Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Structured Steps of SEO


SEO, or search-engine optimization, is an important component of your blogs ability to rank well. SEO is a complex topic that can be frustrating for a beginning marketer, which is one reason why an estimated 95% of people fail at online marketing.

In order for SEO to be effective on your website, you should make sure your blog is properly structured. Your blog will thrive better if it's set up properly. Continually structuring and posting content, not having enough links or too many links at one time, and other factors can destroy your chances in ranking in the search engines. This is why it's so important to properly structure your blog in order to make search-engine optimization easier. 


1.) Structure your blog

The first step to structuring your blog performing keyword research. Use keyword research to discover what keywords rank best in the search engines. Go to Google and search for 'Google adwords' or 'keyword research tool'. Type in a keyword or set of keywords that are related to your niche and see how many search results come up for each month. You really want to use keywords that get at least 100,000 searches a month and that preferably have low or medium competition. When first starting out, it's usually best to rank for low to medium competition keywords if you want better chances of ranking higher. 

Select around 7 to 15 keywords and copy them to your notepad. You will be using these for your keywords or 'tags' when posting in your blog. You want to sprinkle the keywords you're tying to rank for throughout all of your blog posts. Putting too many keywords in your post could be considered as spam, so you may want to limit the amount of keywords you use. Below are a few basic SEO tips you  can apply to your blog. 
 
1.) Make sure to use your target keyword in your blog title. 
    
2.) Use one other similar keyword
  
3.) Use target keywords in meta tags

4.) Use target keyword in header tag 1, but only one time.          
          
         An example of an h2 tag  Looks like this
     As you could probably guess, the tag pattern continues like this:
          The H2 tag Looks like this 
          The H3 tag Looks like this 
          and so on...
         
5.) Use your keyword as the alt text in one or more images on your blog 
   
6.) Use about 5 to 7 generic keywords in your post. These can be keywords that are similar to the one you are already ranking for. So for example, say your target keyword is 'make money online'. 
     
Some generic keywords you could use are 'how to make money online', 'make money online free', 'make money free', 'how to make money free', free ways to make money', etc. Just make sure your generic keywords are ranking high as well. 
 
7.) Make videos that teach people how o do something or try writing some of your articles into a
Powerpoint layout. You can record your voice reading the content on the presentation to give your
 visitors a better idea of who you are. 
 
8.) Link your blog to other sites on the internet. Free and paid backlinking is a big, yet complex part of SEO that contributes traffic to your blog. 


After setting up your content in the correct and writing your blog posts all in the proper structure, you should add videos, images, polls, comment areas, games, just anything that makes your blog stand out and beneficial to the reader. Make your blog stand out with a variety of blog posts that contain valuable information and videos or images. 

Add social media buttons to your blog as today many people love to share articles, blog posts, and videos they liked. 

Share your content on social media websites, post on guest blogs, or post links to your content in forums and other blogs that are related to your niche. Promoting your blog and networking with others in your niche are two of the most important skills you should have in internet marketing. This is why you should use social media to establish a presence and promote your content. 

2.) Promote your blog with social media 


Creating profiles on several different social media websites is the best way to establish a social presence, which will eventually help with your blogs traffic. 

Listing information about yourself and including a picture or video is a great way to gain the trust of visitors that come to your website. People like to see who's posts they are reading and fell more connected to authors they can relate to. 

Here are some social media sites that you should get accounts with in order to help establish your online presence.

1.) Facebook
2.) Linkedin
3.) Twitter
4.) Pinterest 
5. Instagram 
6.) Digg
7.) Facebook group or fanpage

Creating a Facebook group or Fanpage can help build a fan base and direct visitors to your blog. Fan pages have the potential to bring in tons of traffic to your website and that you can present future offers to. 

Promotion and visitors= backlinks

You can think of backlinks as votes. The more backlinks your blog has, the higher your ranking is going to be. So what exactly are backlinks?

Backlinks are links posted on other web pages that contain your link. These are a great way to get traffic and there are are many ways to get backlinks. 

Backlinks can be manually posted in blog comment areas, forums, and other pages that have similar content to yours. There are backlinking tools that will distribute hundreds of backlinks for you at a time. There are some great softwares for this such as Backlink Energizer and Article Marketing Robot, however these cost around fifty to a hundred bucks. Both are well worth the investment, but if you don't have the money then manual link posting may be the way to go. 




However, a website called Fiverr is filled with gigs for backlink posting and almost any other aspect of internet marketing that is in demand. The majority of gigs cost only $5 on Fiverr but and the majority of work I have purchased has been completely satisfactory. 

You can find some great help on Fiverr, but beware of scam artists that don't have a clue how to properly do your requested task. Be sure to check feedback and ratings from other buyers before you decide to buy.


Saturday, November 3, 2012

5 Top Tips for Getting Traffic


Website traffic consists of the people that visit your blog or website. Traffic can essentially determine the success of your blog. If you can't drive traffic to your website then your efforts have basically become a waste of time.



There are many ways to drive traffic to your blog and some are more fundamental than others. The most fundamental strategies are the ones that tend to work the best, and many, many people have had  success using the methods listed below:



1.) Blog Commenting

Commenting on blogs related to your niche is a great way to make new contacts and generate backlinks to your blog. Backlinks are links posted on other websites that link bank to your blog. Commenting on several different blogs is a good way to get your blog noticed while acquiring backlinks.



2.) Forums

Forums are where you can offer value to a group of people and answer any questions they may have. You can post a link to your blog in your signature in the forum in order to link back to your website. 



3.) Article Marketing 

Article Marketing involves writing articles on product reviews, about leaders in your niche, or any affiliate product you may be trying to sell. People love to have product reviews available for reading so they can learn more about the product before they buy it. Just make sure you have actually used the product before you write about it.


4.) Guest Blogging 

Guest blogging involves writing a blog or article for another blog and getting a link back to your website in exchange. This is a strong way to get backlinks and traffic to your website and drastically increase your blog's amount of visitors.

You can search Google for blogs that provide guest blogging opportunities. Simply search under the terms " niche + write for us". Guest blogging is the best way to get traffic and backlinks to your website.


5.) SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO controls your blog or articles ability to rank in the search engines.

Keyword Research is a very important part of SEO. The keywords you choose to rank your post for should be researched to insure relevancy and ranking. You should perform keyword research before even writing your post, and find out which keywords are ranked the most.

You can use the Google Keyword Tool for keyword research and to see how many searches each keyword gets per month.