This is the second part of the post about important elements of search engine optimization; you can read the first post here at: On Page SEO Elements Part 1

Choosing a Domain name: while choosing a domain name try to find out a domain which is simple; preferably with one or two words and have your main keyword in it.

Suppose you keyword is engagement rings, if that is unavailable try with dashes in it like engagement-rings( however domains with dashes have a minus point with it, generally we will talk about type-in visitors or when you become famous, people might type engagementrings without dash in it and in this way you can loose your visitor to your competitor ) if that is also not available use some prefixes( like in this case use best, ideal, genuine, fancy etc) or suffixes ( like store, sale, geographic locations like engagementringsny).

Always try to go for .com, if it is available and if it isn’t then go for .net or .org( please check the guideline for registering a .org domain), or if you want to target your business in a specific geographic location, have domains with geographic TLD, like for Australia .com.au, for United Kingdom .co.uk etc.

The process simplified (Assuming our main keyword as “engagement rings”)

Best Domain Names:

engagementrings.com

engagement-rings.com

If they are not available: Add suffixes and prefixes like

bestenaggementrings.com

fancyengagementings.com

Or

engagementringsstore.com

If these are also not available go for

engagementrings.net

engagement-rings.net

I hope this will make the point clear.

File and Folder Names and Site Structure: Try to name your directories with your keywords or their variations, same with file names. Suppose you have three varieties of engagement rings, white gold, yellow gold and diamond and all of these have three settings namely princess cut, bezel cut and round cut.

Assuming that we have all static pages and we have to create our directory and page structure.

Now what we have

Engagement rings

yellow gold          princess cut

White gold           bezel cut

Diamond               round cut

Scenario : our domain name has keywords in it. Suppose we have domain bestengagementrings.com

Now we can arrange the structure in two ways

First

bestengagementrings.com/yellowgold/princesscut.html
…/bezelcut.html
…/roundcut.html

bestengagementrings.com/whitegold/princesscut.html
…/bezelcut.html
…/roundcut.html

bestengagementrings.com/diamond/princesscut.html
…/bezelcut.html
…/roundcut.html

Second

bestengagementrings.com/princesscut/whitegold.html
…/yellowgold.html
…/diamond.html

bestengagementrings.com/bezelcut/whitegold.html
…/yellowgold.html
…/diamond.html

bestengagementrings.com/roundcut/whitegold.html
…/yellowgold.html
…/diamond.html

Third

Bestengagementrings.com/
Yellowgold-princesscut.html
Yellowgold-whitegold.html
Yellowgold-diamond.html

White-gold-princesscut.html
White-gold-bezelcut.html
White-gold-roundcut.html

Diamond-princesscut.html
Diamond-bezelcut.html
Diamond-roundcut.html

Or just the reverse order (however proximity and order must be kept in mind, more on this in coming posts), but as the number of product increases this structure becomes clumsy and very hard to manage.

Things to keep in mind is, remain near to home page, the more clicks it needs to reach a page from the home page, the less importance it receives, so a page reachable within a click receive more importance in comparison to a page which needs two or more clicks to reach.

Name your directories and pages in lower case and use hyphens if the names become too big and confusing.

Name your images correctly using hyphens, it will also benefit you in search engine image searches and can bring some extra amount of traffic to your website.

Special Formatting Tags: Use special tags like bold, italic, underlined and in different colors for your keywords in the body copy to emphasize importance to your keywords, for making your keyword bold use instead of for giving more value to the keyword.

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Important points which help in better rankings and enhancing user experience.

Introduction:

When we talk about search engine optimization or SEO, there are two types of elements which influence the ranking of a webpage (Keep in mind search engines rank webpages and not websites) in search engines, they are broadly know as ON Page and OFF Page factors. Today in this post we will discuss about some most important on page elements which not only helps in better rankings but also enhance user experience and establish your authority over your niche.

Title Tag: The title tag is one of the most important elements of on page optimization. It tells the users as well as the search engines about the topic of the page. It provides snippets as to which topic the page is concerned. You can compare it with an article in a magazine or headline of news in daily news paper.

It is enclosed between <title> …Your Title Goes Here…</title> in the html coding of your webpage.

While writing title of pages keep the following points in mind:

Include your main keyword in your title tag. I also advice to keep a related keyword with the main keyword, the best is to frame a sentence which includes the main keyword as well as a related keyword.

Keep your title less than 70 characters (including spaces), as you can see in the figure below Google almost caches title less than 70 characters, so keep it under that limit. It does not mean that you cannot create titles more than this limit; the idea is to include your keywords within the limit of 70 characters. Always keep in mind the title must be legible and simple. Avoid keyword stuffing.

Meta Tags – Description and Keywords: According to definition “Meta data is data about data”. The description and keywords Meta tags are not visible on the webpage, they are for the search engines to help them know and categorize your webpage.

Use two lines of text for your Meta description tag (keep it under 150 to 180 characters) define in short about your page.

In keywords Meta tags include 4 to 6 keywords related to your webpage content.

Always keep in mind every webpage in your website must have unique title and description tags.

Heading: This is the second most important element which you must use in your search engine optimization campaign. The main heading is enclosed between <h1>…your heading goes here…</h1>

Similarly use <h2> and <h3> for subtopics of your articles.

Heading makes a specific point about the article. Include your main keyword in the heading tag, but make sure that the keyword must be present in the body text. I have seen many people doing a mistake by including such keywords in the heading tag which are not present in the body text. The same old rule goes here, keep it simple, legible and do not stuff keywords. There is no character limit for heading but try to keep it short which make sense and easily understandable by the readers. …continued

On Page SEO Elements Part 2

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Are you planning to launch a website? For many of you it might be the first one. The planning process and implementation of a website is tough and easy both, it is easy if you know how to do it right and very tough if you don’t. Do not get dishearten if you are new, with regular updating and sharpening your skills and with “the will power to achieve success”, you can surely become successful in making money online.

Today we will discuss some points about a new website from planning to implementation phase.

Know your audience

First of all know your audience, try to get a feel of the audience and do brainstorming about the problems and need of the niche you are going to enter. For this purpose visit various blogs related to your subject, visit different forums and try to find out what kind of questions people are asking and what the topics of hot discussion on the forums are. Visit yahoo answers and find out the questions related to your topic. In this way you will get and idea about the potential of the niche as well as you will know the topics to concentrate on while preparing the content.

Niche Research and Arranging for content:

I am a strong supporter of ezinearticles. There is a reason behind it, after doing initial research, visit ezinearticles.com and find out the articles people are submitting on your topic, then figure out what type of promotions people are doing. It is very easy to find just click the link in the author’s bio section. There are two possibilities, a lot of ezine marketers just do a simple domain redirect to the merchant’s sales page and others try to attract visitors to their own landing page with preselling content and then funnel them through their affiliate links to the merchant’s website. In this way you can find out either there is potential in the market or not. If there are many authors promoting articles on your topic then the niche must be profitable. An another way to find out the profitability of a niche is, to find out different Adwords ads in Google search results and ads in search result pages of Yahoo, if there are many advertisers, it is a strong signal of the profitability of the niche.

Now back to ezinearticles, find out the keywords on which the writers are publishing their articles, just see the page source and you can easily find out the keywords. Just pick up one author and find all the keywords on which the author is publishing the content, in this way you will get lot of keywords to start with your website.

Organizing content:

Organize content in a way that the flow of the information seems natural, the best way to do this is to arrange the content in a silo structure (a detailed discussion on this topic in coming posts).

The organization of the content must be in a logical way, avoid clumsy language and try to keep it simple, which can be understood by an average reader.

Prepare content in such a way that it interacts with the audience, try to find out that after reading an article what would be the mindset of the reader , whether they need some more information or they just want to buy services or products you are offering. In this way you can easily generate interesting content which not only provide value to the readers but also fetch more rewards for you.

For more information on this topic read testing and dominating a niche using SEO and PPC

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What is a market or niche?

According to wikipedia “A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing on; Therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact.”

In short a niche can be defined as a smaller segment of a market which is super targeted around a specific topic.

For an example in the health industry or market “acne” or “anxiety” is niche markets.

There is a lot of confusion when it comes to the definition of niche. Everyone has own understanding and definition.

But I like to call an area as “market” and a specific area in the market as niche.

Niche and micro niche

A niche is a specific are of a market on which product or services are focused, as defined above and micro niche is an another focused area in the specified niche.

For an example “health” is a market and “weight loss” is a niche. Now more specific areas in the niche weight loss is “weight loss using pills”, “weight loss using exercise”, “weight loss using yoga” and more are micro niches.

Hope this would clear the difference.

Finding a Market and Niche

For finding a market for affiliate marketing there are some very good places from where you can collect ideas. Think about your hobbies and problems you or any of your known people has and try to research on the topic. Like someone has problem of “weeds in his lawn” or “pest control” etc.

There are many resources on the internet where you can find different ideas for you niche website.

Dmoz.org

Dmoz is the largest open directory project on the internet, apart from serving as a directory it can also be used for niche research. Delve deeper into the categories and you will find many.

Just open Dmoz and start your research, I am sure you will find several niches; some of them may be even untouched.

Shopping.com

Shopping.com is one of the largest shopping websites over internet. You can just surf it and find the hot keyword ideas.

Amazon
The largest seller of books and nearly every physical item on the internet. This is a very good resource for finding a niche, just browse the best sellers section and you can find gold

Ebay

I think nearly everyone is familiar with ebay.com, you can find out the hottest selling stuff at eBay by visiting pulse.ebay.com

EzineArticles

EzineArticles is the largest article directory on internet, you can use it for your bum marketing campaigns, for finding ideas related to a topic. More than that you can find out different niches using it and in most cases the niches would be profitable because internet marketers and others are already using it for their campaigns

Google Trends and Google Insight Search

Google hot trends and Google insight search are very great places where you can find trends over time and if done properly finding good keywords for CPA and affiliate campaigns is not tough. Just use your mind

Testing a Market and Keyword Research

Before you jump to any conclusion and finalize your keywords, just try to find out the need of your targeted audience. Visit different forums related to your niche, read articles and blogs to delve deeper in your niche. For reading more about this topic, visit my previous posts about keyword research here:

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path Part 2

Using PPC to Test a Market

After you have finalized your keywords and ready to shoot your campaigns, build your landing pages and try to test a market using PPC. In this way you will find out whether the market has the potential. Do keywords level tracking and you will find out the keywords which trigger sales. After you have found sales keywords or gold keywords, build more pages; invest in SEO for long term profits.

But be cautious if you are new to the PPC market, because a little mistake can ruin your pockets.

Using SEO for Growth and Long Term Business

You cannot solely depend on PPC on a long term, so invest in SEO for long term profits. Build more pages using your gold keywords, use variations and always try to test new keywords. Rinse and repeat your action and you can have long term profits.

What do you all think in this regard. Have i missed something, please provide your feedback.

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This post is the second part of my post related to keyword research, you can read the first post here at: Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path

When it comes to keyword research and selection, there are numerous points which should always be kept in mind during the process because keyword research is the most important part of developing an online business and choosing wrong keywords might ruin all your efforts. So always invest reasonable amount of time for finding the right keywords to start with. 

Long Tail Vs Short Tail Keywords:

Short tail keywords are those keywords, which represent a niche (If you are new to internet marketing, read as “market” for the sake of simplicity). While long tails are those which specify a little deeper in the concerned niche or market. For an example, if we talk about digital camera niche then keyword like “Digital camera” is a broad keyword (read as short tail) and “Kodak digital camera 9 MP” or “Cannon digital camera DX665” are long tail keywords.

Hope you got it.

If we consider commerciability in our research there are two types of keywords.

1. Research Keywords
2. Buying keywords or Money Keywords

For an example, if someone is searching for “digital camera”, might be the surfer is doing some research on digital cameras and not in buying mood, so the probability of sales is low, on the other hand if someone searches for “Cannon digital camera 9 MP DXS-635”, as we can see, this search is for a particular product and the probability of sale is much higher than the previous one. So knowing about right keywords is must because optimizing or doing PPC for wrong keywords will not return anything. Keeping track of your campaigns is also necessary both for SEO and PPC.

But this doesn’t conclude that one should not target broad keywords. Actually the whole game depends upon the budget and goals. If you have a handsome budget you can easily go for keywords like “credit cards”, but if you do not have much to spend , start with long tails(like “HSBC bank credit card London”) and then as time passes , invest more to gain results for short tails

Wide Vs Deep Keywords

Wide keywords refer to all the keywords related to a niche just like, if we talk about “dog training”, keywords like:

dogs training
dog training course
dog obedience training
dog training courses
dog training schools
dog training classes
dog training equipment
dog training class
dog training information
dog training collars
dog training collar
dog agility training

are called as wide keywords as it specifies the keywords related to dog training..

Now for finding deep keywords we need to do some brainstorming. Not only in dog training niche, this is true for all niches, just find different characteristics of the situation or problem. For our dog training example, just try to find out the problems your dog has for which you want to get it trained.

Some common problems are biting, excessive jumping and barking, digging. Apart from this we can also find out different dog breeds like Doberman, Alsatian, German shepherd, pug etc and then prepare our deep keyword list.

Stop dog digging
Stop dog jumping
Stop dog biting
Stop my dog from biting

————————————

Stop Doberman from digging
Stop German shepherd from biting

————————————

German shepherd agility training
Doberman obedience training

————————————

And many more.

Are Keyword Tools Helpful?

The answer is YES and NO. They are indeed helpful if you really know how to use them properly and extract the most from it. If you don’t know to use them properly, you might end up with a wrong keyword list. In my opinion Google keyword research tool and search based keyword tool are best. In addition you can also use Traffic Travis (It has both free and paid versions, but free version is capable enough to extract optimum results).

OK OK I got it all, now tell me, Where to start?

Good now you are ready to find your keywords and start your online business.

Ok I am just opening Google keyword tool, I have extracted my keywords…..

Hey Wait… Again you are missing something…

Before you start your keyword research with Keyword Tool External, Traffic Travis or some other tool, I have a suggestion for you.

Visit different forums and blogs in your niche and try to find out what people are talking and searching about and what are the basic problems of the audience you are going to face and attend ?. I think you got the point.

Always keep in mind if you have the solution of a problem and if you can present it to your niche properly then you are going to sustain in the business. So just spy your market and try to find out the problems and the solutions available and then decide to do things in a different way and you will be the boss of the niche.

Using Forums and Yahoo Answers

Just fireup Google and type “your main keyword” forums.

Like “dog training” forums

You now have a list of several forums, just enter them and try to find out the topics which the members are talking about and in this way you will have an idea of the problems related to the niche. After you have noted down all these things, you are ready to prepare your keyword list.

There is one more effective way, use Yahoo Answers. This is a very good platform to know about your niche. I myself use Yahoo Answers extensively for finding keywords for niche I wish to enter and know nothing about.

Using Google Wonder wheel and suggest for finding right keywords

You might have noticed Google’s new tool, wonderwheel. It’s a very good tool for conducting keyword research and SILOING. I would try to post about silo, its effect on SEO and how to SILO a website in coming days. Google is doing a very good job by providing more effective tools for us webmasters. You now have options to search forums, images, timeline which relates to trends (they provide timeline data from 1800 AD, I do not know whether Larry Page or Sergey Brin were there back in 1800 AD   ), shopping results , videos etc at one place.

In my opinion this is the right process from doing keyword research to finally establishing a successful online business

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