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: 90% [?]

A major advantage of social bookmarking sites is their complement to search engine optimization which is something no website can do without. Who doesn’t like being Google’s favorite? These social bookmarking websites are easy to use. They work wonders for generating massive traffic to your websites when you add a bookmark tool on your web pages. Your visitors do the rest of the work - the ones that come by read your content, love it, bookmark it with the bookmark tool, and start the link building process. Does that sound sweet?

You’ll find social bookmarking most popular at the social marketing sites mentioned earlier - YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Squidoo etc. one of the best ways to begin benefiting is to sign up with social networking sites that are suitable to your business and create a profile. To get the best out of your association, there are certain vital things you need to do that will help your website, which we’ll cover in a later part in this training series . If you are too impatient to wait, just go ahead and grab your copy of the complete Social Bookmarking Guide at right away.

Social bookmarking is a vital marketing strategy that has a major impact on the following for you, as an online marketer:

Links - You know inbound links are the biggest things that influence your website’s rankings. Using social bookmarking can give you millions of new inbound links to your website. And you what is really wonderful about these links? They are neither pushed nor forced nor bought - they happen independently and naturally.

Managing your reputation - Google just loves these social bookmarking sites. Depending on what you give your visitors to talk about on Digg, MySpace, YouTube and the like, you can literally shoot up in search engine listings very quickly.

Page Ranking - We all know just how long it can take for a new website to get ranked by the search engines. But with social bookmarking and media sites, you don’t have to wait. You can get the word out there by uploading videos on YouTube, creating profiles on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter -and build some links to these.

Search engine optimization or SEO - social bookmarking complements seo quite nicely. Here’s how it works - you bookmark your site or blog, creating an inbound link. Others visit and bookmark your content - so more links. Search engines love quality links. If your content is optimized well with the help of keywords - you are well on your way to seo success.

The collective outcome of the above benefits of social bookmarking is traffic that will convert to sales and profits. Mission accomplished! But how do you actually go around achieving what we’ve discussed above with the help of social bookmarking? You can get the complete guide right away and get started. Social Bookmarking Guide is an investment well worth it!

Popularity: 24% [?]

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: 22% [?]

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% [?]

One of the best tips to getting more money out of your website lies in the website itself. Many AdSense-enabled websites only generate a small amount of income because the website only has a few pages. Consider this. Suppose you have a website that has about 10 pages; chances are that you aren’t generating that much money. Now take your website and divide it into five sections and work towards adding more pages to each section. If you can add 300 pages of content to each section, that’s 1, 500 pages! With a few simple promotion tactics, you can start generating $30 a day from a single section. Compare that to the measly amount you get with a 10-page website.

Choosing Sides

An important thing to keep in mind is to make sure your website is divided into relevant sections. Most of them should deal with subjects pertaining to popular AdSense keywords or tools that people like to use. Let’s take a look at some of the sections you could incorporate into your website.

• Use a search page as your home page. It’s a useful section to have because a search page is something everyone uses. Many people click the AdSense ads that appear on search engines.
• Add a shopping section. Lots of people use the internet to shop online and to find information on buying something as small as a pair of shoes or as big as a house. Having a section dedicated solely to shopping is a great way to generate AdSense revenue.
• Computers are another useful section to have. A majority of computer users today don’t have much technical know-how. When it comes to virus issues, upgrading problems or just questions about new computer models, most people look to the internet to find more information. This is a perfect way to generate AdSense income with relevant computer ads.
• Have a finance section. This is a particularly hot topic- people are always searching for ways to either improve their credit, get out of debt or for new ways to invest. Coherent content and AdSense ads relating to credit and finance can result in some serious earnings for you.
• Other popular sections you can consider are cars, diets, loans, health and travel.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Regardless of which social bookmarking website you choose to use, the tips that follow will help generate traffic to your website. So lets move to the 5 steps:

Action Tips To Leverage Your Social Bookmarking Campaign

Now, you know what a job it is to appear on the home page of social bookmarking websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, etc. You also know that being there could mean massive traffic and links to your website, in addition to high search engine rankings. Well, its not the Holy Grail anymore, if you know how. You are about to! Read on:

Your Posts Must Have Good Titles

Ask any SEO expert - and they’ll tell you that it’s in the title. It, in this case, is the keyword or keywords. Did you put the keywords for which you want to be found in your title? Say yes, because that’s how the people who see your content or article on these sites will link to you - that is, through the titles. This gets your keywords in the anchor text. This increases your search rankings. It’s a neat cycle.

Keep It Short

If you’ve noticed, visitors on social bookmarking sites don’t have a whole lot of patience to read lengthy text. What you need to do then, is to create content that is interesting, short and easy to read. The first two lines must grab your reader’s eyeball and keep it till the end of your content. Then they might link to it, if they like it.

Use RSS Feeds

Social bookmarking site members are there for information. Not for ads or to do their shopping. That doesn’t mean you’ve lost them. Why not put an RSS feed button on your webpage so that they subscribe to your site, and also submit your site to the social bookmarking sites? You can also position ads in your RSS feeds. That’s more money, more pageviews and more subscribers.

It All Comes Back To The King, Content

Have lots of content or linkbait - the more the better. It enhances your chances of focussed traffic. On social bookmarking sites, users comment. Do away with obstacles like asking users to sign in before they comment. Rather, lure them to comment.

A Word About Coming Up With Content For Social Bookmarking Site Users Here:

As obvious as it sounds, users browse to read as much as they can. They don’t want to linger. So make it easy for them by formatting your content to ensure that they read it and hopefully link to it. No point writing a great article if it isn’t easy to read.

• Make use of paragraph headers that highlights important points
• Get the best out of top ten/five lists - people love it
• Use images instead of words where possible.

You must identify the social bookmarking and networking sites that work best for you. The biggest may not necessarily mean the best for you. So identify those niche sites that can bring you a whole lot of traffic and customers rather than lose time on the passive ones. Check the sites you would like to be associated with to see if the content gels with you. Look for sites where the activity level is high. After you identify the right sites, establish yourself by submitting content and build the community’s trust in you. This will naturally lead them to your website.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Buying SEO software can be a pretty intimidating proposition. With search engine optimization being such a complicated field, you naturally want to invest in a package that will help you without costing you lots of money. But doesn’t high-quality software cost a lot of money? In fact, can’t I just do my SEO by myself?

What Do You Want?

If these are some of the questions you’ve been asking yourself, it’s high time you sat down and figured out what exactly you want out of your SEO software. This can make it easier to narrow the field and choose the right software for you. If you’ve decided on SEO software, it’s probably because the services of SEO professionals are pretty expensive. But keep in mind that these software packages can be expensive too- the more advanced the model, the higher the price.

So the first thing you need to ask yourself is, ‘What do I want my SEO software to do for me?’ If you just want to use some simple SEO methods, then you can find a range of moderately priced, effective software packages. If you’re looking for something more advanced or want something specific out of your SEO, then you’ll need a more expensive, advanced model. In either case, look at the price in terms of returns. In other words, make sure that you’ll be able to make up the price of your investment in profits.

But Can’t I Do It All Myself?

This is something many people ask themselves. It’s only natural; basic SEO methods include things like doing link exchanges, developing unique content, distributing articles and analyzing links. Isn’t this something a person can do on their own? Technically, yes. But bear in mind that doing SEO manually is a very time-consuming affair. Also remember that these are just basic ‘traditional’ methods- the SEO playing field today is a lot faster and more complicated. For example, some time back it was enough to have a rich keyword density to get a good page ranking with Google or Yahoo. Now, if your content appears to be ’stuffed’ with keywords and key phrases, you could actually be penalized! SEO software takes care of all these factors for you. What might take you hours to collect and analyze can be done in a matter of minutes with the right software. Always make sure that you are comfortable with the software package you buy- something that is overtly complicated and confusing isn’t going to help you at all. Good SEO software is easy to understand and offers support services in case you have a problem. It will offer you free software upgrades as well.

Don’t let the vast and complicated world of SEO intimidate you! Just invest in some quality SEO software and let SEO work for you instead. Here is a list of both free and paid SEO software that should be helpful:

• WordTracker (powerful subscription-based tool)

• WebPosition (software you download)

• Trellian’s Keyword Discovery Tool (excellent subscription-based tool)

• SearchStatus (free - open source)

• SEO for Firefox (free Firefox extension)

• Digital Point’s Keyword Suggestion Tool (free tool)

• RankQuest (free)

• SEO Quake (free)

• Alexa (free information - useful to research competitors)

Popularity: 15% [?]

SEO helps to optimize keywords for your site. Many hours of hard work go into this process. You pick keywords and phrases, select some, discard others and so the process carries on and on till you zero down on the best keywords for your website. For this procedure, you employ the best keyword research tools and Viola! you have an exclusive marketing strategy at hand.

The Best Keyword Research Tools - Types

Though there are many keyword research tools, some are the best of the best. Let us see the best keyword research tools, know how they work and learn their key features:p>

• Trellian’s Keyword Discovery Tool: This keyword tool is considered good for keyword discovery. It captures data such as frequency of searchers, searches of exact keywords and key phrases, related key phrase searches, keyword density analysis, misspellings as well as seasonal trends, from more than 180 search engines. It is comprehensive, and has a database consisting of approx 30 billion searches in the last 12 months.
• SearchStatus: This is also one of the best keyword research tools. Developed by Quirk’s CEO, Craig Raw himself, it fulfills the specialized needs of search engine marketers. Also a toolbar extension, it assists you in your endeavor to know how other websites are performing. It is all the more wonderful, as it is an open-source product that requires no licensing fees. Now isn’t that awesome?

• SEO for Firefox: Although one of the relatively new best keyword research tools, this tool is getting popular by the day. It has an exclusive design that helps you add more data to Yahoo and Google! It gives you a complete picture of the marketing scenario online and the marketing strategies that are being used, by providing to you marketing data points and important SEO information. The negative point of this tool is that it uses a large bandwidth, though that is nothing that you cannot handle if you show some care.
• Digital Point’s Keyword Suggestion Tool: This tool is free. Counted one among the best keyword research tools, this tool displays results from Wordtracker as well as from Overture to help you to find the most commonly searched for keywords and keyphrases.
• Wordtracker: Also one among the best keyword research tools, an old timer in the field, it searches only meta-search engines. Wordtracker is excellent not only for its massive database of the most searched-for keywords, but it also has the ability to show you the related key phrases that you have given a miss. This keyword research tool is an organized one as well as it records the number of per day per keyword searches, keywords in competition with each other and much more in a tabulated form.

These are some of the keyword research tools at your disposal. Some even offer a free trial period, so take the best pick.

Popularity: 26% [?]