Articles are a powerful way to generate traffic, in addition to bringing you a whole lot of other benefits. When you post articles, you build credibility and trust which is very important for an online marketer. When readers believe what you have written, they don’t hesitate to click to your site and know more or sign up with you. You build a reputation with your niche market. When you are perceived as trust worthy, you also attract joint venture partners.

How do you write articles that will bring loads of traffic? Here are some tips:

• Your keyword rich articles must be focused to your niche market. Decide who should read your articles and write for them.
• An attention-grabbing headline with your primary keyword tucked into it is essential. People read the headline first, and if they find that it shows a benefit, decide to read the rest of the text. People love useful information, and you should write your title accordingly. Some suggestions are:
  • How to…
  • The complete guide to….
  • The truth about…
  • What you don’t know about ….
• Make sure your article has a proper introduction, flows well into the conclusion and states what action the reader should take after reading it.
• Your resource box at the end of the article is the most important component of your article next to the quality content. This resource box will have your contact information in the form of a link to your website. It must be worded in such a way that there is a call to action - depending on whether you want the reader to sign up for your ezine, purchase your product, claim a free report, etc. Your resource box is a lot like an ad so write it with care. Preferably use language your readers will identify with. You must include a benefit to encourage your reader to take immediate action.
• While there is no rule about the length of your article, generally about 500 words should be adequate. Don’t forget to include your keywords.

Articles are an efficient way to get back links and traffic to your website. If you already have a blog, you can always use your own content to write good articles and submit them to article directories. Article directories let you link back to your blog or website via the resource box so that they can generate traffic. Just make sure you have a headline that tempts the reader to get to the whole article.

One method to have your reader clicking to your website or blog is to post a part of the article and at the end, say “part 2 is at link” Your article must be divided at a point where the readers will quickly rush to your link to read the rest of it.

You can post your articles to your blog, your website and on forums. No Internet marketer can afford to ignore article marketing because keyword rich content is the single biggest traffic builder. Search engines love information in the form of articles especially if they are original and updated regularly.

Popularity: 92% [?]

In my last article, “Discover The Easy Way of Building Link Directories” I told you about how search engine optimized directory pages can attract more traffic to your website, when people search for those related products or services that you have listed on those directory pages. I also told you that by maintaining well laid-out and organized directory pages, you could get reciprocal links from those websites. Or, in other words, you can get more inbound links to your website.

Link Popularity Means High Page Ranks!

Let’s face it - the greater the number of links pointing to your website, the higher is your page rank with most search engines! Google, AltaVista, HotBot - they all use the number of inbound links parameter as a very important factor in determining your page rank. As such, link popularity still plays a vital role in getting those top ranks and search engine positions for your websites.

Moreover, if those links are coming from high quality, related websites, then there’s nothing better than that! Search engines will love your site if all your links - both inbound and outbound - are completely relevant to the content of your web pages! And if your inbound links come from pages having a high ranking, then that automatically increases your page rank too! If such high-ranking pages consider your site worthwhile enough for linking to it, then your site must be offering some really good content!

The Catch

The only catch here is that acquiring a decent number of legitimate inbound links, from good-quality, related websites, requires a considerable amount of ingenuity and expertise. You don’t want to irritate the search engines by accumulating generic links, so that they throw you off their grid completely! Neither do you want to end up linking to a banned website!

As we discussed in the previous email, accomplishing this task can consume a lot of energy and leave you tired, even more so when you have to maintain more than one website! Besides, there is always the time factor that is essential for gaining the upper hand over your competition.

Use Of SEO Software For Link Maintenance

Using a reputable SEO software program, for establishing and maintaining your link partnerships, can greatly ease the burden off your shoulders! It can accomplish within days what would manually take months to achieve! A good link maintenance program -

• keeps track of the locations you’ve already submitted your site to
• prevents being linked to banned websites and thus, keeps you out of trouble
• allows you to manage information about all the sites connected from your website
• generates highly targeted directory pages automatically, based on the information specified for your outgoing links
• automatically uploads the link files to your web server
• customizes the structure of your link pages through automatic category creation and management
• has an internal link check feature, that easily and conveniently ascertains whether your link partners still have reciprocal links to your site or if they have been dropped
• effectively manages all your link email campaigns - handles all email tasks of contacting and managing prospective link partners, and also keeps them notified of any updates

Popularity: 92% [?]

Are you using keywords that give you excellent returns?

Hopefully you already know that traffic is the secret to Internet success. Keywords are the easiest and the most effective way to attract hordes of traffic to your website. Why? Simple. Search engines crawl through your content and pick up your keywords. So, if you happen to use a popular keyword, you will be listed as often as the word is searched.

Next, how many keywords do you need per website? I’d say roughly 80-100! Your Blog or site is a collection of pages and each page should have a different set of unique keywords. The obvious advantage: each of your pages will be working to pull traffic, instead of just the index page or the “About Us” page doing all the work.

Using multiple keyword phrases will give you more numbers of filtered traffic.
Hint: Including your most relevant keyword or keyword phrase in your title works wonders in getting your pages ranked and listed.

So, what’s the secret behind selecting keywords that pull traffic?

Selecting targeted keywords or keyword phrases is a little tricky because of two things:

• You obviously don’t want to use words that nobody is looking for, unless it is a high-priced specialty item. So you have to devise a way to know what ‘phrases’ people are looking for. For example, using a word like ‘natural Isapgol Fiber’ will not pull many hits. Swap it for something like “Diet supplement for speedy weight loss” and you will see a drastic increase in web traffic. Why? Because that is the phrase people search for.
• You need to keep away from the top 10 generic keywords in your niche. Ranking among the top 10 for the most competitive keyword/keyword phrase in your niche may be impossible. For instance, using a keyword phrase like “Make money online” is highly competitive. It is extremely difficult to feature in the top 10 in this category unless you are doing solid work.

So, you want to select a keyword or phrase that gets a decent slice of traffic without being too competitive. A nice keyword that has low advertiser competition is something worthy of exploitation. This way, the keyword bids for paid searches through search engines like Google could be low.

Experts suggest that you should try to build 8-10 websites around certain keywords and go back to those sites that click. You can use a number of tools like Wordtracker or Google Keyword Selection Tool to find the half a dozen or so keywords to optimize for your webpage.

Type in your keyword in the service of choice. This will give you a list of total number of daily searches. Just multiply the figure with 30 for the average figures for a month. Try this with every tool you have, so you can filter your list down to the choicest few.

After that, it is time to dig deeper to collect a crop of related keywords. You can search for your keywords in Google and Yahoo listings. Then, look for keywords and phrases that your competitors are using in their meta tags and articles.

As you can see, keyword research is an important part of your duties if you want to make money online.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Link building takes time and effort but the long-term benefits are worth it. So how will you build link popularity for your site? That’s our focus for today.

In a previous article, “Why Should You Build Links?“, I talked about how important it is to build your site’s link value since it will increase your chances of getting linking requests and gradually get other sites to link to you, increasing your link popularity at the same time. There are certain things that you must bear in mind when you build link popularity:

• Go only for the relevant links. Quality scores over quantity any day and you need to ensure that the links pointing to your site are from web sites relevant to yours.
• List your website in all the major directories.
• Submit your website to the about.com site if it is relevant to a particular topic.
• Which sites link to your competitors? Find those and try getting them to link to yours.
• Make a list of links when you get in touch with related sites for linking.
• You can also try to get websites complementary to yours to link to you. if you sell dog food, then you might want to a website dealing in kennels to link to you.
• While visiting websites related to yours, if you comment on their guest books or participate in their forums, include your website URL in your signature.
• Write a testimonial for the website you want to link to you so that they can link to it on your website.
• Affiliate programs are a great way to build link popularity

Search engines prefer to see links that come naturally to your site and there are several ways to achieve link popularity, increase your search engine rankings and generate huge traffic to your site.

How Great Content Can Help With Link Popularity:

Just as search engines love natural inbound links, they also love quality content. This is a major factor that brings in natural back links. You can write keyword rich articles, publish them in high-ranking websites, and also submit them in article directories. By adding a resource box where there’s a link to your website, you can see a lot of traffic and inbound links.

Consider Blog Publishing

By starting a blog, you can post the kind of content you want your niche market to see. Unlike in article directories, you can also freely add links to your products or services where appropriate. Blogs can be submitted to blog and web directories enabling you build link popularity. In addition, RSS syndication will also make you more visible.

Posting In Forums:

These are search engine friendly places where you can sign up for free and provide useful content. Apart from the advantages of establishing yourself as an expert, you can also generate a lot of natural inbound links to your site through your signature file on the forum.

Obviously, there are plenty of other ways to build links to your site. High page ranking by the search engines equals traffic equals better conversion rates and profits.

Popularity: 33% [?]

While keyword optimization plays a vital role in getting you access to those coveted “top positions” in search results, competition analysis is an equally important factor too. Once we know exactly what our competitors are doing, only then can we figure out how to do it better than them! Therefore, the 3-step program to success is:

1. Search for your competitive websites
2. Analyze the competitive websites
3. Surpass your competitive websites

Now that we get the big picture of what we need to do, let us look into the details of each step.

Searching For Your Competition

This step is fairly easy. If you have already read “The #1 Keyword Secret That You Always Wanted To Know“, then you must have already worked out the most competitive keyword phrases in your particular product segment. So you must already be familiar with the list of keyword phrases that seem to be doing the trick for your competitors.

So simply search for those exact keyword phrases on various search engines, and make a list of the top websites displayed in the results. These are your competitors - the ones you have to beat, in order to get their traffic directed towards your website. You have to work your way up, to a position higher than these websites. How? Read on.

Analyzing the Competition

Analyzing the competitive websites in your market segment is probably the most difficult and the most time-consuming part of the process. That’s because you have to go through each of your competitive websites individually, for a whole set parameters, like:

• The design and layout of the site (color scheme, fonts, positioning of important page elements, level of interaction with the users)
• The keyword combinations on which the site pages have been optimized
• The content of the top ranking pages, and the positioning and density of keyword phrases in those pages
• Finding and analyzing the link partners of your competitive websites (how high they rank, the kind of content on their pages, their traffic, what kind of content pages on your competitive websites are they linking to)
• The product range of your competition, and the ways they have used to encourage their visitors to take action and become customers

As you can see, this is a mammoth task, requiring several man-hours of hard work per website you analyze.

Surpassing Your Competition

Once you have completed this process however, that’s when you reach the stage where you can actually work out ways to make your website better than your competitors in all respects mentioned above.

However, time is a crucial factor here. In today’s dynamic world, statistics tend to become “outdated” at the drop of a hat! So if it’s going to take you weeks, or even months, to go through the research and analysis of your competition, by the time you have worked out any substantial improvement methods for your own website, they would have made improvements in their websites too. You don’t expect them to be sitting idle, do you?

So the whole purpose of doing this elaborate research and analysis on your competition stands defeated if you cannot take advantage of their weaknesses right now! You have worked out what seems to be working for them and where they lack. So if you can act faster than them, and exploit their areas of weakness immediately, you can beat them at their own game.

Well then, is there any quicker method of doing the competition analysis? As a matter of fact, there is. There is a way to automate the entire process of competition research, analysis and implementation of improvements. Find out how you can do this with SEO Equalizer right now.

Popularity: 21% [?]

In my last article, “Discover The #1 Secret To Leverage Forums For Traffic“, I talked about forums and how you can leverage them for traffic through the content you post. Blogs can also be monetized through content. Blog marketing is a hot topic with internet marketers, so lets see how you too can get the best out of them.

Blogs are easy to start. Blogs are cheap Internet advertising strategies. You can start one for free on blogger.com, wordpress.com, etc. They are often a great alternative to building and maintaining a website. In fact, most Newbies in online business get started with a blog to get a feel of the whole thing and then plan bigger projects.

The success of blogs is mainly due to that thirst for information, which leads visitors to browse the Internet. Happily, the search engines also demand good quality content and since you need to rank high with the search engines so that they bring you focussed traffic, you can use blogs to achieve this.

Blogs are must-haves for Internet business success. Bloggers wield a lot of powerful influence because when someone is considering buying something, they prefer to turn to their favorite blogs for more information and product reviews and to express their concerns. People trust blogs and visit them regularly, especially when it is refreshed on a daily basis. See what we mean? Now lets move on to ways in which you can pull traffic using your blog.

• Your blog title and description must be keyword specific. When you sign up to start a blog, say at blogger.com, you are asked to give a title and a brief description. Here’s where you think hard. Based on who is your target audience and what topic you are passionate about writing on, you can do some quick keyword research with the help of a keyword research tool and name your blog.
• Generate keyword rich content for your blog. You want to be found by your niche market don’t you? Update your blog on a daily basis so that your visitors bookmark you and keep visiting to see what is new. While original posts are best, you can also use an automatically updating feed getting content from other blog posts and articles. With each post treated as its own page, to the search engines your blog will appear like a multi page website with regular fresh content that is rich in keywords and links.
• Your blog profile must be complete with information about yourself as a person. Visitors love to see that you are for real, what you like and dislike, your favorite things etc. Sprinkle in a few relevant keywords, too.
• While at it, you can also post on other blogs and link back to your blog. Make contact and start the process of relationship building. The more links you have to your blog, naturally the more traffic you will see.
• Allow people to subscribe to your blog through RSS feeds. The advantage is, your content will be delivered to your readers by their consent. Each time you post new content they are notified about it.
• Submit your blogs to RSS directories as a one time activity.
• Each time you update your blog, ping it to let the directories know.
• Preferably create an RSS reader of your own - it’s a good branding exercise for increased visibility.
• Consider pod casting. Technology changes by the day and you might like to keep up with it. There are pod casting services that can upload, store, host and set up the RSS and submit to directories as well as ping.
• Try video-blogging.

Blogs are probably the easiest way to be indexed by the search engines for your specific keywords, and are a great platform to launch your products, pre sell your products and keep in touch with your niche market.

Popularity: 27% [?]

As we all have well understood by now that traffic means business and business translates to profits, then the most important step in promoting our business becomes finding ways to bring in more traffic to our website.

We have already been through the strategies for optimization of our web pages for the most highly searched keyword phrases related to our products. We have also been through ways in which we can find and dominate our competitive websites. What next?

What Attracts Traffic?

That’s the question we need to ask now - what kind of information are the internet surfers looking for? Most surfers are browsing the net for pages that contain how to information or where to find something it! In other words, they are looking for free resources!

For example, if your website is about pet food, your visitors may also be interested in pet accessories or kennels. On the other hand, people who do a search for pet accessories may also be interested in re-stocking their pet food at the same time! This creates a valuable possibility for you to attract more traffic to your website.

If you have well built link directories on your website (to related products, though, and not your immediate competitors) then your website actually becomes a useful resource for your visitors. It finds a place in their bookmark list, which means direct one-way links to your website! With well-maintained link directory pages, you can attract as much as 15% of your traffic per day through these repeat visitors!

Not only that, it also gives you a chance to get reciprocal links from these websites. Once you put the link of a related quality website in your directory, and then send them an email asking for a reciprocal link, your chances of having your request accepted increases many times over! When these webmasters visit your well maintained link directory page, they are more than willing to share links with you!

The result is that you get added traffic from their visitors too, who may be interested in buying your products or services. And, if a visitor directly lands on one of the directory pages on your website, looking for pet accessories say, he may stop to buy some pet food from you too! So it’s a total win-win situation for you! These directory pages will obviously get a high search position if they are linked to related high-quality websites.

Time Consuming Process

Well, you will need to spend considerable amount of time and effort in finding good quality websites, visiting them, adding them to your directory and then sending each one of them customized email request for link partnership!

Moreover, you will also need to maintain the directory pages properly, with proper page titles and URLs. In other words, you will have to make sure those directory pages are search engine optimized, so that people actually land on them.

Besides, you don’t want those webmasters to see a haphazard, free-for-all, poorly organized link page. You will need to organize the links on the page into proper categories and labels, so that both the webmasters as well as the search engines love the page, and of course, your visitors too!

Popularity: 19% [?]

In this article, I am going to cover how you can select the best performing keywords and phrases for your business.

Before I go into that, let’s first discuss the purpose of setting up any business, virtual or real. A business is set up with the intention of making profits from it, right? And how can we make higher profits? There are several ways of doing this actually. The most important ways, however, are:

1. By cutting costs
2. By increasing sales

This article deals with both these methods of increasing revenues and turning your online venture into a money-minting enterprise! But first we’ll see how we can increase the sales volume by attracting more free traffic to your website with the use of correct keywords.

What Are Keywords?

When a person, belonging to the market segment you are targeting at, wants to search for your product on the internet, he opens up a search engine first, like Google, AltaVista, MSN, Yahoo or HotBot. He then enters a specific word, or a combination of words, to search for your product. Then, depending upon how well a particular webpage has been optimized for that specific combination of words, it is displayed in the search results. Needless to say, the better optimized pages are displayed first, and as such, they have a higher probability of a click through, leading to a potential sale.

Keyword Research And Analysis

This means that if you want to increase traffic to your website, you need to find out what keyword combinations in your industry are being searched for the most, and then optimize the pages in your site accordingly, so that they are displayed at the top positions in the search engine results. This is what is called keyword research and analysis.

In simple words, keyword research helps in searching for competitive keywords and phrases, and then analyzing those keywords and phrases in order to surpass your competition.

1. Keyword research helps you find the number of times a particular keyword has been searched for.
2. It also gives you the alternate phrases that can be used for a particular keyword.
3. Keyword research lists your various competing sites for that particular keyword.
4. It helps you track your website’s search engine position for the various keywords and phrases related to your product niche.
5. Keyword analysis helps you optimize your pages for certain keywords and phrases, based on keyword density and keyword location.

Use Of Automated SEO Software For Keyword Research And Analysis

By using some SEO software for keyword research and analysis, you are able to:

1. Completely automate the entire process of research, analysis, and optimization which is associated with highly targeted keywords
2. Quickly analyze why a particular website has a higher ranking for a certain keyword or phrase
3. Conduct a quick and easy automatic optimization of your web pages for the specified keyword phrases, turning them into lean and mean search engine magnets

Popularity: 19% [?]

A well designed link building campaign can rank your site high with the search engines, and also increase traffic to your website. When you link to quality sites, you will build your brand and receive a lot of exposure, with webmasters wanting to link to your site.

Back links or incoming links are links at other sites that lead to your site. They are one of the most vital components in the search engine optimization process. This is because search engines assess the importance of your website based on the quality of back links coming into your site. Link popularity tells you how many websites are linking to yours and you can check this with a free tool.

If there are a large number of links from related or complementary sites that already have a high search engine ranking, coming in to your website, then your website will also automatically rank high with the search engines.

To develop an effective linking strategy, the following will play an important role:

• The quality of your links
• The anchor text in these links
• The total number of links
• The quality of content on the page that has these links
• The number of outbound links on the page
• The page rank of the page your link is on

Search engines smile upon natural incoming links to your website. But how do you build incoming links naturally? How to make webmasters want to link to your site? There are sites that will offer to link to yours if you link to theirs, but this does not always work. Instead you need to focus on getting productive one-way links, since the idea here is to make the search engines happy. Here’s how you can add ‘link value’ to your site:

• Get related sites to link to you because your site offers value to their traffic. This is hard work but when you accomplish it, you can enjoy unprecedented traffic, better conversion rates and therefore, profits.
• Offer value to the website that can link to you by offering complementary products or services or useful information that the site can link to.
• Add special reports or guides to your website so that you can address a specific need.
• Publish articles, hints and tips based on what customers want. This material must be link worthy to your target market so that they want to link to you.

Popularity: 23% [?]

In this article I am going to describe and give you practical tips about different ways to bring focused traffic and build your lists. Do you have a list? If not, start building one right now. In affiliate marketing, no such traffic, no list. No list, no money. The equation is obvious.

Here’s part 1 to get you started immediately - How to bring in that traffic with blogs. It’s easy and you can do it now.

By the way, do you have a website? Then you must be constantly trying to find new ways to get focused traffic. Among different effective ways, blogs are amazing. Apart from the fact that search engines are partial to them, blogs can generate heavy traffic. Search engines index them frequently and it’s not hard to see why webmasters like blogs. For the affiliate marketer, blogs are cheap to start and maintain unlike websites.

You can add a blog to your website or start a blog on wordpress.com or blogger.com. These free resources can get you started right away. I personally like wordpress the best because there are so many plugins and features that the wordpress community has developed. It far outweighs any other CMS (content management system) out there.

Your blog must be relevant to your website topic or business to serve its purpose of attracting traffic. So if your website sells pet food, then your blog should be related to pets. The best way to bring traffic to your blog is by adding new content a minimum of four times a week. The most successful blogs are updated on a daily basis.

You need not necessarily write the content you add to your blog; you can also post free content or outsource the writing to a professional. Each blog post can be as short as 200 words or longer depending on what you are writing about. Your posts can be information, product reviews, tips, etc.

Since you want your blog to generate traffic, make sure you have a link to your website on the blog. It is also possible to link to your site through your blog posts. In addition to this, you must also link to content on your website so that people find it easy to go there.

Once you post content, you must get your blog indexed by the major search engines. The easiest way to do this is to post content daily. You can also submit to blog directories so that you can come up in specific searches. Here are specific action tips:

• You must post at least four posts a day with your keywords incorporated into it. You can use RSS 2 Blog to create multiple posts and post them at periodic intervals.
• To index your RSS feed, submit it to Google’s Reader and My Yahoo. Also submit your blog to directories like DMOZ. You can also get your feed listed.
• Link your blog to your website, and other relevant websites
• Pinging services can be used to show that your blog has a new post. On WordPress this happens automatically.
• Become a member through a free sign up with websites like Facebook, MySpace, and Ryze etc. and display a link to your blog. Facebook, MySpace and YouTube are websites that have the largest traffic statistics on the Internet and the search engines can find you easily. It is also advantageous in getting you a backlink ranked high.

Popularity: 20% [?]