For example, if you have a weight loss program you are marketing, instead of trying to tackle weight loss program which has some 5.5 Million exact match websites competing for search engine position (remember you can find exact phrase matching by searching google with quotation marks around your keyword phrase) OR you can optimize for "weight loss workout program" and only have 5,000 competing pages, a number well within reach to rank in the top page of Google results. 

Inside InfoMarketer'sZone we have a very detailed system for finding, optmiizing and testing to discover Golen Nugget long-tail keywords that produce massive returns for your products and services. 

Here are a few tips we can share that will really help you.

How do you decide on which long-tail keywords to go with?

I have found that I can almost always rank in the top 10 for a long tail keyword phrase if the exact match " " results are less than 100,000.  

Using our example above, certainly "weight loss workout program" fits the bill, so that would be a legitimate candidate for a long-tail keyword, it would make my short list assuming the information I had to share, and more important, the product or service I am marketing is relevant. 

There are exceptions, at times I have ranked higher for exact match keywords that have much larger search volumes (though that usually takes a little more work and time) and can't seem to crack the top 10 on some with lower, though that is the exception rather than the rule.

You can either go with those general guidelines and get to work, or decide to advance your research and look at the top competition for those keywords looking for factors such as their number and quality of backlinks, type of domain .info, .com .edu, age of the domain (big factor), domain name itself…etc…

There are keyword tools that will automate this for you or you can do it yourself with some work if this is a one-time thing. 

Finally, don't forget to use your own intuition and knowledge of the market to know if the keyword phrase will actually produce an actionable customer rather than a visitor.  You can waste weeks trying to rank for one long-tail keyword only to find out it does not bring motivated buyers or opt-in candidates to your site.

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Let's say you have an ebook about weight loss that you want to market on the internet, one of the ways you want to work on to get masses of hungry customers to your website, blog or landing page is SEO.

Are there other ways to generate traffic?

Sure – here are a few:

1. Affiliate marketing – you can have partners send you traffic in exchange for giving them a share of the profits…we teach these principles along with other traffic generation techniques inside of InfoMarketer'sZone.  But for most people, you want BOTH a partner source of traffic and "organic" – or something that passively taps into the flood of internet search traffic from people who are looking for a product like yours.
2. Paid traffic – absolutely, you can pay to target certain searches (pay-per-click advertising) or tap into traffic that is already visiting other sites through banner or ads on Facebook, etc…BUT again, there is a COST to this advertising, and for most people starting out, they lose money for several months with paid advertising until you actually figure out which ads make you profit versus just sales

Without a doubt, putting in place an SEO plan that works is the most profitable way to make money with your internet business.

As many of us know, one of the ways to optimize your content (articles, blog postings, forum postings, press releases, web pages, etc…) is to target a specific keyword phrase or phrases by including on the page we are optimizing.

Certainly this means including them in the headline, throughout the text and even in image "alt-tags" as well as some meta content for that page.

A question often comes up though – how to prevent losing the benefit of on-page SEO when Google sees you as keyword stuffing versus natural optimization.

In this 2-minute video by Google's Matt Cutts, he covers two important points:

• Should you target multiple versions of a given keyword phrase (such as weight loss tip versus tip weight loss?) and will that be viewed as keyword stuffing?
• What should you pay attention to when you derive your keyword targeting strategy…this is the MOST interesting part of this video – one that we expand on with an entire week-long keyword research and testing strategy inside InfoMarketer'sZone…

Watch this SEO tips video here:

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1. The page that will typically rank highest is the one that gets the most high quality, relevant backlinks (naturally of course).  While this often tends to be your main page, it could often be a popular article, your blog, an FAQ page or another viral page that turns out to be very popular.

I know in my case, I have 1000's of articles off of one of my domains along with a popular blog – I do have several articles and blog postings that rank in the top 3 for certain keyword phrases.  You can often tell by the traffic and referrals on your stats, but you do want to be watching (and ideally planning) for this.

2. If you do have a page that is ranking highly and you have another page that you want to rank higher – you can place a link from the lower ranking page on the higher ranking page (again, this should be relevant)

3.  Make sure your internal links are consistent and that you are not splitting your link rank by having half of your links go to www.mysite.com and the other half going to mysite.com

4. Think about how you can make your main page viral – what will make allot of people visit?  It could be an FAQ, a news-worthy article, a blog post that raises many comments, etc…

Here's the video – it is worth the watch:

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When you develop a site to market your business, promote your ebook or information product or gain traction in your marketplace as we outline in our 6-Week Information Product Profits System, a common question is how MUCH content do you have to develop.

Now that comment comes from the seeming link between large sites (lots of content, lots of pages, blogs, articles, etc…) and how that site ranks within Google (commonly expressed as "authority")

It is true that often (but certainly not always) sites that you find at the top of the search engines for a given keyword phrase tend to have many pages…but is it the number of pages only that is the factor here?

According to this video by Google spokesman Matt Cutts, it is not purely the number of pages that is important to gaining authority and thus the traffic rewards of being indexed and listed higher on the Google search results…it is certainly more complex than that…

OK, makes sense that Google wouldn't blindly reward sites or pages based on the numbers – that is too easy to abuse and really doesn't fit with the ultimate intention of Google to index and rank sites according to their relevance and usefulness to the search intention.

But, there is a very real possibility that size does matter and here's why…

As Matt tells us in the video above, it is how, how many, and from where inbound links are made to your content that matters a great deal to Google.  So, the question becomes, does a 1000 page site that has (over time) gained natural inbound links to 500 of those pages outrank a site of 10-pages where there are 500 inbound links to 1 or 2 of those pages?

While yes, the page that has the 500 inbound links on the 2-page site may (??) rank higher than any single page on the 1000 page site, chances are that the 1000 page site will have a better chance of having all of their 1000 pages indexed and overall, through smart internal linking brought about by good site organization, will rank higher on pages that have a very low number of incoming links.

In any case, there will be much more traffic distributed across a much broader set of keywords which will end up targeting more of your audience in the end…always a good thing for growing your online business.

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Once you begin to generate some decent traffic – even as little as 100 unique visitors a day in some markets – you will be contacted and have the opportunity to sell space on your blog or website where you will either place text ads, javascript code (as Google Adsense gives you when you signup for their network), image-linked ads right up to full banners.

Should you offer ad links on your website?

What does Google think of selling your ad space to 3rd party advertisers – where it is not Google Adsense – for instance?

The main concern here is that Google frowns upon selling space on your website for the purpose of generating pagerank or linkjuice.

So – if someone wants to pay you to get in front of the visitors you have coming to your site for the sole purpose of getting those visitors to click on their links, then that is fine.

What Google doesn't want to see is text links (or now javascript ads as you will see in the Matt Cutts video below) that are sold based on your site being a PR3, 4 or 5 site to transfer some of that pagerank through to your advertiser.

How do you get around this?

Google suggests that you mark all text (and perhaps now javascript) ads you place on your site as "No Follow" typically done through a robots text command so that you tell Google that these are paid ads where you don't want to be penalized for passing link juice or impact search engines based on paid ads.

Here is the video from Google researcher Matt Cutts that explains further:

So, what seems to be happening here is the following:

1. Over time, google has gotten better at identifying paid ads in text-link format and penalized sites that do not include a No Follow on those paid ad links

2. Google is getting better at crawling javascript code and passing link juice through javascript links – but to do so, they do not want to open up a new weakness of exploiting search engine page rank techniques that obfuscate themselves as javascript links instead of plain text links.  So, they are getting better at not not only crawling javascript, but at penalizing sites that use javacscript as paid ads to pass search engine advantage to their advertisers.  The answer again here is to use the No Follow tag in your javascript.  How diligently you do this and when (and how hard) Google will begin to penalize is yet to be determined

The message is fairly clear – if you operate a directory on any page within your site (or as the main function of your site) and you do so through either unpaid or paid links, pay attention to how well you No Follow those links to preserve the integrity of your other links where you DO want Google to follow, index, rank and pass pagerank (such as internal links or links between your sites where there is relevancy).

What are your thoughts on Google's latest moves to better crawl and control search engine impact on javascript links?

Jeff

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As internet marketers, the idea is a simple one – the better your quality score, the less money you need to pay when bidding on keywords with Adwords. 

If you can get a 20% improvement in quality score of your ad, the url where the ad is directed and the landing page – then you will rank higher in relation to competitive ads while having to pay a lower cost-per-click than other marketers – the advantage being more traffic for less money. 

Factors Affecting Quality Score

So, what are the factors that affect quality score. 

As this excellent blog post points out – quality score is determined by a combination of on-page and corresponding ad elements and the click through rate (how many impressions your ad has versus number of times someone clicks through).

Further – this blog post goes on to suggest that the on-page factors weigh more heavily before there is a clear rating on click-through-rate (such as when a new landing page and ad campaign is started) while the clickthrough rate becomes the predominant factor as more history is collected over the life of the campaign.

Wondering what the factors are that Google has determined impact quality score – they list them over at their Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines page here.

Specifically, they organize them into 3 concepts:

• Relevancy (relevancy of the ad to something specific and corresponding clarity on landing page for the visitor to get what is promised in the ad) . Along with relevancy comes the notion of originality which means that if you are promoting affiliate products or products that others are also promoting – take an original approach to the landing page rather than simply re-using content and descriptions from other sites
• Transparency – Google makes it very clear that they want you to pay attention to clarity for your user around the business you are in, how your site interacts with the user's computer (ex. opt-in forms, privacy and confidentiality agreements, etc…) and how you intend to use the user's personal information
• Navigability (Is that even a word?) – this has everything to do with being honest and efficient for your user to get what was promised in the ads – avoid pop-ups, pop-unders, long-convoluted sales processes – make it easy for your visitor to get what you advertise

The message is clear – when you are first starting out with your ad campaigns and landing pages – pay special attention to the on-page quality – abide by the Google guidelines AND also pay very close attention to optimizing your Google Adwords keywords, ad groups and campaigns to ensure the best click through rates so that you get more traffic at a lower cost than your competition.

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This is great blogging.  It's great publicity – before anyone will read what you've written and potentially become a fan, they have to be interested enough to get emotionally involved in what you write.

Seth's recent blog post about SEO is a perfect case in point..Makng Money With SEO.

Is Seth Godin an SEO expert? 

Not likely – just as he is not a deep expert on many of the topics he publishes on his blog.  That's ok, what he is very good at is touching on those "bee hive" type topics that results in online marketers, entrepreneurs, webmasters and (in this case) SEO professionals, from having an opinion and therefore linking back to his blog further widening the scope of his branding.

Seth's most recent argument is that you have 2 choices on how to optimize your content for the search engines (hmm…black and white eh?)

1. You optimize for your root keyword – if you have a weight loss diet then you try and get ranked in the top listings for weight loss diet (as he points out the chances of this are pretty slim) OR

2. You "brand" your weight loss diet and your name and then optimize for your "owned" brand.

Absolutely – #2 is a great way to approach any market – if you want to dominate a market, then set it up so that when you dominate it, you have a technology at play…a system, a formula, and YOU are the expert. 

But..there are other options as well, and I'm pretty sure Seth understands the concept of the "long-tail" since he has written about many times in the past.

Instead of optimizing your content for weight loss diet, where you have some 3Million competitors under exact match that come up in our friendly Google search, you can optimize for "weight loss diet plans" and fairly easily reach the top page of results with 93,000 exact match competitors. 

Likewise there are dozens of other long-tail phrases that still get thousands of searches each day where you can dominate the top pages of Google. 

The next test is to uncover which of these are most profitable…that will take another blog post.  All I will say here is that you can uncover the highest ROI long-tail keywords in a matter of 5-7 days if you are willing to drive initial traffic through paid advertising ($200-$500 of investment). 

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly…

So, let's summarize shall we:

The Good:  Seth's ideas on branding yourself and your solution are A1, invaluable strategies – not nearly enough people think in terms of making their products, services and businesses easily identifiable and linked to unique value.

The Bad: Just as not everyone who searches for weight loss diet plans is looking to buy your stuff, neither are those who search for particular brands or people looking to buy what they have – so the example of branding yourself isn't always the one to take.  A much better approach is to brand a system or solution to a challenge and drive those obviously seeking solutions to their challenges to your page using long-tail keywords phrases – which brings us to the UGLY.

The Ugly:  By painting a black and white picture excluding the most profitable and valuable SEO information of ALL…Seth is badly misleading his readers and for that, he must be held accountable. 

Alright – there's the rant for today.  But more than just a rant, I'm hoping that you take 3 major points out of this ramble:

1. "Bee Hive" Blogging is a great way to attract attention and interest to your blog – something most blogs are sorely missing

2. Yes, focus on creating a highly value, unique and easily recognizable brand for your products.  Inside InfoMarketer'sZone we teach systems for packaging information into courses, books, ebooks and other info products with an emphasis on turning that information into "solution systems" so they can be tested and recognized as helping customers achieve major life outcomes. 

3. Understand that there are powerful, long-tail methods of optimizing your content for keywords that attract rabid buyers within your marketplace – and they DON'T involve targeting the most competitive, general root keyword for your product or service. 

Jeff

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Many people make the mistake of thinking that Pagerank is the same thing as having your site indexed.  So, they try everything under the sun to get their site indexed, continue to see a pagerank of 0 and wonder what they are doing wrong…in fact they are not doing ANYTHING wrong.

There are ways to get your site, blogs and content pages indexed very quickly by Google – within hours often times, but Pagerank (the system by which Google uses to rank specific sites and pages) will take much longer – sometimes within days, sometimes within weeks, often it will take 1-month or more for any pagerank to show up. 

How can you check to see if your site or pages have been indexed by Google?

Simple, enter the following syntax in the Google search box:

site:http://www.yoursite.com

Of course, you substitute your own site, blog or page URL for the "yoursite.com" in the example above.

The results will tell you if your site has been indexed by Google.  If you get no results, then try some of the tips we show below.  If your pages have been indexed, then congratulations – you have achieved your first step on the path toward improved search engine optimization.  Your next steps would involve syndicating your content links so that legitimate, related publishers will link back to your page giving it additional pagerank over time. 

HOW CAN I IMPROVE THE CHANCES OF MY SITE BEING INDEXED?

If you publish good content, your site will eventually be indexed by Google and pagerank will be established over time, but there are some important steps you can take to get your content indexed faster.

Indexing occurs using Google bots that spider sites and will often follow links - this spidering activity occurs more often on sites that have a high authority rating by Google and that publish content frequently.   These types of sites may be spidered each hour. 

So, it stands to reason that if you can get your site listed inside one of these authority sites, your site will be found much faster than otherwise may happen.

Here are a few ways you can make that happen:

1. Create a blog…this can be a blog as your main page on your domain, a blog off of your domain in another directory or even a blog on an entirely new domain…the reason why blogs are so powerful as a tool to get noticed online by the search engines is that blogs are designed to syndicate content.  RSS – or really simple syndication – is a defined standard for sharing information with directories and subscribers meaning that by simply using a blog as it is designed to be used (including a Ping list that pings different directories and content aggregators) you can have your site automatically create links through major authority sites.  For example, a common ping site is Yahoo RSS – by setting up a free Yahoo account and subscribing to your own Yahoo RSS feed (you'll want to subscribe to others as well), you will have your site spidered within hours.  Then, it's up to you to continue to publish new content a few times a day over the next few weeks so that the search engines know to visit your site and index new content more frequently.

Other places to submit your blog RSS feed includes: Feedburner, MillionRSS, Feedage, Bloglines, etc…these will help you get indexed fast, create some good quality, authority backlinks into your site and get you subscriber traffic as well.

For a full set of workshops around traffic generation and blogging you'll want to join InfoMarketer'sZone and uncover the 6-week InfoProduct Profits System for making money online with your own websites. 

2. Article directories…another way to syndicate content and get rapid backlinks from authority sites to your own site so it will quickly get indexed by Google is to write an article, include a link back to your site within the resource box of the article and submit it to high authority article syndication sites such as http://www.ezinearticles.com

For instance – this article we wrote just a few months ago called "Proven, How-To Book Writing Formula For Beginners" provided indexing extremely quickly to a new page on our site and has resulted in thousands of views and clicks by itself. 

3. Create a sitemap and try and keep your pages 1-2 levels deep, at least when you first start out.  You want ALL of your content pages to be indexed so make sure when the bot does come visit your site it can find your content quickly and easily.  If you create content that goes 3, 4 or 5 levels deep within your site – the search engines may take months to discover and index that content.

Next time you wonder, is my site indexed by Google – you have the methods to both improve your liklihood of being indexed and ways of searching to ensure your site has been indexed.  If you have not yet been indexed after taking these steps, then take a look at your site and make sure you have not breached any of Google's terms of service by adding questionable search engine linking, hidden text or spammy type content on the page. 

Try these methods and let us know (by leaving a comment) how quicly you were able to get your latest page indexed?

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Do you really want more visitors to your website – is that REALLY your objective when you unleash a new marketing campaign such as writing articles, blog postings, publishing videos, or even paying for traffic?

Are you happy if you see the number of visitors to your site go up by a factor of 3 or 4? 

A DRAMATIC REALISATION THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR BUSINESS FOREVER!

Several years ago when I set out the massively generate new content (I wrote over 1,000 articles and have well over 1,000 blog postings within a couple of years), it was all about driving traffic – wild streams of traffic that would turn my 5-figure business into a six and seven figure business.

And you know what?

That's exactly what I got – at least the dramatic improvement in traffic generation. 

About that same time, (mid 2000's) there was a big push from top internet marketers to test, analyze and refine their businesses…things were getting more competitive and the need was to better use their time and energy on marketing that was really making a difference.

What really shocked me is when I began to analyze all of the responses to content and paid advertising over the last 1-2 years – at that time.

What were the results?

Remember the 80-20 rule where 20% of your traffic will lead to 80% of your response, well in this case it was more like the 95-5 rule – where 5% of my content and paid advertising was bringing me 95% of my response. 

So…what that meant was that putting in 14-hour days generating mass content and placing more paid advertising was having a dramatic effect on traffic to my site, but a much smaller impact on sales. 

Sure, there was some impact, but given the 95-5 rule I discussed, most of the content I was busting my butt developing was missing the mark, which led me to the question…

I MUST BEGIN THINKING BEYOND VISITORS

I remember sitting at my computer at 2AM near the end of the year in 2005 thinking, I have all of these visitors, but what is the use if they all visit for a few minutes and then leave forever? 

Not all of them do of course, some of them come back again and again and eventually turn into action-takers buying one of our products or participating in our blog or become a loyal subscriber.

But most do NOT!  At least not back then.

From that point on I started to analyze every aspect of the process from generating traffic, through the initial visit all the way to taking multiple actions in the lead-generation and sales process. 

Let me tell you, when you think through traffic generation in terms of the entire process of illiciting actions, you see all kinds of disconnects that may have otherwise been missed – completely.

For example, for one of my online businesses I generate content for 3 different target markets – writers, professionals and entrepreneurs. 

Each of these target markets are VERY different in how they think, what they believe is important, the language they use and are comfortable with, what they VALUE and what they don't, etc…

Writers wanted to know how to spend more time writing – they love their art, so any system that could help them make more money with their writing (as we outline in the Ultimate Information Entrepreneur's Success Package) needed to focus on the benefits of having a steadier income to feed their urge to write.

One the other hand, entrepreneurs desire starting successful businesses and know that having their own product is a key part of the equation.  So, we focus heavily on the advantages of the demand for and profit potential from packaging information for profit.

Both groups by my products like crazy, but…

As you see, the message is quite different.

So, generated traffic from all three and sending them to the same landing pages was my first mistake.  It just doesn't make sense trying to "talk" to these 3 groups of people in the same way.

Another mistake, I offered the same incentive to opt-in to all three markets.  Again, the issue is that all 3 markets valued information, tools and other giveaways in different ways. 

Then, there's the ongoing email sequences, blog communications, offers we put in front of them, additional follow-on content and so on…these all need to keep in mind the different nuances of these 3 different target markets. 

Since altering my follow-up process I've been able to triple my response rate making the effort and investment put into content development, SEO and advertising much more worthwhile, profitable and effective.

The lesson in all of this…have a profile of your customer in mind…who are they, what do they value the MOST, how do they talk, what words do they use, what words do they find as "hype", and how would they expect to be treated once they click to your site?

Then, tailor your process, from beginning to end, in line with communicating with THEM the most. 

Suddenly, traffic itself won't seem so important – what comes first is what you DO with that traffic. 

Once you have a solid back-end lead-generation and sales conversion process in place, you can then ramp up your website traffic generation machine to take full advantage of the automated money machine you have created.

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But what remained fairly elusive is any substantial advantage gained through Google by having a good presence on Facebook – over this past weekend, that changed as Facebook opened up more of it's pages branded links to the search engines – the result could very well be a significant bump in well networked, branded pages in the search engines.

When you operate an internet marketing site, info product sales site or blog as we outline in the Steps To Setting Up Your Online Business within our Info Marketer's resource site, we recommend that you setup your content in a way that makes it simple to submit to the social networking sites and directories – now this move by Facebook only adds to that recommendation.

In fact, I've noticed a very significant number of active internet marketers re-visiting their Facebook pages and increasing their Facebook networking efforts in the last week, no doubt due to this decision to open up the links.

In this article "Facebook Steps Up SEO For Brand Pages" it is made quite clear that thousands of links may now be exposed to search engines and the more networked pages will be the big benefactors.

What does this mean for you?

Certainly, if you have been thinking about experimenting with Facebook (or neglecting an account you setup a year ago and have done nothing with it), then now is the time to get busy. Not only do you have the benefit of alternative forms of communication with your audience, you have the added enhancement of getting more exposure with incoming links from a very high authority site thanks to this Facebook gift.

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