In line with my previous post about trying to make this blog more for the noobs, I’ve written a little guide on how to do some basic keyword and competition research.

This is all about natural, organic search engine results page rankings, and how to make sure you are targeting the right keywords before you start to build links.

There’s a chance that I’ll have missed out some parts of the research process due to either lack of sleep or the fact that I don’t do them myself. If that’s the case, feel free to leave some feedback in the comments section underneath the post.

Research Keywords That Get Traffic

This might seem a little obvious to some, but I can assure you that there are people out there who target keywords based on whatever they feel like.

“My blog’s all about gardening, let’s target landscaping help because I saw a nice article on the internet about landscaping”.

What I’m trying to say is that some people don’t put any rational thought into the keywords they choose to target. Or they think they are thinking rationally but there thoughts aren’t based on any quantifiable data.

If you are targeting a keyword, it has to get traffic. Otherwise why bother. If no one is searching for landscaping help there would be no point in our imaginary friend with the gardening blog from targeting it.

I hope I’ve hammered home this point quite clearly. The keywords you target better damn well get traffic.

Which Keywords Get Traffic?

There are tools both paid and free which can help you with this. There are only two tools I use for organic SEO research.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool

Many people swear by the Google Keyword Tool alone, and would quite easily shun the SEOBook tool. Most other keyword tools are powered by the Google Keyword Tool anyway, even SEOBook’s tool pulls some of its results from there.

However, I like the way you can click on a keyword to get even more relevant suggestions. Perhaps the same functionality is available in the Google Keyword Tool, but I like the way SEOBook handles it so I use it just as much.

Anyone can rank for a keyword that doesn’t get traffic, but what would be the point? For proof of this take a look at this post by Glowleaf: Make Monies Online Using Your Boobs.

He managed to get that post to rank for that exact phrase just by doing a little bit of on-page SEO and some social bookmarking. Take a look on Google and you’ll see that he’s got the number one ranking for that term.

Check Out the Competition

Who are the competition? They are the sites that are currently ranking for the keywords you’re considering targeting.

The aim of this section is to research how strong the competition is in terms of ranking for the specific keywords you are targeting. Whether you can beat the competition or not is usually down to your own skill level, so as a beginner you should try and go for the longtails.

A longtail keyword is a phrase that usually has at least 2 or 3 words in it, and it’s much more targeted and less general. They also have less searches per day than other keywords.

Take gardening advice for example. According to SEOBook it gets 58 searches per day from Google alone. Check it out in Google:

Another thing to note here is that this is a Google US search. I live in the UK, and the top 3 results here are actually .co.uk domains, completely different to the US results. I’m showing the US results because most of you readers are from the US.

How Does Google Rank Sites?

In order for you to work out if these sites are weak competition or not, you need to know how Google decides which sites to rank for which keyword.

There are many, many people out there on various forums that will try and give you advice or tell you what works and what doesn’t - 90% of them have no idea what they’re talking about.

You see, people like to come across as SEO experts and so they spout out all this stuff to make SEO sound confusing and technical. While I’m not saying that it’s as easy as pie, I am saying it certainly isn’t as complicated as a lot of people make out.

There are a few main areas that Google looks at when deciding where to rank a site:

1. Title tags
2. Header tags
3. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)
4. Backlinks

Technically that’s incorrect, because Google looks at a whole range of things, hundreds in fact. But look at it this way, as a beginner you’ll want to concentrate on the basics.

Title Tags

The title tags appear near the top of the HTML of a page like this:

<TITLE>This is my title, I am so cool.</TITLE>

This text is then interpreted by the browser and placed right at the top, above the page in the little (usually blue) part of the browser. Google looks at what is in those tags and gets an idea about what your site should rank for.

Header Tags

Exactly the same as title tags, they appear in the HTML like so:

<H1>Hey, look at me, I’m a Heading One tag</H1>

<H4>STFU, I’m a Heading Four tag and I’m gonna kick your ass</H4>

Google interprets these heading/header tags as important and so decides that the content of them must have something to do with what your page is about, and therefore should be something to do with what the page should rank for.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)

Google isn’t stupid, they aren’t just going to rank your page in their index for the term gardening advice just because you used that keyword on the page.

They’ll also take into consideration similar words that are used to see if you are really talking about gardening advice. It’s kind of hard to understand, but the way I look at LSI is like this: Google can tell if you are really writing about a subject or if you are trying to pretend to write about a subject.

That’s the basics of LSI, and it can be used to manipulate Google in a blackhat way, but for now just remember that they can for the most part detect what you are actually writing about.

Backlinks

Now we’re talking! This is one of the biggest factors that Google will use to help determine what keywords your site should rank for. A backlink is simply a link back to your page.

The more backlinks you have, the more popular your site must be, and so more likely to rank on Google.

Some backlinks are worth more than others, and yet again there are a number of factors that determine the value. A few of them are as follows:

Anchor text: the words used to describe the link.

<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/tasty-link.php>This is my anchor text and I reign supreme</a>

Obviously, if your anchor text matches the keywords you’re targeting, that’s a good thing.

Page Rank: the bigger the page rank (PR) of the page that the backlink is on, the more value it passes on to the page it links to.

No-follow: if the link has the no-follow attribute applied to it then the search engines do not apply any relevance to the link. That doesn’t mean that they won’t have a look at the site, and add it to their index if it isn’t already in, but it won’t count the link as a relevant backlink.

In other words, no-followed links severely reduce the power of the link that’s being given. No-followed links look like this:

<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/tasty-link.php rel=”nofollow”>I’m the anchor text</a>

Competition Research

Now you know what Google uses to rank a site, you should check out the competition and see if they’re really strong in those areas we looked at before.

It’s important to remember that we’re looking at this from a beginner’s standpoint, so there will always be more to this than what I’m writing here. But for taking out the competition and dominating some longtail keywords, what I’m going to say will be more than enough.

We’re going to take a look at the second site down from our gardening advice search on Google.

I’ve turned on the SEOQuake addon for Firefox, that’s what you can see underneath the result. The first thing you notice is that the page is a Page Rank 5, which is pretty good. Next up you’ll see it has 65 backlinks according to Yahoo.

It’s important to know the backlinks to this particular page and not the whole domain, because it’s this page we are trying to outrank and not the whole site. This gets harder when the competition isn’t a sub-page of a site, but it’s homepage.

If this happens you’ll see lots of links showing up to that specific page, but in it there will be a lot more that aren’t anything to do with your specific longtail keywords. I always find it easier checking out a sub-page than a homepage.

Does the page in our example use the target keywords in the title? For the most part yes, although it could be optimised a little more for it if they wanted but I imagine they have bigger keywords to fry. If the site didn’t target your keywords in the title, that would be a good thing because you’d have a better chance at taking over them in the SERPs.

Having a look over the page, can you see the keywords being used on the page at all, specifically in heading tags etc. If not then that’s another plus one for us.

Next we’d check out the backlinks for that page. We already know that it has 65 from SEOQuake, but we need more information such as what’s the Page Rank of those backlinks. The simplest (and most tedious) way would be to check out each of those backlinks in Yahoo Site Explorer.

Search the HTML code of each site looking for the backlink, and then check out the anchor text. This can be quite time consuming but it’s worth it in the end. If you’re using the Search Status add on for Firefox you should also be able to see the Page Rank of each site that you check out as well, so you get an idea of how valuable each backlink is.

How Tough Is The Competition?

That’s a question that only experience can really answer. There are no hard and fast values here, it’s all down to your own SEO skill. Knowing how effective your competition’s SEO work is takes you one step closer to beating them with your own link building campaigns.

Common sense tells us that if they have lots of high PR backlinks with relevant anchor text, that they are going to be harder to beat than someone with just a handful of low-quality non-targeted backlinks.

Where To Go From Here

This is just a taster of keyword and competition research from a beginner’s perspective. There’s more to look into, but you need to learn to walk before you can run.

I’d recommend trying to get a small site ranking for some really easy longtails at first, and once you can do that start moving up the levels until you eventually start to take on the big boys.

If you have any questions please post them in the comments below.

The site I’m showcasing today is for the noobs. I mean, it was made to help noobs! A pretty good idea for a site if you ask me.

What is EPN?

EPN stands for Ebay Publisher Network. It’s a way of making money out of Ebay by referring people to the site. You can make money when people sign up to Ebay, and you can also get paid when people win auctions.

Why epnStore.com?

Simple, a lot of noobs struggle to get themselves accepted to EPN in the first place. And the ones that do get accepted can’t work out the technical side of things like implementing it into their own websites.

epnStore.com takes away any need for a noob to understand all these complexities. Instead, I’m led to believe that the only code you need to use is this:

[epnstore]keywords, more paramaters here[/epnstore]

You could teach a monkey to write that!

The point of all this is so that noobs to the industry can concentrate on other points of interest such as promoting and marketing their sites.

At the moment epnStore only works with US marketers, and at this time there aren’t any plans to accept other countries.

Check it out: epnStore.com

First of all, blog commenting is great! I love it, and you should too. If done right you then it’s a win-win situation for both you and the bloggers who’s blogs you comment on.

But it’s not done right, not by a long shot. I had a blog comment today for “latin American commerce”, what does that have to do with my site?

The problem is the ease of access to automated software that lets you find blogs to comment on such as Comment Kahuna. Don’t get me wrong, I love that program, but I wish the retards would stop getting ahold of it.

The Wrong Way: What Will Happen?

This is what will happen if you do blog commenting like an idiot.

1. I’ll receive your blog comment and then click on the “spam” button.
2. Lots of other bloggers will also receive your comment and click the “spam” button.
3. You’ll now show up as a spammer and Aksimet will automatically delete your comments for me.
4. You will die, alone and afraid with no one to care for your sick dog.

How Do You Do Blog Commenting Then?

Like so…

1. Find blogs that are in your niche instead of spamming every blog you can think of.
2. Do not include a link to your site. If you want some link love then you’ll get it from the URL section of the comment box. Posting links (especially irrelevent links) will get you put in the spam queue faster than you can say, “spam and eggs for breakfast”.
3. Make sense. Don’t write some random, generic crap. Instead, look at the post and genuinely share your opinion. Disagree, agree, whatever. Just don’t put, “Nice article, check out my link.”

That’s it for now. Some more common sense goodness may follow at some indeterminate time.

Don’t get your hopes up.

Sometimes I can post every day for a few days because my mind is full of ideas, and other times it’s weeks and I don’t write. I don’t see the point in writing filler content just to make it look like I know what I’m talking about.

On the flip side, this isn’t how I run the rest of my blogs. This is an internet marketing blog, and there are many people out there who have a lot more juicy information to hand out than I do.

But on the blogs that I do outside of this niche, I try and follow the blogger rule of doing X amount of posts per week. I make sure that I have something interesting to say.

I guess when I think about it, the reason for this is that my other blogs are all about making money. If I stop posting then potentially my income goes down, whereas this blog doesn’t affect my income in the slightest.

That’s why all these make money online bloggers come out with so much crap on a regular basis, they just need to say something so that they can have an excuse to sell you yet another crappy ebook.

But I’ll have to make an exception for this one: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-different-types-of-clients

This little gem popped up in my feed reader tonight. It won’t teach you much about internet marketing, but it might give you a bit of a chuckle. Take a look.

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I received a direct message today asking me to joining some sort of stay-at-home-wealth-formula programme. I politely declined, and informed the user that it really isn’t the best use of his time to be spamming his link on Twitter.

Twitter doesn’t have that big a userbase, and the people that are in it are like me and you. They are internet marketers, SEOs, web designers and graphic designers. I would say that most Twitter users are web-savvy.

It seems a waste of time to be marketing online riches to these types of people, when there’s a whole load of people in other areas online that are ripe for the picking.

And speaking of Twitter, I’ve been struggling to get my head around it. I see all these high profile bloggers saying how amazing it is, and how they posted one message for help and got a gazillion replies. But I never get anything like that.

I really need to build up my followers, but that takes so much effort that could be put to better use elsewhere.

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Not in this case, however. This time, I was talking to someone who didn’t think that there was any money in SEO. I say SEO, because this guy was an SEO.

He honestly didn’t believe that there was any point in SEO’ing his own sites.

He would quite happily do it for businesses and clients, but seemed to think that there was no point getting search engine traffic unless you had a “killer idea”. I find it hard to believe that someone who’s involved in the web development industry so much wouldn’t see the stupidity in that.

The thing is, I’m noticing this more and more. People don’t seem to recognise the potential in internet marketing. I’m an admin for a web design forum, and I often here people complaining about some web design problem they can’t solve and I just have to laugh.

We don’t have to deal with that sort of crap in internet marketing! Unless we want to of course.

Internet marketing isn’t about pretty pages, it’s about making money. And yet so many people miss out and try to start their own “web design” business or “graphics design” business. You’d think that these people would know better.

Ah well, we can’t complain. The less people in the game, the more money for us.

As for my internet marketing blitz, I’d say that was most definitely a success. Figures wise, it wasn’t so good. This was due to me having a couple of weekends away towards the end.

But the main thing is that this blitz taught me something about my life. I am destined to be an internet marketer. This isn’t just some pipe dream, this is who I’m supposed to be.

I never want to work for another company again. I just want to work for me, and I feel that so strongly now.

The blitz also helped me to focus all my efforts on my business, so much so that about halfway through it stopped being a “30 day blitz” because I realised that this was a new way for me to live.

I now put the majority of my time into the business, never mind about blitz’s! I just want to put in the maximum effort all the time.

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What I want to say in this post is that it only takes one idea to get the ball rolling. At the moment I’m investing time in building up a network of blogs, as opposed to a lot of people who would just make one blog and then hope for the best.

I’m also looking into four other ideas other than blogging to see if I can work out how to get them working. Whatever works for me will be scaled up, just rinse and repeat. If all 5 of my ideas don’t work, I’ll simply get 5 more.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. By working on multiple projects in different niches and using different marketing techniques, I increase my chances of success. The negative side of this would be to have so many different projects on the go that none of them move forward.

I haven’t got to that stage yet and I’m more than happy working on my 5 projects so we’ll see what happens. Watch this space.

This blog is here to share my experience of making money online. I hope that it’ll be an inspiration to other noobs, and that one day people will look back through the archives here and think, “this is how it all started”. One day I will be able to give advice, and great tips. But right now I’m concentrating on using those tips for my own benefit until I can get something to work.

What I will share with you is advice that I pick along the way. So this post is about building up a network. In a previous post I mentioned the importance of content, and how you need to just keep on creating content. I think that this is one surefire way of making money online.

No, it isn’t perhaps the best way, or the most intelligent way.

But it is one of the easiest ways, if you follow the right advice. Right now, I’m building up a network of blogs. I call it a network, but really the only thing these blogs have in common with each other is that they’re blogs.

I’m writing 2,500 words of content a day as I take part in the WebWriMo challenge, but I plan on continuing at this pace even when I’ve finished the challenge. At this rate, I can get a new blog up and running with all the content it needs (time stamped of course so that it has fresh new content each day) as well as keep writing for the other blogs I’ve already started.

This is only one of the things I’m involved in, but I hope that in 6 months time I can say that I have a few blogs to my name. Each blog can be developed in it’s own way, and be promoted into a profitable site. If not, well I can always sell them.

I think that there is something to be said for having “online real estate”. That is, online properties that you have created that continue to grow even if you’re not actively promoting them. If I want to take a break from blogging, all I have to do is stop making new blogs and have a good long writing session to give me enough content to last a few weeks for all my blogs.

And in that time the blogs will continue to grow and become more popular by themselves, providing I’ve done enough work in beforehand to get them to that stage.

Even if I don’t make a whole load of cash from this idea, I will have some kind of audience around each of sites as well as linking power. There is definitely power in numbers in this game, even if I only have 10 medium sized blogs, that’s still a way for me to break into whatever niche those blogs are in if I decide to at some point in the future when I get the skills.

So my message to you today is to get building. Build sites, build content. Content never gets old. The great thing is that even if you’re not a great marketer right now, one day you will be. And you’ll look back on the sites you’ve made that will be sitting with page rank, links, and some amount of a readership and think, “Damn, I can market the hell out of these!”

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