Targeting the proper keywords and accumulating links is still a big part of the process, however, building a brand and developing authority goes way beyond finding keywords and putting them onto a webpage and getting a thousand links from any ole’ website.

We have Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, You Tube, and now Google+ as vehicles for developing an “authoritative” entity, and no matter what your product or service is, there are a thousand others competing for that top spot in the search results pages and you can be sure they are utilizing every tool and tactic available to get there.

Whether you consider yourself social or not, search engines are now usling Likes, Shares and Re-Tweets and Google Plus’ as metrics to calculate authority and determine placement in the results for keyword searches. There’s no way around it. Even if you are an established brick-and-mortar company you may not lose your brand authority but a keyword is a keyword and a link are still the major online monetary medium.

Folks will tell you that it is possible for anyone to “follow the rules” and build an authoritative site, and well, they are sort of right depending on what set of rules you may be talking about. SEO is still keywords and links but now you have to do the tweet thing, get liked, +’d, linkedIn and whatever else there is. Unless you are on the long-long-tail end of it, you will never be able to compete online with giants who seem to be able to operate above the law.

The SEO Cheatsheet

To get a little perspective, have a look at The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors, a very informative infographic from Search Engine Land. It is a SEO cheatsheet that outlines ranking factors and the tasks involved in addressing them. Keyword research and links just don’t cut it any more. Good luck stuffing this under your sleeve

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Search Engine Optimization or SEO is basically a set of rules one follows when developing a website. Rules that when followed properly produce optimal conditions for a website to be found on a search engine results page under the desired search queries.

Web Design requires a broad skill set that crosses over into several technical areas. On the one hand web design requires skills in markup languages such as HTML and CSS. Skills in developmental languages such as PHP, ASP, PERL and JavaScript can be necessary as well. On the other hand web design also, quite obviously, demands skills in traditional design and knowledge of design theory such as color coordination, principals of effective layout, content organization, fonts, and website usability. Other realms of mention would also be accessibility (for the deaf and blind) and mobil display.

My guess would be that out of the bazillion web pages on the internet very few (by percentage) address all of the above aspects effectively.

Many people making websites tend to have an area of expertise in either web design or SEO. Great looking sites that don’t show up in the search engines and crappy looking sites that rank well. I come from the school of make a good looking site and let the client worry about the search engines.

I used to have a “real job” but the company I worked for went belly up. It was a small company which grew REALLY fast then died, a fairly common scenario in this industry. Fortunately I was able to keep in touch with many of our clients after the fall, many of whom had previously relied on me to keep their sites updated. Even though I was able to continue to earn a living as a freelance web designer and web master I saw many of these websites and companies die in a similar manner and it made me realize that something important was missing. TRAFFIC. Without traffic it really doesn’t matter how good a website looks because no one is going to see it. This frustrated me to no end and was the catalyst to my search for how to get it.

Who needs SEO Web Design

I am by no means an SEO expert or a guru but I have definitely picked up a few things along the way. I didn’t go to design school either, however I have built over 300 websites from the ground up for clients that span a very wide range of internet needs and from what I have experienced, most people either just don’t care or they don’t make the connection of how important SEO really is to their business.

There is a meticulous focus on design, “move that one pixel to the left”, “change that color from 246-57-102 to 247-56-102″. After the site is all pretty and tweaking is complete the site is posted and the press releases are sent. Meanwhile the page title, description and keyword meta tags are BLANK (I do this a lot in order to remind myself to ask the client about it later). Recently I tried doing some research myself and when the client got the invoice and saw that I spent an hour doing keyword research they threatened to not pay for it… “the site is about hedge funds, just put that in the title and the keywords thingy, and for the description just put something like expertly managed hedge funds”. ouch…

Bumps on the Road to Effective SEO Web Design

After overhearing a conversation or reading some related article many people discover the concept of keywords and SEO. Then without further research they go about filling in the page title, description, and keyword meta tags. I have seen this hundreds of times; the title is either the URL or the name of the company, the description is a nicely thought out, concise two or three sentences that describe the product or service, and the keywords are precise. Then they proceed to put these on every page, the same exact title, description and keywords on every page. Sometimes they will put a dash in the title and complete the URL such as companyname-about, companyname-contact, etc… Plus the keywords they choose have no relation to what people are actually searching for at the search engines. This is not the best way to go about SEO.

The keywords research tools available to non-programmers today are 1000% better than what was available even three years ago. Still, no one can deny what an immense ocean of words the internet is, so to think that your site will be found because you put one specific word in the keywords meta tag is fairly ridiculous.

No matter how pretty a site design is, you’ve got to work the right keywords or no one will ever see it.

A keyword is what someone types into the box when they are at a search engine such as Google.

SEO is for “robots”, programs (not people) that look at your pages and determine what they are about. They record the content then process it through huge algorithms that determine where it will show up in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

First Steps to Effective SEO Web Design

Use the free Adwords Keyword Tool (Google It) to search for the words that are getting good amounts of monthly search traffic.

• Find your sites main keyword.
• Find relevant, supporting, keywords to your business and location
• Place page keywords in page title, the description and keywords meta tags, the page header, and at least twice in the page content.

SEO no no’s

• Don’t dilute the relevant keywords by putting non-relevant keywords into the page title, description, and keywords meta tags.
• Don’t use the same meta description and page title on every page.
• Don’t stuff keywords into the content for the sake of repatition, this could actually do damage to your search engine ranking.

On-Site and Off-Site Optimization

On-site SEO will optimize your site to be indexed under the correct search terms.

Off-site SEO is what will beat up your competition and move your site to page one on Google for your main if not all you targeted keywords.

Focus on the on-site SEO first. Here are the rules……

• Focus on one keyword per page. Toss in supporting, related keywords.
• Use the keyword in the HTML page title tag.
• Use the keyword in the page header. Using the <h1> or <h2> tag is best practice but not really necessary.
• Use the keyword in the file name… keyword.html
• Put the keyword in the content of the page. No need to mention a keyword more than once as was once believed.

That’s all there really is to it.

The big pay off is in off-site SEO and link building.

SEO web design may seem like two separate diciplines however in my humble opinion you really can’t have one without the other.

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Link building is something that every knowledgeable webmaster should know about. One of the more popular link building strategies is the process of putting a link to another website on your own page in exchange for a link to your site from them. This is called reciprocal linking. There are entire companies that focus solely on this and will provide link building services for huge monthly fees.

If you’ve just put up a website and are trying to get it noticed, link building will be most successful if you approach other websites of a similar size and style to your own. Chances are they will be just as interested in working with you as you are with them. It may be difficult to get a reciprocal link request for your one week old dog biscuits store from a national powerhouse such as the Humane Society so begin by staying in your own web neighborhood and build links up slowly. You should also begin a one way link building strategy. You also need to find related keywords and what are termed as long tail keywords. The longer terms will have less search volume but if used properly they can help the slow process of building a sites authority.

Personal blog sites are great for link building because there are so many of them. You can usually find one that relates to your site in some way or another. One tip to remember is that links from related sites will always be more powerful than links from a non-related site. Also, one way link building is usually more powerful than exchanging reciprocal links.

Focusing on sites that relate to your site will make it more likely that your links will be clicked on. And once visitors are on your website, they will be more likely to stay around and browse.

Reciprocal linking is just one type of link building and is not necessarily the most powerful. It has been said that getting a one way link to your site that uses your keyword as the anchor text within the natural flow of language in an article on a related topic that has your keyword in it’s title is indeed the most powerful type of link building strategy. It has also been said that focusing too much on getting links to your homepage is not as powerful as getting links to ALL your pages. These are things you just can’t do with link building software so do not be enticed to take or try to find any short cuts here. The most natural way to do this is of course to write compelling content. Write stuff that people want to link to simply because it is useful or entertaining.

There are many little tricks to SEO and even though no one REALLY knows how the search engines divvy up the juice the above techniques have been tried and proven to work time and time again. SEO tips and tricks are not hard to find, just do a search on the terms and see what you get.

If you really want to find out how to rank within your choosen realm, do a search on your main keyword, go to the number one site and check out how they’re doing it. What is their page rank? How much link building have they done. If a site is on the top spot at Google you can be assured they know their SEO. If they don’t…. you’re in LUCK.

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Links are the bullion of internet traffic. The more links pointing to a website the more authority and rank that site will have which directly effects its position in the search engines for the terms being searched. The higher up in the search engines a site is the more traffic it will receive. Obviously moving up to page 300 from page 400 will not yield much more traffic however, once a site starts climbing up to the top ten where the competition is very heavy, every little link counts. Keep in mind that his uphill climb is on a keyword to keyword basis.

Submitting articles to article directories such as Ezine, GoArticles, HubPages, and Squidoo, provides you with the opportunity to build links to your website. Select the keyword you would like to rank for. Now write an effective article using your primary and secondary (cousin) keywords. Do not over saturate your article with unnecessary keywords, just write naturally and make an attempt at being interesting for readers and the related long tail keywords will occur naturally. You should pay special attention to the title of your article. Select a title which will attract any readers attention. Unlike your own website where you need to use the main keyword in the title of the article, keep in mind that the article will reside on a site which most likely already ranks for many keywords and your article will most likely be in a related category listing. Go for an effective, memorable title, if your keyword happens to fit in naturally that’s good, if it doesn’t, don’t sweat it. As long as the article delivers what the title promises you are in good shape.

While writing the article, make sure to use your primary keyword at least once in the first sentence of your article body and possibly once within the last 100 words. Don’t get all whacked out on keyword density, write naturally and stay on topic.

Last but not the least you need to write an effective resource box for your article. You are usually allowed about two sentences about the author and the website you would like to promote. Most directories will allow 2 anchored links in the resource box, use them wisely. If you don’t know what a resource box should look like, just check out some of the other submissions on the directory you are submitting to. You should also consider that many directories do not allow links, anywhere, so you may want to include the URL written out as well. This way if your anchored link gets cut the text version will remain.

The best kind of link you can give yourself is one that uses your keyword as the anchor text, for example… web design, would be a good one for this site.

There are hundreds and hundreds of article directories. Many people will put the same article on a hundred sites expecting to see a hundred links pointing to their site in a few weeks. This tactic used to work but now there are duplicate content penalties which could result in turning your work into a waist of time. Other tactics such as article “spinning” are suspect as well. Article spinning is usually done with an application where you provide two or more versions of each sentence and the application will randomize them to produce 50 or so “unique” articles. These tactics have been used with varying degrees of success depending on who you are talking to. Some claim to have reached the number one spot for their keyword through mass article marketing.

Submitting an article to a hundred directories takes a lot of time which is why there are now many services that have automated the process. These services tend to be somewhat expensive however the claim is that in the long run, if your websites are monetized properly, the benefits far outweigh the monthly subscription. Many of these services will spin your article and send random versions to over 500 directories.

Article marketing services seem to be a great way to get a large amount of links very fast. Article Marketer, Unique Article Wizard, and Jet Submitter are just a few of the services that will distribute your article to hundreds of web sites yielding hundreds of links to your website. These services recommend writing at least one article and submitting to their massive list of article directories every week. Considering that building links to your site is perhaps the most powerful way to attain page authority and gain better ranking in the search engine results pages, these automated services sound like an awesome deal.

The reality though, in my opinion, is that this mass production of articles written only as a vehicle for a link is saturating the internet with crap. Articles written for the Google bot for the sole purpose of getting a link with no regard to being the least bit useful, entertaining, or original. The search engines are on to this as well and we have seen many shoddy directories drop in rank lately due to all the crap articles with perfectly optimized links piling up.

I still believe article marketing is a powerful tool. There are some directories such as Ezine articles which have strict guidelines that must be followed before an article is accepted and the search engines love them for this. Use article marketing wisely and it will work. Taking shortcuts could be detrimental. Write articles for people first then sprinkle in some robot talk to be sure the article works for you. Sure it’s a lot of work but what worth while ventures aren’t these days.

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I have a business that picks up in the summer then dwindles down in the winter, not sure why because weather has absolutely nothing to do with the work. I’m in front of a computer all day. Anyways I’ve been to the school of the Griz and am a member of the Keyword Academy now so, like any idiot with a little knowledge, I think I know what I’m doing. (keyword = think). It makes sense to me now but the work necessary to accumulate momentum and make money and work from home is pretty heavy… I suppose that’s better than ugly heavy… or pretty ugly (does that make sense?) whatever. I am currently working a bunch of “green” keywords on a handful of sites and beginning to see some progress however, it’s taken me a little over a year and this is my third round of domain names.

Round one – low competition but otherwise useless keywords:

My first attempt at trying to make money online yielded three completely useless domain names and one that actually works. Two of the useless ones are on page one of the SERPs for their main keyword but if I told you what they were you’d laugh. Here I tought I was getting some great domains because they were subjects I thought were cool and I knew there would be no competition… and there wasn’t. They don’t get any traffic either. Pretty cool, top spot at Google, 130 hits a day, public service ads. They have NOTHING to do with ANYTHING closely resembling a product or some type of usefull consumer oriented information. My mom thinks one of them is “nice”. Just so you know, when you get a public service ad that means Google just doesn’t have any ads that match the subject matter of the site. I suppose I could try to target more useful keywords but that would be like writing about baseball on a site titled lefthandedknitting.com.

One is a BANS and it actually does a dollar a day. I like that one and hang on to it just because its a BANS. BANS was an awesome thing, mine has paid for itself several times over.

Round two – highly competitive, consumer oriented but general keywords that have a huge search volume:

My second attempt occurred after the giant coffee cup that is make money online for beginners. Here I got a clue. I’d found a decent source of information with some no-brains-necessary step-by-step instructions as well as a lot of theory on SEO, affiliate marketing, Adsense, lots of snow and golf. But I am a slow learner when it comes to pure intellectual absorption, I need the hands on approach.

This 2nd round yielded about 10 or so new websites of which 3 had a chance to actually make money in a niche market. The other 7 sites were OK but the subject matter was so broad that I didn’t know where to start. My intent was to focus on the long-tails of a fairly wide niche market. I got a bunch of articles up but then realized that these niche markets were just too much for me at the time. One started getting some traffic and I was getting a better idea of how to find related keywords that I was capable of working. Then summer happened and my job became hell again. All my clients just wake up in May and start sending me stuff to do… all at once. One day I’m sleeping till 10 and having an easy day of writing and reading, playing with the dog. Then all of a sudden I’m working 12-14 hours a day and still have clients peeved at me because I can’t do 40 things at once. 39 is my limit. I do catch up on occasion but the in-box doesn’t sleep in the colder months here. Money is nice, but couldn’t they just get together and space out the requests a little better.

I didn’t really put into that last batch of websites what they deserved and so the traffic was just not happening. I do what Griz says and wait until there is around 100 uniques a day before I do Adsense. I also did a little cheating where I used some private label content. I would edit the first paragraph and the last paragraph then post on a site. I also tried Unique Article Wizard articles using the plugin. I now had a site or two with 50+ articles. One of the sites started getting around 120 uniques a day so I put a 366×280 on top there and waited a few days. A funny thing happened though, one of my round one, top of the SERPs sites disappeared. This site had no ads on it, gone. Hmmm, so I took the ad off the PLR site and the next day the round one site was back, position one. Whoa. So I tried it again and the same thing happened. WTF. Pretty sure it had something to do with the fact that the content was not 100% original on either site???? Anyways, I’ll deal with those someday. Right now I’m on round three.

Round three – long tail, low competition, decent volume “green” keywords in the domain name and on the page:

Round three started about four months ago after discovering the Keyword Academy (KWA). Court and Mark are honorable dudes and will show you their method of how to make money online. I discovered some major flaws in my keyword selection process as well as several other aspects of my approach. I’m SURE I would have figured it all out eventually (2050 A.D.) but these guys are real heros in my book. Round three yielded 13 new sites. I’ve got the standard 5 articles, 3 categories, and 25 or so tags. I’ve done Ezines, GoArticles and will get to Bloggers soon. Did some linking via the Grizz exchange page and will start next on the KWA sites. It’s a lot of writing but I think I’m getting a little better as time goes on.

As it turns out, 3 of the round two sites, the real broad subjects, seem to be great candidates for the “super site” technique. I’m toying with the idea of opening one of them to KWA members, just another place for people with sites in the niche to get some links.

So, that’s where I am. I have about 30 domains, 3 of which are completely useless though fun if you like that sort of thing, 3 are a little bit better and at least have consumer related subjects, 7 really broad topics, about 10 pretty good KWA style sites, this one and a few more I just haven’t done much of anything with yet… they’re “aging”.

This is a hell of a lot of work starring at me. Winter is coming but damn, building links, writing content (no more PLR for me), making supporting sites and all the other lovely stuff you have to do to get some momentum rolling is seven winters of work. I think of new stuff I want to do every day but I know I’ll have to invent a third arm or an eight-hours-of-sleep pill to get to it all. And the seasonal opportunities that pop up, you have to be on your toes to be able to leverage that as well.

Outsourcing: Haven’t gone there yet. I hear good things and I hear bad things. I may try it in the near future but will be sure to use Copyspace or Plagiarism Checker on them. I hear Dupe Content is really good.

So, what have I learned about how to make money online with Adsense?

Pick the right keywords and work until your fingers are bloody stubs. Make friends with like minded people. Stay as close to the white side of the gray hat as possible because mama G owns everything now. Pick the right keywords and work until your fingers are bloody stubs. Yes, I said that twice.

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The word niche is derived from a French term nichier (to nest) or from the Italian nicchio (seashell).

According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, and in regards to internet marketing, a niche is

“A situation or activity specially suited to a person’s interests, abilities, or nature.” and “A special area of demand for a product or service.”

Finding a niche is easy for some and difficult for others. Mozart found his niche fairly early in life while on the other hand I know some people who are in their forties and still haven’t found their niche, then again, I suppose sitting on the couch and watching sports could be considered a niche. However, in the realm of internet marketing, niche has a different meaning altogether.

Niche marketing and more specifically affiliate marketing is all about finding profitable niches. Weight loss, insurance, make money online, and web design are all considered niches. They are all quite profitable niche markets as well if you know how to properly monetize a website. However, these niche markets are also massively competitive and even the most adept guru would have difficulty making a profitable website from scratch with any of these. And good luck finding an available domain name that has the niche name in it.

So how do you go about finding a profitable niche these days? A good place to start is Goggle. There is an adwords tool that anyone can use for free here https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Start off by brainstorming some general topics, enter the topic word or words into the tool and hit the Get keyword ideas button. When your list of keywords comes up be sure to select “Exact” from the Match Type dropdown. In the choose columns to display drop-down select Estimated Avg. CPC. Now your ready.

The two most important columns are the Estimated Avg. CPC and the Global Monthly Search. The CPC column shows how much a click on an ad that targets that keyword is worth. The Global Monthly Search column show how many searches there are for that keyword. The trick to finding a niche is to find a keyword to target that a) pays well b) gets a lot of monthly searches and c) is not too competitive for you.

If you were to target weight loss, which definitely pays well and gets a ton of searches, you would be up against the heaviest of the heavy weights (pardon the pun) in internet niche and affiliate marketing. If you do a Goggle search on weight loss there isn’t a site on page one of the results that has less than a page rank of 4. There are PR6 sites even on the 6th page of the results. This basically means that in order to get any traffic at all to your site you would have to have it optimized perfectly, get about 20,000 other sites to link to it using “weight loss” or “lose weight” or some other variation as the anchor text and then post a new article every day for the next six months targeting your main keyword and fifty other related ones as well. Its doable but very few people have the time and determination for that kind of effort.

Long-tail keywords are a much easier prey. Weight Loss in Boston, Lose Weight Watching TV, and How to Lose Weight While Frying An Egg are examples of long-tail keywords. These are much harder to find but much easier to get to the front of a search results page. And that’s where a site needs to be in order to get decent traffic. People don’t generally click through to page 7 of the Goggle search results pages, they generally click on one of the first 3 or 4 listings.

Once you have found a niche you are comfortable with, one that is not too competitive, gets a decent amount of monthly searches and pays pretty well it is time to hunt for a suitable domain name. Your domain name should contain your main keyword, it obviously doesn’t have to but it has been proven to help immensely. Now all you need to do is build the site and monetize it with clinkbank offers or Adsense or one of the hundreds of other ways to make your site profitable.

Sounds simple doesn’t it. Well don’t let me give you the wrong impression as this is a very brief description, a general overview of what is involved when attempting to make money online. The internet is packed full of much more in depth information on keyword selection, on-site SEO, off-site SEO, website building, and site monetization. The best place to start however is to identify your niche market.

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George Russell was/is a legend in his own time. But like most things in Jazz music these days only a select few know about George Russell and the enormous impact he had on us. His Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization was his life work and his gift to music. The “Concept” was respected by jazz artists such as Miles Davis who used it as inspiration for his ground-breaking 1964 record All Blues.

George Russell was an intellectual. He could see and hear the Big Picture and was able to conceptualize and communicate theoretical nuances in a way that changed how many people viewed western musical theory in general. The concept challenged how we have learned and how we are taught music theory. This pissed a lot of people off : ) It also created a new generation of theorists who are quite passionate about his concept. My impression is that the concept itself is simple however, it’s ramifications and its application can become very, very complex.

I was honored to meet Mr. Russell several times and found him to be gentle, unassuming and very willing to point out and acknowledge other peoples better qualities. He had a reverence for music that just oozed out of him and got all over you. He was very cool.

I made georgerussell.com and lydianchromaticconcept.com in 2003 and under the guidance of his wife Alice, I kept the sites up to date until just recently. I consider myself very lucky to have been involved in what I think is a step forward in the evolution of the human race.

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This site was online with one page for about 4 years then it disappeared. The domain is still there but no site to speak of.

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One of my best friends, Scott Palmer, had just landed the gig with JBB. What a totally perfect fit. I played with Scott Palmer for years and knew his style quite well, the first time I saw him with JBB I knew before I arrived that he acclimated to the new project… you could feel the thunder before you even walked into the club. I’d been Palmerized, his bass OWNED the club, the Paradise on Comm. ave. He had 800 watts pouring out of two SVT cabinets. The thing is, his style is laid back and can be minimalistic so no other musicians were overpowered. What an awesome band that was, IS?  Haven’t seen the new incarnation yet, looking forward to it though.

Anyways, this was my first freelance website design project, post Stumpworld, and it really helped me get situated to my new situation.

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