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With the appropriate knowledge and tools, the vastness of the Internet can be transformed from an arid wasteland into a fertile oasis. At first, the sheer size and abundance of the Internet may seem more like jungle, teeming with life and opportunities. Demand is high, running costs are low, and access to people seems limitless.
The problem is, you’re hardly the first to come to this realization. The first critical realization for anyone wishing to establish a platform online is the following; the jungle might as well be a desert unless you specialize. In this article I will detail how to begin to build a solid platform that will allow your venture to grow exponentially, gather interested, targeted traffic and allow you to broaden your oasis until the desert becomes a pasture.
For the remainder of this article, the arid wasteland will be known as competition (or saturation — take your pick), and the oasis will be summarized by the term niche.
If I build it, will they come?
Perhaps — given enough time. But don’t count on it. Popular search engines such as Google drive the majority of most website traffic. Traffic which originates from a search engine query is known as organic traffic, and is absolutely critical in determining the fate of most online ventures.
There are many factors which influence how well a given website ranks in the search engines for any particular query. One of these is time. Thus, old domains have some inherent benefits in terms of search engine ranking.
But in terms of importance, the first issue we need to deal with is telling major search engines the basics about who we are, and what we do.
Keyword Research
Keyword Research should be considered the foundation of any online venture, and should be completed before anything tangible is even considered. But what are they, and why are they so important?
Keywords are how search engines decide what your website is about. Google uses a veritable horde of bots (or crawlers), which are small autonomous scripts that browse the Internet and categorize blogs based on content. One of the most important data collected are links, which give Google an educated guess about what that particular website is about, and how relevant it is to a particular search query. For instance, by including the following link: internet landing page marketing, I am telling Google that the blog in question is related to that keyword phrase. If the site in question has content that matches the anchored text in the link (the keyword phrase), then Google will take note and list the website on its index in for that particular search.
Important: Due to the fact that we’re just starting up, our back-links will be few and far between and Google may have a hard time finding us at all! Thankfully, the anchored text in a back-link (the keywords!) also tells Google what OUR blog is about, not only about the destination. The process by which we ensure that our website contains search terms relevant to our content, and the content of our link destination is a part of what is (I’m sure you’ve heard of it) known as SEO (Search engine optimization). But more on that later.
Keyword Competition And Website Authority
It’s time to plan our company. In this case I’m going to start a business that sells Top Hats. So, if we employ what we’ve learned so far, you would probably advocate adding the following keyword to our links and content. But that’s because you’ve already forgotten the first lesson in this article, which is “specialize”.
You may think that selling top hats is already a fairly specific niche. But a quick Google search (picture to the right) informed me that for that roughly 14 million other pages are competing for that particular search term phrase. No, that isn’t good.
Creating our oasis
Attracting any attention at this point may seem difficult at best — but don’t despair. Efficient Keyword research separates the men from the boys (pardon, if you’re female), and we’re going to go through it step by step.
The first thing we need Is a free search term tool (there are some amazing and highly prolific commercial tools — but for now, let’s stick with a free one), one such tool is Google’s very own search term finder.
The first thing we want to do is enter our broad search term into the keyword box on the left so we can get some ideas. Bear in mind that researching search terms can become complex, and that this is an introductory look at the process which excludes a lot of valuable data, But that will come with time.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
In theory you can build a blog revolving around a dozen keywords. When starting, I recommend researching and building around a handful only (if successful, you can branch out gradually and target more competitive search terms). While we’ve discussed the role that links and anchored text have, they are not the only important tools with regarding clever SEO.
To the right I’ve posted a couple of articles that will guide you through the specifics. One part of SEO that I did want to mention was that of meta tag analysis, since it contains elements of what we have already discussed.
Meta Tag Analysis
Meta tags are snippets of code that are invisible to the browsing end-user and are specifically planted for search engine crawlers. They house important information such as keywords, content description and authors, I mention this because most layman webmasters ignore the power of meta tags, simply because they aren’t aware they exist.
Bear in mind that these tags, as with your search terms, need to be relevant to the content of your landing page (or page).
Creation and Installation
In order to correctly install the tags you will need writable access to your website’s template. The following code needs to be inserted in the tags at the beginning of the document. Here is a bare-bones example of an HTML document layout and where you should insert your code.
“open bracket”head>
“open bracket”title>Your title
“open bracket”/title>
“open bracket”meta name=”description” content=”Describe your landing page here”>
“open bracket”meta name=”search terms” content=”search term1,search term2,search term3″>
“open bracket”/head>
“open bracket”body>
Rest of Page Goes Here
“open bracket”/body>
“open bracket”/html>
Now that you have these tools I hope you are able to turn your landing page into a passive income generator and possibly create passive income streams to create wealth.
Tags: passive income generator, promote, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, website seo
Posted in SEO · July 20th, 2010 · Comments (0)
Yes, it is yet another internet term! You are undoubtedly familiar with what a link is in cyberspace, but do you know what Backlinks are, and how they can help you grow your internet business?
If you look at just about any site out there, you will see a page set aside for links. For example Pete the plumber has a website. He has pages to tell his customers all about his products and services, and how to contact him. And he has a page of links to other relevant businesses, perhaps one to Gary the local gasfitter, and one to his plumbing association. From Garys perspective, this is a backlink, a link pointing back to his gasfitting site.
On the face of it, Pete is providing a service to the people browsing his site. They can simply click on these links to assist them in learning more about plumbing, or to find a contact address they need. Are you aware however that there is another benefit in having these relevant links?
It is all about sites improving their search rankings. That is the eminence if you like of their site on a search engine result page, when someone types in a relevant keyword. Remember Gary the gasfitter mentioned above? Well suppose a person who is looking for a gasfitter types in the keyword gasfitter into a search engine, along with their suburb. I am sure it is important to Gary whether his site is listed first or twenty first in the results.
There are quite a few factors at play here, too many to detail in this article, but one of those factors is the quality of his backlinks.
The link that he got Pete the plumber to place on his site is viewed by the search engines as a vote of confidence if you like. It indicates that other relevant businesses, (Like a plumber and a gasfitter in the same area), are choosing to list Gary on their sites. Therefore the more relevant backlinks a site has, the higher its ranking will be urged in any given search result.
Notice the term relevant here. If Gary asked his dear aunt with a flower shop on the other side of the world to link to him, that is sweet, but it would alas fail the relevance test, and therefore would count for almost nil.
Accumulating backlinks can be a tedious and lengthy process. You need to contact other relevant businesses and convince them to link back to you. Most of the time they will either want you to do likewise or they will ask for a payment for doing this. There is however a better way, the article driven way. To continue, an article about gasfitting published on the internet with its own URL, (internet address), with a link back to Garys site, will count as a relevant backlink in the world of search engine algorithms. Ten articles like this published on one hundred sites each, will count for one thousand relevant backlinks.
Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/sem-articles/making-backlinks-work-for-your-website-140702.html#ixzz0ritrjAuE
Now that you know a little bit about backlinks, you should be able to use them as a passive income generator to get traffic to your multiple passive income streams and create wealth online fast!
Tags: back links, backlinks, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, website seo
Posted in SEO · June 26th, 2010 · Comments (0)