Posts Tagged ‘onsite SEO’

Day 3 – How To Optimize Your Body Text

April 30th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in SEO  |  11 Comments

This post is part of my 30 Days To Better SEO series.

Before we can talk about how to optimize the body text of the page you’re working on, we should probably define what body text is. To put it simply, body text is the text that you can see on a web page. Everything you can see on this post would be considered to be body text.

The technical explanation of what body text is would be everything that appears between the opening body tag, <body>, and the closing body tag, </body>, in the code for the page.

Bloggers don’t really need to worry about the technical explanation – you can think of body text as a combination of your post title and the main body of your post, or as the text that appears on your blog’s homepage.

Optimizing Body Text

Step one of optimizing your body text is making sure that the keyword appears as text on the web page. If it isn’t there, you’ll have a weaker relevancy score and that means you’re going to need extra links to outrank the competition. We don’t want that because it’s obviously easier to add the keyword in as text than it is to get extra links.

If you’re working with a post page (or sub-page on a static site), you should use the keyword as the title of the post (or as a heading at the top of a static sub-page).

If you’re working with your home page, you should just make sure that it appears somewhere on the page. You can definitely still use your keyword as a title or heading on the page, but I understand that in some cases this won’t work for functional reasons.

Lately I’ve noticed that Google’s filter for over-optimization is a lot stronger than it used to be. I remember when you could use your keyword in the HTML title, H1 tag, Alt tags, bolded in the text, 10 times on the page, and in tags/labels. That has changed and over-optimization is a lot more prevalent than it used to be.

Basically what Google is telling us with this filter is that there’s no need to use the keyword 57 times on the page and in every type of secret tag known to man. If you use the keyword in the title of the post (or heading) and once or twice in the body of the post (or page), you’re good to go. I usually also use the keyword as a tag/label – that makes sense from a functionality standpoint and Google understands this.

Step two of optimizing your body text is making sure that you cover topics that are related to your keyword. This will increase your relevancy score with Google. That means if your keyword is ‘cars’, you should talk about Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, GM, Saturn, Mercury, Lexus, BMW, and a bunch of other types of cars. Wikipedia does a great job of this, relative to other sites, and this increases their relevancy scores with Google and also makes their pages easier to link to.

Most people leave out this step entirely and honestly it’s a big reason why people don’t do as well as they would like to. If people would just take a little extra time to add more information they would gather more natural links and would have better relevancy scores for their content.

Step three is linking to pages that are related to your keyword. If Google knows that you’re passing your visitors on to additional, related information, it will really help out. Why? Because it’s Google’s job to answers people’s questions and to solve their problems. I personally would do everything I could to make sure that the places you’re linking to are also on your site, as opposed to their being on someone else’s. That makes your overall site look more relevant to your keyword.

The Big Picture

Don’t fall into the trap of over-complicating this. If you’ve followed these three steps, you’re good to go.

How To Get Started Making Money Online When You’re A Total Beginner

January 20th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in For Beginners  |  20 Comments

When I first started to get interested in making money online, I honestly didn’t have a freaking clue where to begin. I figured that somehow I had to create a site, so I started fumbling through that. That took a couple months and when I had a terrible-looking, worthless site, I didn’t know how to get anyone to go to it. Even if I had been able to get some traffic to it (that didn’t happen), I wouldn’t have had a clue how to make money with it. Lol, what a mess that was.

That was four years ago. As it turns out, it isn’t that hard to create a website, it isn’t that hard to get traffic, and it isn’t that hard to make money from that traffic.

Everyone and their dog is going to tell you how to make money online and the problem is that A LOT of people are going to tell you what they think, even though they don’t make jack online. If you don’t believe that, go and try out everyone’s garbage for a couple years. When you realize that you have wasted a few thousand hours of work you’ll be back to where you can really get started, which is right here.

There’s only one reason I’m going to write this article – learning this business for me sucked. I had so many set backs it’s not even funny. I’ve had sites banned from their traffic sources, I’ve had tons of sites that didn’t work, and I’ve wasted literally thousands of hours of work.

Nowadays I have my sites cranking on auto-pilot and none of this is as difficult as it once seemed. Even though I’ve been advised to not give away everything I’m using, I feel like helping a few people to make it. I emphasize ‘a few people’. In all honesty most people are too lazy to do anything on their own and if you don’t have any personal determination, you might as well close this article now because it won’t do a dang thing for you.

Building a Solid Foundation

I can’t really think of a way to say this without being condescending so I’m just going to come out with it. You have a SHIZ-LOAD to learn. If you will be patient, I can help you out.

To make money with the internet, you have to be able to accomplish three simple tasks:

  1. Create a property on the web. In other words you will have to create either a web page or a web site. Yes, there are other ways to make money online. They are also a lot harder and more difficult than creating a web site. Trust me, anyone can create a website and all you have to do is learn a few simple steps.
  2. Get traffic to your site or page. There’s no shortage of information on this topic but most of it is worthless to tell you the honest truth. There are a lot of methods out there that will show you how to get tons of traffic – the kind of traffic that is absolutely worthless. I’ll teach you to get the right kind of traffic.
  3. Get your traffic to do something that makes you money. This means you will have to get your traffic to either buy something or do something else that will get you paid.

All of this may seem hard now, but I can tell you that it really isn’t that tough. It’s not exactly the easiest thing on the planet but you can figure it out. Luckily for you, I have created a boat load of free videos that can help you to get a web site up and running and I have a ton of free, published advice that can help you to start making some money. I will point you there once we’ve laid a foundation.

Creating a Property on The Web

Since I couldn’t possibly cover every single aspect of this concept within a single article, I’m going to have to do it in sections. Here are the basics that we need to cover. Within the next few weeks I’ll add additional articles, and will turn these bullets into links:

  • Choosing a topic for a website. You will have to learn to find topics that will pay well. I have a basic process for this and you can read more about that by following the link.
  • Choosing the right domain name. If you choose the right name, you’ll have an easier time getting ranked in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
  • Setting up the website. This may seem like it’s outside the realm of possibility for you, but trust me, it isn’t. I have a bunch of videos that will show you how to do this so be patient and I’ll get you taken care of. I have also set up an example site that you can emulate.
  • Creating content for the website. Most of the sites I set up are basic, informational websites. That means I have to put up some information that covers certain topics. If I choose to create a site about ‘computer speakers’, I will have to write some basic articles about speakers. Any topic can be covered with some basic articles and I will show you how to do this.

If this seems like it will be hard, it’s only because you haven’t done it before. Once you’ve done it a few times it won’t seem nearly as difficult.

Getting Traffic to Your Web Site or Web Page

This is the part that most people just don’t understand. If you start looking up ways to get people to your site, you’re going to find literally thousands of worthless articles. The problem with most of them is that the kinds of traffic you’ll get will be terrible. Sure, they might show you how to get a few thousand visitors at a time, but none of them will be the kind you want.

I read blog posts and articles all the time about how people got 10,000 visitors from Digg, or 3,000 visitors from StumbleUpon. That’s great and all, but you’ll notice that they never talk about how much money they made from that.

Would you rather get 10,000 visitors from a site like Digg and make $0, or get 10 of the right visitors so that you can make $1? Frankly, if you’re like most people you’d rather get the 10,000 visitors that are worthless. People chase that traffic around like crazy and honestly, it’s a very unhealthy addiction.

Don’t fall into this trap. If you will learn how to get the right kind of traffic, you will always be able to make money online.

How I Get The Right Kind of Traffic

Every day, millions of people search for information on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Google is by far the biggest search engine, but all three of those sites are used quite a bit. Let’s assume that a person wants to look for information about computer speakers. They are going to go to Google, Yahoo, or MSN and they are going to type in computer speakers. They will then see something like this:

Google, Yahoo, and MSN are going to show them sites that cover the topic they’re looking for. Let’s imagine that your site shows up on the first page of Google when people are searching for your topic. That would mean that people would be clicking into your site each day and they would be searching for information about your topic.

Since the people that find your site will be looking for information about a certain topic, they will be very easy to make money with. A person that’s looking for computer speakers will probably eventually buy some so someone is going to make a profit. You don’t have to necessarily be the person that sells the speakers to make money. There are tons of people that will pay you simply to send your existing traffic to them and that’s very easy to do. I will explain this in detail.

You may say to yourself that getting traffic from Google in this manner must be pretty difficult. The honest truth is that it actually isn’t that tough and it doesn’t cost money. You simply have to learn to execute a plan and follow through on it. I can show you the basics of making this happen, but you will have to do the work. I’ll present the basics and will link to additional articles from the bullets as soon as I’m able to fill them in:

  • Getting Your Website Into Google – Obviously you’ll never get Google traffic unless you get into Google.
  • Search Engine Optimization – This is often called SEO and refers to the art of creating a website in a way that Google, Yahoo, and MSN will like. This has two parts including onsite SEO and offsite SEO. I’ll create basic articles that cover these topics and will link to them from here.
  • Link Building – Google, Yahoo, and MSN all rank pages based on a system of counting links. If you can get websites to link to yours, Google, Yahoo, and MSN will love it. I have a system for this and will show you how to execute it with a follow-up article that I’ll link to from here. Link building and SEO are very closely related in fact link building is the most crucial aspect of effective SEO.

If you can get traffic this way, you can make money and you can make a lot of it. I don’t have a job anymore and will never again have to, simply because I understand how to execute this strategy.

Making Money From Your Traffic

So let’s assume that you have some traffic from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN. That means each day you’re going to have people finding your site. That traffic is worth something.

The easiest way to make money from search traffic is to use allow advertisers to buy that traffic from you. That probably sounds difficult if you’re a beginner but it couldn’t be easier. Google has a program that you can use to show ads from advertisers, and it’s 100% free to use.

Here’s a screen shot of a page about computer speakers that’s using this program – I have outlined the Google ads in red:

Google is giving this site access to the Google advertisers who are selling computer speakers and paying the owner whenever the ads are clicked. Usually a single click on a Google ad is worth anywhere from $0.25 to a couple of bucks.

If you can get 100 people per day on a site, and get 10% of them to click on an ad that’s worth $1 per click, you’ll make $10 per day. Increase traffic to 1000 people per day and you can expect to make $100 each day. Increase to 10,000 visitors per day and you can expect to make $1,000 each day.

The beauty of this program is that it’s absolutely free to use. Google pays you for the clicks via check or direct deposit and you never have to deal with any of the advertisers.

There are actually hundreds of different ways to make money with your traffic, but this one is honestly one of the best. It’s by far the easiest and it pays very nicely, as long as you can get the traffic. If you can’t get the traffic you won’ t be able to execute anything else so you might as well learn how to get the traffic.

Making money this way is honestly one of the funnest things on the planet. You can make money while you’re asleep. You can make money while you’re on vacation. That said, it does take work. If you’re a lazy person I wouldn’t waste your time. If you’re committed, dedicated, and hard working, there’s a great chance that you can make this work.

You’re definitely not done learning. Be patient and work hard. You’ll get there!

As I said earlier, I will be adding to this article over the next week or so. Please be patient. Rome wasn’t built in a day. :)

How To Target A Keyword With A Post Page

January 19th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in SEO  |  42 Comments

The more I dig in mentally to the world of making money with the internet, the more I realize that there are a lot of different ways to go about it. When I first started making money online, I would create simple content sites that got 99% of their traffic on the homepage. For some reason I was living under the misconception that home pages could rank better than other pages. I now know that this isn’t true in fact I have quite a few post pages that bring more search traffic than their corresponding home pages.

Almost all of my sites make more at the post level than they do on the home pages and this is because I understand how to write posts that target keywords. This is a basic process that a lot of you probably already understand, but I wanted to cover it so that everyone would know that they aren’t missing anything.

Here’s a simple step-by-step of how to do this:

  1. Make sure that the keyword is used in the title of your post.
  2. Make sure that the keyword appears in the HTML title of the post page. This should happen automatically if you’re using WordPress or Blogger.
  3. Make sure that the keyword appears a few times within the text of the post itself. This should be fairly easy to do if you write posts that are large. I would recommend going with a post that’s at least 300 words and I prefer to make them a lot larger. Most of my post pages that rank are at least 500 words and many of them are over 1,000. I like to make sure that these pages are meaty and provide a lot of useful information.
  4. Use the keyword as a tag or label on the post. This helps you to get the keyword on the post page one more time and also creates an extra page within your site. The tag page not only covers the topic but links to the post that you’re targeting the keyword with.

A lot of you are probably wondering how many times you can use a keyword within a post and get away with it. There’s no simple answer to this because it depends on how long your post is. If you write a 2,000 word post it would be quite natural to use your keyword like 10 times. If you’re only writing posts that are 300 words, you could probably only use it twice.

The bottom line is that you don’t need to use your keyword 500 times to get ranked and based on what I’ve seen I can tell you that most people seem to overuse their keyword thinking that it’s the only way that they can get ranked. I honestly haven’t found this to be beneficial as rankings are influenced a lot more by the links pointing at a page than they are by the text on the page.

What most people are missing in this game is that in order to get a post page to rank, it has to be linked to. Most people understand this concept if they’re working on their home page and simply don’t realize that with a post page, the same concept applies.

Based on what I’ve seen, Google doesn’t really discriminate because of the location (the URL) of a page, in fact in many cases I have seen my posts outrank home pages when both pages are going after the same keyword. This has to do with the fact that the posts have better links or a higher quantity of links. This generally happens because the post does a better job of solving the searchers problem which means the post gets linked to more often and by better sites.

A huge advantage to going after keywords this way is that you can add to the traffic and income of any site by creating a keyword targeted post. As long as you haven’t used every single keyword in your niche you still have upside.

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