Help 2 SEO

Are you new to SEO or just want some SEO help then the Econsultancy SEO Guide is place to look.

The SEO Best Practice guide at over 200 pages is packed full of SEO tips and help. The guide takes you through a proven SEO process and for each step in the process gives you all the details you need. This is not generic stuff but real proven useful information that a lot of Search Engine Optimization or Internet marketing agencies are keeping secret from you.

Rather than spend $300-$500 on an website audit I would recommend joining Econsultancy where you will then get this best practice guide along with many other useful reports, guides and templates.

So how to make money online?  This can range from simple AdSense areas on a website to complex membership sites. The one thing for sure is if you are focused there are plenty of opportunities out there. This article will focus on one such method, affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a very generalised term that itself includes many methods to help you make money online. The idea is not to develop and sell your own products but to bring people to a website where you will market other peoples products and/or services.  If the visitor buys the product or service, you make a commission. Here are some specific affiliate marketing points which will help you with the “how” in “how to make money online”:

* Squeeze Pages – A simple squeeze page contains free content such as eBooks, articles or videos, to bring visitors from the search engines and set them up for making a purchase. Squeeze pages must answer a concern of the searcher, they are not generalized articles but very specific text that solves the concern.

* Email Newsletters – Email marketing is among one of the best ways to make money online. The idea is to capture email addresses through the offer of free items through either a squeeze page or a sales page of some sort. These emails are then gold dust, you can send sales pitches out among free tips and newsletters loaded with valuable information at regular intervals through pre-configured auto-responders.

* Cost Per Action (CPA) – A mechanism that wants to get the visitor to perform an action like filling out a form or ordering a free sample, rather than just buying a product. You can find CPA programs at Commission Junction among many others and can market through traditional affiliate marketing methods or banner advertising.

* Pay Per Click (PPC) – A mechanism where the affiliate pays for clicks to the squeeze or sales page. With careful analysis of the figures it is possible to use a percentage of your profits to drive more customers and thus make more profits. Be aware that if you don’t carefully monitor and study your cost of a click vs. your average commission vs. your conversion percentage you could end up spending more than you make.

There are hundreds of resources on the internet with methods on how to make money online including Niche Profit Classroom. But one thing for sure is that you will need to work hard to stay one step in front of other affiliates.

Don’t complain if you have no website visitors if you don’t have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

Everyone website owner or marketeer is looking for the perfect search engine optimization strategy that has an outcome of a top search engine ranking i.e. your site on page one. This can be difficult when you think all your competitors are all trying to do the same.

Any search engine optimization strategy must encompass both on site and off site optimization and I don’t think it is worth investing in off-site strategies until you have a sound website that has passed through on-site optimization.

On-site Optimization

This should be the first step in an SEO strategy and for some with low competitive search terms may well be all you need.  Don’t confuse this with Google Page Rank, Google has some 200 factors it considers of which a considerable amount are related to the website and individual pages. This phase also covers the initial writing of the pages so that when a customer lands [landing page] the page is relevant to the term they used and the call to action gets them to convert. It is NO good getting visitors to your site on a false pretense as you won’t get any money out of them.

On page optimization includes page design, page content, keyword selection and then optimization, alt tags on your images, deep navigation, seo friendly links, title tags, page speed and SEO friendly code.

FREE SEO Analysis of your website :

Off-site Optimization

Off-site optimization is a balance between a number of techniques listed below:

1. Article Marketing
   Article marketing is another search engine optimization strategy that has been around for a long time and is remains highly successful. You will write articles with a single keyword focus and this article will link back to your website using anchor text relevant to the keyword. These articles are then uploaded to article directories. This can be very time consuming and a number of article networks with automated tools have appeared like SEOLinkVine (click for more info).

   This gives you two advantages; (1) these articles provide high quality single way links to your site that the search engines index, and (2) you will get visitors directly from the article sites. Article marketing is not a one time process, you must continuously post new articles over time.

2. Trusted Site Inbound Links
   Article marketing generates inbound links, but if you want valuable inbound links, you need to find trusted sites. Trusted sites are those that Google holds in high regard or thinks are an authority on a topic. In general any domain that ends in .GOV or .EDU is regarded as a trusted site. Additionally, a few high level directories like DMOZ or Yahoo! are trusted sites, along with major forums or information resources. Google is known to hate paid links and so if you need to pay for a link you must check the site is trusted by the search engines or it could count against you.
3. Link Baiting
   If you take the time to create high quality content that people like this will naturally attract attention and over time you will find people link to the article from blogs or social bookmarking sites.  The seach engines also like this as it starts to make them think you are an authority on a subject or niche area.
4. Social Media Marketing
   Social media is not new anymore and is used by a large percentage of the population, though many marketers still don’t know how to take advantage. The goal is to use sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to set yourself and your business up as an authority as well as a recognizable brand. You need to provide constant uptodate value that your followers/readers can participate in, the participate bit is key in that this is not about you telling them but about you listening and discussing with them.
5. Viral Marketing
   As a search engine optimization strategy, viral marketing is hard to measure, but can be one of the most successful ways of getting new visitors to your website. Examples of viral marketing include sending out free reports, video productions, and giving away free ebooks and software.

I hope you take away from this article that a Search Engine Optimization Strategy is a activity that is a blanace of techniques, both on-site and off-site. You don’t have to do it all at once, but do need to plan of what you will do and when you will do it, whilst keeping a measurmeent of which parts were successful and at what cost – ie. the Return on Investment (ROI).

If you are not using the strategies above, you’re missing an opportunity to get free targeted traffic for your site.  A search engine optimization strategy starts with a long term view and a detailed plan on how to get your site to the top of your niche. Use multiple strategies, test constantly, and adjust when necessary – only then will you find the traffic you’ve been dreaming of.

A few simple pointers to help you dominate your market.

• Understand your customers’ search behaviour. Walk in your website visitors shoes and understand the interaction they have with your site. Most customers are researching or looking for a problem to solve. If you understand what problem they’re trying to solve in terms of the keywords and phrases they will type, you can provide them with a  solution to it on your landing page.

• Decide how you will track conversions. How do you know how successful your campaign is? This can be when you make a sale or possibly a lead and you’ll have to assign some kind of monetary value to that lead so you can determine how much advertising to spend in order to get it.

• The email list. The email list is your best sales tool, it is cheaper to sell to an interested party. Autoresponders are simply a way to keep in touch with your customers through newsletters via email lists.

• Do the keyword research
  - Brainstorm and test with associates
  - “spy” on your competitions’ using tools
  - use other tools to expand the core list
  - don’t focus on generic terms but go for a niche

• Group keywords by the conversation type
  - what is the potential customer looking for?
  - If you’re an estate agent, you’re prospects will be having different conversations if they’re looking to buy as opposed to someone looking to sell their house.

• Build landing pages on your site for each conversation type.  You’d want the two different potential customers above to go to two different pages within your site.  You want to highlight the different value propositions you’re bringing to the table, i.e. each page solves a single problem.

• Set up your own blog. Let everyone know your an expert in your field and use it to communicate and let people know someone exists behind the website.

• Set up your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign using the keywords, groupings and landing pages.

• Monitor and test your PPC campaign EVERY DAY
  - Split test ads every day
  - Adjust bids every day
  - Get rid of non-performing keywords every day

• As soon as a great “money term” is found, start the search engine optimization process for that term
  - Market 2-3 articles per week (or even more)
  - Make blog postings on your blog and others’
  - Answer posts on forums and yahoo answers

• Review and repeat this process every 3 months!

Everyone whom owns a website wants to know how to get more traffic. It doesn’t matter what your website consists of, if you can’t get traffic, you’ll never make any money. Luckily, you have many ways to get people glued to your site. Here are some examples:

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

If you want a guaranteed source of instant traffic, it doesn’t get any easier than PPC advertising. However, PPC can be the most expensive traffic source on this list and you’ll always have to pay for it. If you opt for PPC advertising, you must spend time learning how to generate keyword lists, understand the cost of a lead, pinpoint effective long tail keywords and split test your campaigns to minimize wasted ad spend.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you want to know how to get more organic natural traffic from the search engines, master SEO. Whereas PPC is a short term tactic that can cost as much as you make if you’re not careful, SEO is a long term strategy that translates to real profits over time. Search engine optimization consists of over 200 on-site and off-site factors although most agencies will primarily concentrate on getting quality back links from trusted sites through article marketing, link baiting, blogging, commenting on forums, and link swapping. One thing to be sure of is that keyword selection is key yet again as the more competitive the keyword the more SEO effort you need.

Email Marketing

When it comes to learning how to get more traffic, email marketing is an old staple of the industry and a vital tool for any site owner. As a site owner, every site you own should have an email opt-in list attached to it. When you gather those email addresses, you can send valuable information along with promotions and links to your site. These are readers who already understand what you are about. It is cheaper to upsell to existing customers.

Joint Venture

Joint ventures come in many forms, but a popular method is to trade access to email lists with a fellow website owner. If you have 5,000 subscribers and they have 6,000, you could both advertise in each others list, gaining an instant exposure to thousands. Joint ventures can also involve giving away free products on someone else’s site in exchange for links or guest posting on their site for a link.

Affiliate Marketing

If you have created your own product, the easiest way to get links is to use affiliate marketing. Affiliates will generally be rather selective about what they market, so you need to be ready to convince them your product is something they can sell. For those seeking how to get more traffic through affiliates, offer free articles, newsletters and banners, bonuses for those that sell a lot of products and active 24/7 support for affiliates. The easier you make it for them to make money, the more money you’ll make.

Social Media Marketing

Of the many ways to get more traffic, social media is one of the newest, but also the hardest to quantify. If you opt for this route, make sure you understand where your customers hang out. Social media consists of many sites with slightly different focus and possibly age groups, use a wide array of tools, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, and more. Your goal here is to create value that will entice people to come looking for you and more importantly interact with you. Free tips, articles, updates, news, and videos all do this, but don’t forget that those freebies must also be entertaining and informational.

As you can see from the above list there is no single secret in how to get more traffic. You need to utilize a wide array of tools that will all help develop a stream of visitors to your websites. Build yourself up as an expert in your field, research your target audience carefully, and get them to come to your site bit by bit. By combining them all, you can guarantee steady, never ending traffic that can’t help but lead to profits.

One last piece of advise is to track, measure and refine all the time. You always need to understand how successful you are and how successful your competition is – don’t stand still!