Money Hints

Finding the right search engine optimization (SEO) agency for your business website can often times be a very difficult task. And taking the time to learn how to do SEO on your own is simply not an option for many business owners. There seems to be an endless amount of SEO companies and individual experts offering services, and it can be almost impossible for the average person to know which one to choose. So how do you do it?

There are never any guarantees when it comes to SEO and the same goes for hiring someone to do it for you. But here are some tips to help you figure it out…

Before you begin, you should know what SEO is and the basic things a SEO agency can do for you. To summarize it quickly, search engine optimization involves using various techniques on your website to help put it in a better position to rank highly in search results, and building backlinks to your site to improve your search engine rankings. Basically this means that when someone searches for the keywords your site targets to find the product/service that your business provides; your website will be the one they find. That means more customers and money for you!

For most businesses, it’s simply not worth taking the time to learn SEO and then try to do it yourself. You are better off just hiring it out and using your precious time on other business tasks. There are a lot of experts out there that have spent years mastering the industry and the competition ensures that hiring a good search engine optimization agency is not necessarily going to cost you an insane amount of money. On the other hand, if you decide you are going to save your money and do it yourself, you are going to waste a lot of the time that you could have spent building your business in other ways. This is something that you can outsource at a reasonable cost and save yourself a lot of headaches.

A top level internet marketing specialist will be able to explain to you what SEO is and they should give you a good summary of what they will do to improve your rankings. They probably won’t tell you every little detail of their strategies because even if they did you wouldn’t understand most of it anyway. However, you can expect to be told the basic details of what they do and how they do it.

Never hire anybody who sends you an unsolicited (spam) email promoting their services. Unfortunately, this is a tactic that is quite common among the unethical and shady individuals. I am not referring to a true professional who sees your business website and then calls you or writes you with a real personalized plan for your site. I am talking about the kind of spammer who is most likely based overseas and sends the exact same message to hundreds or even thousands of website owners all the time.

You should easily be able to tell the difference because the spammer will not have made any legitimate attempt to contact you personally or given you any real details. You will probably even notice something just doesn’t seem right about their email. Stay away from them. On the other hand, somebody who is offering a valuable service will have taken the time to understand details about your business. They will come to you with ideas already prepared on how they might be able to help your business, including an outline for the work that they will perform.

Typically, an SEO professional will offer a plan for boosting your website’s search engine rankings in a natural consistent manner over an extended period of time. They will probably also offer a maintenance plan where they will work as-needed to keep your high rankings after the initial work has been done to get them to the top. It is important to maintain your rankings once they are there or they will fall back.

You can expect this to be a long term goal. Don’t be fooled by anyone offering quick results or guaranteed top rankings. This is not something that anybody can honestly do! There are far too many variables when it comes to SEO and that makes promises of guaranteed results impossible. It also takes time to see real ranking improvements on a consistent basis so you should be very skeptical of anyone promising fast results.

Ok, I’m back again with another of my money hints when it comes to the wide, wide world of the web. This time I want to look at using mini sites to help you make money online using their revenue share for Adsense amongst other things. In particular, I’m looking at Infobarrel and one of the quirks of that setup that is annoying on the one hand and downright dangerous on the other.

Its probably not a regular occurrence, at least I hope not, but on occasion, certain articles published in good faith by writers at Infobarrel have had their article title altered by an editor before it was accepted. Now this is fine of there is an error in the title, or if it is clearly not relevant to the topic of the article. But if the author chose the title for a very good reason, such as it being the exact keyword that the article is targeting, then by altering it, you are detracting from the article’s ability to rank in Google’s search engine for that keyword which was carefully selected by the author.

By altering the article’s title this instance, the editor has effectively robbed the article of a potentially good source of  targeted traffic from the main search engine and therefore effectively robbed both me and Infobarrel of a potentially lucrative source of income from Adsense from that article.

An example of one of my own personal articles that has suffered from this foolishness is now entitled “History of the long tail keyword” where its original title and highly lucrative keyword was simply “long tail keyword.” For obvious reasons, I’m not revealing what that keyword is exactly, because it has a very high CPC and is in my sights to take in the SERPs. This is a keyword that a lot of time was spent researching for viability as a source of revenue and one that could relatively easily be taken advantage of. Not any longer, it seems. It wouldn’t be so bad, but the article only touches on the history of the long tail keyword as a precursor to the rest of the article, the bulk of which explains what this long tail keyword actually is and what its used for.

The worst part is that by altering the title, they also altered the part of the url that contains the main keyword. Sure, the keyword is still in there, but its lost a little of its SEO power by diluting it with the extra words that are both unnecessary and irrelevant.

So this is my timely warning to anyone who is using infobarrel as their mini site to create articles and make money from Adsense. Watch your titles and if you haven’t yet reached the point where you are past having to wait for each article to be approved, make them relevant as well as containing your keywords. Your keywords should come first, so here’s an example of what I mean. If your wrote an article about weight loss and it was about the benefits of a certain type of exercise, your natural inclination would be to make the title something like:

The Benefits of Exercise for Weight Loss

whereas a much better, more SEO oriented title would read:

Weight Loss the Benefits of Exercise

Notice, I didn’t put any punctuation in the second, more relevant title. Its another quirk I just discovered about Infobarrel article titles in that if you place punctuation in there, it ends up on the url. I just wrote one using:

Keyword: The Benefits of Subject

(replace “Keyword” with the keyword phrase and “Subject” with the article’s subject) and got a shock when I saw the url:

www.infobarrel.com/keyword:_the_benefits_of_subject/

Luckily, I don’t think Google take much notice of the colon in a url, but it looks ugly. Just a few pointers there.

Of course, once you gain full “writer” status with 10 articles, you can write the titles any way you want and they won’t be changed by the editors. That’s what you need to aim for anyway, as when all is said and done, Infobarrel is a good authority domain for strong links to your main sites.

How To Make Money Online SEO Hints

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a big buzzword that has been echoing around the make money online fraternity for several years now. But it seems that only recently has several of SEO’s biggest kept secrets been blown wide open to anyone who wants to hear about them. This is a change of scenery from my last post here at How To Make Money Online SEO Hints where I looked at How to Make Money Flipping Websites and building up new websites and then selling them for big profits was the order of the day.

However, SEO is also a part of that business, as the better optimized a website is, the better it will rank in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, the more traffic it will attract and therefore the more money it will make. Which will make it sell for more money, of course.

By SEO, I mean the process of obtaining high calibre back links to your site and not really much else. Sure, there are books that will teach you all about so-called on-site SEO, but in the real world, 90% of SEO is about accruing strong, authority one-way links to your site. I’ve probably already explained that part in earlier posts in this How to Make Money Online blog, so I won’t go back over them again here. Suffice it to say, links are SEO and SEO is all about links.

But if you weren’t in the market to sell your website after careful search engine optimization has boosted it to the lofty perches atop page one in Google’s index for some heavily searched terms, then of course it make sense to keep hold of them. Why? Because you can monetise them and probably, assuming you’d chosen a nice hot niche, have found out how to make money online hand over fist.

So what is a hot niche?

Well now, a hot niche is a piece of pure solid gold that many Internet marketers are searching high and low for. A hot niche is one where the following criteria exist:

• Its main keyword is heavily searched for in Google’s index
• There is scant competition from other SEO savvy Internet marketers
• There are plenty of advertisers who pay top dollar per click for their adsense campaigns
• People searching on the keyword terms are looking for something in the guise of information or merchandise

This all ads up to a veritable goldmine if you can find it.

Ok, these goldmines are like real ones in many ways. There are out there all right but they’re damn hard to find. So when you do stumble upon one of these goldmines, what do you do to make money from them?

Well, this is where a lot of luck comes into play. If you have the luck with you, then you’ll already have a website that occupies a very similar niche where some of the keywords overlap. Your site already has authority for similar keywords and you have access to other sites that can link to your main site using the new goldmine keywords as the anchor. Then you need to write a long, keyword rich article, publish on your main site and then link to it from as many different sources as possible using the main keywords in the anchor. If you can get links from other authority sites in similar niches, all the better.

If you do it right and there is not other serious competition, you can quickly dominate the niche and take the spoils in the form of PPC (adsense) or affiliate merchandise, or both, whichever the niche will support the best.

If the luck is not with you, then you’ll have to sit down and have a re-think about how to make money online from that niche. SEO is the key to the equation for sure, but if you don’t already have a suitable website with authority, you are going to have to start at the bottom and work your way up. Now in a highly competitive niche, such as Make Money Online, you would have a real fight on your hands and it would be one that you wouldn’t expect to win for a long time without a mountain of high grade link sources to draw upon.

But if the niche were not so competitive, then you could still expect to do well relatively quickly even with a new website. Of course, you’ll need to be able to avoid the dreaded Google sandbox, which is not always possible even with the best will in the world. If Google see a new site appearing high in its index and it suddenly starts attracting a lot of traffic, chances are that site is destined for the box. Its merely Google’s way of protecting their index from the scourge of spammers, which is perfectly understandable. As long as your site is completely legitimate, has plenty of relevant original content and complies with Google’s quality guidelines, you’ll be out of the box again pretty soon and back in a hot spot in the index.

A lot of marketers have a keen interest in trying to game that system in some way or another, but to be honest, there is no need and often no point. If you get caught, your site risks getting de-indexed for a long time which will render your attempts to dominate any niche stone cold dead.

The sticking point for most people is that part where they need the links to rank high in the SERPs and fulfill the SEO that is necessary to dominate a niche. Many resort to buying links, or getting tangled up paying for the services of a link farm. These actions are in contravention of Google’s guidelines and will get you penalised if caught. And they are very good at catching people who disregard their guidelines.

Better to do it naturally. Let your site grow naturally over time and let people link to you because you have something worth linking to. Or you can go a little more quickly and procure links from authority sites by using guile. I don’t mean cheat, exactly, but there’s no reason you can’t contact the owner of a high ranking website and draw their attention to a relevant article you just published on your site and ask them if they would be kind enough to link to it. In all honesty, ot won’t work in most cases, but in some it will as long as the site you are approaching is in the same niche as yours and they don’t view you as competition. Y

ou could even offer to write an article for publishing on their site free of charge, and put your own anchored link in there. There are several authority blogs around that also accept articles from third parties. You may have to write one and submit it for free to begin with as a show of goodwill, but if you could get to write a relevant post with your anchored link in it once a month, you’ll be doing your site no end of good. And that is one form of SEO that is perfectly legit and win-win for all concerned. The blog owner gets free content, you get am authority link!

Ok, that’s enough on the subject of SEO for this post, which seems to have run on for longer than I had initially anticipated. Oh well, at least it means I have had the chance to add plenty of my own keywords to it as part of this site’s own on page SEO is concerned. While its only a small part of search engine optimization, every little helps in the advancement up the SERPs ladder as I help people to learn how to make money online!

Terry Didcott
How To Make Money Online SEO Hints