Google update targeting exact match domain EMD Are you affected?

Typical Google. Launching another update to get rid of folks like us. This time it is targeting low quality exact match domains. Since I have 50 of those for my Amazon 50 niche site challenge, I am already mentally prepared for the worst to come.

After checking through the stats last night, none of my sites are actually affected even though all their domains are exact keyword domains. Amazing! There is no obvious conclusion but I am guessing that one of the following could explain why my sites were not affected.

Reason #1: I build my sites correctly

If any of you have been following me in my amazon challenge updates, you will know that I build these sites differently from my past sites. Specifically:

• No more writing keyword stuffed titles that matches the keywords in my domain
• No more getting spammy backlinks
• No more focusing on one set of keywords
• Trying to write something of value to serve the folks coming to the site
• Using different themes

That is basically how I have been building my sites. Although their traffic is not high, it is steadily increasing. The mini cupcake maker site for example has gone from 1-2 person a day to about 5-10 a day. I believe the true potential will come in another 1-2 years as the sites gain more content and age. 

Reason #2: I was lucky

This is definitely one possibility. Maybe the alogorithm missed my sites because I wasn't targeting the ultra spammy niches like finance, legal, home furniture etc. Or maybe I was targeting keywords that had low monthly search volume. Too low for the alogorithm to care.

One key observation

One of the key observation was that none of my sites were pulling in traffic from the keyword in their domains. Let's take the mini cupake site as an example. I have never gotten one person typing in the keyword mini cupcake maker. Instead the following is the list of keywords that are bringing the site traffic.

The above image makes one wonder if this is a good leading indicator to tell you if your site will be penalised. If your site has lots of different keyword combos like the one above, you are probably doing your optimisation correctly. If you are seeing lots of repeated and targeted keywords, you might be getting too aggressive in your SEO.

Anyway, it is still early days and I will continue to monitor the effects of this exact match domain algorithm update.

Hope none of you has been affected. 

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How many keywords can you get on page one with one article

How do you sharpen your SEO skills? There are a couple of things that I do and this is one of them.

In my previous article on how to get traffic to your blog without backlinks, I mentioned that decreasing your reliance on link building improves the remaining aspect of SEO, which is mainly keyword reseach, copy writing, and developing metrics & analytics. In this article, I want to zoom in one aspect, which is copy writing.

Everything else aside, I am not a good writer by any standard. I have poor grammar, lots of spelling mistakes and no voice to call my own. So, the copywriting I am talking about is being able to think and write in the same mental mode as the readers you want to attract.

A good SEO copywriter produces lots of longtail keywords naturally. By placing myself in the same mental mode as my user:

• I use the same terms they use 
• I ask the questions they ask
• I provide the questions they ask
• I talk about related things that they might be interested in

This is how my content can meet the needs of all those longtail searches without me forcing it. This in turn is how you can increase your longtail traffic.

If you want to hone your copyrighting, set yourself a metric.

For me, every content that I produce, I target to have at least a couple keywords which the content is on the first page of the search engines. I don't care which keywords or which search engines. I focus on getting into the head of my users so that I understand the context, the timing and the reason for their search.

If you practice this long enough, it will come naturally in whatever materials you are writing. I have not completely master it yet but I have improved quite a bit since I first started sharpening this skill. If your niche sites have low traffic after penguin, time to hone your copyrighting skill as well.

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How to rank without backlinks and get traffic to your site

I am not a big fan of building backlinks to get rankings and traffic. Backlinks can often get your site into trouble. Just ask the folks whose sites have been penalised by the Penguin update. Of course, the IM folks are starting to say things such as varying your anchor text to make backlinks effective. To me, that is going to be a short term solution. When penguin 2 or whatever animal comes, don't be surprised if these guys are wipe out just like in the first penguin.

So, do I mean that sites don't need links? No, but you don't need as many links as what others have been saying. Links matter when you decide to go for keywords that are solely being competed by links. That is your own choice and I would say, your own stupidity if you decided to rank for keywords that are based on link wars.

However, not all keywords compete on links. You need to observe the SERPs and see how the competition is like. For example, there are certain types of keywords (such as news driven keywords) where the freshness of the content is more important than links. In such cases, you need more fresh content and no amount of backlinks can help your site.(Try to experiment with a sports event related niche and you will know what I mean).

In SEO, there are basically 3 areas that we can work with:

• keywords
• content
• backlinks

Within each area, there are opportunities to groom our skills.  This is where the meat of this article is

How to rank with good keyword research

Keyword research is a diverse area that offers anyone opportunities if you can specialise. Within keyword research, I divided it into the following:

• trend keywords
• keyword divergence
• long tail keywords

(Note: for new readers, you might want to familiarise yourself with the concept of longtail keywords and trend keywords)

How to be good in trend keyword research: You need to be a person who reads widely, especially the technology blogs. Other good resources include blogs that highlights small businesses as well as articles that focus on trends in specific industries. When your radar is up, you will start to see lots of keywords that are literally wide open with little or no competition. To rank, all you need is content.

How to be good in detecting keyword divergence: This kind of research is for people who like to attack popular niches. Understand this: the more popular a keyword is, the more likely that there will be new ways to search for this term. Why? Because people get tired of seeing the same results for the keyword they are searching for so they will try different terms to see different results. The more popular a term is, the more likely this will happen and the more diverse the terms will be. It is your job to learn when such divergence will happen and grab the chance to optimise for these new terms that essentially describle the same niche.

How to be good in longtail keywords: The discussion forums are your goldmine. Spend some time looking through the forums of your niche and you will start to know what are the specific longtails relevant to your niche. Seriously, the kind of questions that people asked in the forums is exactly the kind of long tails keywords that will appear in Google. Even though they might not appear in any Google keyword tool, rest assured that as long as people ask such questions in forums, they will be searched for in Google.

Mastering any one of the above will equip you with enough unoptimised keywords that don't need a single link to get traffic from Google. If your current keyword research is only from Google keyword tool, time to step up your game.

How to create a new query space with great content

Being able to produce great content is a wonderful skill. There are some folks who are just so good with headlines and content that they draw traffic from diverse sources, not only from the search engines. For SEO purposes, there are certain things that you can do with content which allows you to draw traffic from Google without backlinks.

Create a new query space with your content: What is a new query space? It is about creating interest in a search term that nobody has searched for, thereby generating search volume for this search term. I have seen this occur with my own eyes in the tech industry.

There was a VC blogger known as Andrew Chen who blogged about startups, user acquisition and viral marketing. In one of his essays in 2011, he mentioned a new term called "growth hacker". This refers to a special group of marketers who can achieve rapid growth for a startup by exploiting technical leverages in popular platforms, thereby fuelling its growth using with users of that platform. 

Ever since that essay went live, I have seen this term used frequently in many other startup/technology blogs. In fact, I did a check on Google insights and this is what I found:

Guess who is ranking for this term? Andrew Chen of course. He has single-handedly created a new search space using content alone and his blog is now enjoying high rankings for this term without using backlinks.

If you have skills in crafting such content, you don't need backlinks. All you need is to draft a new memo, give it a sexy term such as 'growth hacker' or 'pillar content' or 'write epic shit', posted to a platform (can be yours or others) where there is an audience and watch your search traffic increase. No backlinks needed!

If you can't create such content, at least be able to spot it and exploit it if you can. Such new query space is also part of the trend keywords research that I mentioned above. If you cannot stimulate new query space with your content, at least learn who to follow those who can. When they come up with a new query space, quickly attack it and make it yours.

I hope this article can convey the message that you can get traffic from Google without focusing just on backlinks. Links are important but they willl never be the MOST important.

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SEO metrics to track for making money

A big part of why so many people failed to make money online is not knowing which part of the equation did they get wrong. Besides visitors and revenue, I don't see much discussion on what other metrics or indicators a beginner should track to assess their performance. It is easy to say: "just do all the work and you will make money eventually. Behind this statement is the implicit assumption that you will learn your mistakes, correct them and then become successful. However, without seeing any positive results, it is hard to keep going to realise this learning cycle.

In this short post, I am going to talk about two important SEO metrics you should use to track your progress as you learn how to make money with amazon or any other niche sites. This post is not meant for those who want to build authority sites. It is targeted at those who are starting out, learning to build a few mini sites and wants to know whether they are on the right track. As I said in my post on one vs many sites to make money, you need to know your market first before going in 100% to build a large site.

Let's get on with the program.

Making money with amazon boils down to a couple of steps:

• Finding low competition keywords that can monetise well
• Laying out your site and content to maximise conversion (not the expense of the user though)
  
• Increasing the traffic from search engines to your site

It sounds simple enough but there is a lot of details within each of the steps. The last metric is easy to track and one that I will not talk about. The first two steps, however can be cruical during the early stages of your niche site building.


Picking low competition keywords
Learning how to pick low competition keywords will solve half of your problems in making money. If you don't get this part down, you will find it hard to draw traffic later on to monetise your site. To master this aspect, you need to know two things:

• Where to find seed ideas that have no competition: I have said this many times but you need to know how to look at a keyword and research on whether there are new products or markets within that niche. Don't just reply on google adwords because the fact that the keywords appear in the tool means somebody might already be competiting with you on that keywords. Learn to expand your source for seed ideas and you will see that opportunity is all around you. 

• How to evaluate the keyword competitiveness of your niche: I covered this in my post on how to check keyword competition. Check that out. 

How do you know you got this part right?

First metric to track is how well you indexed. If your site indexed on page 1-3 without any serious backlink effort, you are picking the right low competition keywords. If most of your sites don't ranked well when they are first indexed. you are probably picking something that is too competitive for a niche site.


Laying out your site
Once you have the keywords and they ranked well when indexed, you need to learn how to layout your site. No point getting your site ranked well when the visitors are not clicking on your amazon clicks. The first rule of thumb is not to layout your site like a blog. Your amazon sites should look like ecommerce stores. Your visitor's first impression should be that this is a site where I can browse for the products that I am searching for. I will give concrete examples in my future post on this topic.


To know if you are laying out your site correctly, track your visitors to amazon clicks ratios. Anything less than 50% should be improved. Believe me when I say that it is easier to improve your conversion ratio than to get more visitors to your site. Maximise each and every visitor so you do less work in terms of traffic generation.


In summary, these are the metrics you should track when you have very little revenue or traffic:

• How highly ranked are your sites when they first index
• What is the ratio between your visitors and those that click on the amazon link

They will help you to know whether you are on the right track when starting out. Try not to build too many sites until you get these two metrics right with the first few that you have.

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One or many sites to make money?

After posting about the 50 amazon site challenges, I had a few private conversions about whether do you need one or many websites to make money. Rather than highlight the pros and cons of each methods, which many had already talked, I just want to say you will need to do both. It is just a matter of timing in terms of which one do you embark on first.

I believe that focusing everything on one site will make the site a quality site. However, the challenge is knowing what niches to focus on. Some will say follow your passion, which is a good advice but you better have a concrete plan on how to monetise your passion beyond just adsense, which tend not to pay well for 'passion sites'. The thing about passion sites is that they are also competitive because most of our interest are the same and there is oversupply of information in such markets. On any single day, there will be more sites about video games than can openers.

So, beyond passion sites, you can have niche sites that target markets which are not based on any broad interest. In these markets, you need to know what product converts well and is easy for a beginner to dominate. This is when the many site strategy becomes useful.

No data in the world can 100% tell you how easy and profitable a niche is. Most often than not, the best niches I am in are 'accidentally'. They are found through the analytics on my sites and hence are not competitive but are lucrative. To maximise my chance of finding these niches at the early stage of my online career, I started many sites, and creating lots of longtail keywords in each site. You will be surprised at the ways that people can find your site if you have a broad enough keyword base.

It is only after you have found such a niche then you can focus on your efforts to make it a super authority site that can draw in thousands of visitors per day and earn you a full time income. If you want to create such a site when you are new to making money online, the chances of picking a wrong is going to be sky high, which is why I don't recommend such a strategy to beginners.

If you are new to making money online, I suggest create a couple of small sites in niches to test their conversion and your SEO ability. You can also create a boarder site when you find your golden goose.

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How to develop a seo strategy - A 5000 word guide

I condensed my 2 years of SEO experience into this post to help you to create a seo strategy from the beginning. This is going to be a changing document as I will be updating it when my methods changed. If you looking for seo tutorials for beginners, this article is NOT for you. In writing this post, I am assuming a certain understanding of technical SEO terms such as keywords, backlinks etc. If you have no idea what does the above means, I suggest you read my upcoming SEO for beginners' post that will touch on the very basic concepts in search engine optimisation strategy.

Warning: this is going to be long so it might take a while to finish reading the entire thing. In case you need a breakdown, below is table of content for this post:

1. SEO keyword strategy
2. On page seo
3. SEO linking building strategy
4. SEO metrics for feedback

The four steps above represent the basis for any SEO campaign that you are going to launch. Each step links to the other and it is vital that they work together. In the past, I used to focus on 3 and claim myself to the SEO authority among my friends. Haha.  It was only after reading SEO theory by Michael Martinez that I realise how backward I am.  If you are like me, I suggest you hop over to the site and see for yourself what kind of tools you have at your disposal, whereby link building is only a small part of it.

1. SEO keyword strategy
When you are developing seo strategy for a new site or old one, the first thing is back to keyword search. In the past, this means going to google keyword tool or some of your other favourite keyword tool software and start punching in some seed keywords to find some terms that are profitable and non competitive. I used to do that until I realise that no keyword tool in the world can accurately decide on how competitive the keywords will be.

In this section, we will talk about two important seo tips:

• how to pick keywords that have no competition
• how to gauge the competitiveness of a keyword space

If you know how to do the above well, you have a much easier time in getting targeted search traffic to your sites.


How to pick keywords that have no competition
The best way to enter into uncompetitive niches is to know how to use trends and the changing keyword space to spot emerging new keyword or what Michael would call a query space. Google reports that about 20-25% of searches are new. Hence, if you know how to use trends and the changing query space to spot these new searches, you have practically no competition. In fact, this is the seo keyword strategy that I used to create an adsense site that is making 1k per month.

So, let's take a look at how keyword trend analysis works.

New keywords emerge from a variety of sources.

• Seasonality: People search for stuff that ends with a date or year. These categories range from holidays to reality shows to sports. It is common to new searches such as best Christmas toys for 2011 or black friday 2011 or american idol 2012. The addition of the time aspect changes the keyword space and allows new sites to enter and dominate if they did early enough. If you start optimising for christmas 2012 now, you will have a great chance of ranking for some seasonal keywords when next year rolls around.

• Events: Elections, disasters, affairs etc. Basically news that sudden causes everyone to start searching different. In a niche such as news when events are common, it holds great opportunity to spot new keywords and dominate them. The traffic may or may not die off depending on the decay rate of the news. 

• New products or services: This is what I used to create the 1k. I basically spotted a market where new products are introduced consistently. Not only that, some of these new products tend to be featured on national TV, resulting in huge traffic spikes as well as an increasing traffic for these new terms. This means that if you want enter a market, know it well. Understand the process of when and how new products are introduced. How often these new products are introduced and do they receive any marketing exposure are key questions you should factor in your analysis. No keyword software tool will tell you this. 

• Evolving query space:  I took the longest in realising this after rereading Michael's blog a couple of times. How people search changes over time. In fact, the more popular a keyword is, the more likely new search terms will appear. This is because there are lots of people interested in the term but are sick of seeing the same result over and over again. This is when they will try new permutations of the keyword to see what new results will be presented. This decay and rise of query space is something that is not mentioned often in all the money making blogs but understand and observing it is critical in your keyword analysis.
  
  As an example, this blog ranks for certain "long tail keywords" terms. I think it is actually on page two for long tail keywords. I decided to write more about this term when I noticed that some SEO blogs started to focus on this. It was an evolution of the term keyword and is something new that my site can tackle and possibly dominate without backlinks. What I have done to enforce the relevance of this blog for this term "longtail keywords" is to write an article on it and repeating them like what I have done above. I am sure that if I write more articles such as the one I have written called what are long tail keywords, this site will draw in more targeted traffic for this term. 

After knowing how new keywords can come about, here are some tools that you can use to help you spot them. The most obvious but often underuse is your own analytics data. You need to learn how to track keywords in google analytics to find these emerging keywords, especially when you have an evolving query space. Not all site owners like to or able to read google analytics data but they need to learn. Your own analytics is a treasure trove waiting for you to uncover its richness.

The simple way to do it is to pick certain high traffic pages that you site might have and see what keyword terms are bringing you traffic. See how often these new keywords emerge and whether they can form an upward trend. 

If your site is new and has no traffic, using a free tool such as Google keywords trends tool is the next best thing. Learn how to drill into the trend tool. Select a 90days or 1 year timeline and start to drill into every category of your niche. Watch out for 'breakout' terms as these indicate a growing sector that might not be as competitive.

Your seo keyword strategy forms the foundation of your entire seo campaign. Without them, you are building on thin ice. I encourage you to spend more time here than anywhere else. With the right keywords, you will find that you don't need to depend on as many links as other people have told you. If you have a weak keyword set, you will have no choice but to be drawn into a link competition. It doesn't have to be this way. Link building is expensive and time consuming. If you can have targeted traffic without backlinks, your seo campaign will have a higher ROI. It all depends on what query space you are entering into.

Before moving on to the next stage of creating site structure and content, I like to touch a bit about how to judge the competitiveness of your keywords.

How to gauge the competitiveness of a keyword space
Most of the time, emerging or evolving keywords have little or no competition. However, it is still prudent to do some keyword competitive analysis. This is an open field that different people have different ideas about. For backlink guys, they will stress on looking at the backlink profile on the competitors using either yahoo backlinks or some other backlink checker software. This is what I used to do but if you are picking new keywords, this is totally unnecessary. Besides, there is no backlink checker tool that is useful.

What you need is to check whether there are sites that have started to optimise their own sites for these new keywords. This can be done via search engine operators.

• intitle tells you whether the keywords are located in the page title
• inurl tells you whether the keywords are used in the url
• inanchor tells you whether the competitor has started to invest in link building. This will NOT tell you how many actual links have been built

If you only find 1-2 sites that have all the above, it is quite uncompetitive. Anything beyond 5 is going to require some serious work. However, as I said before, there are many new terms being formed everyday so you don't have to go into the link building game. It is up to your keyword seo strategy to help you get those terms out.

2. On page SEO strategy
Once you have determined your keyword set, you need to work on optimising your onsite SEO. Contrary to popular beliefs, targeting a set of uncompetitive keywords with good onsite optimisation is sufficient to get you targeted traffic. No backlinks needed!

Why do onpage SEO
Onsite SEO helps your seo strategy by proving the following benefits:

• Help search engines to crawl and index your site: Many people have downplayed this part but I think it is important especially if you are developing a seo strategy for a large website. In such cases, you are more concern about whether the search engine can crawl and index as much of your site as possible as oppose to your search engine rankings for any keyword. In many cases, your pages are not ranked not because it lacks links but simply because they have not been indexed. In such cases, improving the crawl helps to improve your index which can bring you more search engine traffic for a larger variety of keywords.

• Internal links:  Internal links do pass relevance to the pages they point to. In fact, Michael suggested that search engines trust internal links more than external links because the site owner will be in the best position to know what keywords the pages should be related to.  That sounds logical although I have no evidence of its validity. However, I do know that inner links do help to rank pages for keywords that are not in competitive spaces. Good on page SEO will help to maximise the use of internal links.

Now that we know why onsite seo is important, let's get to the actual implementation of onsite seo. There are two basic things that we have at your disposal to do this: (i) site structure and (ii) seo content strategy.

Site structure for SEO
One of the first thing you can do is to find the right site structure that is right for the keywords. Most of the time, we use blog format but that might not be the use in terms of onsite SEO. Your navigation, your promotion links and your site organisation will not be the right structure that will maximise your exposure to the search engines.

So, when choosing a site structure, there are a few choices you can pick from. The most common one is blog and is great for informational based sites. Other options include

• forums for niches where discussions are important
• data based driven ecommerce stores for people selling physical products
• Q&A site
• A social network
• a mix of the above. You can be innovative and find ways to combine certain things but do keep the code clean. There is a technical side to site structure whereby the wrong codes can result in search engines not indexing your page properly. This is not my area of expertise but I like to give everyone a heads up on this. 

Once the site structure has been decided, here is an onsite optimization checklist that you can use to maximise the relevancy of your site to the search engines.  The checklist is no means complete as I am only starting to learn how to do onsite seo after reading through all the onsite seo tips given by Michael. If you want to learn from the source, go and read his blog. 

Onsite seo checklist

• seo friendly navigation: navigation are important part of your inner link structure. Remember that your navigation links exist on EVERY page. Therefore, the keywords used on your navigation effectively passed the relevance to the pages they are pointing to. Every often, the home page uses the keyword "home". This need not be the case. You can always include your main keyword i.e. 'home of dog training guide' if your main keyword is dog training guide.
  
  Beside the keywords used in the navigation, you should also consider what pages you want these navigation links to point to. Ideally, these inner pages should be hubs within your sites that connect to the rest of the pages of the site. One good example is a sitemap. By nature a sitemap acts as a hub for your content and feeding internal links to it help it to strength other pages that it links to. So, one part of your navigation system can point to the sitemap.

• create internal hubs: I have mentioned this above but to explain more clearly, internal hubs can be pages that link to the rest of the content in your site. For example, you can create an article titled "top 20 post of mysite.com" where it can link to the 20 most popular articles at your site. These internal hubs are not only useful for internal linkage but they are great for your readers as well. 

• promotional links:  You can use some plugin to cross promote relevant content across posts, similar to how Amazon recommends similar product. It is great for both increased readership as well passing internal links. 

• meta tags, page titles, url:  These are the normal stuff that other sites have advice. Use keywords in your meta tags, page titles and url. If you used a blogging platform, your article titles immediately become your url and page titles.

• avoid overusing similar keywords in page titles: this is just my hypothesis but letting your main keyword appear in all your page titles via some wordpress plugins might be one negative factor in Panda's algorithm. I am currently testing this by moving all main keyword from all my page titles.

SEO content strategy
After mapping out your site structure, it is time to plan out your content strategy, which is just as important as your keyword research strategy. Content drives targeted traffic. Without content, there is no basis to draw search engine traffic from.

Content needs to valuable. I used to think that purchased content is sufficient. Well, the recent panda just proves otherwise. So, if you want to create quality that is appealing to both search engines and human visitors, here are some ideas:

•  Your own journals: Write down your own experience or experiments for the keywords that you want to provide value to. For example, I created a case study of how I took a site to 1k a month within 6 months. Readers enjoy that because you are providing your unique perspective of your own experiences. 

• Interviews of experts in your field: If you want provide interviews that help your readers learn from the leading experts in your field, it is both useful and relevant.

• In depth tutorials: For certain niches such as design, beauty, software etc, giving detailed tutorials are a great way to give value for your readers. This article can be an example (I hope!) of a detailed guide for anyone who wants to develop a seo strategy for their website.

• Breaking news or insightful commentary: For people in the news niche such as tech blogs, you can either to be the first to break news or provide the most comprehensive analysis of popular events. Although you can get with by repeating what the top sites have written, readers will soon find them boring. 

•  Real product reviews: If you want to go into product niches, best way is to buy the product and use it. Take lots of images and videos and write about how the product really works. Nothing beats a real hands on experience. 

• Content strategy for small companies:  For small business owner who want to use SEO strategy, you can use the below as the basis for insightful and relevant content for your customers:
• Company history: how, why, when you start the company is a good reason to be interesting and relevant
• Case studies: how real customers are using you
• Solve their problems: provide information that solves some of your customers' problems in your market. For example, if you are a florist, give ideas on what kind of unique gifts for valentine's day. If you are an ebook software company, talk about how to organise, find and share ebooks can be useful.
• Profile of people: the lives of yourself and your employees can make for interesting content.
• Events and functions: when you company has any marketing events, write about them. Use lots of images and videos as well.

Content can be a powerful to enforce the relevance of your site. A good way to get new post ideas is to look at your stats and what keywords are driving traffic. Take those keywords and plan some really good content around them, using the ideas I have suggested above. Nothing else, this will bring in lots of long tail traffic to your site.

How to do seo copywriting
Now, we get to the actual writing of the content. With your keywords in place, your site structure defined and your content ideas thought out, it is time to write. Here are some seo copywriting tips or best practices that I often used. You are free to innovate of course. There is nothing fixed in stone for seo. You need to constantly change and evolve or be left behind by others who are willing to do so.

• Keyword content targeting: For best results, target each section of your article with a long tail keyword. Never mind the traffic volume. Just use them rather than using your own way of writing which might have zero search volume. I did this in every section of this article. I used "choose keywords for your article" as this section's heading before changing it to the currently used "keyword content targeting". In such instances, you are not betting on any particular long tail keywords. You just optimising the entire article so that there is a chance that some of these long tail keywords will bear you some traffic. For such longtails, I used google suggest rather google keyword tools as the latter does not show you all the longtails which are suitable for your particular message that a section of your article might want to convey.

• Repeating keywords:  This still carries a certain weight in terms of relevance of your content. To avoid being spammy, you need to write long copies so that the keywords you are targeting get naturally repeated. For example, I have already repeated the keywords "seo strategy" many many times because I need to. Of course, you cannot write long copy by rambling. Each of your points needs careful deliberation and planning so that it maximises the value of your user. 

• Optimise each section for a keyword: It is ok for an article to carry many different keywords but it is good practice to write in a way such that each section targets a particular keyword. This is called micro seo copywriting. I have demonstrated some of these seo techniques in this article as well. The paragraph above, for instance, targets how keyword repetition helps your seo strategy. 

• Try different keywords: As I have mentioned in the keyword section, the more popular a keyword is, the more permutations it will have as people are sick of seeing the same results and are trying to see alternatives. In the course of your writing, you can take advantage of this by thinking and trying different keywords that say the same thing. For example, how to make money online and how to earn money online means the same thing but I am getting traction for the latter and not the former. The former is competitive and tough to get in while the former has more room for me to scrape some of this traffic off the search engines. If you change the combination of your keywords through different adjectives and verbs, you will be surprised to find some unoccupied keyword space. 

• Write seo content consistently: You will find that that writing consistently for a long period of time will produce search engine traffic even if you don't how to target keywords in your content. When I started this blog in 2006, I know nothing of SEO and just write. Now, I am getting search traffic for terms such as twitter startups, ebook applications without intentionally targeting. Just goes to show that consistently in producing content can yield search traffic. Using seo content strategy just gives you better ROI and faster results.

3. SEO linking building strategy
Now we get to everybody's favourite part of SEO strategy: linkbuilding or link placement. Frankly, if you look at the amount of information before this section, you will already know that SEO is more than link building. I am NOT saying 10k of keyword anchored links will not get you anywhere but it is not the only solution and far from the most cost effective.

Why link building is important to seo
Building links to your site has its place. Firstly, it helps to get new site crawl and index which I mentioned above is important. If you are using wordpress or blogspot, there is an automatic system that will ping the blog servers for you when you published an article. This can help you to get index without backlinks.

Secondly, backlinks can give you anchor text relevance. This is the main reason why most SEO engage in so much link building. It is an attempt to give the page the links are pointing to relevance through the anchored keywords that are being used in the links. However, building tonnes of high quality content over a period of time can give you relevance as well. The latter process might be longer but it is more cost effective as it helps to bring in other longtail traffic while giving your site real value. The backlinks might lose their value passing ability over time, especially they come from those backlinking network or software tools. I have more to say about whether all backlinks can help you to rank.

Thirdly, getting links to your site can give you traffic and recognition. This marketing aspect of getting links is actually the most important to me nowadays. If my content is outstanding, I just need to let people know about it. By placing links in places where my potential readers hang out, it will drive them back to my site. They may become regular readers. In fact, they might like the content so much that they give me natural backlinks. This can only works if you follow section 2 of the content strategy.


How to get backlinks to your site
Now that you know why you need links to your site, the key is where to get the ones that matter. This is where I will not reveal so much information except to say that go for quality. 10 value passing links are much better thousands of links that don't pass value.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to tell if a link can pass value. The complicated way is this: if a page ranks for the keywords anchored in the link that is pointing to it, even though the page itself does not contain the keywords, then you can safely say that the anchor text has been passed from the link. The easy way is to use your common sense and get your links in popular sites that have both traffic and high keyword authority.

That is all I have to say about your seo linking strategy. If you want to know about how many links you should get, how diverse should your link profile is and how varied your anchored keywords are, I am no interest in these questions because they are not relevant to me now. There are lots of seo blogs that talk about such useless things if you want to read about them. 


4. SEO metrics for feedback
One of the least discussed SEO topics is SEO metrics. I am quite surprised at how little information there is at measuring the success of your SEO campaign. The most common types of seo metrics that people report is the number of backlinks and rankings for certain keywords. That is not the end objective of SEO. The point of doing a SEO strategy is to get more targeted traffic to your website at the most cost effective ways.  Or else, there is no strategy. It is just slamming links and pretending to do SEO.

What are the SEO metrics that matter
In this section, I will be talking about some personal seo metrics that I am tracking. Mind you, this is a new area for me as well and it will probably be the most blogged about seo topic for the next few months in my blog. Again, read Michael Martinez's SEO theory if you want to learn more. I know nothing when compared to him.

• Emerging keyword dashboard: This is, hands down, my most important SEO metric. I constantly look for new keywords in my analytics data so that I can spot new areas to write and dominate. Currently, there is no seo metrics tool (that I can know of) which can help to track these new keywords. What I do is to look at my Google analytics and dot down in an excel spreadsheet the new keywords that look promising. It is primitive but it gets the job done. I am going to try is Fraser Cain's keyword strategy tool. It seems to be able to spot keywords that are non competitive and yet relevant to my niche. In fact, I am going to do a 3 month case study on whether this tool can help to improve aaronchua.com's search traffic. Stay Tune! For those who want to check out how this tool works, click on the banner below to see the demo videos:

• Search traffic growth: The next important thing is how much your site is growing in terms of search engine traffic. Why you should track this metric should be self explanatory.
  

• Cache rate:  I am tracking how often search engines cache my side. The more often my site is cached, the more crawling and indexing my site will get. With new keywords, all you need is to ensure your site is constantly being cache so that your content has a chance to rank. A low cache rate might mean you need a couple of links to get your site going. You should not need too many. 

• % of site index:  It is impossible to get 100% of your site index if you have lots of articles. The goal is to get as many indexed as possible. The more articles that are indexed, the higher the chance of your site getting all the long tail traffic. Section 2 gives you some ideas on how to improve this through hubs.

• Hubs to articles ratio: There should be some kind of ratios between your hubs and the number of articles your site has. Besides a sitemap, I can't think of a natural way for one hub to link to all articles. This is why maintaining a ratio is important as you get to see when you need to add another hub to strength your site's index and crawl rate. 

Conclusion
I hope the above makes it easier (if not more confusing) on what is a proper seo strategy. It is not always about getting more links. In fact, you might never need that many backlinks if you think through your entire strategy. SEO strategy is about an entire process of keyword research, content generation, site structure, getting feedback and iterate.


When you are doing your seo strategy, you might not need all the elements. In fact, you should experiment and come out with something better. If you do, let me know and I will be more than happy to share them here.

If you enjoy this article on how to develop a seo strategy, share it using the sharing buttons below, you lazy lot!

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How to create an authority site for passive income

This a long post about how to go about creating an authority site. It comes from an email that I have sent to my 'students' learning how to do internet marketing. I thought it would be useful to produce that here:

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As you guys know, Google undertook some serious cleanup for the past few weeks. I have already told you guys how to position your blogs to be sustainable in the long run. I am going to summarise this in this email as well as to rant a bit of other stuff, so do stay with me for a while.

One of the thing about making money online is about commitment. It is all about doing CONSISTENT work for the first few months before seeing any results but they will come. To show you evidence, here are the adsense earning trends of my fellow marketers. As you noticed, the shape is all the same although the amount earned can be different i.e. a flat line for the first few months and a sudden jump in earnings. This is because age plays an important factor in the ranking. All the good work done in the first few months is just to convince Google that your site is genuine. Once Google trust, they will suddenly release your content into the SERP, resulting in a jump in your traffic and money.

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Hopefully, these will help you set the right expectations. Nothing good in this world comes easily and it is the same with passive income. You need to put in the work first before seeing any result. I had quite a number of ‘students’ in the past and 95 % of them failed because they didn’t really commit. Sure, verbally they will say they are ‘in’ but action wise, you know they are not committed. By commitment, I mean do mean commitment. The kind shown by sportsman who want to win medals, who trains everyday rain or shine. That is commitment. Not the type where “oh, I need to go out with my friends today; oh, I need to do XXX”. All these are excuses.

One way to commit is to set targets. A lot of my students didn’t. They work as and when they like and whenever I gave them a push. So for you guys to really succeed like me, you need concrete targets. These targets should not be in the form of earnings or rankings or traffic, they should be in terms of work. More specifically, they should be in the form of articles produced per day, per week or per month.

You might say this is easy for me as I have been through this already. Fair comment. So, to work along with you guys, I am setting myself a new challenge and target. For the next 2 months, I am going to master Amazon. Currently, my Amazon earnings are pitiful as they range from 20 cents to 20 dollars a month. I don’t know how to do this properly but I am going to take these 2 months to try. For this experiment, I going to use 2 new sites and create content on them that targets the grilling and toy niches respectively. My target is terms of workload for May and June is this:

- 50 articles on 1 site with each article focusing on reviewing one specific model and brand

- 50 backlinks to each article

That means a total of 200 article within 2 months. I am going to throw these out and see what happens in July. In the meantime, I will not check my stats or ranking or traffic. The only thing I will be checking is the work I have done.

I hope you can commit yourself to some target along with me. I suggest you focus on one site and create 100 articles for it within these 2 months: 50 to be posted on your site and 50 to be used for backlinks. 100 articles within 2 months means an average of 1.6 articles per day, very doable if you commit.

Guys, this is a great time to start. A new month is coming and that is good to start something new. With the Amazon experiment, I am now on the same footing as you. I will be working on the new site as well and I am will figuring out how to do things. If I can try something new, I am sure you guys can. Remember, I am still be doing work on my Adsense sites even when doing this experiment so my personal workload will be much much heavier.

Ok, as a recap on how to create an authority site, here are the basic things you need to be aware of:

1) Pick a wider niche that obeys the same principles:

a.Competition: PR3s and below in the Google search result page. PR4 is ok if the main keyword didn’t appear in the heading of the search result


b.Potential: I would recommend more than 500USD to worth the effort, even 1,000USD.

Notice that I didn’t say pick keywords, I say pick a niche. A niche can have lots of keywords. When calculating the potential of a niche, you need to sum up all the profit potential of all the keywords within the niche. For example, if I am picking the niche “ rain boots”, I would sum the profit potential of not only the keyword “rain boots” but for all related keywords such as “women rain boots”, “rain boots for kids”, “red rain boots” etc. So, a keyword itself might not give you 500USD but the summation of all the related keywords in a niche can easily hit that target.


2) Write 50 articles for your site:


a. Each article should target a long tail. I have sent you guys some info about how to do that yesterday. Read that again to understand what is long tail keywords. In the beginning, your site will only attract long tail keyword searches and the more you have, the more traffic you will gain in the short run. Once you are ranking of many long tail keywords, your main keyword will start to appear.


b. Your long tail keyword must appear in the article title. However, do not make it spammy by including just the long tail keyword. In the past you can do that but with the new changes, you will want a post title that appears natural and yet contains your keyword. For example, if you are targeting ‘yellow rain boots’ in an article, you should use titles like “best looking yellow rain boots”, “where to find the cheapest yellow rain boots” etc.

3) Write another 50 articles for backlinks:

a. Nothing much to say except that each article should target the backlink to one of your articles that you have written for your site. The good thing is I have a backlink resource you guys can use. When I started by myself, I need to literally beg for these backlink resources.

4) Enforce what Google already recognizes you for:

a. By the third or fourth week, you should start to see some traffic if you have been diligent and have put up more than 15 articles in your site. Use analytics software like StatCounter to monitor what keywords are bringing you these traffic. For example, you might find that ‘green rain boots’ is giving you traffic even though your article was about ‘yellow rain boots’. You just happen to mention the word ‘green’ in the article and got ranked because of that. If the traffic is good for this keyword, you might want to write a new article that just targets ‘green rain boots’.

If you finish these within 2 months, I can safely say you will have your first click by July. However, the full effects will come only in September or even October when the site has aged and there will be a sudden jump in your earnings. If you do have your first click in July, I think that will motivate you enough to continue what you are doing and you should have a good passive stream in the future. The tough part is always the beginning.

So, how badly do you want this? Take a moment and think for yourself. If you are not willing to do the work above, I suggest you stop now. Seriously. No point wasting your time as you wouldn’t get anywhere with half hearted attempts anyway. I have seen this happen to my old students so many times so I don’t want it to happen to you.

Are you in or out?

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Buying keywords for beginners

I have not updated this blog because I am been working hard at building my niche blogs and making money. It has been a very rewarding experience to apply all the SEO tips that I have learned to make a real living. However, this is not instant wealth. Don't expect to create one blog and expect to quit your job. It wouldn't happen that way. Making money online using niche blogs is a long process. Give yourself a year and tw0(plus constant hard work) and you will have a passive income stream that can then allow you to quit your job and do what you really.

A year or two of hardwork is not actually that long. Most of us have worked for 5 years or more and we are still stuck in the same 9-5 working conditions. However, we don't complain about working for 5 years. Relative to that, 1-2 years is nothing because the rewards at the end of the day is so much richer. My plan is to have enough passive income to travel the world for almost everyday of my life. Because I can work anywhere with my niche blogs, I can practically work from any country. Even if I don't work at all, it will be ok because I have the passive income coming in. That is my end goal and that is why I am motivated to do this.

When you first start out as I have, the beginning is always the most difficult. The income you get is so small that you will think whether this is worth it. My first month adsense earning is only $15. Well, that wouldn't get anybody excited and this is why most people will fail. They can't see the long term potential of that USD$15. My second month is around USD$50. Again, not exciting but the growth is there. I break theUSD $100 mark in my third month and things got really interesting. I am now at the 6th month and I am on track to break the USD$1000 a month mark. That is my aim for this year and to break the USD$5000 a month by next year. Based on my current progress, this is certainty doable if you put enough hard work into it.

Making money using adsense is not rocket science. You just need to

(i) select good keywords which can produce profits,
(ii) create keyword relevant content on free platforms such as Blogspot, Blogetery, Blogpico or your own self hosted blogs, and
(iii) the most important part, getting anchored backlinks to your site using a variety of varied phases relating to your keywords.

If you do the above, your site will be ranked on the first page of Google and you will received targeted traffic that will click on your adsense because they are relevant to the searcher. Once that happens, you make money.

However, getting the anchored backlinks is the most difficult because as a beginner, we don't have a lot of resources to place our links. Therefore, we need to think of out the box and figure out niches that our site can get to the top page without that many backlinks. To do that, I have 2 tips for you.

The first is to buy domains containing the exact keyword phase. Domains carry quite a bit of SEO juice so they can rank out of the box if the competition is not strong. If you select keywords that are typically three letter long and the result pages in Google showing 100,000 or less, the chances of that domain ranking for its keyword is very high. This is my current strategy and I am using it to create 100 micro sites. I called this my microsite challenge and I intend to finish it by end of May. With 100 microsites making roughly $10-$40 per month, you are looking at USD$1000-USD$4000 a month, a full time income right there.

I will detailing this challenge in my future posts. So far, the learnings have been great from creating these sites and I can't wait to share them here.

The second tip is to look for keywords that have no authority sites for them. What are authority sites? These are sites that Google trust and you will find that there will be 1-2 for these for any 2 word common keywords. Take window blinds for example. There will be ecommerce store selling blinds that have around since 2000 and these site, due to the age, will have a lot of trust in Google's eyes. Trying to outrank them is possible if they don't have a lot of anchored backlinks but it will take a while and most beginners don't have patience or confidence for this.

The tip is then is to look for new keywords that have no authority sites. Where to find them? Look for trends and events. One good example is movies. There are always new movies so the title of the movies are new keywords that have no authority sites. A personal example is New Moon. This is the title for the second saga for the popular Twilight series. This word is new and there were no authority for it. I created a blog around a merchandise item around New Moon and got ranked on the first page within 3 weeks with only 3 backlinks. This 2 post blog made me a few hundred dollars a month during Nov and Dec.

While the earnings have tailored off, it still gets a constant traffic. Even if the earnings stopped, so wait., I have earned the money and I now have a blog ranking on page one of Google for its keyword that I can use for backlinking.

So, look for trends and spot keywords because they are easy to rank for beginners. However, do try to pick out buying keywords. Going back to the Twilight example. Ranking for something New Moon trailer might get you lots of traffic but the clicks will have low paying ads because the searchers do not really want to buy anything. When going back such niches, think of the product side. What kind of merchandise will fans of the movies looking for. These product related keywords are definitely buying keywords and will tend to have more clicks and higher paying ads.

If we continue the movie example, I will then look for what will be the hottest say, kids animation movies for 2010. I will do a little research to see which one of these titles have an existing fan base and will then select my keywords accordingly. For kids animation, things like coloring book, songtrack, toys, action figures etc are good buying keywords that you can tag below the name of the movie like this example: diary of a wimpy kid coloring book, or how to train your dragon toys.

Of course, besides movies, there are other types of niches that has new keywords with no authority. Look out for new product launches. Products can be in home applicanes like the new bladeless electric fan or they can be services like new type of cosmestic surgery. All these type of niches are easy to rank for. Of course, some will turn out to be duds but if you build on free blogspots, where is the cost?

I hope this post on selecting buying keywords for beginners has been useful.

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How to select good keywords for niche blogs

To make money online, there is two main things you need to do: picking good keywords and using keyword anchored links to get your site rank high in Google. This is as basic as it gets and anybody that follows this strategy will be able to make money within 2 months.

As an illustration, let me show you a niche of mine that I started in November. Using the tip to get index fast, I manage to get the blog to be indexed within 1 day. After which, it is a matter of selecting long tail keywords that are contains your main keyword and getting them ranked by using keyword anchored backlinks. Because I was able to rank for long tails, traffic begin to come in after one week. I slapped on Adsense after 2 weeks and in the month of November, this is my income for this new blog.













Earning around $5 is no big deal. What I did then was to look at the keywords that were bringing me traffic. I then create a post that targets each of the long tail keyword and build a couple of backlinks to each post. After a month, these long tail keywords begin to rank and my traffic increase. As a result, my income for December for this blog increase as well.














The best thing about this niche is the CTR. I got around 20% , meaning out of every 10 visitors, 2 would click on an ad. The price of the ad is also high, ranging from 80 cents to over a dollar. I will definitely break the $15 a month while my main keywords is not even on page one on Google yet. I can imagine that if my main keyword goes on to page one, my income for this blog will across a hundred bucks a month. Not bad for a free hosted blog.

$15 a month of course is not something to brag about. However imagine if I multiple this blog by 100 or 200. That would bring me about $1500 to $3000 per month of passive income. That, my friend, is what making money online is all about. You pick niches that you can rank given your current resources and you duplicate your success by 100 or 200 blogs.

So, what kind of keywords are good for beginners? This is my general guideline. I pick buying keywords. These keywords contain buying intentions such as affordable, cheap, inexpensive. They signal a strong buying intend from the searcher. Next, I choose ncihes that don't have much competition. I pick niches that have less than 100,000 competing sites. I also look out for niches that have lots of ezine articles or other article directories in the top 10 results. This means you can easily take the page one position with a few anchored backlinks.

When I say anchored backlinks, I doesn't mean links from commenting or bookmarking. I mean links that are found within the content of an relevant article. This is the best form of backlinks and is the hardest to get. As a beginner, if you pick a low competition keyword, you can do the following:

- set up a few hosted blogs on blogger, wordpress, typepad, squidoo that are long tails of your your niche. Make sure they are indexed and then point a link back to your main site
- submit a few articles to high PR article directories such as Ezine, Info barrel, Hub pages etc again point a few links back to your site.

Make sure you vary your anchor text. For example, if you are trying to rank for the keyword: used electric wheelchairs, you should embed the following as your long tail keyword:
- where to buy used electric wheelchair
- used electric wheelchair under $500
- acorn used electric wheelstair

These will ensure that your long tails will start to rank and you will see long tail traffic coming in. From my experience, it is almost impossible to rank for your main keyword. It is the long tail keywords that will bring in traffic first. Also, ranking well for your long tails will help your main keywords to rank if your long tail contains your main keyword.

In summary, to make money online, you need to pick buying keywords for niches that have low competition. Then, source for some anchored backlinks using means that any beginner can get. Within a few weeks, you can start to see income coming in.

This is all I have for how to select good keywords for niche blogs.

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SEO tips: selecting keywords for online income

Getting good keywords is the first step to generate online income. There have been many articles around the Web that teaches you how to do it. For me, I have developed my own system for gatehring these good keywords that are targeted at helping me earn a passive online income. These are my methods. They are not a sure fire way to get rich but they helped me a lot to spot keywords.

The common method people used is to go to places like Google keyword tool and type in a keyword like iphone for example. The tool will then give you a list of long tail keywords and their associated CPCs, search volume, etc. While useful, almost every internet marketing guy is using the same method so you can be assured that most of the good keywords are already saturated with competition. That is why I don't use this method solely.

Here is the one other method that I used. I will talk about the rest in future posts.

Letting Google tell you how to select keywords for your blog.

First, you need to select a keyword that has tons of traffic. Go to google keyword tool and just type in your keyword. Under the 'match type' category, go for 'broad'. This will tell you the total search volume that contains your keyword. Basically it is a sumed total of all phases that people search for that has the word iphone. People can type in iphone accessories, iphone jailbreak, iphone api, iphone games, etc. It doesn't really matter. Google will sum it all up and tell you the total if you used the 'board' category. For this, you are going for keywords with high search volume, preferably beyond a million.

Next, change your 'match type' settings to 'exact'. This will then give you the search volume for for that exact keyword. For example, if you use the 'exact' option on the keyword 'iphone', the search volume result that the tool gives you is only for searches that use the exact word 'iphone' and not other things like 'iphone API' etc. The nice thing about the Google keyword tool is that it will also give the exact search volume for the related keywords. Say, you type in iPhone into the Google keyword tool and choose the exact option. The result will not only show you the exact search volume for iPhone but also for related keyword like 'iPhone games', ' iPhone APIs', 'How to jailbreak iPhone' etc. What you need to do next is then sum up the exact search volume for your main keyword and all the related keywords that the tool is showing you. You can do this by importing the result page into an excel sheet. There is option at the end of the result page where you will see an import function.

So, what you have now are 2 things: (i) the broad search volume for your main keyword and (ii) the exact search volume for your main as well as related keywords. If there is a big difference between the 2, then it means there might be keywords which the tool is not giving you but has significant search volume. For example, let's say the broad search volume for iPhone is 20 million but the sum of all the exact search is only 18 million. That means there is about 2 million searches being done for iphone related keywords that the tool is not telling you. Among these, there might be gems that are bring in 10,000 or 20,000 unique searches per month. What you need to do is to fish them out. How?

This is can be accomplished by writing super long articles. They should be at least 4000-10,000 words. For example, in the iPhone example, I would write a long articles about iPhone that rambles about everything I could think of about the device. It can be iphone batteries, how to maintain iphone, how to clean iphone earplugs, where to buy iphone accessories, etc. The important thing is to keep it long and put in as many related iPhone keywords within the post as you can. I don't mean keyword stuffing until it becomes unreadable but do it in such a way that it is natural. In this article, I have already included so many iPhone related keywords, does it feel keyword stuffed to you?

Then you publish the blog post and wait for a few days (I assumed your site is already indexed). There should be long tail traffic that Google will start sending you. Keep an eye out for these long tail keywords because they will point you to those gem keyword that I talk about. This is how I discovered keywords. Typically these keywords will not have much competition because you cannot find them appearing in Google keyword tool when you do a broad category search like iPhone.

Once I have these keywords then the fun begins. I first decide on my monetisation methods to beginning making online income. Typically, I like Adsense but some keywords doesn't have advertisers (because the Google keyword tool doesn't show these advertisers what to bid for as well LOL). Then, I will look for affiliate products. If it is information based, you can try Clickbank where there are tons of information products (You can also create your own information product btw if it is not available in the market). If it is physical, then Amazon will be my first store. I then build my income generating site according to the type of monetisation method I used.

In summary, that is how I select keywords to make online income.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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SEO tips: anchored backlinks

There is a universal SEO tip for those who really understand what search engine optimisation is all about: it all about anchored backlinks. On-site optimization like including your keyword in your header, blog title, url etc accounts for maybe less than 20% of your ranking in Google's front page. The rest is dependent on anchored backlinks. That is the SEO tip.

What are anchored backlinks? They are like normal backlinks, but anchored with your keywords, like this:

baseball strength training

Notice how the keywords are used in the links and how it is related to the niche of strength training? That is a anchored backlink.

We all know that links are what drive Google's pagerank. The more links you have, the higher you will get in the Google's result page. You don't need SEO tips to know about this. (Note: this is a simplification of pagerank and there are more indepth articles elsewhere that talked about this_

What a lot of people don't know (and this is the SEO tip) is that Google will also associate the link with the keywords you used to anchor it. If there are many links pointing to my site using the words aaron chua wee nian, aaron chua, aaronchua etc, Google will know that this site is all about aaron chua. The next time somebody searches for aaron chua, my site will be among the top 10.

This is how I get keyword authority. My site is deem by Google to have authority in this keyword.

However, using names as anchor text is exactly what we want to avoid, if you want to get use SEO tip to make money. Would anybody want to advertise on the keyword 'aaronchua'? Of course not. This is the common mistake made by lots of bloggers. They don't understand the use of anchored text and therefore, they don't gain authority in any keyword except for their names, which are completely useless when it comes to advertising.

What you want is to use the proper anchored backlinks to give your niche blogs authority in the keywords you are targeting. Let's go back to the example of strength training for beginners. If I can get many backlinks to a site about strength training using the same or similar keywords, such as strength training, strength training for beginners etc, then this site would gain authority and rise in the Google search result. What happens next is the money making part and where the SEO tip is.

Now, if somebody is looking for information on strength training for beginners, and key in that keyword into the search box, my site will appear in the top 10 result and they will click on it. Because the traffic is so targeted, any relevant ads you show will get them clicking on it. That is why anchored keywords are important.

This applies to any niche you do. Be it cameras, food, shoes etc, you need anchored backlinks to get you to Google's top page and get targeted traffic and clicks. So, if you want to link back to this site, please use SEO tips or best SEO tips or something similar. Don't use aaronchua : )

My next SEO tip will be on how do you get those anchored backlinks without people actually linking to you.

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SEO tips: "for beginner" keywords

The SEO tip I like a lot is choosing the keywords which contains "for beginners". Why is that important? Well, it is simple: beginners are ad clickers. That is the SEO tip.

When you are a beginner, you are open to learning things. Your mind is in state of search for information. I was in this state when I first began my niche blogging. I was always looking out to what SEO tips to learn. In fact, I often googled for these terms:

best seo tips
top seo tips etc

When I was in this state, anything I saw that was evenly remotely interesting, even if it is an ad, I would click it to find out more. That is how beginners are. This is why they make a great niche to target for ads.

However, I am not saying we should just focus on beginners only. In fact, the next SEO tip is this: use the "for beginners" term as a beachhead to start penetrating into other related terms. That is how you expand from a dominating a keyword to an entire niche.

Let me illustrate with an example. Let say I am interested in strength training. Rather than, focusing on strength training right from the start, I would use "for beginners" instead. That means my initial keyword would be:

strength training for beginners

Once I have managed to get into the first page for this term, I will start getting traffic from people who are ad clickers. Their volume might be low but boy, do they click. This is a good start to get your revenue going , right off the bat, rather than having to work on your niche blog for a few months without seeing any money. (consider this another SEO tip).

The next step is interesting. You can start to expand into other related terms by focusing on other similar keywords such as:

baseball strength training for beginners or
soccer strength training for beginners

Doing so will immediate create additional targeted traffic for your niche, which in turn brings you more ad revenue. That is how to expand from a keyword to a niche.

Hope you find this particular SEO tip to be useful.

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