Websites that achieve high natural searches are highly dependent on using the best most relevant keywords.  In addition you must optimize each page of your website with keywords that are not too competitive yet generate targeted traffic to your website.

The process of finding these keywords is called keyword optimization.

Why is it important? 

Because using the right keywords attracts the viewers most interested in the items or services on your website. You will also achieve higher search engine ranking for your chosen keywords, saving you thousands of dollars in advertising.

It all starts, however, with the finding the most appropriate and relevant keywords pertaining to your product or services.

When selecting keywords you should select 1 perhaps 2 of the most relevant keywords for each page of your site. I suggest using no more than two keywords per page, preferably one.

Why?

Because search engines strive to deliver the most relevant pages for the search term entered. The more focused your page is for the search term, the more relevant the search engines will find your page. The more keywords you use, the less focused your page becomes.

How do you find keywords that your target audience will use?

- Think like your readers. Take yourself outside your site for a minute and think about how you would find the products or services you are selling.

- Use the Wordtracker Keyword Research tool and type in your most basic keyword. It will show you the variations of the search term and also the count of how many times that term was entered in the search engine.

- Think of phrases as opposed to one single word. If you sell clay pots, think of keywords such as painted clay pots, or clay flower pots, large clay pots, buy clay pots. Use descriptive words when brainstorming phrases.

- Ask your relatives, kids and friends what they would type in to find your products. You would be amazed at the great ideas that can be generated. For example, I asked a teenager once what he would type in to find shoes online and he said 'nice kicks'. As of this writing, Wordtracker shows a count of 155 searches a day for 'nice kicks'. I never would have found that keyword on my own.

- Use a thesaurus or Webster's dictionary to find similar words to your chosen keywords. Consider all forms of the word. For example, for the term supply there is supply, supplies, supplier, supplying. Thinking of all forms of the word help a great deal in brainstorming keyword ideas.

- Provide a search box on your website that allows your visitors to search your website.  Sites such as Freefind allow you to not only provide a site search engine for your website they will help you collect data on what keywords users are using. Once you've collected a good list of search terms you can use this to help you determine the best keywords.

You can also use your website server logs to gather information on the keywords that visitors use to find your website.

Once you've made a list of the best keywords and keyword phrases, you will need to determine which ones are the best.

Your challenge is to find keywords that have a high usage count but appear on the least amount of competing web pages.

 Wordtracker's 'Keyword Effectiveness Index' (KEI) will provide you with the number of times a keyword is used along with the number of competing web pages. The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition. This means a better chance for you in getting to the top of the search engines.

Finding the best keywords and keyword phrases is an important part of your marketing mix. Finding the best keywords and building your content around those keywords is your ticket to higher search engine ranking and less advertising costs.

Effective link building strategies for your website include both on-page link building methods as well as off-page methods.

Proper use of these methods will help you optimize both you on site links and help you build high value backlinks.

Today we’ll review some of the effective and not so effective link building strategies and how to best use them.

1. Reciprocal linking

This strategy involves exchanging links with other sites.

Contrary to popular belief this strategy does still provide some benefit, but its minimal.

Asking someone to exchange links often means they will put your link in a sidebar, footer or a links resource page with several other links.   Since the search engines put greater value on links contained in content rather than in side bars, footers or on links exchange pages, which is where a reciprocal link typically goes, the benefit is lost.

2. Write articles and submit them to sites that accept articles

Submit your articles with your resource box containing your name and website address. Article sites often have high page rank. Also, if someone decides to use your article on their site or in their newsletter you’ve just received a new inbound link.

3. Write product testimonials

If you use a product or service that you like, write a testimonial and submit it to the product owner or manufacturer.  If they use it on their website ask they they include a live link to your website or web page in exchange for the testimonial

You will not only gain an inbound link, you can draw traffic from those that read your testimonial.

4. Use your own website’s navigation as a linking strategy

Every page of your site should include links to your most important pages.  Implement good web page optimization methods that includes a site map, proper  site navigation and proper use of tags.

5. Create useful and unique content on your website that will compel others to link to you

How well your content is written and how useful it is will determine whether others link to it.  When people read things that they can learn from or find value in they will reference it in their writing and on their websites.

This will not only help improve your link popularity but it will also satisfy the search engines and increase your keyword search ranking.

6. Join Forums

Search the web for forums that relate to your niche or site’s topic.  Once you find 3 or 4 forums that you like sign up for each one and be a contributor there.  Ask questions, share your knowledge and join discussions.

If the forum allows for a signature link, be sure to include it.  This signature link will be included with your name every time you make a comment on the forum.

Don’t spam the forums with useless comments or dissertations that users find boring.  Most forum moderators will simply delete those types of entries and they just might delete you altogether. T

Most online businesses appreciate being able to do things themselves …I know I do. It not only saves me money but I learn a few things along the way  

SEO isn't hard; it's just a matter of knowing the key strategies, understanding why they work and putting them into practice.  As soon as you start doing them they'll become second nature to you and pretty soon you'll be doing them without even thinking about it. 

So if you've got a website and want to optimize it without hiring a professional or using expensive tools, here's what you need to do …       

Use Your Best Keywords
This is a pretty important one and you should really take your time to examine your options. For example, each page of your site should be optimized for the best keywords possible.  Start by 'summing up' what the page is really about, then ask yourself what keywords accurately describe the content.  Once you have a good list of about 2 or 3 keyword phrases use a keyword tool like Wordtracker to determine which keywords get the most searches and have the least amount of competing web pages.

Learn to stay away from general words like pets, candy, shoes, computers; instead look for niche long tail keywords like 'women’s red tennis shoes' or 'black licorice candy sticks'.  Long tail phrases like this target several keywords, for example, ‘black licorice candy sticks' includes the keywords, 'black licorice', 'licorice candy' and 'licorice candy sticks'.

Create Search Engine Friendly Content
The search engines have always looked for content however it's more important than ever.  That means you have to focus on creating only good, quality content that is unique and useful. 

You also have to make sure the search engines can read it. Flash content or text embedded in images can't be read by the search engines. You're far better off using anchor text and make use of 'alt' text in your images.   Also use your best keywords that you wish to rank high for in the body of your text, use heading tags correctly and don't try to hide text by blending it into the background of the page.

Ensure Your Content Gets Indexed
Once you create content and upload it to your site or blog, check to see if it has been indexed by the search engines.  This may take a few days, however if you don't get indexed it may be because the site is still fairly new, there may be duplicate content, there may be links generated by JavaScript instead of HTML, it could have poor site architecture or has orphaned pages or various other factors.  If your site isn't getting indexed try writing to Google and asking them. Their responses can sometimes be a little cryptic but sometimes they do provide a few good suggestions. 

Get inbound links
Inbound links are simply your links that appear on other websites. If you have lots of quality sites that display your website's URL the search engines determine this as a vote for your site.  There are lots of ways to get inbound links, all of which are completely free methods.  However those sites that contain your link should be well-established sites that have quality ranking themselves.

Exchanging links with other sites is still an acceptable method but there are much better ways.  Keep in mind that using link farms and buying links are frowned upon with the search engines so avoid them.  Here are the methods that work best:  

• Submit to directories like Yahoo! Bizdirectory.org, DMOZ, Joeant.com and others
• Find blogs that relate to your site’s topic and make constructive comments or ask questions.
• Write articles that contain your website link and submit them to relevant websites and article directories
• Submit a press release that creates a backlink to your site. 

Start participating in social media and bookmarking communities
Social media and bookmarking is pretty new but it's creating quite a buzz and sites using them are experiencing some amazing traffic results. Social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Furl, Digg, Del.icio.us Reddit, and Technorati provide users a way to store their favorite pages and media online plus share it with others.

In addition services like Facebook and Myspace provide services for creating a comprehensive profile that gives you a way to promote your content which in turn helps you create your own personal "buzz" throughout the internet. 

A word of advice, social communities won't do much for you if you are pushing or promoting products.  Social media is based solely on popularity, so if what you are sharing with people isn't interesting, unique and of interest to them you won't generate much interest. 

If you're pretty much on track with all of the above suggestions …and I hope you are, but you need to get on a faster track, then you're probably an excellent candidate for Traffic Secrets 2.0.  It's designed for the user that needs more of a competitive edge by getting the high octane strategies that can sky rocket your traffic.  It's definitely worth a peek.   

You've got nothing to lose except tons of traffic.

One of the things that's important to the success of your website, but often overlooked, is your website's structure. Today the search engines place fairly hefty weight on how your site is laid out, what components are included and your content.

Let's start with one of the basic components that easily get out of whack for most sites — directory structure…     

Before you begin building your website, sit down with a pencil and paper and map out what topics your site will include.  Your main topics should be included in your site's navigation.  Each topic should link to a separate page.   Don't try to include too much varying information on a page, instead divide your information into chunks and link each chunk to a separate sub-page.  

Try to keep your links no deeper than 3 pages deep as the search engines rarely index beyond that. 

Your Website Keywords
Your site has an overall theme or niche for which your site's domain name should reflect the best keyword.  If your site is about 'running shoes', then the words 'running shoes' should be in your domain name. It is imperative that you find not only relevant keywords but the keywords that will get you the most traffic.  That's why Wordtracker is my tool of choice.  Another pretty good tool is Google's Keyword tool, which is free

Next, each page of your site should reflect what is called your long tail keywords. 

For example, a site about running shoes should have ‘running shoes’ in the domain name.  A page talking about 'how to buy running shoes' might look like this:

http://www.runningshoes.com/how-to-buy-running-shoes.html

Your Title, Description & H1 Tags

It's a big deal to be #1 on the search engines but not everyone at the #1 spot gets the clicks they expect, that's often because their title and description tags fail them, meaning the title and description aren’t compelling enough to warrant enough interest. 

How unfortunate is that!

Your title tag should contain a clear title for your page that also contains your best keywords, but also think of the title tag as if it were an ad because this is what the search engines will use as the link descriptor to your site, so it's to your advantage to make it something that encourages a click. Keep the title to about 5-10 words, anything longer than 65 characters will get cut off so keep it short and direct.

I recommend creating a separate description for each page; your description can also influence the reader to click so again use your same keyword phrase as in the title tag and use a description that expands on your title tag. 

Your Heading or <H1> tags

Your heading tags are just good practice.  It's also a reinforcement for the search engines that your page really does contain what your title and description say it contains, and you want all the reinforcement you can get.

The header tags appear like this: <h1> Page Header </h1>

Your Site’s Content

The search engines require sites to offer value to its readers.  A search engines determines value by the amount of fresh, useful and unique content they find.

But what does unique content really mean?  Unique content is content that isn’t found everywhere.  An article on your site that is on 500 other sites isn’t going to do much for your reputation.  That’s precisely why private label content has become extremely popular because many PLR writers only distribute a set number of licenses. 

However the very best way to generate unique content is to generate your own.   Here are a few ideas for coming up with unique content:

• Perform your own case studies
• Perform your own product reviews
• Create an FAQ page derived from your own visitors
• Request feedback from viewers and post the results
• Start a forum – this is an excellent way to encourage people to visit and comment
• Personally comment on industry related news items

It's not hard to figure out how to create a website and there are plenty of easy website builders and information on how to create a blog, however before you start building and creating your website or blog make sure you focus in on a profitable niche, have a good idea what your will be offering on your site and organize it into a logical order and keep each page of your site focused.  No matter how good the site builder it will still depend no your ability to include the necessary information and organize it so your readers can find it.

[tags]website structure[/tags]

While reading Webpro news this morning over coffee I couldn't help but click on the item about 'Adsense Earnings Down'. 

It caught my eye because I've noticed a drop in Adsense earnings myself over the past few months and it appears that many others have as well.

According to Google, how much an ad pays can depend on a number of things such as the advertiser's bid, the quality of the ad, the other ads competing for the space, the start or end of an ad campaign, and other advertiser fluctuations, but what Google doesn't say much about is how much benefit is placed on what happens after the click such as whether there is a buy or if a form gets filled out, etc., …which is something I always wondered about. 

In any event, Google does stand by their 'Content is King", theory stating that the higher quality the site, the more likely the publisher gets high quality, costlier, better-converting ads.  

OK, add good content, yes I can get behind that, it's what I do but, like many things with Google they just aren't consistent with what they preach. What about the sites that violate Google's own rules like sites that have nothing but Google Ads but no content?

And of course, Google uses the old standby 'recession'. They hint that recession in the economy may mean recession in your Adsense payouts as well.

One possible nugget of hope that Webpro pointed out is that if you have many sites with one Adsense account, you could experience a hit on all of your sites, which indicates it may be better to create a separate account for each site.  Will this help, it remains to be seen.

What does all this mean?  It may mean that Google Adsense had a good run but in the overall scheme of things, this may be the start of a wind down. In my experience, what really counts when it comes to making money online is to create content that visitors will benefit from, establish trusting relationships with your visitors and practice good SEO and website optimization.

If your Google adsense revenue has gone down in the dumps have a look at Joel Comm's Google Adsense Secrets, at $9.95 he's practically giving it away.