Internet Marketing Ideas by Steve Weber   Reply to Me On Twitter: Click Here

There has been much interest lately about my keyword research method. I just posted a step by step process of how to do it yourself on my member’s page:

www.WeberSEO.com

On the member’s page click the link “Steve’s Keyword Research Method”.

All my customers get access to the member’s page where I have numerous video and audio downloads found only on the member’s site.

More about keyword research:

Creating a great site using correct SEO techniques is useless if your keywords are not good. Anybody and everybody can use a free keyword tool to come up with piles of keywords. But that method alone just won’t cut it; I learned this lesson the hard way early in my Internet marketing career! I spent far too much time writing and optimizing pages of content which never get traffic because of poor keywords. Trusting the keyword tools 100% is NOT a good idea.

You don’t have to use my method, but you must somehow verify that people really are searching the keyword AND you have a chance at competing with the keyword.

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You might have heard the news; about half of our state (Oklahoma) has no power after a huge ice storm struck. We are lucky so far and still have power (But have our generator on standby!).

I woke up this morning to see a solid sheet of ice over everything. Besides thinking how beautiful it looked, I was reminded how thankful I was that I learned SEO several years ago. Honestly, and I have said it before, it was SEO that propelled our Internet marketing businesses to the point of allowing us to quit our jobs and work from home. Without the free traffic SEO provided I don’t see any possibility we could be where we are today.

It’s going to be another icy night. I’m sure glad we don’t have to worry about fighting the roads in the morning driving to work!

My tip of the day: Learn SEO!

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Writing plenty of content for your site, your blog, and article directories is great for SEO! However, you can’t take shortcuts by using the same content for each! Duplicate content is an area to avoid if your objective is to have your sites and articles rank highly in the search engines.

Many people have misconceptions about duplicate content. Let’s say I start a new blog and write some great posts for it. After writing each post I also submit each post as an article to an article directory. Is this a good idea?

Nope…Here’s why:

What if the article directory page your article is on gets indexed by Google before your blog’s post does? It could happen this way if the article directory is well respected by Google and crawled often. If Google sees the content on the article directory first, it will probably consider your blog post as duplicate content.

What are the consequences of having one of your pages flagged by Google for duplicate content? Many people think this will lead to being banned. Google won’t ban your page or your site with duplicate content. However, it will penalize the page. This penalty is not site wide, but the penalized page does the rest of your site no good at all. A penalized page is usually still in the index; it is simply bumped way down on the list…WAY down.

Take the time to write original content for everything you post online!

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Linking is an important aspect of SEO!

Internal Linking

Did you know that even with only a small handful of incoming links from other sites you can still build your pages’ rank to at least one or two! (I am talking about Google Page Rank which you can see with the Google tool bar installed.)

That’s right! In order to help page rank, you should start with interlinking your pages together. No, I am not talking about having the same navigation bar on every page linking to every other page. This does not help.

What you must do is link to other pages from within your written content. Notice how I am doing it from within this post. This is the type of linking Google loves (and Yahoo and MSN too of course). It is extra work, but well worth it! Additionally, it makes your site “stickier”; visitors are more likely to follow links from within the text they are reading and remain on your site longer.

Linking to External Sites

If you must link to external sites, make sure the site you are linking to has some page rank; you want to know that Google has at least some respect for it. If you link to a page with a grayed out Page Rank bar, you risk linking to a site Google has deleted from their index. You do not want to link to a site like that. Of course not every site without page rank has been banned; most simply have not been indexed. Simply be careful with the sites you link to.

If your site’s theme is gardening, do not put a link on your site to your friend’s music site! You must only link to sites in the same theme. Likewise, it does no good for your friend to have a link from his music site to your gardening site.

If you must put a link on your site which you can’t vouch for, use a no follow tag in the code like this:
<a href=http://www.Friendsdomain.com/rel=”nofollow”>
This way Google will know you are not promoting this link.

Reciprocal Linking

This type of linking does not offer the benefit it used to. A one-way incoming link is worth FAR MORE to your site than a reciprocal link. If you do trade links with a site, make sure the other site is trusted by Google AND is in the same themed area as your site.

Never ever fall for a “Get 1000’s of incoming links for just $19.99” kind of scam! More than likely this is what’s called a “link farm”. You could get your site banned for this!

Steve

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Again today someone sent me a site to look over with SEO unfriendly title tags. The title tag is what shows up at the top of the browser. It is also what shows up in bold in the search engine listings. It is ALSO something the search engines place a high importance on when ranking pages. Titles are a VERY important part of good SEO.

• Each page’s title tag should be short as possible and contain the keyword that page is optimized for. Do not put in unnecessary words.
• Good: Large Dog Collars
• Bad: Try Our High Quality Large Dog Collars
• Horrible: Huge Selection of High Quality Collars. Large, Small, Leather, Nylon, Woven, and Spike Dog Collars - Super Fast Shipping!
• Each page should have a unique title

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There are many pieces to the Internet marketing puzzle one must put together before success shows up. Search Engine Optimization is one of my favorite Internet marketing tools! I can safely say that without SEO I’d be at “work” right now!

There are a lot of small steps to SEO, and I explain them all in detail on my Back Porch Marketing CD’s.

Here is why SEO is great for beginners:

• SEO basics are not that hard to implement and succeed with.
• Without SEO, your site will probably never be found in Google or Yahoo.
• SEO doesn’t cost anything except your time!
• Best of all, SEO produces results relatively fast!

If you are new to Internet marketing and don’t have a good understanding of SEO, stop whatever you are doing right now! Educate yourself on SEO basics. The rewards can be awesome!

Talk to you later….headed outside to play with my dogs for a while…

Steve

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