How To Rank Number One On Google

Each day I go on the hunt for profitable keywords for my sites.
I have been doing this daily task for years and have come to
enjoy the simple steps I take to find profitable keywords.
It has become so enjoyable because I know with each valuable
keyword I find I am adding hundreds, sometimes even thousands
to my yearly online income.

Keywords power much of the online traffic and commerce on
the web. Keywords are the exact word or phrase surfers type
into search engines to find what they’re looking for on the
Internet. They are the essential elements in your website’s
profitability and in many cases keywords will largely
determine how much revenue you earn from the web.

Finding profitable keywords is not a difficult task, anyone
can use popular online sites and tools to find valuable and
profitable keywords with a few minutes of work. Quick, easy
and simple. You just have to know how to find the answers to
these three questions:

1. How Many Searches Are Made Each Month For Your Keyword?

A keyword that receives no searches is worthless. A keyword
which receives just 10 to 100 searches each month may be very
profitable. Your first task is to find out or discover HOW MANY
SEARCHES are made each month for your keyword or keyword phrase.
You can use sites like Overture (Yahoo Marketing) or WordTracker
and they will give you the number of searches made each month
and also variations of your keyword phrase. For quick reference
I use this site: http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/

Once you know how many searches are made for your keyword you
can determine how much traffic you will receive if your site
lands on the first page SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
The closer you are to the number one spot will determine
the percentage of these monthly searches you will receive.
Most of your traffic will come from Google, even if you get
#1 spots in all three major engines, Yahoo and MSN will
return less traffic – at least this has been my experience.

Keep in mind, even keywords with low search numbers may still
be profitable. For example, ‘unique corporate gift ideas’
only has around 400 searches but this may be very profitable
for companies or websites that cater to corporate gifts.
Also remember, some keyword searches are seasonal, i.e. the
number of searches made for ‘valentine gifts’ in July will
greatly differ from those made in February.

2. How Much Competition Does Your Keyword Have?

You must know the level of competition for each keyword
phrase you target with your online marketing. Extremely
competitive keywords are not worth your time because
you will not place for these keywords on the SERPs
and you will get no traffic. As a general rule, the
most popular keywords with 100′s of thousands of
searches a month will have the stiffest competition.

You can still place for very competitive keywords but
it may require months, usually years of content/link
building. Unless you use a PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising
system such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Marketing; you
won’t get any traffic from extremely competitive keywords.
It’s best to target keywords with little or no competition.

One of the best sites to use to find out your keyword’s
competition is Google. If you type your keyword phrase
‘corporate gift ideas’ into Google search you will see
there are 7,660,000 pages/listings returned. To get
the number of pages that have your exact keyword phrase,
you need to search your phrase within quotation marks
“corporate gift ideas” and you will see it has around
275,000 pages featuring your keyword phrase.

If you check out the sites on the first three pages of
listings you can determine the level of your competition.
I use the professional keyword research software
Keyword Elite to determine my competition. But here’s a
quick way to check the PR (Page Rank) of the listings for
your keyword phrase. Let’s run thru an example.

First do a search in Google for ‘corporate gift ideas’ and
then highlight and copy the return url.

Next go to this site http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank
and paste in your Google keyword return url:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=corporate+gift
+ideas&btnG=Search

This will give you a quick visual pagerank of all your
chosen keyword’s Top 10 competitors!

3. How To Know If Your Keyword Is Really Profitable?

One quick and simple way to tell if your keyword
is profitable, i.e. people are making money from
promoting and optimizing your chosen keyword phrase.

Take your keyword phrase and type it into Google, Yahoo
and MSN. Just count the number of Sponsored Links at
the top of the page and at the sides. If your keyword
phrase is profitable you will see a lot of sponsored
links, which means sites/businesses are advertising.
Where there is advertising, there is profit!

You can use Yahoo advertising (Overture) to discover
the amount each advertiser is welling to pay for
each click or visitor to their keyword phrase;
this amount can range from $.10 to $10 to $100
per click!

I use the keyword software mentioned above to monitor
the different sites promoting my keywords. If my
competitors are buying PPC advertising month after
month, you know this keyword phrase is profitable
for them and chances are it can be also profitable
for you.

Many savvy Internet Marketers instead of targeting
extremely popular keywords, find a niche market and
target a whole string of related keywords that have
little or no competition. This Long Tail marketing
method can prove very profitable.

How profitable will largely depend on what you do with
your keyword traffic, how well you can convert this
traffic into a sale or how well you can monetize it
with affiliate programs or Google Adsense?

Just follow these three easy steps for finding profitable
keywords and you will have a simple system for adding
valuable keywords to your site or online marketing.
Take full advantage of these little income magnets which
powers so much of the commerce done online and you will
succeed. Always remember, these little nuggets of gold
are yours for the taking.

I don’t know if you’ve been online for long or not. If so you probably remember online marketers turned their backs on local customers in the 80′s. The belief was the internet would bring an entire whole world of customers to their doors. Finally the little guy could compete on a global scale just like big businesses.

“Think Big.” became the mantra of the day. Local internet marketing was abandoned. Business owners across the nation turned cold to local online customers. Basically an attitude of not wanting to be ‘bothered’ with local inquiries permeated net commerce.

Well, like mini-skirts, VW bugs, and bell bottoms…pursuing online relationships with local customers has become hot again. It’s making a comeback. In a big way.

A few companies noticed the real buying trends. They’ve come to their senses. And have placed themselves to profit from those trends.

It should now be obvious to anyone with half a brain that most (if not all) communities here in the USA have more money passing through them than many individual countries. If that doesn’t turn businesses on I don’t know what will. Of course I mean turn them onto jumping on the local SEO bandwagon that is rising and rising quickly.

Both Microsoft and Google are fighting for control of local search marketing by providing their own versions of mapping services. Their respective products are Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Earth

Both companies know the winner of this battle will gain a major foothold in local search engine marketing arenas. They aren’t after one or two communities, they want them all.

Ok, here’s why you as a business owner should care about local SEO…

70% of local queries (vs. portals) are provided by search engines. That’s huge. Few companies are getting their share of local searches. They are buried deep down in the search engines where almost no one can find them. And worse, some companies still have no web presence at all.

When trends make a come back they tend to be short lived. The miniskirt is out of style (I will miss that one), VWs are still ‘cute’ but likely to drift away into oblivion soon as the glass-topped newness is no longer exciting, and interest in retro bell bottom pants has completely died (I’m so glad for that because I hated being a kid forced to wear ugly bell bottom jeans when they were hot back in the 70′s disco era).

I predict local SEO won’t die off though. Only the opportunities for small businesses will die. Two things will cause this. The first is big businesses will push SMBs aside. And the second is web spammers have noticed what’s going on between Google and Microsoft and they too have entered the race for local SEO dominance. So even local searches are becoming inundated with crap sites and fake content designed to grab attention of searchers in all communities.

Small business owners everywhere will become casualties in this new local web marketing war. Just as deep pocket businesses dominate the global online markets, they will soon dominate local searches too.

One way to avoid getting pushed into oblivion is to get well positioned for local searches now. That way as more spam sites and big businesses began entering your domain, you will have already established yourself as a valuable local resource for the web’s billions of surfers.

Just kidding. That’s so 90′s. You will have established yourself as a valuable resource for local web surfers no matter how long this ‘fad’ lasts.

What is a good SEO Content? – Ranking Factor Aspects, Sales Power of the Page

In this article I will cover some of the ideas and thoughts I have with regards to what exactly makes SEO friendly website content a really powerful marketing tool that increases sales of your product or goods. Hopefully this will help to break some myths or wrong believes that some inexperienced SEO specialists and marketers probably have.

The absence of magic in on-page optimization
If you still believe there is a magic keyword density, number f keywords or set of phrases on your page you can discover to rank high on search engines, you are not a SEO professional. Lots of beginners (thinking they are good at SEO) spend hours investigating the keyword density, number of words and other staff on the website or particular page to figure out the magic formula why the competitor’s website ranking higher than yours. I guess you to use the following HTML tag to rank high on Google, with Yahoo this doesn’t work: Your Beloved Keyword. I hope you liked the joke.

Forget about it! The only thing you should care about it the title tag of the page – as this is the most important on-site/on-page ranking factor. While writing the body of the page the only thing you should care about is to make sure the title of your article doesn’t fool the reader. Give them related information to what is promised in the title, make your content relevant to what it is optimized for. Also it would be great to make it catchy and attractive to increase the CTR rate.

What kills the visitor and turns him into customer?
My only advice here is once again is to forget about keyword usage for search engine optimization purposes, just make your content interesting and useful for the reader and keywords will rise like flowers naturally. Do not fool the person landing on your page. Keep all your promises you made in the title tag of the page. Show you are a real professional and know everything you are writing about.

Text by itself is rather dull even if it is interesting, web content readers are not classic literature readers and book warms, they are lazy, want every at once, require quick access to what they are look for. Give them images, place banners and create clearly visible menu with clear names so that even a child know if he clicks here, he will be directed there and ‘there’ is what he is looking for. Simple as that!

What kills the visitor and makes him vomit and run away?
Messy and difficult to understand website navigation is the biggest mistake you can make. You visitor would rather leave away than desperately try to find something that is very difficult to find. Categorize and tag your product or content of your website.

Horrible English, typos and wrong style is another big mistake – no one will read crap that was probably written by a school boy! If you want to be better than your competitors, do something – proofread and edit your pages, correct mistakes, typos, grammar if need.

Browsing through hundreds, maybe thousands of websites in a work week, I am continually amazed at the laziness of some web developers. I know how useful copy and paste can be, but believe me, in SEO, uniqueness is King. If you are a customer to some fancy web development firm, make sure to check your Meta description tags on every page. Google is notorious for devaluing a site whose Meta descriptions are repeated in every page. Take advantage of the power of the Meta description tag.

Most people get lazy when creating pages in the areas that are most important in ranking. While you may have a $10,000 website, the sad fact of today’s internet is that you either need one of two elements to get web site success as far as traffic is concerned: a large budget, or great ranking.

Google SEO is increasingly affected by the type of Meta description and how well it fits into the theme of the page, and the web site. Once you have gotten all the right elements in place, begin brainstorming on a catchy way to describe the focus of your page, while describing a call-to-action.

If your site is about apples, and your page about red apples, you could create a powerful Meta description, unique to that page that could read something like this:

“Look to our delicious red apple recipes, and find out what you have been missing. The best red apples usually have a ripe texture, not too soft. Read more!”

That small description mentions some assets about red apples, while using the keyword twice in a description that will peak the interest of the reader.

In Google search results, the description or snippet used usually comes from the Meta description. You can be less description and optimize for more keywords in the title, rather than the description. This strategy is sure to give your web site ranking a boost.