SEO tips: money making gurus

In all my SEO tips posts, I had forgotten to pay my dues to these money making gurus. People who are masters of everything I have said including SEO, keyword research, building backlinks, the use of anchored text etc. I learn everything from these guys and I think a thank you post is needed. Below are the people who not only knows how to make money online, but are people who are helpful and have given me either direct advice or good lessons through their posts. In no particular order, here they are:

Gizz: The one who started me on this path. Ignore this 'ugly' blog at your peril. The articles he puts out and the free advices he gives are nuggets of wisdom that you can't get anywhere. He single handedly disapproves everything about making money online. It is not about pretty blogs, continuously posting, getting social traffic. It is all about finding the right keywords, writing relevant content and getting relevant backlinks. Here is a BIG thank you to his make money blog.

Working on the Go: Michael has been providing personal advices to me on how to write relevant content that targets keywords and how to take things slow and easy. He is also just starting out but is way more successful than what I have achieved in either money making or SEO. I wish him success in his working on the go venture.

Make money online with SEO: Ben has to be the most hardworking man in this business. He creates niches blogs as fast as a hot knife cuts through butter. His money making and SEO posts are relevant and provide a step by step guide for beginners. As a newcomer, I am not only learning his techniques but his work ethic as well. If you don't believe hard work can pay off in this online business, check out his make money with SEO blog. You will be amazed. (PS: Check out the forum there. The people there are all very helpful folks that I have greatly benefit from).

If you want to learn how to make money online and leave your day job, there are no better places than the site mentioned above. As a tip, don't just read what they say, watch what they do. I know I did and that is how I learning all the different SEO tips.

Read more »

SEO tips: select keywords for your blogs

In my last SEO tips, I have mentioned about the benefit of search traffic over social traffic. Basically, search traffic is more desirable because it (i) is more stable, (ii) increases over time and (iii) requires less efforts to maintain. However, many of you have blogs that are more social than search traffic driven. How do you turn the former into the later? It all starts with keyword research. I am going to talk about how to select good keywords for your blogs and using them to optimise your blogs so that they can benefit from some search traffic.

Before moving on, I want to say that this blog is a living example of how to turn a blog that used to get social traffic into one that has search traffic. Below is the traffic chart for the past 2 weeks.







Notice how with no posting, the traffic doesn't drop to zero? All these traffic came from search engines and in particular from longtail keywords that involves SEO, keyword research, how to index fast etc. All keywords that were missing before I started to SEO this blog. I haven't seen massive traffic because I didn't build any backlinks for these keywords yet. Once I do, the traffic will be much higher and more consistent.

Now, how can your blog benefit from search traffic as well. As I said, it all starts with doing the right keyword research and selecting the right keyword. As an example, I am going to use one of my favourite blogs, unstructured thoughts by Taylor Davidson, to show how this can be done.

Now, Taylor is one of the most gifted bloggers I have seen. He writes beautifully and his articles are full of insights that can really benefit the readers. That is why he has a PageRank 3 blog, backed by 2,ooo backlinks. For those of you unfamilar with SEO, 2000 backlinks is a LOT of linkjuice and his blog should be ranking well for his keywords. Unfortunately that is not so. The reason is because he has not optimised his site for the keywords relevant to this site.

First of all, what should be the keywords Taylor should be using? Based on his homepage, my guess would be the following:

landscape photography
documentary photography
financial modeling
business consulting

If all his 2,000 backlinks contain these words, his site would gain keyword authority and be ranked on page one of Google's results. Unfortunately, Taylor didn't do so. Instead, most of this backlinks either contain his name or the name of his blog or the article titles, of which none are optimised for his keywords. This is because most people don't know how to use the right keywords to link and simply use the author's name, the blog title or the article title. That is why it is important for us to make it easy for them by using our keywords in these areas.

The URL is hard for us to change so I don't recommend changing it. The blog title however can be changed. If you look at my blog title, I have changed it from "Wild Illusions" to "SEO tips for niche blogs". Just by simply doing that, the big G immediately ranks me for the former and start sending me traffic that is relevant for this keyword. I strengthen that by using keywords in all my articles titles. In addition, if anybody is to link me using my blog title or article title, these links will now contain the right keywords and I will be gaining keyword authority.

For Taylor, I can't imagine him changing his blog title but simply modifying the article titles would give him incredible keyword authority. In addition, he can also asked his readers who have linked to him to use the right keywords. Doing both things can immediately send him more search traffic.

How much traffic would that be? I did a simple keyword research and below are the monthly search volume for his keywords:

landscape photography - 27100
documentary photography - 8100
financial modeling - 8100
business consulting - 49500

Add together, there is quite a bit of search traffic there. Not only that, these are targeted traffic so the probability of engaging Taylor to do a bit of work in these areas is much higher than people like me, who reaches his blog through social means.

So, to summarise this post, what you need to do for your blog to tap into search traffic is the following:
- Do some keyword research and figure out the keywords you want to use
- Change your blog title to include your keywords
- Change your article title to include your keywords
- Ask your read to give you the right type of links i.e. those containing your keywords, rather than your name.

That is all the SEO you need.

Read more »

SEO tips: search traffic vs social traffic

The SEO tip for today will on why you want search traffic, rather than social traffic. I have intentionally stop posting to see what happens to this site, which is primarily based on social traffic. I used to get traffic from ycombinator, facebook, twitter, commenting etc. All these are social traffic. The diagram below shows the results.





From a daily visitorship of 100 readers, my blog went to almost zero when I stopped posting. That is the greatest disadvantage of social traffic. You need to post everyday just to keep the traffic coming.

Some of you might notice the spike I had experienced towards the past few days. This is because of the new posts I have created on SEO tips. That is when I started to SEO this blog. I begin to select the keywords I used very carefully (i.e SEO tips, keyword research, backlinks etc). All these are keywords that I am trying to rank for.

It has taken a couple of weeks but I think the big G has finally begin to recognise this shift and has begin ranking me for many of these new keywords. Here is a sample of the keywords that I am ranking for i.e. in the top page of Google. Just type these in to see if I am on the top page.

anchored keywords
percentage of traffic in top 3 of google pages
good keywords for seo
how to get new post indexed fast

These are the keywords that bought me traffic for the past few days even though I have not been posting. This is search traffic.

Finally, good to see that I am ranking for my blog's title as well. : )

seo for niche blogs

I have not been building backlinks so the ranking must come from the authority that this site has accrued over the years and the fact that I am doing on page SEO. However, if any of you wanted to help me rank higher, I will appreciate if you can linked to this blog using the following keywords, rather than my name : )

keyword
keyword research
SEO

Before I go, one last evidence to proof that search traffic is much more desirable than social traffic. The diagram below shows one of my niche blogs that I have not posted in months.






Even if no posting, the traffic is slowly but surely increasing. That is the power of search traffic. If you build enough backlinks, these backlinks will aged over time and give you more authority on the keyword you are trying to rank for. The older the site, the more search traffic you will get if you do your SEO right.

PS: I will not be showing my niche blogs in this site anymore. Some bastards have been flagging them and causing me headaches. My intention was to show how SEO can be done by examples but it is not worth the effort.

Read more »