keyword buffet

Keyword rich might be good for your static home page – don’t count on – but used liberally in your posts it has the same effect on search engine spiders as a buffet laden table of food:  no focus.  Keyword stuffing might be the better term for it and you know what you get when you stuff yourself at a buffet

Indigestion.

At our weekly Gather Success Challenge online get together, Alvin took us through a number of items we should keep in mind when writing our posts.

TITLE
Capitalize the first letter of each word in your title.  This Small change makes the title stand out more.

Consider:

Keyword stuffing  confuses search engines
vs
Keyword Stuffing Confuses Search Engines

As you can see the second title commands greater authority. Rule of thumb is that words such as the, a, and, for, are not capitalized.

PLUGINS
The beauty of using Wordpress is that there are plenty of plugins to help us optimize our marketing effort, but the one plugin that you must have is the All in One SEO.  When installed, enabled and configured, this plugin helps to optimize your keywords with  search engines.

PAGE URL
Each page has its own URL.  To optimize the keyword you are fighting for, place them at the beginning of the URL title.  For example:

The domain URL for this site is:  http:// www.blogincomelife.com
A page URL looks like this:  http://www.blogincomelife.com/new-look-for-blog-income/

The page URL always follows the domain URL.  After hearing what Alvin has to say, a better way to have titled my article would have been “Blog Income Sports a New Look” the reason being that the keyword is “blog income” and not “new look”.

KEYWORDS
Many of us tend to put as many of our keywords into our posts as possible with the idea that as  our sites are crawled, we begin to rank higher and higher for our list of keywords.

Stop it.

Too many keywords confuse the search engines.  They don’t know what sort of traffic to send to your site.

Use no more than three of your keywords.  Mention your main keyword once in the first 50 words of the post and once in the last 50 subwords, i.e., words related to your keyword or a slightly different phrasing of the keyword .

CATEGORIES
Just as with keywords, when writing your post think of two maybe three categories that it will fit into, definitely no more than five.

BACKLINKS
The importance of backlinks cannot be stressed enough.  Search engines consider backlinks as votes for your site – simply put, people like it and if people like it then the search engines give you good marks and move you up along their ranking.

Quality links carry more weight than others.  Here are some good ways to get quality backlinks:

-          Get backlinks from .com,  .org or .ed

-          Age domain matters

-          Authority sites (have lots of traffic, links and ranking)

-          Article directories

Comment on blogs that fit the above criteria.  Personally I like to mix it up otherwise  how would the newbies ever get started.

spider keyword buffet

IMAGES
Now this was a new one for me.  When uploading images to your post, give the image an alt tag.  For example the when I uploaded the image above this was what I filled out.  Images get crawled and it’s just good practice to have something for the spiders to read.

There was so much more.  Each challenge is a stand alone.  You can always join and do the latest challenge.  Points add up.  At the end the participant with the most points wins to work with Alvin on his new project.  Definitely some of the participants are internet marketing savvy.  No matter.  If you participate you will learn.  From my perspective its all about tweaking the details – even if you only pick up one point, that point can make a huge difference to you.

Unfortunately this is a step that gets skipped way too often. Have done it, own the t-shirt, coffee mug and more. Skipping this step always comes back to bite you unless you are using your blog strictly as a part of your email marketing.

So even though it is not fun at times doing your research first will pay off. Knowing who you are targeting and what they are interested in makes it much easier to supply that need.

So find your specific niche first and look to see if there is money being spent in that niche. If not maybe you need to choose a different topic. I am doing that thing I hate to do assuming that if you are creating a blog you are looking for it to generate income. If that is not true then you can ignore this part.

The second part of the equation is to find the keyword phrases that people are actually searching for AND that do not have a huge amount of competition. It is a tight line to walk.

Eventually you can rank for any term if you are willing to work hard enough for it. Low competition terms just make it much quicker and easier to get rankings and the traffic that comes with that.

Finally you need to build from the bottom up. It is usually easier to rank for a 4 word phrase than a 3 and a 2 word phrase is usually tougher.

Here is a picture of how I set up my niche sites after researching them.

The center is my main topic. Each of the categories will be related to that top keyword and will usually be more competitive than the keywords below it.

For example my topic is dog training. One of the categories would be dog training collars and the keywords could be electronic dog training collars, choker dog training collars, etc.

Start by doing a post on all of the lower level words like electronic dog training collars and you will build up to dog training collars because each of the 4 word phrases will have the 3 word phrase in it or a variation of it.

Getting this right can lead to traffic fairly quickly and eventually you can rank for all of them. For more on picking your niche and generating your keywords check out The Keyword Call. Tomorrow I will be back to discuss review posts.

About the author

Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends. You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy. Follow Mike on Twitter

This week I will be talking about using a blog for affiliate marketing.

Now you can do this in any niche and it is probably easier to do in niches outside of the internet marketing area. Blogs work because Google has shown that they like blogs and the ease of use to add content helps you keep it current.

The topics that I will cover will be using your blog for…

• List building
• Finding a good niche
• Review posts
• Finding the right affiliate product

All of these things are important but the item that will help you the most is doing good research before you even start your blog. You need to find the right keywords to be able to rank and generate traffic from the search engines.

Finding the keywords that you can easily rank for and that are words searched for by buyers is the real key no matter what your business model. You can get more information on doing keyword research and finding a good niche check out the keyword research call.

Look forward to spending the week and look forward to your comments and questions.

About the author

Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends. You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy. Follow Mike on Twitter