Affiliate Program information- Introduction to Six Figure Affiliate Blogging
- 10 Mistakes Business avoid
- Guide to Learning Search Engine Optimization
- Affiliate Marketing
- AdWords Step by Step guide
- On Time-How much is Your Life Worth
- Increase Your Local PPC Performance
- 3 Simple Tasks get you involved in your PPC campaigns
- Building Links
- Build Mailing Lists 3 Steps
KEYWORD SHORTCUTS
KEYWORD SHORTCUTS
Do you know what I love about natural search? I love that there is no hype, no “ifs” or “buts” attached to it. If a site ranks at #1 in Google, or an article is the most popular article in EzineArticles, it’s there for a reason. Once you know what those reasons are, you can replicate it and outrank it.
Another great benefit of natural search is that it doesn’t take any money. Once your site is indexed in a search engine, all the traffic that arrives at your site is free.
With AdWords or other pay per click programs, so many variables are involved in replicating someone’s successful campaign that you could spend months trying to track them all down. Which keywords are being used? Which keywords are most profitable? How many versions of the ad are being displayed? What is the daily budget? By the time you worked it all out, you would have spent a fortune on advertising, and there is no guarantee that the ads would still be profitable.
On the other hand, you can find what keywords a site at the top of natural search listings are using in a couple of seconds. Then you can quickly trace sites that link back to it. With careful choices, you can out rank it within a matter of weeks or even
days if you are lucky.
Which Keywords Are the “Buying” Keywords?
Obviously you aren’t going to outrank major sites and conquer keyword phrases like “Lose Weight” overnight. However, we are Internet marketers, and all we should worry about is making sales of the products we are promoting as affiliates. So we need to focus on the keyword phrases we know are going to sell products for us.
The first thing we need to do is to cut down on all the keywords that we are focusing on and concentrate on ones that buyers would use.
Being intelligent Internet marketers, we know that we are wasting our time if we target a phrase like “lose weight,” because someone using this search term is almost certainly not a buyer. We need to focus on the keywords that people who want to buy will use, not keywords that people doing research or who are generally interested in a product would use.
So if we were selling a product called “weight loss widgets,” we would look at variations of this keyword that people might use when doing natural searches:
“review of weight loss widgets”
“Does weight loss widgets work”
Or even something like “best products to lose weigh fast”
Tapping into the Right Keywords
I’m sure you get the idea now, but how do you find keywords like this? Let’s look at some tricks you can use to get keywords that will help you rank high in the search rankings.
The first step is to go to the product sales page, right-click on it, and choose View Source. This will bring up the source code page; you are looking for the keywords meta tag here. Copy a list of all the keywords listed here. It is always worth looking at the affiliate page as well, as publishers often give a list of keywords for PPC campaigns.
How Keywords Are Used in Articles
Now that you have you initial list of keywords, it’s time to check out one of the Internet’s best research sites, EzineArticles.com. Like most people, you probably just thought of EzineArticles as a place to add your articles, but it’s even more useful than that — much more. Under each article are three lists that show you recent articles, most viewed articles, and most published articles. The one we are interested in is the most viewed articles list.
This list contains the most viewed articles in a particular niche in the past 90 days . These articles are usually popular for one reason: they rank well in Google. This is exactly what we want to do, so let’s find out why. This may get a bit confusing for a moment, but stick with me — it will be worth it!
If we look at the most popular article in the weight loss category on EzineArticles, we find that it is called “15 fat burning foods — eat and lose.” By scrolling to the end of the article, we can see that it’s been viewed 26,067 times since it was published in May 2008. Quite impressive! We can now right-click on the article and get another list of keywords that we can copy.
Checking the Google external keyword tool for the keyword, the average search volume for the keyword phrase “15 fat burning foods” is 1,600, but there is no data for June. This is a bit strange, as I wouldn’t expect there to be much volume at all.
However, if we look at the Google External Keyword tool for the phrase “fat burning foods” there are 18,100 searches in June; and when we search Google for the same keyword we find that out of 560,000 broad matches and 141,000 exact matches, the article is listed in fifth place.
We now know that if we write an article about “Fat Burning Foods” and add it to EzineArticles, we will rank well in Google. Linking to your article in EzineArticles is usually a great way to outrank the current article in the Google rankings. A few well-placed links work wonders on EzineArticles rankings, since not many people link directly to their articles.
Obviously the keyword we focused on isn’t necessarily a buying keyword, but it does illustrate just how simple it is to find phrases that will rank well in Google.
Buying Keyword-Based Domain Names
Another great way to ensure that you rank well in Google is to buy domain names based around keywords. I currently have a number of sites ranking in the top three of Google for keywords I am not even targeting yet, simply because I bought keywordbased domain names. Many of these are search terms that have over 10,000 exact matches.
Once again, the Google External Keyword tool comes in handy here. Type in a keyword phrase and copy all the resulting keywords to the selected keyword box.
Once you have done this a few times and have a list of 200 or more keywords, download them as a text file and copy them to your clipboard. Now all you need to do is to copy this list to a bulk domain checking tool like the one at GoDaddy and it will return you a list of available domains. Then you just choose the one with most traffic.
I did a demo of this on my blog recently and found that HowToLearnThePiano.com was available. This keyword is much more useful for natural searches than LearnPiano101.com or something similar. Had I bought it, I would now have a site that ranks highly for a keyword phrase that gets about 500 searches per month; not bad for five minutes work!
Tools to Use
Several great tools will help you to conquer any niche and get to the top of Google. For instance, Link Diagnosis http://www.linkdiagnosis.com) will display all the linking information for a site —not just where the links are, but which are “no follow” and what anchor text is being used. It will then display it all in an easy-to-read pie chart.
The second tool I like is Tracking Guru (http://www.trackingguru.com). This will display how sites are ranking for specific keywords. Using both of these tools together will allow you to target specific positions in the search engine rankings and know exactly what you have to do to get there. The information it provides is invaluable!
I hope I convinced you to spend some time to try to get good search engine rankings and enjoy all the benefit of free traffic. It’s incredibly easy to find keywords to target, and the rewards can be excellent.
About the Author
Mark Thompson spent many years working in IT consultancy in London. Following a re-evaluation of his goals and lifestyle in 2004 he sold everything he couldn’t fit into the family car and moved to rural Spain where he now pursues a variety of online ventures. See: www.income-academy.com
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