Internet Marketing

With a new edition of OK to Make Money Online, we are going to look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is just a fancy term for teaching Google about your website so it can send the best traffic your way and place the proper ads on your page.

The problem for Google is it has only started using natural language, so it has to resort to taking your article text apart and trying to figure out what your site’s main subject or topic is. When this is done, it can send you the most appropriate ads to be displayed on your site. However, it may not be the best words to drive traffic your direction, and isn’t this the point?

Take most sites: they are all over the place with the subject matter. One article may be about shoes, another about clothes and on the same site cooking utensils. So how does Google rate the site and what ads does it display? We have to help Google out here and in response, they will rate your page higher in page ranking.

We need to make your site single purpose. So let’s say you have a site that covers many categories or subjects. We need to break it up into niches, with each niche having a single subject or keyword. Then Google will be able to correctly categorize your site by keyword. So: one subject per niche.

With a list of topics or categories in hand, we need to create a website of each. The hard part is going to be the URL name. This is the one area where the name is important. So how do we determine the best name? By using our keywords. But wait you don’t know what a good keyword for your subject or category would be? OK, let’s ask the expert: Google. You can use the tool Google uses to sell ad space under Adwords, Keyword Tool. With this tool you can input your subject, category and Google will return a list of the searches that people have entered and the keywords they used.

When you have gathered your keywords, run over to Blogger or check the URLs for your keyword being available. If it’s not, add a few words to the back or front to create a unique keyword, but don’t use hyphens to separate your keywords. After installing your site, create your privacy page, about page and your introductory page making sure to use your keyword.

Once you’re done, break the articles you have on the original site into major subjects and copy them to each new website. Rewrite the articles using the keyword for that site, making sure that the title, first paragraph, last paragraph, and one or two percent of the article body contains the keyword.

Does your site contain pictures? Good! Make sure that every picture has a sentence or caption that includes your keyword.

However don’t overdo it! Overuse was used by Black Hats to trick Google. Google now detects if you overuse a keyword, and will flag you for keyword stuffing.

Review of the rules: make sure your site sticks to one topic, make sure you research your keyword or long tail keyword, and use your keywords in every article and page on your site to make money online. Then as always, get as many backlinks to your site as you can (i.e. traffic).

Michael