Nothing is more frustrating than building a website, then posting new content day after day and watching as a handful of people visit your site and you get no (or very low) sales. 

You feel like screaming – where's the traffic?

Where's the profit?

How do I get people to my website? 

We've been in the exact same spot you are…and that's why I think I can help you get over the hump by pointing out the two most common, deadly mistakes that most web entrepreneurs make when hoping to make big money online.

INTENTION TO BUY KEYWORDS –

For any given web business and niche market there are tens of thousands of potential keyword phrases that **may** be related to your business.  Yet, there are a handful of keywords typically that bring in the hungriest buyers, we call those "intention to buy" keywords because these keywords are typically what someone ready to buy will search with right before they make their buying decision.   

1000 people searching for "Digital Camera" are most likely kicking the tires and won't buy anything…whereas someone typing in Canon Rebel XS or Best Digital Camera is far more likely to be ready to buy something online. 

So many people get caught up in making sure their keyword has tons of searches that they forget all keywords are not created equal when it comes to INTENTION to buy online. 

The result is that people work like dogs trying to optimize for hundreds of keywords that are both tough to rank highly in the search engines for AND that don't bring in cash anyway because they are not high on the "intention to buy" scale.

What happens?  Either you can't rank for those keywords and that means you get a trickle of traffic OR you do rank for the keywords, but nobody buys – either way, you end up not making any money. 

Within InfoMarketer'sZone we show you how to discover the "intention to buy" markets, niches and keywords so that you can spend your valuable time focusing on the targets with the highest profit – highest return for your effort. 

TIME + OPTIMIZATION EQUALS PROFIT

There are definitely steps you MUST take to make sure your websites, content pages and action pages rank highly in the search engines for your chosen "intention to buy" keywords, and these factors will make a HUGE difference in how well your site ranks, how much traffic you get and the profit you make from your online business.

But…

Remember that Google factors TIME into their ranking criteria. 

How?

• They rank domains that are older higher than domains that are new.
• They rank content that is more established on sites that are more established higher than newer content
• They frown on quick addition of backlinks that do not look natural, meaning that an important part of backlinking is getting quality backlinks in a slower, more natural way than loading your site with 100's of low quality backlinks each day. 

What this REALLY means though is that you need to have faith.  Faith that the activity you do each day to generate content, get backlinks, become involved in social networking communities and so on are going to pay off weeks from now.

For most people, their limit is 1-2 weeks – when they see no improvement in 1-2 weeks, they lose faith, ease up on their plan and eventually trickle down to little or no activity.

Interesting enough – even in these cases, typically TIME will lead to more traffic and some sales, but you have lost momentum, have set yourself back by weeks and have probably lost interest enough that you won't be in a mindset to pickup and get going again when the first wave of traffic and sales comes. 

They key to getting more traffic, making more money online from your sites is smiple:

1. Have a solid plan that will see your content both rise to the top of the SERP's AND be effective in attracting buyers from your niche market, and…
2. Stick to your plan with faith that it will pay off – if not next week, then in 4-6 weeks

With our sites, we have seen our process result in traffic and sales in 2-3 weeks, and in other cases, it has taken 4-months…Google takes time, but as long as you are following the correct process, know your market and understand the "intention to buy" keywords, you will break through.

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This time it is different though, the recent change to nearly 12% of online search impacts a much wider swath of results and targets a number of article directories and content farms that have, for years, gone from Google darling to top of the most hated list. 

A good example is EzineArticles.com that was once treated extremely well by Google with a high page rank, much of its content ranked exceptionally high and provided solid inbound link juice to websites who would link back through article resource boxes. 

In the recent changes though it seems EzineArticles was one of the hardest hit – they were even forced to admit that on their own blog here.

What is interesting about their response though is that they blame a small % of their article writers for the Google changes when in reality what Google is doing is changing its focus from these wide scope article directories because 99% of the material is rather useful and not typically what people are looking for. 

Granted, EzineArticles is better than most article directories – but really, is an article directory a natural type of website? 

Instead, wouldn't it make more sense to raise the ranking on sites that are highly focused on the topic people are searching for instead of returning one Ezine article of millions that deal with other topics? 

Which one serves the user better?

But that's not the only reason Google is making these changes, what they are doing is lowering the rank of these content farms and increasing the rank on content that IS in higher demand such as Youtube videos, Facebook and Twitter realtime information - so what we have is Google literally re-structuring 12% of its search to be more relevant in today's internet.

Take a look at this blog posting by Danny Sullivan and note the winners and losers in the latest search engine changes -

Biggest Losers:

1. ezinearticles.com
2. associatedcontent.com
3. suite101.com
4. hubpages.com
5. buzzle.com

Biggest Winners:

1. youtube.com
2. ebay.com
3. facebook.com
4. instructables.com

Notice how the content farms are losers and newer, more interactive, social networking sites and e-commerce site Ebay are the winners?

Fail to include social networking sites in search and risk being irrelevant in a very short period of time – that is the real message here!

Make no mistake, this Google search change is entirely about making sure they remain highly relevant, is anyone screaming for Ezine article content?  Not exactly.

Is anyone screaming for Facebook, Twitter or YouTube content – Yah!

As internet marketers, that means we also need to stay relevant, and that means we must learn social networking – how it works, why it works and put that to action right now if we want to stay relevant and keep traffic flowing to our sites. 

Are you active in social networking?  Leave us a comment and let us know which social networks you are using most.

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Earlier this year I blogged about how Google's Matt Cutts and SEO Wiz Danny Sullivan were talking about SERPS slowly including social networking authority as factors in their search engine indexing and ranking algorithms.

Low and behold, I see a case study over at SEOMoz that proves just this fact as a Tweet they posted about a Beginner's Guide To SEO went somewhat viral after a major social networking site re-tweeted (basically forwarded for those of you who are not yet Twitter junkies) and others did the same.

Within a very short time the link back to the webpage they referenced for their Guide to SEO suddenly started getting some pretty decent traffic as it ranked for the term "Beginner's Guide" when there was previously NO ranking and NO traffic coming from this keyword phrase.

Pretty strong proof point that the Search Engines are watching for signs that your content is liked by people on social networking sites – once again, it's time to jump in and begin to post daily about your topic, market – include a good balance of informational or opinion posts along with others that provide inbound links to various pages on your site – you just may see a jump in traffic.

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• further action on finding and reducing the ranking of content farms – and -
• taking a harder line on spammy content sites where the content is identified as shallow or poor

A few things to keep in mind for all of us doing business on the internet…

1. As Matt Cutts himself mentions in this video back in April on past algorithmic changes, Google makes some 400 tweaks to their algorithm each year mainly based on improving the quality of search, so the changes announced above are simply another set of changes added to their already active work in this area
2. Again, Google is mainly targeted the fringe Gray/Black Hat SEO techniques of content farming that are primarily designed around SEO but giving the searcher very little content (I personally hate these when I go searching for something and come across a spammy article or 4 paragraph article that offers no value other than to say the same thing every other website says in the same way)
3. Always, always, always remember that Google's entire business depends on search quality, so keep that in mind when you build your online business, brand and marketing plan…keeping this fact in the back of your mind means you will usually make the right decision when generating content, ads or other online marketing activity
4. One sentence in Google's latest update should also serve as interesting for online marketers – " We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites." What this will mean in the future is that your visitors will have more options available to "rate" your content which will have some bearing on the algorithm for site ranking…something to think about when creating your content.
5. Finally, remember that in the end, using SEO tools such as auto-blogging, shared content farms, paid content farms, etc…and spinning, writing or outsourcing questionable quality content **MAY** have given you extra traffic in the past, but does it really end up getting you a customer in the end? 

In our experience online you are far better putting time into developing high quality content that is based on a solid understanding of your market and prospects where they will both find the information on your site useful and valuable but also may be more likely to participate in discussions and turn you into an authority than to waste time trying to manipulate search to bring questionable traffic to your site.

I would much rather have 100 visits a day where 30-40 people like what they see and 10 buy from me than to have 1000 visitors who stay on my site for under 10-seconds and then never come back again.

What about you?

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As online marketers we concern ourselves with producing great content with an eye to what Google likes to see and how that impacts our overall placement…the main objective though is how our content, web pages and overall website ranks in the search engines.

The challenge Google faced recently though was the massive expansion of social networking sites where content is being generated real-time on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, etc…where the websites are not yours, yet the content is.

Rather quietly, with sporadic communication some of which has been delivered by Matt himself, Google has been increasing its coverage of these social networks as well as testing different methods of ranking that content (both within the social networking realm itself as well as the broader web context).

But as Matt explains in this video (watch the last 3-minutes especially closely)…

• Social networking content is linked to YOU (or at least your identity online) rather than any one website or even business
• Google now builds a picture of YOUR social networking behavior that assigns you a REPUTATION  – how often do you post, what content do you post, what sites do you refer to, how many followers do you have, etc…
• Google is also including in that REPUTATION a sense for how good an e-commerce vendor you are and uses that in ranking both your websites as well as your social networking content.

In short, if you have a spammy, low value reputation on the social networking sites, that will show through and you will not be ranked as highly by Google.

If you have widespread customer complaints around your e-commerce activity, then your reputation will suffer as will your search engine rankings.

So, be aware online marketers, there are two sides to the massive growth in social networking…a positive side where you can build great relationships with your markets and gain search engine traction by doing it as well as a negative side that can see Google slap a bad reputation on you, your online identity and associated content – all the more reason to keep your use of social networks real where your focus is adding value to your marketplace.

Here's the video:

What are your thoughts on Matt and Danny's SEO trends?

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In an example of how quickly things change, Matt Cutts of Google admits in this recent video that YES Google does now use social networking backlinks 'lightly' to help rank both Google Realtime Search Content as well as normal websearch content when just 7 short months ago he stated in a video that they do not use social networking sites for websearch ranking.  Whether we believe that in May he was telling us the truth or whether we just chalk it up to how fast the web changes, I'll leave that debate to you.

Matt then goes further and suggests they not only look at inbound links from social networking platforms, of course they are also looking at the "quality" of these inbound links which means they need to start assessing factors of the posts and the owner of those posts within the social networks. 

For example, he specifically mentions that a bot on Twitter will be found and inbound links from those will not be used. 

So, just as with content generation and inbound linking strategies for websearch – developing great content, a relevant and loyal following and strong reasons for others to share your websites will be the best way to go to get Google's attention in terms of helping rank your content higher from social networking activity. 

Here is the video – I found it quite useful, hope you do as well…

By the way – feel free to follow us on Twitter @Highertrust…we post daily great tips, content and specials as well as often re-tweet great content from our followers…

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Frankly, the days of keywords on a page being the only or major factor leading to ranking your webpage for a given keyword are long gone, so this shouldn't be a surprise, but for website owners like you and I – it is good to remind ourselves that the more great content we generate, the more backlinks we get to that solid content with anchor text combinations, and the wider array of pages linked together with semantically linked keyword combinations…the better the ranking we are going to have in the SERPS

That means, if you are marketing your own ebooks, reports or other information products you want to be producing content daily – blog posts, Youtube videos, valuable forum and social networking posts, articles submitted to relevant directories, guest blog posts, and so on…all of this will work together to rank you higher on more keyword combinations which means more traffic, more visitors, more eyeballs and more sales…listen to what Matt has to say here:

Now, go ahead and write your next blog post…

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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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