The Basics Of Link Building

For many webmasters, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is at the top of the list of marketing duties. SEO involves different tasks to get your website to rank as high as it can in the search engines. This article will cover some of the basics of link building help your site get seen by more people when they conduct searches.

Getting links to point back to your site is one of the main ways people implement SEO. The reason this works is because when the search engines crawl websites, they check to see what other sites are being linked to. If you get a link on a site that is relevant to yours (in the eyes of the search engine) your site will look better. Now, if you can get a lot of these links, your site will start to climb higher and higher in the search engine results.

Why does any of this matter? After all, there are other ways to get traffic besides search engines, right? That’s true, but there are a lot of people that will only find you through the search engines. Furthermore, the closer to the top of the results pages you are, the more likely they are to see the link to your site and visit it.

Keep in mind that while you can do things to rank higher, the search engines are not their to serve your desire to get traffic; at least not entirely. What they are there for is to give relevant results to their users. That’s why the sites sending links back to your site need to be relevant. In fact, the more a particular search engine likes the site linking to you, the more benefit you’ll receive.

This all sounds great. Just get a bunch of links to your site and do a few other SEO things and you’ll be at #1 in no time, right? Not necessarily. You also have to make sure you have high quality content on your site. After all, the people visiting your site need to like what they see, otherwise you have wasted a lot of time and effort. To put it simply: it’s alright to do SEO, but don’t forget that you are creating your site for people.

You can get links back to your site by swapping links with other webmasters. However, you need to give this some thought to make sure the links you’re getting will be looked on favorably by the search engines. Another way is to write articles and submit them to article directories. The articles will have a link back to your site. Leaving comments on blogs (again with your link) is the method of link building preferred by a lot of people.

Whatever ways of link building you choose, the key is to get a large amount of links and to make sure the sites linking back to you are relevant. This can take some time, but it’s a good investment if you know what you’re doing. The back linking methods we just covered are a good start, but don’t stop there. The more you know about various SEO techniques, the more you can use them to your advantage.

Keyword Assistant – Grab Your Targeted Traffic

When people search online for keyword assistant they will often get two main results, one is for an IPhoto plugin, but for the purposes of this article we are going to concentrate on finding quality keywords for your online business web sites.

Creating a keyword list for your online business should be your number 1 job. After all, a good keyword list is as close to being able to legally print money as you can get.

The keywords you choose will go a long way to determine not only the amount of traffic you get but also the quality of the traffic you get.

A lot of people online will talk about ‘targeted’ traffic, but what in the world does that mean? Well, when it comes to online traffic, quality is so much better than quantity.

You only want to get visitors to your website who are interested in your product or service. It just doesn’t do you any good if you get thousands of visitors to your website but don’t make any sales. After all, sales is ultimately what it is all about.

So, if you choose the keywords that will deliver the visitors to your website who are truly interested in your product or service, many more of them will actually take the action you want them to take, whether that is to buy something or to sign up to your email list.

This is a common mistake that people who are new to internet marketing make, they see a keyword that gets hundreds of thousands of searches a month and they jump on it. The problem is what they don’t take into consideration is the fact that those highly searched keywords also have a ton of competition.

For the most part, you are simply not going to be able to compete again that much competition. Instead, don’t even try. Find great keywords that get fewer searches but also have fewer competitors.

If you compile a large list of keywords that get 1,500 or more searches a month than you will have a great shot at ranking well for many of the keywords on your list. Ranking high for 10 keywords that each get 1,500 searches or more a month will actually deliver a lot of traffic for you.

The exact parameters you want for your keyword list may vary somewhat depending on what niche you are in and what you are using the keywords for (SEO,PPC, article marketing, etc.). Take some time to test and tweak your results until you find just the right combination of monthly searches and low competition.

Keyword research can often be a long and tedious process, but it is also a necessary one. Good keywords can do so much to improve your search engine rankings (which results in providing you with a ton of free traffic) as well as help you drive traffic with other methods.

Consider this article your keyword assistant

and use this information to hone your keyword list building skills.

Niche Keywords – Sub Niche Keywords Are Your Key

You hear a lot about niche marketing online. All that means is to find a little sub section in a market, one that has decent amount of interest but not much competition and fly under the radar. To do that, you will need to find niche keywords for that niche market.

There are many great markets you can make money in online. But you will save yourself a lot of time and effort if you don’t try to go toe to toe with the ‘big boys’.

For example, lets say you want to make money in the weight loss market, which is an extremely competitive market. Why make your life harder than it needs to be by trying to go straight on against millions of competitors? That’s just silly.

Instead, why not find a ‘little’ sub section of that market where there will be much less competition but still enough interest for you to make a very nice living (and remember, this is just one website. You can repeat this method as many times as you want and have dozens of niche websites all making you money).

So, instead of focusing on such a broad term as weight loss, why not find a niche that targets “middle aged women and weight loss”? Or how about “teenage boys weight loss”? See what I mean, you are still in the weight loss market but you are targeting a more precise sub section of the market instead of trying to throw a net over the whole ocean.

Doing this will make it so much easier to make money online. It will just make your life so much simpler and you can find a great list of highly targeted keywords that you can rank for a lot more easily than you would if you went with the broad weight loss terms.

To find highly targeted keywords for your niche all you have to do is to use the free Google Keyword Tool online. Start by entering a broad search term related to your niche, say weight loss for moms. The tool will give you a list of up to two hundred variations of that keyword.

Some of the variations will work, some won’t. But it will give you a great place to start. From there you can drill down even further until you have a nice big keyword list to work from.

You also want to make sure that the keywords you choose are highly relevant to your website. Don’t choose a bunch of keywords that have a high monthly search volume if they are not highly relevant to what your website is all about. The traffic that you get won’t be very targeted and your conversions will suffer.

Finding great niche keywords is one of the most important tasks you can master to have a successful online business. Good keywords may take some time to find but when you do they are like money in the bank. Use the free tools online or invest in some down loadable software, it’s up to you. Just make sure you know what you need to look for and the difference between a good keyword and a not so good keyword.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Success Shortcut

One of the most popular tools around, and it is totally free to use, for compiling a list of great keywords is the Google Adwords keyword tool. You can use this tool for any keyword research you may have, whether you use the keywords for your website or with your article marketing. You don’t need to be running an Adwords campaign to use the tool.

As a matter of fact, you don’t even need to sign up for Adwords, you can just go to the tool and use it whenever you want to. If you are new to internet marketing you should stay as far away from paid traffic as possible right now. Paid traffic can give you a high rate of return on your investment, but only if you know what you are doing.

Learning to do it right takes time and guess what happens while you are learning? You guessed it, you will be spending a lot of money. That is an expensive education.

With so many wonderful ways to get highly targeted traffic for free, why would you even consider paying for it until you are at the point in your career where you are actually making money?

You will still need great keywords for all of your free traffic generation. Whether you choose to use on site optimization also called search engine optimization or article marketing.

The definition of a ‘good’ keyword can be a little vague but a general idea would be any keyword that gets a lot of monthly searches and has relatively little competition.

What constitutes good monthly searches can vary from one niche to another, but a good rule of thumb is to find keywords that get over 1,500 searches a month but have less than 20,000 competitors. To find the best parameters for your needs and your niche, you may have to test a little bit.

Another aspect of a good keyword is that it is very tightly related to the subject of your website. For example, if you find a keyword for bird watching binoculars that meets all the above criteria, you may be tempted to use it. But if your website is about bird feeders it isn’t relevant to the content of your site and you should avoid using it.

The number of times you should place your keyword in your article is another thing you need to consider. Keyword density again, can be somewhat vague but a good thing to keep in mind is that when you read your article out loud it should sound natural. If you keep repeating the same word or phrase over and over again, it’s not natural and it’s likely that you are using the keyword too often.

Learning the right way to compile a keyword list can truly be the difference between success and failure in your online business. It can also be the difference between things being really difficult and things going more easily.

Using something free like the Google Adwords keyword tool can make your hunt for great, and very profitable, keywords quicker and easier and what could be better than that?

Relevant Keyword – Will Draw Targeted Visitors

When doing your keyword research it’s very important that you don’t overlook a very obvious, but frequently overlooked fact: you don’t just want traffic to your site, you want targeted traffic. You want to draw the people to your website who are most likely to buy the product or service you are selling. For that reason you cannot forget to consider the relevant keyword when evaluating your keyword list.

Make sure that the keywords you are targeting are relevant to what your website is promoting. If you find that you have kind of missed the boat you can either renew your keyword list or change some of the content on your website to make it match up more closely with your keyword list.

All the search engines consider relevance very highly. If you target keywords that are not closely related to your website, the search engines will find that you have very low relevance and won’t rank your site as high.

Do not get too caught up on one or two word keywords, in almost all cases they will be much too competitive and you will have a very hard time ranking for them. Instead, find a large list of keyword phrases. When you have a 3 or 4 word keyword phrase you may not get quite as many searches but you also won’t have nearly as much competition.

Longer keyword phrases can still deliver a lot of searches, probably not as many as the more popular one and two word phrases, but they will also be much less competitive.

When you first start your keyword research you can use many tools online, some of them are free, some of them are not. If you have a limited budget you should start with the free Google keyword tool. This one tool can give you all the information you need to compile an excellent keyword list.

Again, the basics of a good keyword list is to have keywords that get a lot of monthly searches (around 1,500) and few competitors (usually anything less than 20,000, though this can vary, you have to find your own parameters).

It may take you and little trial and error to find the highly relevant, well searched for keywords that also don’t have a lot of competition. This process can sometimes get a little tedious, but remember a good keyword list is like money in the bank. When you have a highly targeted keyword list you can get a lot of quality traffic to your website and that can relate directly into sales.

To recap, in order to build a top notch keyword list that will allow you to get a ton of very targeted traffic you will need to consider several variables. One of them is to find only the most relevant keyword possible. The keyword must relate directly to the subject of your website. If it does you can have a much higher conversion rate and you can also get a lot more organic traffic.