Search Engine Optimization | Work From Home Resources Blog

February 2010 Blog Post Roundup

Posted by Alan Mater on Mar 1, 2010

Another month has gone by. Seriously… is it going as fast as I think it is? I seem to keep losing more and more time each day and getting further behind on stuff. I apologize for the minimal amount of posts. I’m doing my best to keep up and provide quality content to you all.

Alas, another time for a blog post roundup of last month’s posts. I have some awesome posts included in this, as well as some awesome ones to come. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them so far and have benefited from them.

I don’t take my blogging lightly. I put a lot of thought into what I’m writing and always have you, my readers, in mind. As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated.

Okay, without further delay let’s get started. Be sure to check out any posts you may have missed.

Affiliate Marketing is the New Job on the Market

30 Ways to Get Free Website Traffic In Minutes

Are You a Struggling Internet Marketer?

Proven Strategies to Increase Website Traffic and Generate Sales

Legitimate Worldwide Work From Home Opportunities

Are You Targeting ‘Paying’ Keywords?

How I Get Backlinks to My Blog Posts Resulting in Sales

Google Celebrates Valentine’s Day – They Gave Me $100!

The Official Alibaba.com Success Guide

I was very pleased to see the first post on this list had gotten Re-Tweeted 27 times so far. Thank you to all who spread the word to your Twitter followers.

The Twitter Tweetmeme plugin has proven to work well and makes it easy for Twitter users to Re-Tweet posts. If you’re not yet utilizing it on your own blog, you should be.

Again, thank you to all my readers!

Are You Targeting ‘Paying’ Keywords?

Posted by Alan Mater on Feb 23, 2010

If you know anything about SEO, then you’ll know that keyword research is so important in attracting the right kind of traffic to your website. I consider the right kind of traffic as being people who are looking to buy something, assuming you’re wanting to sell something.

If you’re doing business online, then obviously you want to sell stuff. So, wouldn’t it make sense to target ‘paying’ keywords?

Yes, I made that name up.

I go into all the details in my guest post and provide a video which I previously posted on my blog.

To check out the article, head to David Leonhardt’s SEO Writer blog where I had the pleasure of writing, Target Paying Keywords to Maximize Your Online Sales.

This neat little tool will help you pump out more sales by targeting the right kind of keywords for your website.

Feel free to browse David’s blog as you’ll find other helpful articles on SEO, which I know can be rather bothersome to some people.

Proven Strategies to Increase Website Traffic and Generate Sales

Posted by Alan Mater on Feb 20, 2010

Okay, here it is. This post is going to contain the simple yet effective techniques I have learned during my time online to generate targeted traffic and generate sales. These are strategies I’m using for my own online business and have found to be working well and improving over time.

If you’ve been following along with us, my last post was about a struggling internet marketer who is reaching out in a desperate attempt to generate sales with his affiliate marketing website.

One of the questions asked was, “How do I drive traffic to my site that can generate sales?”

This is going to be the topic of this post, and I’ll be going very in-depth, starting with the basics and moving towards the more advanced strategies.

I apologize in advance if this turns into a very lengthy post, but please bare with me as it will be well worth your time to read through everything.

So let’s begin, shall we?

The very first thing you must understand is that everything revolves around keywords. Keywords are the life-blood of websites and how they become seen by internet users using search engines.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the foundation of using keywords effectively, and this is how you’re going to target specific internet users to generate sales online.

Rather than going in-depth on the subject of SEO on this post, I have a few previous posts that should cover this subject thoroughly enough for you to understand. Please check them out, and if you have questions use the comment section:

Optimizing your web page for specific keywords is critical and is the foundation for which you’ll build the rest of your marketing efforts upon. Seriously, nothing else matters until you’ve done this. Don’t ignore it!

One thing I’ve learned is that backlinks are KING. Okay, so content is still KING, but backlinks are a very close second, and here’s why. Backlinks to your website or web pages are what helps to drive your site or pages higher in search engine results pages when someone searches for a specific keyword phrase. See how this is coming together?

Without building backlinks to your site, you won’t generate enough traffic to your site to generate sales. Now I know what you’re thinking here. There are other ways to generate traffic without building backlinks, and that’s true. However, the best traffic is free search engine traffic, and the only way to get it is to rank on the first page in Google, or Yahoo and Bing. I’d focus on Google as it produces over 70% of search traffic across the entire web.

Now that you understand the importance of building backlinks and getting your site or web pages to the top of search engines, you now need to start the backlink building process. There are numerous ways to go about this, and luckily for you, I’ve written many posts on the subject. Here they are:

Remember when building backlinks that you want to use your keywords for the web page you’re linking to. This is the only way that your backlinks are going to be effective in boosting your search engine rankings.

Okay, so you now have a great start in getting backlinks; however, I’m not done just yet.

Well… sorta. I have a post planned that will discuss another very effect backlink building strategy and will be posted soon, so stay tuned for that.

Hopefully right now you have a solid understanding of doing keyword research and web page optimization, and how it all ties in to building backlinks. This is all part of building targeted website traffic that will result in sales.

As always, if you have any questions about anything discussed here, post them in the comments section.

My next post will discuss the second question asked by a struggling internet marketer, but in the meantime, start applying the tips I mentioned today to your website, and you’ll soon see an increase in traffic and internet income.

Free Traffic Getting SEO Blog Software from Jeff Johnson

Posted by Alan Mater on Jun 5, 2009

I’m all for getting more traffic to my blog. Traffic is a good thing, especially when you’re trying to sell products online as an affiliate. You won’t make sales if you don’t bring in any traffic.

I’ve been a subscriber of Jeff Johnson’s for quite some time now, and he provides some top notch tactics on getting more traffic and sales. And believe me, I don’t use the phrase “top notch” lightly at all.

Jeff knows his stuff and tests everything he does. It also helps to have a team working for you, which of course, Jeff does. He had his team put together new software that could get more traffic to his blogs by optimizing them for search engines and utilizing various plugins.

Jeff provides a lot of awesome content on his Underground Training Lab blog, and for free. He’s really a down to earth guy that enjoys sharing what he’s learned with others. I’ve learned a lot just from his videos. If you’ve never seen any of Jeff’s videos before, you can check them out on YouTube.

Jeff decided to give away his SEO blog software for free. I’ve already downloaded my copy and plan to install it here on this blog shortly. I wanted to make all of my readers aware of this software and how it can really benefit your blog by bringing in more traffic, and hopefully more sales.

You can grab your copy of Jeff’s Free Traffic-Getting SEO blog software here. All you have to do is simply enter your email address… no name required. You’ll also get full instructions on installing the simple plugin and setting everything up.

If you don’t yet have a Wordpress blog setup and want to take advantage of this software, simply sign up for a hosting account through HostGator, and I’ll help you set up your new blog and software. HostGator is my recommended web hosting company as they provide the best support, and their prices are very hard to beat.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this software is bringing in more traffic for you. Did you find it easy to install and setup? How much more traffic are you getting from it?

Once I get it up and running on here, I’ll be back with an update.

Build Long-Term Traffic to Your Work From Home Site with Article Marketing

Posted by Alan Mater on May 6, 2009

Writing articles is an art form. Developing content for the net takes time and practice. Writing effectively and getting your readers to respond is the first benefit in building traffic. This results in direct traffic as readers are inclined to click on your link(s) in the resource box of your article.

I suggest you take a moment to visit Patricia Makhulo’s Article Marketing Made Easy post which gives you many great pointers on getting your article noticed and read.

Article marketing has two main traffic benefits: direct traffic and search traffic. Both are important and should be utilized to their fullest potential. You want to get as much bang for your buck as possible, so there’s no point in wasting a good article by only getting half the potential traffic.

Article marketing is one of the best ways to create long-term, targeted traffic to your website. I’m going to explain both traffic benefits.

An article is made up of different elements that are essential to getting direct traffic. These elements include:

Defining the product/service you need to promote – Most articles have the purpose of providing useful information in order to pre-sell a product or service.
Using the “useful, but incomplete approach” – Provide useful information to your readers, but make sure it’s incomplete and that they could better use the information by visiting the link(s) in your resource box.
Using a tips list or tutorial format when applicable – If your article can be broken down into a list format, then do it. This will direct your readers along towards realizing their need for your product/service.
Expanding on your main points to build the content of the article – as I’m doing with these key elements, provide information that expands on the main points of the article.
Providing a closing or “call to action,” usually in the resource box, also known as the “about the author” section – Most people fail to do this. The resource box is there for a reason. Tell your readers to visit your link(s) to make better use of what they read.
Re-reading and proofreading the article to avoid errors – Don’t do this yourself as most people fail to catch their own mistakes. Have someone proofread your article for you so that it reads well and is error free. The best thing you can do when crafting an article is to write in a clear and concise manner. You need to convey your message to your readers so that they can understand it. Your article should read as though you were talking face to face with them.

If you focus on these key elements, your article stands a much better chance of receiving clickthroughs and your website getting targeted, direct traffic. Also keep Patricia’s models in mind as they work very well too.

The other main benefit involves getting natural search engine traffic from people searching for information. Aside from direct traffic, search traffic is just as good because it’s also highly targeted. Most searches performed in a search engine are for information. That’s why it’s so important that you provide useful information to your readers because there’s a better chance that they’ll convert to a customer.

There’s two elements that you need to be aware of when striving to get search traffic as a result of your articles. As people search for information, they enter keywords into the search box. The keywords they enter determine what results are displayed.

It is your job to find out what keywords those people are searching for. I recommend Google’s External Keyword Tool. Once you determine the keywords you’re going to focus on, the two elements soon come together. The first element is writing your article for specific keywords.

You need to determine what keyword phrase you need your article to rank for in search engines so that it is displayed when someone searches for that keyword phrase. This may sound complicated, but all you need to know here is that as long as you provide useful and unique content, your article will get noticed.

Websites are primarily ranked based on how many backlinks (links pointing to your site from other relevant sites) they have. The key here is containing the keywords you need your website to rank for within those backlinks. This you can completely control with the use of your article resource box.

The second element applies to your website. This involves the use of your article resource box. While the resource box can be used as your call to action as discussed earlier, it also has another use. As you need to get your article ranked high in search engines for a particular keyword phrase, you also need to get your website ranked high for keywords as well.

While developing your call to action phrase, create a link to the web page that you want to send your readers that contains your keywords you need your page to rank for in search engines. Every article you create will contain your resource box with your call to action and a backlink to your website. You see how your resource box serves two purposes in one?

If all of this sounds a bit confusing to you, then you should read some of my other posts on SEO:

Web Page Optimization

5 SEO Tasks You Should Do Every Day

I also recommend Suzanne Morrison’s 3 Steps to Search Engine Success.

Applying these methods to your article marketing efforts will ensure direct and long-term traffic for years to come. Both forms of traffic are equally important, so don’t ignore these methods. Article marketing, when done properly, will help you build your business and set it up for long lasting success. Remember, your website must have traffic, and article marketing can help you achieve it.

Marketing Your Work From Home Web Site with Proper Use of Forum Signatures

Posted by Alan Mater on Apr 28, 2009

One of my readers prompted me to write about the use of forums in marketing your work from home web site or products/services that you offer. Believe it or not, forums can provide terrific targeted traffic as well as long-term natural search engine traffic.

I’ve always been a fan of forums. They provide an enormous wealth of information that is completely free. You can get any question answered by those more experienced. These two benefits alone are well worth the time of getting involved in forums.

An even bigger benefit that some overlook is the marketing aspect that forum participation can bring. The marketing doesn’t come from your posts, but instead from your forum signature. This aspect, that is built into most if not all forums, is not used to its full potential.

Forum signatures should be designed to grab the attention of other forum members who read your posts. This can be tricky as you usually have limited space to create a signature, but it can be done.

A forum signature usually consists of your favorite links to websites that you want to share with others. These can also be your own websites, and that’s what this post is going to focus on.

Here’s an example of one of my signatures… http://www.warriorforum.com/members/alan-mater.html. Click on the About Me tab and scroll down till you see the Signature section.

Notice how every website or web page contains a phrase that is hyperlinked to go to the corresponding URL. For instance, I have Professional Proofreading Services linked to go to http://www.replaceyoursalary.com/proofreading.html.

The mistake I see many make is that they ignore the keyword aspect of forum signatures and just enter the URL for their website, and sometimes they don’t even have it hyperlinked! That’s fine if you’re focusing on direct traffic from the forum, but you’re missing out on the larger aspect of natural search engine traffic.

Note: Most forums have different signature rules and require specific code in order to create hyperlinked text. Be sure you know what is required when setting up your signature, otherwise it won’t turn out right.

You see, using keywords in your signature links will create backlinks to the web pages those links link to for your given keyword phrase and also boost those pages rankings in the search engines. This will create long-term search traffic, which should be your ultimate goal.

Forum participation is a great way to get your name and business or work from home web site noticed by others. But, you want to get noticed by the right kind of people. What I mean is that you want to pick forums that are related to what your business or web site offers. You want your direct traffic to be as targeted as possible.

The last MUST is providing value when posting in forums. This will ensure you get noticed and bring more clickthroughs of your signature links. Below I’ll provide a list of forums I actively post in that are related to the Internet Marketing and Work From Home niche and get a great deal of traffic from…

Alright, now get to work and start getting involved in forums!

5 SEO Tasks You Should Do Every Day

Posted by amater on Apr 9, 2009

There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. Here they are:

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you don’t know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they aren’t getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labeled to reflect the page that they link to.

2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you don’t have much reason to keep a link if you aren’t getting the back link that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).

3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common courtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.

4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.

5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure it’s still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at missopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors’ satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someone’s site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you – even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your site’s content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks:

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says ‘Disallow’ and has the URL of their links page, then they’re not letting spiders index that page. Don’t exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being ‘cloaked’, and report it to the search engines if it is. You don’t want to get involved with these people – better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR doesn’t necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldn’t be more than 20 links – if the site breaks this rule, don’t even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking they’re helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them don’t even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. There’s no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

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Steps for Building a Successful Online Business – Web Page Optimization

Posted by Alan Mater on Oct 23, 2008

The Web If your online business consists of a website promoting products or services, then your business depends upon getting traffic to your site. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to sell if no one ever finds it. You must continually work to get traffic to your site on a daily basis. I’m going to detail the steps I take to build my online business, and how you can do the same.

Step One: Web Page Optimization

SEO, or search engine optimization is important for your website. Specifically, I’m going to talk about web page optimization. This first step is THE most important step that you can take to build your online business. Your website’s survival depends on it! Skipping this step is futile for you and your business. If you want to succeed, then make sure you do this FIRST.

Make sure you optimize your web pages for the search engines, importantly your homepage. Don’t worry, it’s not rocket science. Just follow the steps below, and you’ll be well on your way.

Keyword Research – Web page optimization begins with keyword research. Find and pick keywords that people search for that are relevant to your site. Here’s what I mean by this. If you sell dog toys on your site, then keywords you might choose are “dog toys,” “dog accessories,” etc. The more relevant, the better. These are keywords that people actually search for in the search engines to find your site.
Keyword Tools – It helps to know how many times a certain keyword phrase is searched for. Keyword tools can be very helpful for determining the best phrases to optimize your site for. Here’s a good list of keyword tools: Google’s Keyword Tool, Keyword Discovery, SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool, and Wordpot. They are all free to use and will give you a pretty good idea on how many people search for a given term. You want a good amount of searches per day for each keyword phrase, at least 200-300 a day. Here’s where it gets tricky. You don’t want much competition for those keywords, either. Once you find a few good keywords, do a search on Google for that phrase in quotes. If you want to rank for online business, then do a search for “online business” including the quotes, and see how many pages are returned. This will give you an idea of how much competition you will be up against.
Keyword Placement – Web page optimization is achieved with proper keyword placement. This requires you know a little bit about HTML. Don’t fret, it’s not a big deal. If you don’t know much about HTML you can take a look at this Basic HTML Tag Tutorial. There’s more on HTML on that site, so have a look around and learn something new. Okay, back to web page optimization. Make sure to place your keyword phrase between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags of your page. Only put one of your phrases in the title, as Google will give more emphasis on it. If your page has a Header tag, described as <H1> and </H1>, then put it between them as well. If you’re not sure about this, then check the HTML source code and see. If you need an HTML editor, you can grab one for free called Nvu. Also, if you want, create a Header 2 tag, <H2> and </H2>, and put your keyword phrase between them as well. Make sure to use your keyword phrase throughout the content of your page. Sprinkle it here and there, but make sure to use it at the beginning and end of the content. This is very important.

Okay, no it’s not rocket science, and yes, web page optimization is work. Building an online business isn’t easy, but with a little work and effort it can be achieved. Remember, this is the first and most important step to building your online business. If you want a more in-depth look into SEO I suggest you grab a copy of the 3 Steps To Search Engine Success. I have seen this ebook firsthand, so I know the kind of value that it contains. It’s simple and easy to follow. It would be a wise investment for someone that needs to learn how to optimize their site.

In part 2, I will discuss the next step you should take in building your successful online business. Keep in mind that this first step is the foundation for the next steps to come, so DON’T skip this step!

P.S. If you found this useful please leave me a comment as you’ll be rewarded with a backlink. It’s what makes SEO work!