Tracker GTrends

This is a powerful tool to use in conjunction with the adwords tool. Take the keywords you have found and type them in one at a time into the Word Tracker site. You will see results in a 3 column layout. The search count on a daily basis is very useful, then there is the keyword and finally on the right is the ‘G’ column. This is what you want to focus on.  When you click on it there are three key parts

1) Google Competition

The number of other sites that come up if you type the term into google.

This important but it is good to check out how well the competition has done their SEO. GTrends could fail this keyword but if the competition has bad SEO it may still be relatively easy to get on the top page.

2)Actual Visitors From #1 In Google

If you get the number one ranking in google this is how many visitors you will get.

3) Keyword Trend

If this graph shows a significant decline then I would recommend not targeting the keyword as it is past its prime. You are better to target keywords that will last. That way your work will have a longer shelf life.

By now you should have a good idea of your top keywords.

Read Part 2

Resources (sponsored)

PPC Bully: Let Your Competitors Work For You!
Uncovers Your Competitors Winning Combinations Of Keywords, Ads And Landing Pages, And You Can Dominate The Pay Per Click Playground.

InstaCash Keywords – I recommend you at least watch the YouTube video near the bottom.
Membership Site That Delivers Niche Keyword Lists In A Daily Basis.

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There are literally hundreds of reasons to start a blog. Here are the top 10 plus another 26 reasons why you should start a blog today.

The Top 10

1] Blogs are Easy.

Blogs are very easy to setup and write.

Check out Blogs 101 – The Essential Tips For Setting Up WordPress.

2] Easily Connect With Readers.

Once you have a following on your blog you just publish content and it is instantly available to readers.

3] Become an Expert.

Writing quality content establishes you as an expert in your field. Its the next best thing to writing a book, and a heck of a lot easier!

People trust experts, and people buy from people they trust.

4] Google Loves Blogs.

They are keyword rich and rank well in Google amongst a number of searches –> more traffic. Read How To Dial In Your Keywords to learn what keywords to target.

Link to your static website to improve its ranking.

5] Show The Person Behind The Company.

Customers like to connect with real people more than companies. Your customers will love getting to know your humour and quirks as they read through your blog.

6] Give People Something Valuable.

By sharing valuable information your customers will stay on your website longer. When they stay longer they will be more likely to buy, if not now then sometime in the future.

7] Customer Feedback

You can find out what your customers like or don’t like.

You can get feedback on new ideas before spending $$$.

Read Blog Community – Starting The Conversation

8] Saves you from having lame conversations.

You can direct people to your blog post instead of actually explaining everything.

e.g. How do you do “boring thing” –> “Read my post about “boring thing”.

9] Improve Your Copy.

Because you are writing things down you will learn to write better.
Your sales copy will get better and you will sell more.

10] Enhance Your Existing Brand.

You can drive home more messages about your brand.

Drive More Traffic To Your Website From Your Blog:

1] Blogs have tons of keywords and have good rankings for a number of different queries.

2] They have fresh up to date content –> more love from Google.

3] Create multiple links back to your site. Articles get covered by other blogs and eventually links back to the source – your website.

4] You can join blog directories for more exposure.

5] You can be a part of Blog Carnivals and get even more traffic.

6] Blog posts can go viral.

7] Promote products on your website.

8] If you have an interesting blog people may ask you to guest write for their blogs. You can include a link back to your blog.

Sell More

9] As you interact with customers discover new markets for your product. Promote and sell to the new markets.

10] As you interact with customers discover new products you can offer them.

11] People trust well written blogs. People buy from trustworthy sources.

12] Blogs can be easily updated and a great way to keep readers informed of new products, specials etc.

13] Blogs naturally build a database as readers sign up to follow future posts. Databases are a powerful Marketing tool.

14] Test out different copy to find out what will sell best before implementing on your site.

15] Make money on your blog with ads.

Improve Your Brand

16] Promote other aspects of your business, such as updates about supported charities.

17] Show photos to enforce brand identity. Such as the new business car, or handshake with the president.

18] Show historical content covering all previous projects and events.

Create Your Own Invisible University

19] You are forced to learn new things as your research for your posts.

20] Keeps you up to date with the latest information and technology.

21]  Join the blog community and share ideas with other bloggers.

22] Organise your thoughts.

23] Explore new ideas.

24] Keep yourself accountable. If you write about good ideas you are more likely to do them.

25] You can save your interesting thoughts and ideas to be accessed anywhere in the world.

26] Add it to your resume.

Resources (sponsored)

Blogging To The Bank 3.0
The Blueprint Of  A Blogging Millionaire. The Best Blogging EBook On The Net.

Atomic Blogging 3.0
Your Complete Step By Step Tutorial Guide On Creating Profitable Blogs.

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Directory submissions are filtered by actual humans so they cut out a lot of the junk on the internet. Make sure your website is quality and not just another spam site before submitting, and remember that it can take up to 3 weeks for some sites to register your site.

The 4 Most Common Directory Mistakes

1) Submitting To 100′s or 1000′s Of Directories.

• Submitting your posts to every directory on the internet will create thousands of backlinks to your sites. But we need to look at a thing called Opportunity Cost [OC]. The OC is the cost of not doing the next best alternative. Simply put what else could you be doing instead. You only submit to the top 5-10 directories, max. 90% of traffic will come from these sites.
• You should spend the rest of your time developing other traffic leads instead submitting to more useless directories.
• Having more unqualified links will not give you better SEO rankings, its quality that counts.
• Submit to DMOZ (Used by Google, AOL, Netscape, Lycos and Hotbot) and allthewebsites.org.  Then do a google search for “your topic directories”. Generally the best directories will have the top results.

2) Not Researching The Directory.

• Make sure your site should be apart of the directory before you submit it. You should also consider the category to submit your article under. In the wrong category or directory a site will either be rejected or not get much traffic.
• Your descriptions and titles should also be targeted for each directory, so make sure you know what people are looking for on that particular directory.

3) Writing Lame or Misleading Titles and Descriptions.

• When people search the directory they click on what catches their attention. In order to maximise results your Titles and Description need to be catchy. Read Article Secrets: How To Write Article Titles For Traffic to learn how to write catchy titles.
• Your Description should adequately describe your site and include your USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Make sure it is unique. This is your one chance to impress directory visitors so make it count.

4) Not SEO’ing Your Submissions.

• If your Title and Description contain search query keywords, then your site might appear toward the top of directory results. If your company name does NOT have keywords in them, do not add those keywords in the submission. Directory editors will remove them anyway, and you do not want them to suspect you of spamming.
• Read How To Dial In Your Keywords for more on deciding what keywords to target.

Resources (sponsored)

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Making new friends come be a bit intimidating at times but its always worth it. To befriend Google you need to say just the right things..

Use Your Words Wisely

The Google crawler searches sites and indexes them based upon their content and who links to them. All Google can see is words and links so use your words wisely, they are 50% of the equation.

Do some research on what your target market is searching for and find out what words they are actually typing into search engines. These are your keywords. Using them correctly can dramatically improve your search ranking.

Use  Adwords Keyword Tool and Keyword Spy to help find effective keywords. You want ones that have a significant number of searches and lower competition.

Visible Words

• Visible words are the text on your page, the page titles and image captions. You should keep the keywords in mind as you write your content and use them as much as possible in a natural manner. Also the closer to the top of the page, the more they will influence your ranking.
• Your titles are some of the most important words on the page. Check out the How To Write Article Titles For Traffic post for more information on how to write a catchy SEO title.

Invisibile words

• The invisible words are in the code of a site and are the meta tags. The meta tags are used to provide extra information and the search engines love them!
• You can insert information such as the title , the description and keywords.

Title:

• This is recommended if for some reson you want to change the title of your page (eg if you have a very long title/ or you want to make it more SEO friendly.)

Description:

• If you don’t insert a description meta tag then the search engines will just show the first few lines under your title in the search results. Having a catchy description can greatly increase your search engine traffic

Keywords:

• Keywords are used to help google index your pages. Include the words you already have and then include other relevant words (thesaurus.com may help). If your post is about cars include the keyword car but al include the keywords automobile and vehicle.
• When inserting keywords it pays not to go overboard as search engines penalize and sometimes blacklist your site if you try to mislead them with irrelevant information.
• Read How To Dial In Your Keywords and Making Friends With The Spider.

See adding meta tags to your Website or WordPress Blog.

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Once you know your keywords and have successfully implemented them in your visible content you will want to include them in your invisible content as meta tags. Before you start make sure you know your keywords. For more information read How To Dial In Your Keywords and Making Friends With The Spider.

You can find out what keywords your competitors are using by ctrl-clicking (or right click) in your browser and choosing view source. Then search for a tag that reads:

<meta name="keywords" content="their keywords will be written here" />

When you are starting out it is a good idea to check out the leaders in your field before deciding on your keywords. You may just get some useful pointers ;)

Adding Tags To Your WordPress

Adding tags to your wordpress blog is simple and you don’t even need to know any code!

Simply add the plugin “All in One SEO Pack” which you can search for within the WordPress control panel (Plugins>Add New). Once you have activated it you will have some options at the bottom of each post where you can add a Title, a Description and Keywords. Simply fill out this information before you publish each post and you are done.

Simple!

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