Posts Tagged ‘target keywords’

How To Pick Your URLs For The Challenge

January 22nd, 2010  |  by Court  |  Published in Explanations, For Beginners  |  7 Comments

It seems like the most common question I’m getting so far with the new challenge is, “How do I pick the URLs to use for the challenge?” This is a good question because the people that have the best results are going to be the ones that pick the best URLs.

The most important aspect of choosing a good URL to use is making sure that it’s a URL that targets a keyword phrase that’s searched for in Google. The title of this post (How To Pick Your URLs For The Challenge) would ironically be worthless for this challenge. Think about it – no one will search for ‘how to pick your urls for the challenge’ in a million years so there’s no point in getting ranked for the phrase in Google.

Using a URL that targeted the keyword ‘bowling ball bags’ would be a lot smarter. Why? Because people actually search for ‘bowling ball bags’ in Google – 5400 times per month. This certainly isn’t the best keyword in the history of the universe but it’s much better than the alternative in this example.

What To Do To Get Started

The first step in getting started is to pick one URL from your portfolio that targets a keyword. This might be your home page or this might be a post page. Some of your have e-commerce sites so for you this might be a page that sells products. Any of these will do as long as they target a keyword.

Some of you may be new to making money online and for you, you may not have many URLs to work with. For you, you may need to do some keyword research, article writing, and publishing to even get started. This challenge will be extremely effective for you since it illustrates some of the important aspects of creating online profits.

Bloggers

Since many people who read TKA are bloggers, I want to address blogging specifically. This experiment/challenge can be extremely effective for bloggers but could also be a colossal waste of time. Bloggers traditionally have many, many URLs that don’t target specific keyword phrases. The post you’re currently reading is one such example. As a blogger you need to be especially careful to build your links to URLs that were created to target specific keywords. If you’re unfamiliar with this process I would highly recommend reading this post: How To Target A Keyword With A Post Page. The first step for you may be creating a keyword targeted post that you can then get some links for.

Keyword Research For The Challenge

Since many of you are quite new, I want to give some advice that pertains to keyword research. The TKA members know exactly how to pick the proper keywords – let me help you out a little in that arena.

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is your best friend when it comes to keyword research. You want to find keywords with decent search volume when the tool is set to exact match. <——- This is highly important. I would recommend finding keywords that have search volumes over about 3,000 and CPCs over $1. Once you have decent keywords you can target them with post pages.

You can also search for your keywords in Google, check the PageRank of the pages that rank up top if you want to get an idea of how strong your competition is.

Those who achieve the best results with this experiment will be those who choose the best keywords.

For Those Who Have Plenty Of Keyword Targeting URLs

Those of you who already have lots of keyword-rich content are ahead of the curve. I would make a list of all of the URLs you have that currently get little traffic. I would then choose keywords based on search volume and CPCs. Higher numbers in those two areas will provide you with more potential to make profits.

Another aspect that you can consider in this process is finding keywords that you already rank somewhere for. If you have a keyword that you rank on page 2 or page 3 for, this experiment will help you considerably.

The key here is to choose one URL each day, improve it, and then move on the next day to a new URL.

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.