Keyword of the Day

Archive for July, 2007

There are a lot of ways to promote and improve website traffic. There are the search engine, SEO, and Wordpress to name a few. Search engine is an information retrieval system that searches for documents and/or data within the database, may it be a stand alone or hyper textually-networked databases like the World Wide Web. It allows searchers or individuals to ask for certain content that meets the criteria of what they are looking for then get results in form of a list of items or topics that match the given word or phrase.

Another tool is Search Engine Optimization (or more commonly known as SEO). It usually works on the course of improving the quality of traffic of a website through search results just like the search engine, but with SEO, the results are presented by the site’s “ranking”. The search can also be on different kinds of target, like web or image search, video search, shopping search and/or even local search engines. It operates by means of storing huge information of web pages, and then retrieved by a web crawler or sometimes known as spiders that browse every link it sees.

The leading search engines use crawlers to find pages for their search results. Sites that are linked from search engine or SEO do not need to submit their front pages because it can be found automatically. Most of the top search engines use a paid submission service for a set of fee or they use of an advertising model on websites like the pay per click method. SEO may operate as a stand-alone service or as a part of a large marketing strategy of a campaign.

The last way of optimizing traffic on your website is by the use of Wordpress which is a blog publishing system. It is written in PHP backed by a MySQL database. Due to a lot of low profile profitable blogs that offer AdSense for websites to generate revenue and the high profile of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Wordpress is sometimes unnoticed and overlooked.

Although search engine, SEO or Wordpress are three popular approaches in marketing strategies when it comes to optimizing traffic on sites, it does not guarantee more sales. Other internet strategies may be more effective depending on the website’s goals. It is also important for business or other commercials sites to build good quality web pages to persuade more traffic and/or users.

In making the right choice on what affiliate program to join it is important to know the right way of knowing if the affiliate program is credible and good.

There is a great danger if one chooses a bad program. Choosing the right affiliate program can help a company or a person become a true winner. Below are some tips in choosing a good affiliate program that one should ideally choose.

1. Try to do research about the affiliate program. This can be done by doing research online. There are many programs one can join online and it is best to get assured that they are credible. Affiliate programs also carry varied subjects and topics.

2. Choose a program that pays fifty percent in commissions.

3. There are websites that offers affiliate resources. They could be a credible source for finding a list of affiliate programs available.

4. Try to find programs that are sometimes listed in the different magazines which most people usually receive. There is a good chance that the owner of the magazine belongs to a program and if the magazine works for them then they probably joined a good affiliate program.

5. Try to focus on items that constantly sell to a large variety of people such as e-books, travel packages, music and web sites. You will enjoy success more if the product is something usually purchased by many people.

6. Check out and read the articles written about the affiliate program. There were several writers who also gained success by joining affiliate programs so the goal is to find out which programs have given them much success.

7. Study the online courses. There are several websites designed and offering free education about affiliate programs. It is worth one’s time to take the time to study about the program and to be educated on how to achieve success as an affiliate.
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Boosting the Sales for Commissions

Here are some tips to help boost the commission one can receive as an affiliate.

Make use of different recommendations and links of texts.

1. Utilize the help of the ads found in the magezine. This is a good way to market the product of the affiliate program. A good ad in magazines can help boost the sales of the product.

2. Create an email where one can sell the products of the program through the text links found in all the emails. This can be easily done by using auto responders which also helps deliver emails in an automatic fashion.

3. Use a lot of time to market the products of the affiliate program. The best way in succeeding with any affiliate program is to market the product very well which could translate to increases in sales. The more one sells the more the commission one earns.

4. Try to write down an article about the program and send them to the websites and add a text link to market a product. This is also a good way to boost more commissions.

5. There is an option of joining a two tier type of affiliate program and can result in a steady output for more sales.

6. Choose a program with products that people buy online all the time.

Todays keyphrase is a brand, namely the Audi car.

Audi seems to be very well searched all over the web, but the keyphrase I turned out was Audi Oakland, it has a staggering 17.930 searches and only 752,000 competition rate in Google.

That added to the Adwords keyword price being shown as $9.93 – $12.70 which is very good, made me choose today’s phrase.

Lets start off by presenting the numbers on this keyphrase:

Searches per month according to Overture: 17.930

Competition without quotes in the search engines are:

Google: 752,000
MSN: 86,325
Yahoo: 800,000

And if you add the quote around “Audi Oakland” you have the following competition rates:

Google:
MSN: 3.426
Yahoo: 18,300

This gives it an incredibly good keyword rating and when looking at the competition I see no problem getting up to around #2 in Google.

The first spot in Google is taken by the actual Audi dealer in Oakland, with an extra map listing and all, so I doubt it will be an easy task to put him down. But let us have a look at the second listing which is the Yelp Review Directory, and the Audi Oakland page is not on an SEO’ed URL:

http://www.yelp.com/biz/k5XbSVKt2FDaETBC0lFvtg

The title of the page begins with Audi of Oakland which is ok for SEO, but not having a SEO URL on #2 place gives us the foot in the door, especially using one of the URLs I will suggest in the last part of this article.

The Yelp Review page for Audi Oakland is a PR2 – which is not that impressive and should be very easy to beat.

The third result on Audi Oakland is a car buyer guide listing car dealers. Their URL is SEO’ed but they are still only a PR2, it should be pretty simple beating their inbound links making your site more important in the search engines.
http://www.edmunds.com/dealerships/Audi/California/Oakland.html

This page has some information we can use as well when creating our site.

Doing this site I would make a Audi car club website, I would run it as a Word Press Blog and have a bunch of people (this does of course not have to be real people, hired writers will do) write up their Audi stories and reviews. Of course several good descriptions of each Audi Dealer in town is a given.

Once you are up around 50-100 pages of good quality content, you could start a forum there as well and have viral content creation. I always use Vbulletin with VbSEO for my forum creations, it is a more expensive solution, but I feel it is the best for SEO, and forum users are very comfortable using Vbulletin.

Both being paid systems also gives you way better support in case you have any issues with the forum software / SEO module.

The domains I would suggest which are available while I write this are:

audi-oakland.com
audi-oakland.net
audi-oakland.org
audi-oakland.info
audioakland.net
audioakland.org
audioakland.info

Be quick guys - these go fast.

The availability of these domains also tells us there is a huge untapped market here; I believe this could really make good money if done properly.

Monetizing your site:

Well Adsense would be my immediate choice with Adwords cost reported around $6.69 – $12.46 – get a few thousand hits a day on this site and you are golden.

Happy Niche Site Creation

- Kim

If you’re still fumbling your way in the dark when it comes to search engine optimization, you need not worry anymore about committing more errors when it comes to search engine optimization because we’re here to teach you what you need to know and what you have to avoid. Search engine optimization may seem difficult to master at first but with the proper guidance (like reading this article!) and the right attitude, your company shall benefit from your determination and gain top search engine rankings in no time.

Search Engine Optimization Error: Using Frames in Your Website
Most people who are still at the stage of acquainting themselves with the basics of web development tend to prefer using frames when building their websites because it’s very easy to do once you get the hang of it. There are a lot of reasons why people prefer to do this. It could be because they want their website to have a uniform look or it could be for navigational purposes, like maintaining a primary link chart for all pages.

Now, that may seem a good thing at the start but once you have to worry about search engine optimization, you’ll realize that there are distinct disadvantages to suffer from when you use frames in your website. First and foremost would be the fact that not all search engine spiders used today are able to read and understand websites that use frames. They used to understand it none at all but search engine spiders have improved – but not completely however.

Secondly, search engine spiders who do understand what these frames are all about may not understand how to merge the information they got from all the frames. You see, two to three frames may be used and linked together in one page, using one main URL. Search engine spiders may not know how to reconcile the information they acquired to gain proper search engine results for the company.

Thirdly, there is the fact that not all browsers are capable of reading frames. Are you willing to risk alienating potential customers just because you prefer using frames in your website?

Fourthly, even people who do use browsers that are capable of reading frames are sometimes unaware that they have to modify their settings and enable the frames option before they can view websites using frames. Although you can instruct them on how to do enable their browsers to read frames by writing them a message using the no frames tag, it’s a possibility that some would simply try another website.

Hence, if you look at in a search engine optimization perspective, it’s better to stay away from frames if you want your website to enjoy better search engine optimization results.

Trundle Bed – Keyword of the Day

Today’s word is Trundle Bed, a simple 2 word keyphrase. Niche Inspector shows this as having a whopping 21.263 searches in Overture per month and only 850,000 competition rate in Google.

This looks like a golden keyword to go for if we can find ways to monetize the traffic. Niche Explorers Adwords information tells me that 51 advertisers are paying around $1.17 – 1.64 per click, so with the traffic we can get on this amount of searches we should have a site that can make a little money.

The actual traffic / search details:

Searches per month according to Overture: 21,263

Competition for Bed Trundle without putting the keyphrase in quotes:

Google: 850,000
MSN: 90,606
Yahoo: 838,000

Competition for “Trundle Bed”:

Google: 353,000
MSN: 65,791
Yahoo: 338,000

When assessing if a keyword is good or bad to pursuer, you should of course examine the competition. So we will check out the first result in Google and see if we have chances to beat them. If for example we go for a brand, it is usually very hard to beat the official site, anyways, let us look at the first result in Google for Trundle Bed:

http://www.everythingfurniture.com/daybeddaybeds.html

This is a PR5 sub page on a PR6 website, it will probably take some work to get in front of this site in Google, but a good keyword rich domain name and unique content and you should be able to do it.

Number 2 on the Google search is Amazon.com and number 3 is Wikipedia.

Those 3 sites would be my main concern, well laid out easy access to sub pages for search engines and a site just about trundle beds should do the trick. You will of course need some quality linking to fight a PR5 site and Wikipedia but again, it is very doable.

Monetizing your site:

For monetizing the keyword, I would go with either clean Adsense or a combination of Adsense and affiliates. I have searched up a few options for affiliate programs:

http://www.designpublic.com/affiliates
Design Public uses Commission Junction, which is great because most of you affiliate marketers are already registered with CJ. This particular affiliate program pays out 8%-12% of each sale.

Lo and behold, our main competitor has an affiliate program as well:
http://www.everythingfurniture.com/affiliate-program.html
Everything Furniture uses Commission Junction and ShareaSale as their affiliate managers, both programs are highly recommended. Everything Furniture pays out 8% to affiliates.

Adsense is according to Niche Inspector paying the advertiser part of the $1.17 – 1.64 per click Google charges. Nobody really knows what percentage Google pays their advertisers though. But I would definitely try it out and then decide what plan works best.

Some good Keyword domains available

trundlebeds.info
trundlebedz.net
trundlebed.info
trundle-bed.net
trundle-bed.org
trundle-bed.info

Happy niche site creation

- Kim

Today I was seeding my keyword research tools various nouns, I put in ceiling and got a whole bunch of keywords back from Niche Explorer. One of them looked quite good, with 4885 searches listed in Overture and only 776,000 search results coming back form Google.

Ceiling Medallion

The stats are:

Overture searches per month: 4,885
Google search results: 726,000
MSN Live Search Result: 77,665
Yahoo Search Results: 772,000

If we do the same search for Ceiling Medallions with quotes around the search phrase we get:

Google: 61,200
MSN: 16,696
Yahoo: 64,700

Niche Explorer also reported back that there are 31 advertisers on Adsense using this keyword for their campaign. They pay in the area of $2.25 – $4.32 per click, which should give us a good cut as well when somebody clicks it.

Please note that these numbers can wary a bit from data center to data center and you should of course do your own research as well, I am just pointing my finger at a key phrase that with the use of Niche Explorer seems easy to gain good rankings for.

Now after we have looked at the general numbers for the competition, we should of course do the search manually in the search engines and see who our competition really is.

In Google my first hit for “ceiling medallion” is:

http://www.goceilingmedallion.com/ which is a PR3 site

Nice looking site with 423 pages cached in Google, by looking at their site however I see they have a flaw in their SEO and all their descriptions are the same:

“Go Ceiling Medallion’s collection of ceiling medallions, corbels, crown molding, panel molding, ceiling domes, rosettes and architectural details for…”

Next step is to look at their incoming links in Google, 12 incoming links registered, with one of them being from their own personal blog on Blogspot.

12 incoming links, same meta tag description on all pages, this certainly tells me that they do not have any professional SEO working for them and my conclusion is that this key phrase is a piece of cake to take over.

Show me the Money!

Now once we have taken over the keyphrase “ceiling medallion” we need to find a good way to monetize it. What is a #1 spot in Google if it not making you any dough?

LightingDirect.com offers 8%-10% commission on sales with an average order of around $350, their affiliate program is run by Linkshare.

Back to Niche Explorer we can see that Adsense would also make sense on this site as the average advertiser there pays somewhere around $2.25 – $4.32 per click. I am always taking these numbers with a grain of salt as they are based on the search result, not what Adsense thinks you page is about.

Welcome to Keyword of the Day

I will try to analyze a new keyphrase every day here using software like Niche Inspector, I am still human(well a little) so I might miss a few days here and there, never the less I do think that this resource is great for the aspiring or even seasoned online marketer.

I will give an insight in what I use of tools and techniques to spot the keyphrases I feel are easy to gain control over in mainly Google. And also share my thoughts on checking out the competition before you enter a market.

Everybody can have a day where they are not in the mood to do too much creative thinking, so it is easy to come in here and see if Keyword of the Day has a good niche for you. I have my trusty old Niche Inspector running most of the day searching and weeding out potential keywords for me. Sometimes I strike gold and I will put most of that gold up here. I still do my own stock of web sites as well, and make quite a nice living off this.

Did I mention I moved to the Philippines and live in a rather large villa on the beach now? All this is from online marketing and running websites. And to me the key is to find niches which are still not exploited and then find ways to monetize them. Granted finding these Niches is becoming more and more difficult, but the tools are getting better and better which evens out the odds for guys who can afford to keep up on the tools.

Most of the tools I use are not the high end $X,XXX tools, I tend to float round low $XXX for the tools I buy, I need more than raving reviews to drop more than $1,000 on a piece of software.

I will get back to the tools in later blog posts.

For now, just a warm welcome to Keyword of the Day

- Kim