Traffic Utilities – Marketing, SEO, Traffic Generation, News

SEO Long Tail Keyword Work For Targeted Marketing

Long tail marketing consists of niche marketing to a great many niches, selling small quantities of many products or services to each. Customers are targeted with “long tail keywords.” What does the term “long tail” refer to?

Chris Anderson popularized the “long tail” in an October 2004 Wired magazine article. Long tail keywords and niche marketing go together on the Internet. To see the long tail, get a spreadsheet of related keywords with their monthly searches, sort the keywords in decreasing order by searches and make a graph of the searches. You should find a very few keywords with many searches and a long tail of the distribution with few.

Most of us can successfully compete only for keywords in the tail of the distribution. The questions are: Which keywords in the tail? And compete how?

You can divide the keywords four search bands: the super, the high, the medium, and the low search keywords. The border between low and medium searches can be set to somewhere around 500 searches per month; between medium and high around 1000; and between high and super around 10,000.

You can divide the keywords into four competition bands as well: the super, the high, the middle, and the low competition keywords. The border between low and medium competing pages — pages containing the exact keyword phrase — can be set to somewhere around 10,000 searches per month; between medium and high around 20,000; and between high and super around 35,000.

To use a metaphor, the number of searches is the quality of the fruit — the higher the number of searches, the more ripe, plump, and tasty it is. The level of competition is where the fruit is on the tree. The super competitive keywords are on the tip top branches. The low competition keywords don’t even require you stretch. There are two not perfectly consistent principles for harvesting the fruit: (1) harvest the best fruit you can, and (2) pick the low-lying fruit first. Here are some suggestions on how to do that:

Remove the super high competition keywords from your list. You will not get that traffic.Remove keywords with too high a level of competition for the number of searches. Why bother competing for them?Do not target the high competition keywords first. Devote your time where it will do more immediate good.Usually it is worth optimizing web pages by hand only for middle- or higher-band keywords. An exception might be for selling products with a high profit per sale — provided also the searcher is intending to buy.You can devote web pages to low search and competition keywords if you generate the pages. That way, you only have to create the template once, but you get to reuse it for many keywords. It would not be worth your effort to write each one individually.You can use the high end of the low band keywords in alternative titles of ezine articles. When you submit the articles through a submission service such as Submit Your Article or Unique Article Wizard, those services submit randomized variations of a your article to hundreds or thousands of article directories and blogs. They permit many alternate titles. You can have many articles spread around the web with titles including the low band keywords, all with less than twice the effort of submitting a single article. All these articles invite interested people to come to your web site. For the low competition keywords, appearance in a page title and page name (both of which you typically get in an article directory) may be enough to get the article listed on page one of the search results. Many page-one listings with few searches apiece is in the spirit of long-tail marketing.There are a lot of searches for phrases the search engines have not seen before. You can devote a page as a destination for these very low frequency keywords. Create a page with a couple of thousand words of text filled with words and phrases related to your topic. When the search engine encounters some semantically-related but not yet indexed query, your page would be a good recommendation. You can also drop low-competition keywords into the text. They will bring a few searches themselves as well as contribute to the semantic classification of the page.

Divide your keywords by search frequency and by numbers of competing pages. It will help you plan your long-tail marketing.

Social Marketing Tips For Twitter

When it comes to social media, no one “gets it” as well as Twitter. Apparently Twitter has some 75 million user accounts, with about 15 million of that total being active users. See http://tinyurl.com/yetgcru . That’s a lot of people sending a lot of Tweets. This micro-blogging service makes it easy for small businesses and entrepreneurs to stay in touch with those who choose to follow them, and stay updated on new products, services, special offers, industry news and more. It’s a win-win for both the Tweeter, and their followers.When it comes to using Twitter, there’s a right way and a wrong way to use it. Your messages must be kept short, under 140 characters, and they need to be helpful or informative. Don’t carry on about what you ate for breakfast, or the fact that you just brushed your teeth. People will unfollow you faster than they can hit the button, even if you do have good oral habits.

I’ve been using Twitter for a long time now and here’s what I’ve found works best when participating in this close knit community of few words.

1) Regular Postings: Now I’m not saying you need to post every day, although that would be nice. You do need to make an appearance on a regular basis. It’s like school – you need to show up to pass. Be a contributor that your followers get to really know and look forward to your Tweets. If you’re the type of person who needs to plan ahead, you can always use a service that allows you to schedule tweets in advance, such as http://www.socialoomph.com/

2) Retweet: If you see Tweets posted by other users that you think your followers would like, then retweet them. It only takes one click, and you’ll also be creating goodwill with other Twitter users at the same time. If you’d like, you can add a personal thought or comment before sending it. Also, make it easy for others to retweet your posts by adding RT buttons to your website or blog. It’s easy with http://tweetmeme.com/about/retweet_button

3) Be Helpful: Keep in mind Twitter is a form of social Media, so social interaction is key. It’s not all about you. Whenever an opportunity arises to answer a question, participate in a survey, or help solve a problem, do so. In this way you’re participating in the community. This also will help your brand and image when others know they can count on you for support or feedback.

4) Don’t Be A Follow CopyCat: Don’t follow everyone who follows you. This is probably my biggest pet peeve when it comes to Twitter. So many people turn this feature on to auto follow those who follow them. Why would you want to do this? I’d prefer that those I follow are people and topics I’ve hand-selected that interest me, and not a mish-mash of followers who may be ranting about things I have no interest in. Be selective in who you follow or your Twitter stream could quickly fill up with junk or spam. For quality people to follow, see – http://followontwitterlists.com/

5) What to Tweet: Make sure that the tweets you post are helpful and/or informative. Late breaking news pertaining to your industry, as well as any specials or sales you may have going on are always good topics. If you find something you think your followers would like, especially if it’s free or a bargain, share the love. Plus, if your tweets are good, it will encourage others to retweet them. For ideas see – http://www.artbizblog.com/2009/07/what-to-tweet.html

6) Comment: Particpate in the community by commenting on other people’s tweets. If you can answer a question, do so. It never hurts and people really will appreciate it when you take the time to comment on what they have to say. It lets them know that others are actually listening to what they have to say in the “Twitterverse”.

7) Say Thank You: When someone takes the time to retweet one of your tweets, make sure to reply to them with a “thank you”. Manners rule online as well as off, and they’ll like the fact that you noticed the retweet and took the time to show some gratitude. It may even inspire them to retweet more of your tweets in the future.

Be Personal: Again, I don’t need to know what you ate for dinner, but every now and then you should show your human side with a creative thought, quote, or other statement. Let people know you’re “real” and not just a lean mean business machine. You want to tread lightly in this area. Too personal is overkill, but a little can help in establishing a connection with your followers.

9) Post Pictures/Video: Remember, Twitter is not just for text. It’s easy to post short videos, and pictures too. It’s nice to mix it up a little and share content in other formats as well. Here are some resources http://freenuts.com/video-sharing-websites-for-twitter/

10) Talk About More Than Yourself: It’s not all about you, so please don’t make all your tweets one big marketing message, such as only tweeting about your latest press release, blog posting, or article that was published. No one will want to follow you if you’re one big commercial. Yes, some of this is fine in moderation, but you need to walk a fine line and mix it up with other helpful, interesting topics.

Now it’s time to start putting these tips into action. Social media is all about participating and listening to what others have to say. It’s all about creating and sharing information and becoming part of the community. If you approach Twitter in this fashion, you’ll not only have a lot more fun, but your followers will like and respect you – and if that doesn’t strengthen your brand, nothing will.

Localalised Business Optimizing Within Google – How to Increase Your Results & Listings

Recently, I have been spending a lot of my time over the last few months, researching and experimenting, on how to get on the 1st page of the Google local business results. Many of my successful listings are through constant testing & experimentation.

Google’s local business listings is a great opportunity to get yourself up in the rankings of Google for your relevant geographical keywords much easier and quicker than Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the best thing of all, it is free!

Here are some proven techniques/ways that I have used to get many of my own and clients’ websites successfully on the local business listings:

1. Get as many free listings in the local directories as possible. One tip to find these local directories is to check the ‘web pages’ under the details of the local business listings. Sometimes these web pages will show you the local directories they are listed on.

2. Optimise the title/name in the local directories for the keyword you want, eg if you want to rank for ‘Sydney Widgets’, have this in your title/name.

3. Same with the above, optimise the company/organization name in the local business centre for your keyword. (I got a successful listing for a couple of keywords just by optimizing the name, of which these keywords ranking for don’t even have a website).

4. Under the address information in local business centre, make sure you have the city location chosen as the city you want listing for.

5. Under the description in the local business centre, optimise it for the keywords you want. Of course, don’t spam it!

6. Under the categories of the local business centre, choose the most relevant category. Also, you can add in manually the category. In this case, add in ‘Sydney Widgets’.

7. When you upload your photos, try to optimise it (name of the file) for the keyword as well (I guess all of what I have mentioned are some basics of Search engine optimization (SEO)

8. Make sure you enter in as many details as possible in the local business centre, example hours of operations, payment options, upload photos & videos if you have, and other additional details as well. The more details you put in, the more the Google local business centre’s algorithm will see you as a serious listing and therefore making your listing more successful.

9. Try to add coupons if you can as this will definitely help. As mentioned before, videos will also help a lot.

10. Reviews seem like one of the important criteria that Google looks at when assigning rankings on the local business ads results. Try to encourage reviews from your customers. Don’t fake it! Google can easily find out and you may get yourself booted out from your local map listings. I have seen in many successful listings where there are no reviews. However, try to encourage reviews anyway as reviews does help promote your site to other potential visitors/customers as well.

11. Obviously, example to be successful in the listings for ‘Sydney widgets’, your site content should be ‘Sydney widgets’ relevant.

12. Basics of SEO – optimise the title, meta description and keyword tags for your keywords.

13. There are occasions where your listing may disappear, log into your local business centre again and update it again (example, re-upload photos, re-edit your description etc) and it should come back up again in an hour or so (from my experience)

14. I do believe that part of the local business listings’ algorithm, Google does look at external links going to your site as well. Example, if you have other sites linking to you with the link text ‘Sydney widgets’, I am sure this will help as well.

Below are some other techniques which I have not used listed by others that have said to improve the local business results:

• Include your phone number whenever you write a description of your company on a third party website.
• Include your address and phone number at the bottom of every page.
• Include the name of your city and state in your website’s content, titles, descriptions and page headers (I reckon this is quite an important component, so try to do it although I haven’t done this).

Search Engine Optimisation v Pay Per Click

While there are differences between Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC). There are in fact a lot of similarities between the both of them. I have come up with a comparison table below during my lunch break today on the similarities of SEO and PPC using Google as an example. It is interesting to see the relevance and the linkage Google is bringing to its natural search results and its adwords advertising program. If we look at the comparison table below and think about it. This will allow us to be better search engine marketers for both SEO and PPC.

Google Hierarchical (Breadcrumbs) Importance So To Generate More Links in Results

Google Talks About Getting Your Breadcrumbs In

Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your breadcrumbs into Google’s results, you essentially have more links on the results page. You have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail.

Do your site’s breadcrumbs show up in Google’s results?

The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don’t give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do. Interestingly, there seems to be an incentive for those who go the breadcrumb route because of the multiple links that you just don’t get with regular search results.

Google’s move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, “It’s definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of ‘providing context’, because the web is heading into its “semantic” period … where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links.”

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, “Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???” Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the “early days” for breadcrumbs.

“Think about the situation with sitelinks,” he says. “Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before…for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn’t like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we’ve changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you’re familiar with). So we’ve iterated over time.”

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. “Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time,” he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn’t exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the “>” used. That includes examples from Google’s original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs (if you see other ways, please point them out in the comments). Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I’d go with that.

There are three types of breadcrumbs (as described here): path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page, while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page. Obviously, location breadcrumbs would be the ones Google is using (although with personalized search becoming more of a factor, who knows in the future?).

One reader commented in the report -

My site breadcrumb is seperated by |. Somehow, Google seems to put the > character in of their own accord. I’ve seen many results with breadcrumbs in the SERPS, and I havn’t seen any with a seperating character other than >. I do think Google puts in the > character regardless of your site’s seperating delimiter.

Have you seen an increase in clickthrough from breadcrumbs in Google results?

Google`s Handling Of Human Language Searches

Google Discusses Synonyms’ Place in its Algorithm

Google has posted a thought-provoking piece to the Official Google Blog, discussing at length, Google’s system for understanding synonyms in search. As author Steven Baker says, “An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers.”

Google considers understanding human language to be one of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence, and the key to returning the best possible search results. While it is far from perfect now, Google has invested a great deal of time into this (5 years of research to be exact).

To cut to the chase, here are some things pertaining to Google’s handling of synonyms that you should keep in mind:

1. Google contantly monitors its system for handling synonyms with regard to search result relevance.

2. Google says synonyms affect 70% of user searches across over 100 languages.

3. For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improve search results, Google has only found one “truly bad” synonym.

4. Google does not normally fix bad synonyms by hand, but rather makes changes to its algorithms to try and correct the problem. “We hope it will be fixed automatically in some future changes,” Baker says.

5. Google has recently made a change to how its synonyms are displayed: in SERP snippets, terms are bolded, just like the actual words you searched for.

6. Google uses “many techniques” to extract synonyms. Its systems analyze perabytes of data to build “an intricate understanding of what words can mean in different contexts”

7. Some words or initials can have tons of different meanings, and Google uses other words in the query to help determine the correct ones. For example, there are over 20 possible meanings for the term “GM” that Google’s system knows something about.

8. Google includes variants on terms (such as singular and plural versions) within its “umbrella of synonyms”.

9. Google still makes mistakes with synonyms.

10. You can turn off a synonym in a search by adding a “+” before the term or by putting the words in quotation marks.

Google wants feedback on algorithm mistakes. They’ll take it through the web search help center forum, or through a Twitter hashtag: #googlesyns.

It will be interesting to see how far Google progresses in the area of natural language search, because Baker is absolutely right in that it is a key to providing more relevant results. If they can understand exactly what we want from our language, without us having to tweak it too much, that will be a tremendous stride for search. Instead of us trying to figure out what Google wants us to say, Google would just understand what we say. Luckily people have gotten much better at searching over the years, learning to enter longer, more specific queries.

Facebook and Twitter Links – How Does Google Rate & View These?

Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?

Do you rely on links from Facebook and Twitter updates?

Essentially, Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from Wordpress or .edus or.govs or anything like that. It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank.”

There you have it. the response probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it’s always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.

Do you like the way Google handls links from Facebook and Twitter? Would you do it differently?

Analyzing The Competition For SEO Purposes

In my last article titled, “Keyword Research Basics for SEO” I discussed keyword research and the basics of keyword selection. Of course – you can’t solidify your targets until you understand what you’re up against. All the keyword research in the world won’t help you rank for the keyword phrase “windows” in 6 months with a brand new site. So understanding how to analyze your competitors and get a feel for who you can compete with in a reasonable period of time is paramount to creating a solid strategy. I’ll also be flashing back a bit on keyword strategy.

In the last article we closed with a list of potential keyword phrases, the idea that we needed to divide our phrases into major phrases and longtail phrases and also a new domain (just to keep things realistic). So where do we go from there?

Generally I start at the top. From the highest searched phrases to the lowest – I do a quick analysis of the major phrases to determine the long term goals and the short term. I also like to look for what I call “holes”. These are phrases that have competition levels lower than one would expect when looking at the search volume. So let’s use the example I was using in the last article and imagine a US-based downhill mountain bike company. And let’s begin with the major targets.

The phrases we’ll examine for the purposes of this article are the top 10 phrases as ordered by search volume. They are:

mountain bike mountain bikes specialized mountain bike trek mountain bike mountain bike frame full suspension mountain bike cannondale mountain bike giant mountain bike mountain bike parts mountain bike reviews

So what are we looking for? It’s obviously not feasible to do incredibly thorough competition analysis at this stage. I’ve listed 10 phrases here but in reality there are hundreds to consider and so we need a quick(ish) way to determine the competition levels of phrases. First, let’s install a couple tools to help you make some quick decisions. You’ll need to install the Firefox browser and the SEO Quake add on. Now when you run a search you’ll be able to quickly pull the competitor stats. I like to look at the PageRank, links to the ranking page and sitelinks. Remember now – this is the basic competitor analysis here.

Here are the stats for the top 10 ranking sites across the 10 top phrases (I’ll leave out the URLs so there’s no promotion):

Phrase: mountain bike

Site 1 – PR6, 70,268 page links, 71,177 domain links
Site 2 – PR6, 262,609 page links, 290,281 domain links
Site 3 – PR5, 0 page links, 604 domain links
Site 4 – PR6, 101,136 page links, 206,397 domain links
Site 5 – PR5, 741 page links, 118,791,902 domain links

Phrase: mountain bikes

Site 1 – PR5, 33,097 page links, 40,747 domain links
Site 2 – PR6, 42,010 page links, 91,385 domain links
Site 3 – PR6, 262,609 page links, 290,281 domain links
Site 4 – PR6, 101,136 page links, 206,397 domain links
Site 5 – PR5, 25,059 page links, 38,132 domain links

Phrase: specialized mountain bikes

Site 1 – PR6, 101,136 page links, 206,397 domain links
Site 2 – PR1, 1 page links, 206,397 domain links
Site 3 – PR4, 2,001 page links, 2,095 domain links
Site 4 – PR5, 734 page links, 738 domain links
Site 5 – PR2, 4 page links, 230 domain links

Phrase: trek mountain bikes

Site 1 – PR6, 65,464 page links, 178,712 domain links
Site 2 – PR4, 108 page links, 178,712 domain links
Site 3 – PR4, 127 page links, 523 domain links
Site 4 – PR4, 2,001 page links, 2,095 domain links
Site 5 – PR0, 0 page links, 3,854,233 domain links

Phrase: mountain bike frame

Site 1 – PR4, 6,348 page links, 44,535 domain links
Site 2 – PR2, 6 page links, 4,303 domain links
Site 3 – PR4, 196 page links, 523 domain links
Site 4 – PR0, 28 page links, 35 domain links
Site 5 – PR1, 0 page links, 294,361,703 domain links

Phrase: full suspension mountain bike

Site 1 – PR4, 58 page links, 178,712 domain links
Site 2 – PR4, 20 page links, 1,729 domain links
Site 3 – PR3, 7 page links, 9,959,894 domain links
Site 4 – PR5, 240 page links, 290,281 domain links
Site 5 – PR3, 0 page links, 294,362,703 domain links

Phrase: cannondale mountain bikes

Site 1 – PR6, 62,614 page links, 91,301 domain links
Site 2 – PR6, 410 page links, 91,301 domain links
Site 3 – PR4, 0 page links, 2,056 domain links
S ite 4 – PR3, 3 page links, 80,580 domain links
Site 5 – PR2, 3 page links, 9,959,894 domain links

Phrase: giant mountain bikes

Site 1 – PR3, 7 page links, 136,232 domain links
Site 2 – PR4, 2,001 page links, 2,095 domain links
Site 3 – PR0, 6 page links, 6 domain links
Site 4 – PR4, 2,262 page links, 2,392 domain links
Site 5 – PR2, 1 page links, 60,131 domain links

Phrase: mountain bike parts

Site 1 – PR4, 610 page links, 2,366 domain links
Site 2 – PR4, 851 page links, 4,303 domain links
S ite 3 – PR4, 6,348 page links, 44,535 domain links
Site 4 – PR5, 4,612 page links, 20,931 domain links
Site 5 – PR6, 4,612 page links, 20,931 domain links

Phrase: mountain bike reviews

Site 1 – PR6, 262,609 page links, 290,281 domain links
Site 2 – PR5, 240 page links, 290,281 domain links
Site 3 – PR6, 560 page links, 361,873 domain links
Site 4 – PR5, 0 page links, 604 domain links
Site 5 – PR4, 22 page links, 90,123 domain links

Now, I’d definitely look further down my keyword list than this but for the purposes of this article let’s assume this is all we have. If that’s the case – what do you suppose would be the primary choice(s)? Were it to me I’d go with:

mountain bike frame – we have a range of PageRank, a range of links and a range of sites. Basically – we’re not up against a wall of high competition and the search volume is solid.

full suspension mountain bike – a full range of sites. Higher competition than “mountain bike frame” but we’re looking at a phrase that would sell a whole bike which needs to be considered and a slightly higher competition is thus acceptable.

So of these two phrases what would I do? Well – if this was all we had to work with I’d select “full suspension mountain bike” as the main phrase and follow that up with “mountain bike frame” as a major secondary phrase and thus a prime target for proactive internal page link building and optimization.

So now let’s look at whether there are any good longtail phrases. In this industry we’ll be looking for specific parts. Since going through all the different types of parts would be a nightmare in an article I’ll focus on a couple parts I just ordered recently and that was a new handlebar and and a new rim. To keep things simple I’m going to focus on just a couple brands in the research BUT in reality we’d take the extra time and look into all the part types and all the brands that we’d be able to sell on our site.

So for handlebars, here’s the long and short of the numbers and competition:

Brands researched – origin and easton

“easton handlebars” with 1,000 estimated searches/mth with low competition outside of the manufacturer is a great start. Further, when we look up the manufacturer we further see that the ea70 and ea90 Easton models are both sought after as well.

When we build our site we obviously want to build a structure and heirarchy that are conducive to longtail rankings overall but what we’re looking for here are ideas as to where to put our energies when it comes to content creation and link building. Handlebars looks good by search volume. The average sale per item would be around $25.

And now to rims:

Brands researched – mavic and sun

“mavic rims” and “sun rims” both come in at 1,900 estimated searches but the comeptition for “sun rims” is significantly lower with lower link counts and lower PageRank sites ranking. The average sale here is also going be in the $40 to $45 range.

Based on this my first efforts for the whole site wold be “full suspension mountain bike” for the homeapge, mountain bike frame” as a major internal page and I’d focus my first efforts on “rims” (“sun rim” specifically).

Now – we’d of course look further than this but what we can see is the direction that we’d go if all we had to go on was the above data. As noted – were we launching this site we’d look into every brand and every part type and research further than the top 10 phrases but that would have made for a book, not and article and let’s be honest – it would have been a very boring book unless you were planning on launching a mountain bike site.

So now you’ve done enough competition analysis (remember – it’s basic research we’re talking about) to figure out what direction to head in. In my next article I’m going to cover more advanced competition analysis. We’ll go in knowing what we want to accomplish in the way of keywords and be working to map out how to take the top spots.

Until then – get your campaigns sorted out for potential keywords and keep reading … this is where it gets really interesting.

Best Ways To Market Your Website

If you’ve got your own web-based business, you might be asking yourself how you can market your site. There are lots of ways to make this happen, and this article talks about all the demonstrated strategies that would make you have favorable outcomes in this particular field.

The traditional way of promoting a business venture would be to pay for want ad space in your local newspapers. This would let everybody know about your website, but carrying this out regularly would make your overhead costs go up.

A lot of people utilise the web to obtain details, plus the constant progression of the internet means that there will always be many different strategies to market your webpage. Among the choices that you could utilize is pay per click advertising, wherein you will spend money in order to put your ad on the results pages of search engines. While this is a proven way to market your site, it can get costly if you are bidding for keywords that are popular. One other way to publicise your webpage is by making use of weblogs. Crafting blog entries about your products or services and also placing the right amount of information in your weblog would draw in potential customers.

But the fastest method to publicize your site is to write content pieces and also submit them to many different article publication sites. The reason why this strategy gives the most results is due to backlinks: if your content is posted, you’ll be required to include a backlink. This particular link will let your readers visit your site if they want more information about your services and products, and you will acquire more page views.

You need to create articles that are short and educational, and you have to come up with lots of articles so that you’ll be seen as a specialist in your chosen field. Article directory websites will always be in need of new and also excellent content since this would help them receive better search engine rankings, and people will always be on the lookout for specialized information for their own webpages. When your content piece is published in an online directory and that specific article directory website acquires a high page ranking, that result could be achieved by your webpage as well since you will lead your readers to your site through your posted write-ups. In other words, everybody wins in this scenario.

But there are a few vital things to bear in mind when composing content pieces. You have to make an effort to compose around three to five articles every day, as well as restrict your write-up to 300 to 500 words; people will not read through content pieces that go past that restriction. Also, originality is of high importance. Never ever reproduce a posted content piece online or in publications and call it yours. Plagiarism isn’t accepted in any industry, plus your write-ups wouldn’t be posted if you’re caught. You can borrow an idea from another article and extend it, but remember to cite your sources.

If you do not have the time or ability to craft your own articles, you can employ freelance content writers or maybe content creation services to make your content pieces for you. Aside from offering you extra time to pay attention to various other aspects of your internet business, outsourcing this endeavor would mean getting a lot more write-ups for you to send for publication.

The main ideas guiding this specific site publicity tactic would be to provide valuable material and compel your audience to take a look at your site to obtain more details on your products and services. The secret is to make them desire more of what you are offering.

The search engines thrive on content and backlink count. Without both your site is dead!

SEO Strategy – Getting Vital Links to Your Blog

It is every blogger’s dream: to be read by as many people as possible. But it’s not as simple as it sounds. Several things have to fall into place to capture that wide audience.

First is to get the word out that your blog exists, second is to hold visitors’ interest in what they are reading, third is to make them return for more, and fourth is for them to start referring you to others.

That is why when SEO marketers sit down with blog owners to talk about increasing audience viewership, one of the strategies they instantly recommend is to build as many links to the site as possible.

Just how does link building equate to a wide captive audience?

The equation goes something like this: links to your blog from other sites generate referral traffic and increase your blogs’s Google page ranking.

The former is possible when users go to another site and click on the link from that site to your blog. The second is when Google’s search algorithms consider the links to your site as a vote of referral from the other sites, taking that to mean that you are a site of substance, thereby elevating your page rank. The higher the page rank of your blog means that when users search via Google, your blog will be one of the first ten sites listed on the first page.

Sources of Blog Links

When you commit to link building, there are many sources where you can get these links. Below are a few of them:

Common-niche blogs, websites, forums, and communities. Visit these sites and drop a comment or two in forum messages and posts. Be helpful by answering questions or offering information. Sign your posts on these sites with a link to your blog site. As your presence in these sites is established, so will your blog site generate more traffic.Social networking sites. StumbleUpon and Digg have proven track records in generating traffic to sites, so take advantage of this. Consider other sites such as Facebook and Twitter as well.Directory submissions. This technique is still good for link building, but you have to be careful to submit your site to quality directory sites only, because there are many directories out there that turn out to be mere link farms.

More Tools and Tips for Link Building

Link sources may be there for the taking, but the key to success is in actually keeping in mind the following rule-of-thumb:

Link building takes time. Many sites require webmaster’s approval for links to be established. And with Google suspicious of a sudden increase in links, a slow but sure approach gets the links in the long run.Link building means never having to give up. Not all link-building efforts strike gold – moderators and webmasters may disapprove of your posts, or remove your link signatures, or worse, consider you spam. Continue your link-building and don’t get discouraged.Link to quality sites. Although they are more discriminating in whom to give their links, links from quality sites are worth more than low-ranked sites.Create quality content. Interesting and useful content gives your link requests a higher chance of being accepted and your blog linked to by other sites.

Successful link-building for your blog generates referral traffic and increases your blogs’s Google page ranking. The result? A bigger blog readership than ever before.