Below are a few easy SEO tips for you. I noticed something about my SEO the other day which made me realize how I could get more traffic to my sites that were on the front page of Google but not yet in the number 1 spot.

What I’m about to explain is very easy to implement, but I know I’ve been guilty of rushing this and neglecting to do this properly.

When you’re building your webpages for the purpose of SEO, there are a number of vital things that you have to make sure you do, to each and every page to maximize the chances of it ranking high in the search engines and requiring as little backlinks as possible. I’ll be writing a seperate post on this very soon, however today I want to focus in on one aspect of this.

Most of you will know that when your site is listed in the search engines, the small block of text that shows in the results under the title is your description for the page. If you don’t know already, it’s important for you to include your exact keyword phrase in the description.

However what is also important, is taking the time to write a good title and description for the visitor to read. This is your advertsing box for SEO, and what I see far to often, is great PPC ads on the front page of Google, with excellent headlines and careful attention to every word used in their ad, however the sites on the free listing working on SEO, tend to fall down and be lazy here.

I’ll be the first to put my hand up and say that I’v been guilty of this, however the great news is that it’s easy to fix.

The way I see your description and title for your page is like a headline and subheadline for an advertisement. It’s what persuades the person scanning the Google results to click on your listing. I know I often click the number two spot in Google, if it has a better decription that caught my attention, and skip over the number one spot.

Easy SEO Tips: So what make a good title and description?

Well I think a good description is something that stands out from the crowd and is intriguing to the reader. This can be done with statements that reflect some form of a story or even mild controversy.

For example, if you were promoting a product called “Product XYZ” you might say something like:

“When I first tried used Product XYZ I was pretty shocked at….”

“Here’s My Story of Product XYZ, and what it’s really like….”

“I finally reviewed Product XYZ and you can find out the facts here…”

If you are not reviewing a product and instead targeting niche specific keywords, you might try something along these lines:

“I thought there was no cure for XYZ and then I found this….”

“I wanted to know to how to XYZ and after months of research I finallly came across this site…”

“My friend put my onto this product to learn how to XZY and it changed everything for me…”

Now if you haven’t actually tried a product, I don’t encourage to make things up, as that’s not ethical, but you can still write in a creative and appealing manner without having to pretend you have used the product, like most of the examples above.

What I do is create some form of interest in my site through the headline, and making sure their is some element of differentiation from the 9 other listing on the front page of Google, while arrousing the curiosity of the searcher at the same time.

This can help to ensure you get the maximum number of click throughs to your site. Not rocket science, just simple, effective, common sense marketing.

I you found these easy SEO tips helpful, and  as always I’d love to hear from you guys, so feel welome to share your thoughts below.

Thanks

Matt

I have to give credit to my friend Terry Kyle (Terry’s product: Best SEO Course I’ve ever used – affiliate link) who has taught me how to do this the right way!

Before I discuss how to buy an aged domain with page rank, I first want to discuss why this could be useful.

The fact is that search engines trust domains with age and page rank, so if you have a domain like this then it can be easier and faster to rank in the search engines. This is especially true if the domain has a Yahoo and/or DMOZ listing.

I’ve bought domains for as little as $40 that are PR 3 and listed in DMOZ, so it’s not that expensive, but you do need to know what you are doing.

When buying a domain from someone, the most important thing to do is check that the domain has not been dropped. What this means is that the domain has not expired at some time in the past and not been renewed by the owner. If this has happened, most SEO experts will agree that the domain has lost a lot of its value.

The best way to check if a domain has been dropped is to head over to www.domaintools.com and use there free service to check the domain out. The image below is an example of what domaintools shows you when you find a dropped domain.

You can see in the blue circle that it reads, “3 drops”. This to me is a domain that I would not consider buying, as you run the risk of the domain losing it’s page rank on the next Google update.

Another thing you need to do is check that the page rank is valid, and you can do this by doing a quick Google search like this: info:http://www.domain.com

You replace the URL with the domain you are looking at buying, and also test it without the www. What you are looking for is that the first result that Google has is the actual domain itself and not some other domain.

The reason you would do this is because some dodgy domain sellers will redirect page rank from one domain they own to another, so it gives the domain it’s page rank, but then they remove it once you’ve bought it. This may leave you with a page rank zero domain!

Here’s an example of a fake page rank:

In the example above you can see that I searched for info:tacticnews.com, however the first result that Google has is for www.burninginfo.com. This shows me that tacticnews.com is a forged page rank domain, and one I would not buy.

The other thing to check is the quality of the backlinks that the domain has. You can do this with any link checking tool, or even Yahoo site explorer. But just make sure you search for good strong backlinks, and not a whole bunch of low quality garbage links. You want to aim for at least 2 or more links to the domain that are of higher or equal page rank.

The reason for this (again thanks Terry for pointing this out) is because if by chance one of the links was removed then your domain should still hold it’s page rank because there is another high page rank link still in place.

One more thing that you should do when deciding whether to buy a domain or not is check and see if any of the inner pages of the site have page rank too. You might be looking at a PR 4 domain, and find that there a several inner pages that also have PR 4. This is very handy, because all you need to do is recreate these pages and you can use them.

To check if inner pages have page rank, all you need to do is search for the domain in Google like this:

site:http://www…..

However you also need to have the free firefox plugin called SEO Quake installed and switched on. The reason for this is that it will show you the page rank of the results. In the example below I have shown a domain that has home page of PR 4 and an inner page of only PR 0, but it still illustrates my point.

Anyway I hope these lessons on buying aged domains was useful for you, I don’t have room in this post to go into detail about why and how you can use these domains, because there are many ways. However if you are truly serious about SEO, I can’ t stress enough how great Terry Kyles course on SEO is.

If you want great SEO rankings for your keywords, then just grab Terry’s course here: BEST SEO COURSE EVER (affiliate link)as it’s simply brilliant and I use it myself. (I stayed up until 2am two nights in row reading it…I don’t normally do that!)

All the best

Matt

We talked about some really interesting aspects of affiliate marketing, and in this post I will be sharing with you one thing I found most helpful.

When you’re starting an affiliate website, and your intention is driving free traffic from the search engines, it’s vital that you plan the site out properly.

The most important aspect to get right is choosing the keywords that the pages of your site will target. Most of you will know what kind of keywords convert best and have a rough idea of the kind of competition you are capable of going after.

However I want to discuss another aspect of targeting keywords, that will allow you to get much more traffic in the long term, and ensure that Google loves your sites too!

OK let’s start with an example. If you have a site that sells mountain bikes, you might be targeting a particular model of bike as your keyword, such as “cell XC-1“. I haven’t checked if that phrase has any search volume, but it doesn’t matter as it’s for example purposes only.

If you were targeting “cell XC-1“, you would write an article about the bike and make sure it is monetized well and then go ahead and start getting some links to that page, so you can get top search engine rankings.

That’s nothing new to most of you I’m sure, however let me explain how you can make sure you are targeting that phrase for its true value.

When doing your keyword research look for phrases that are the longer tail version of  the phrase you are targeting. Taking this example, with the phrase “cell XC-1“, I could also potentially target “cell XC-1 cross country” or “cell XC-1 cross country mountain bike” or even “buy “cell XC-1“.

As you can see in the examples above, the core phrase of “cell XC-1” is contained in all the variations of the phrase.The longer phrase variations will have less traffic, however I will explain in moment what I am getting at.

Before I continue to explain though, I first want to explain the concept of “natural looking” link building. It’s no secret that Google prefers all link building to be built naturally, which is where people just decide to link to you. However in reality, if you rely on this you’ll struggle to get top search engine rankings.

So of course, everybody builds link themselves. However that doesn’t mean that when you are building links that you shouldn’t try and mirror what natural link building looks like as closely as possible.

One way to do this is to have variation in your anchor text that makes up your links. I don’t go over board on the variation, however I think 20% of the time, if you have a slight variation in your links it’s a good idea.

Here’s the clincher, when you are adding this variation, you should use the longer version of your keyword phrase, with the original core keyword phrase embedded inside it, just like I showed in the examples above.

There are two major advantages of doing this, the first is that your links will look more natural to Google because your link anchor texts are varied, which is good for your search engine rankings, and also you’ll start to rank for these longer tail phrases eventually and get more traffic from them too!

But that’s not all, because you are still using phrases with the core keyword phrase in them, your rankings will still be boosted for that core phrase also.

I did this recently when I has starting an affiliate site, but I did it the other way around, and I went for the longer version of the phrases first, and when I got rankings for them, I then got my link builders to start building links with the shorter tail version of the keyword.

The cool thing about this was, because I had been building links on the long tail phrase that contained the exact shorter tail phrase inside it, I was already on page 2 for the shorter tail phrase anyway!

So when you are planning an affiliate site, or any site for that matter, where your intention is to drive free traffic from the search engines, it is a good idea to add variation to your links, using longer tail versions of the core keyword you are targeting for that page.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the beginning of this post I mentioned that I caught up with two of my internet marketing buddies, both absolute experts at marketing online, and the great news is that one of them is giving away a free report for a limited time where he provides a detailed plan (with video) of his best affiliate marketing tricks.

I encourage you to grab it now, here’s the link:  ==>Free Report<==

Enjoy!

Google Wonder Wheel is free and allows you to enter a root keyword and then drill down deeper and uncover more possibilities as you follow it’s branches.

In the image below you can see that I’ve searched on the phrase “finding keywords” the topic of this post. Initially Google Wonder Wheel shows me two main branches to choose from, one relating to ‘choosing’ keywords and the other related to ‘research’ of keywords.

I decided to look for words that related to ‘research’ and so I click on the right side and expand this branch out. As you can see now the Wonder Wheel shows me a whole lot of new ideas for keywords and even more branches to dive deeper into.

I then look through each branch of the new wheel and see what keywords I can uncover that I may never have thought about before. Once I find either a broad category or even a specific keyword phrase, I can then go over to the Google Keyword tool and see what the search volume is like for these new potential keyword phrases.

In the example below I found a keyword phrase “finding long tail keywords” from the Wonder Wheel, that suites this very post for my blog, that I’m writing now. All I need to do next is check how difficult this phrase would be to potentially go after with SEO, and if it’s OK I can target it.

For the phrase “finding long tail keywords” the competition isn’t very hard, with no one really specifically targeting it on the front page of Google, and it gets about 200 exact match searches a month. Therefore I will add this phrase into my meta tags for this post also and see if I can drive some traffic from it.

When you are blogging or building a standard website, targeting additional keywords is this manner is a good idea to broaden your reach and the Google Wonder Wheel is a trusty companion for finding keywords!

I try my best to provide quality content for my readers in this blog, so if you like my posts, I would greatly appreciate it if you leave a comment and use the Twitter and/or bookmarking buttons to spread the word!

Thanks

Matt

It’s obviously very important to continue to build as many backlinks as you can to your web pages if you want them to rise in the search engines and eventually get to the top.

However what I’ve found, is that not many people discuss the crucial elements that ensure you stay at the top.

Google are clever, they have to be, and one thing that many SEO experts will agree on, is that Google records the amount of time that a visitor spend on your page, and this plays a role in your search position. Remember that Google’s main goal is to provide relevant information for its users.

In fact all search engines would be happy if the user typed a search phrase in and the very first result they displayed, ended the user search, because it was exactly what they were looking for.

With that said, one way Google and other search engines can tell if they have provided quality to the user, is by measuring the amount of time the user spends on your page. If the user very quickly hits the back button, it’s not a good thing, and Google will take this very seriously.

Three Ways to Decrease Your Bounce Rate

1.) Make it Obvious: Once the user is on your page, your job is to immediately tell them what they will get from this page. DO NOT leave it up to the visitor to work it out, or have to read the first paragraph of text to see if they are on the page the need to be.

Look at the first sentence of this blog post, I have written: “In this post I am going to give you three tips….”

Do you think if someone lands on this page, that they will be wondering what the post is about, and if it will be useful to them? No of course not, because I have purposely engaged the reader with a hook, to encourage them to stick around!

Headlines that are tightly focused on the keywords your are targeting is also important. So make sure the headlines and relevant and enticing.

2.) Clean Layout: This next point is rather obvious, but I’m still amazed out how many websites that I see with terrible layouts, that make it very difficult to see what is going happening on the page.

Make sure you space every thing out and use plenty of white space in your text.

I for one hate landing on a page that is giant pile of text and nothing much more. I can’t be bothered reading something like that, and very quickly hit the back button.

3.) Using Video and Graphics: To further engage the visitor in your page, the use of video and eye catching graphics can help. Not all videos will work for every site, but if they do, then I encourage you to use it wisely as it is a great way to keep the visitor on your site, especially if you remove the fast forward option on the video.

One thing to be careful of is not to use videos from Youtube that give the visitor links to other sites, as this can backfire and the user may leave your page in favor of the link in the video. Just use pure content and non-promotional videos.

If you do these simple but highly effective things well, you can increase the amount of time that someone spends on your web pages and in turn this will help you to maintain number 1 position in Google.

Matt Carter

RapidRewriter.com

In this post I am going to be looking at SEO keyword research.

We are going to cover free ways to find keywords and then discuss how to weigh up whether or not a keyword is worth going after for SEO purposes, and how difficult it would be to get on the front page of Google for a particular keyword.

Commercial Intent

Before we look at places to find keywords, I first want to discuss the ‘Commercial Intent’ of a keyword. This simply means how close to buying a product the person who types in that particular keyword is. I see a lot of people get this wrong and end up doing hours and hours of SEO and getting their web pages ranking in the search engines, only to find that the keywords don’t convert to sales for them.

This truly is a tragedy, however with a little thought it can be avoided.

There are a lot of paid tools you can use to assess whether or not a keyword is making PPC marketers money in the niche, and they are great for working out whether or not you should put effort into SEO to rank for the same keyword phrase organically.

However as I mentioned let’s just stick to the free methods. Therefore the first thing to do is at least make sure there are a decent amount of PPC ads showing when you type in a particular phrase, as this is always a healthy sign.

More importantly though it is essential to ask yourself the question: “What is someone who types this keyword into a search engine thinking?” By doing this when you scan your potential keyword list you can quickly get rid of keywords that are not going to make you money.

For example if you were in the Cure Acne Market, the keyword “Acne Information” may not necessarily be a great one, because although some people who type this word into the search engines may be ready to buy an acne cure product, a large amount will probably just be information seekers, and may not even have acne themselves.

However a keyword like: “Help Cure Acne Fast” would be a different story altogether. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that someone who types this keyword into Google is most likely to be an acne sufferer that is willing to try anything to cure their acne. These types of emotionally charged keywords convert very well.

Another type of keyword that has high commercial intent is the review keywords. This is where someone is typing in a product name plus the word ‘review’. These people are well aware of the product, and have most likely already been pre-sold by another website, and are very close to pulling out the credit card and making a purchase.

Review keywords convert at approximately 10 times higher rates than other words and are well worth going after for organic traffic.

Keyword Research

Google Keyword Tool

The Google Keyword tool is possibly the best free resource for finding great keywords, and I am well aware that most people will already know about it. However apart from the usual keyword searches you may do using the tool, I encourage you to use the ‘Website Content‘ search function, which is found on the left hand side.

A great way to do this is to search in Google with the most root keyword for your niche, for example in the cure acne niche, this would be the word ‘acne‘.

Once you have done that look for an authority site, such as www.acne.org and place that into the ‘Website Content’ search and Google will tell you what it thinks this page is about, by providing you with a list of categorized keywords..

If you are an affiliate for a Clickbank product then a good way to start your keyword research and get a feel for the niche is to place the products sales letter URL into the website content search, and check out the keywords that Google tells you about the site.

Wonder Wheel

Another free tool that is helpful is the Google Wonder Wheel function. On any Google results page you will see the link that says “SHOW OPTIONS”. Once you click on that, scroll down until you see the link for “WONDER WHEEL” as you can see in the image to the right.

Google then gives you further ideas for related keywords, that you can take note of and start plugging back into the Google Keyword Tool.

You can then simply rinse and repeat and keep putting news words through the Google keyword tool, and provided the ’synonym’ function is selected the tool will keep finding new keywords related to the additional keywords you are adding.

Of course you should also be using your own brain to come up with keywords and use other tools, if you have them, however these are two simple, free, and also very effective ways to find keywords.

SEO Competition

Once you have used all your methods for finding potential keywords that you want to rank in the search engines, it is then a good idea to analyze how difficult it will be to get on the front page of Google for them, because ideally that’s where you want to be to get maximum free traffic, and preferably in the top five positions.

One of the best SEO tools that I use is ‘SEO for Firefox’ add on.

Once you have installed this add on, you can then get some very valuable information for SEO. When I am looking at the results on the front page of Google for a particular keyword, there are a many factors that I consider, however to keep it simple I have summarized the key things below.

When you are looking at these factors it is important to look at them together and not as individual elements to base you decision on of how difficult it would be to out rank the websites.

1.) Page Rank: If all the results on the Google front page are PR 6+ then this isn’t a great thing, however Page Rank alone is not the deciding factor of whether or not to tackle a keyword phrase, however it plays a role.

2.) Age of the Domain: If all the domains in the top 1-10 spots in Google are 8 years+ then this isn’t great either, as Google trust older sites. However again this is one factor that goes into the mix, as I have outranked many 10 years and older sites with a brand new domain before, because the other elements were weaker for those sites.

3.) Back Links to Page: If the results on the front page of Google all have a huge amount of back links then this can be a problem, however as a rough rule of thumb, if there are some below 50 then it’s a good sign, because getting more than 50 back links really isn’t hard to do.

4.) DMOZ: I also like to check if the page is listed in the DMOZ directory, as Google favor sites which are listed in DMOZ (if your’s isn’t then I advise you to try and get it listed, as its free but can be difficult to get accepted).

5.) ON PAGE SEO: A very important thing to check is how well the sites have done their ON PAGE SEO. The main factors I look at are the; Title, Description, Keywords, H1 Tags. If you find the keyword phrase here then these pages have done their On Page SEO well and are trying to rank this page for that exact keyword phrase.

When making a decision whether or not to go after a keyword, you then have to weigh up all these factors and give the top 10 pages a sort of overall score if you like, based on all the factors we just looked at. For example, if a page has 80 back links, none of which are .edu, and they have not done their on page SEO, then the high back links would not be as much of a concern for me, and I would then continue to look at the other factors involved.

If you then think you can do better than a competitor, the search volume for the keyword is worth the time spent on SEO, and the keyword phrase is a high commercial intent one, then you have a green light to go for it!!!

With that said, this is where the SEO for Firefox add on comes into play. As you can see in the image, when the add on is activated it shows you below each result, the core factors we looked at.

I have highlighted them to make it more obvious. These factors are Off Page SEO factors that we looked at; being Page Rank, Domain Age, Links etc…

In order to have a closer look at what each site is doing with their On Page SEO, you simply click the website and when it opens, right click anywhere in the page and select “SEO for Firefox—>SEO XRAY” then the tool will give you a wealth of useful information about this particular page.

As you can see in the image I have highlighted the On Page factors of; Title, Description and Keywords.

There is also another very useful function which is not for this post, but I will briefly mention it now, and that is the External Links function, which is highlighted in the image above in white at the bottom. This allows you to view where this page is getting their back links from, and can be a great resource for helping you find places to also get links from, after all Google must think these links are ok if this site is on the front page!!

Now there is a huge number of factors that go into SEO keyword research, however this will give you a great start and if you are not going after hugely competitive keywords like ‘weight loss’ then with some basic SEO, combined with this analysis you will do fine.

With all that said, a rough rule of thumb that you can use, if you find this a bit too difficult is to target keyword phrases that consist of 3 or more words. Usually these keyword phrases are less competitive, however not in every circumstance.

For example you might have the keyword phrase: “Learn Spanish Online” which is three words but is still rather competitive, because it is the root phrase for the learning Spanish online niche. Once you start to branch away from the root keyword phrase you will find the competition drops off.

That’s all for now.

Enjoy

Matt Carter