Internet Marketing, Make Money Online

If you're serious about boosting the rankings of your blog for niche keywords, here's a tip that could help, just be aware this isn't totally user friendly and should only be used on keyword niche blogs.

Keyword niche blogs are those that specifically target certain keywords, for example make money online, usually because the owner of the blog wants to monetize the keyword somehow. Methods of monetizing a site include AdSense, affiliate links, etc.

I mentioned this is a tip that isn't completely user friendly, let me explain. Go to almost any blog and click the title link, and in most cases you'll be taken to the blog post page. This is the page that has the full blog post, comments and comment form. This is user friendly because readers expect to click the title to read the post.

For SEO purposes though, the homepage is usually the strongest page on a site, and for monetization, the home page is often the best converting page. So, if the homepage is so strong, doesn't is make sense to link internally to the homepage for all your main keywords?

Make Money Online eBook

Well I think it does, and this is a lesson I've learned from Grizzly, the master of MMO (make money online). Would you like to know how to make money online using free blogger.com blogs and AdSense or affiliate programs?

I recommend an ebook writtten by a friend and fellow Internet Marketer Janet Smith. We both follow the advice of Grizzly Brears, a man who has been making money online for more years than most of the A-List bloggers, and who ranks number one for "beginners make money online" against competition of 19 million. That's impressive!

Checkout Nomad's Guide to Make Money Online, an ebook that gives step by step instructions for creating content rich sites that people will want to link to, and will make you money. Or, if you've already heard of Janet's ebook, go ahead and buy her make money online ebook now.

Getting back to my original point. Considering the homepage is often the strongest page in a site, it makes sense to link to the homepage using your keywords. How do you think people link to my blog when they think their readers can benefit from one of my posts? A lot of the time people link to me using my name.

Sure it's nice that my name is out there, but hardly anyone knows who I am so it doesn't really help me very much. Instead I'd prefer if they link to me using keywords that better describe what my blog is all about. If you decide to link to this post, please use a keyword for the anchor text, maybe something like make money online ;-)

Post titles are usually keyword rich, anyone who is serious about blogging, even if they don't want to make money online is still going to think long and hard about their on-page SEO. I'm thinking of people who blog with humor, or politics, or religion. Maybe they don't make money, but it is important they rank for their niche. Same thing with MMO bloggers.

Changing your post title to link to your homepage strengthens the homepage even more because you're in control of the keywords, whereas a link from another site owner is a bit hit and miss, they could use any anchor text and you have no control over it.

Google actually recommend restricting your website or blog to a specific niche, and they also recommend getting good quality backlinks to your homepage. Why? Remember Google are in the business of search. They want to rank the most relevant pages for their customers. What is the point of a search engine that doesn't give you good results.

So, make sure your niches are specific, and change the link URL in your post titles to your homepage, not the blog post. This way all your posts that normally disappear into the archives will continue to benefit your entire site. In your sidebar you can still have a top posts widget, and you should.

A while back I wrote about SEO using social bookmarking and blog communities and since nearly a month has passed I thought I'd update my notes on the subject

I've been most happy with Blogcatalog this month, it really seems to have powered ahead to the extent that I am now actively working my Blogcatalog profile. I think the very fact of mentioning it in my last post attracted a lot of visitors who then added me as a friend, and the widget helps too. You may have noticed I've been more active in the Blogcatalog forums and I've updated my profile and joined a couple of groups.

Next month I'll be keen to see how Blogcatalog continues to develop for me so I think I'll be making use of the friend feature more to drive more traffic and increase subscriber numbers. Strangely though, Blogcatalog traffic increases haven't increased the number of comments, and commenting is something I'm really monitoring, BTW thanks to Paul and Jillian for taking an interest. Read More

For a couple of years now I've been playing around social bookmarking sites, blog communities and other widget type sites like Blogrush, and for almost as long I've been meaning to write up my thoughts about them. Well, at long last, here it is.

Technorati and SEO
I started with Technorati like most bloggers do, I even have all of my tags set to the Technorati standard so they get read properly by the Technorati spider, and it wasn't until I did this that I noticed any traffic from Technorati. I'm one of the fortunate few who use Serendipity as my blog software so I have a plugin that automatically converts my tags into the format they use, and this really is absolutely necessary if you hope to get any serious traffic.

Technorati users seem to work almost exclusively on tag searches. Out of interest, almost all traffic I get is to entries with descriptive titles, and doesn't seem to have anything to do with the description or first paragraph so if you want Technorati traffic, use tags and write good entry titles.

Social Bookmarking
I've also tried Digg and del.icio.us which can be great sites for gaining backlinks and traffic but need to used wisely. Both of my profiles are examples of how not to use these sites if you want to be successful. Let me tell you why, I haven't really used their services for anything other than a half hearted attempt at self promotion, and if I was serious about using them I'd be digging or bookmarking worthy sites within my keyword niche as well as a few of my own entries. In terms of traffic, I get nothing from either of these sites but I'm going to change the way I use them both and try to improve that. Read More