I have told you all about keywords, and search engine optimization before, and I hope you have gained some knowledge, and hopefully put some of it to use. I would love to hear which sites you people work on, leave me a comment!

Keywords are often hard to come across, and if you have chosen an area in the market, which is already popular, then it’s even harder to optimize those keywords. Just imagine trying to optimize words/phrases like “make money”, “jobs online”, and so forth. I’m sure you can agree with me when I say that it is near impossible. Unfortunately, for those people who are new to the ‘game’ of advertising and making money online, there isn’t much room for making a success in an already established area, unless your ideas are unique or you have a clever way to get traffic to your website.

So what can be done about this? Well, I can’t tell you exactly how to get loads of traffic to your site, and I can’t tell you exactly how to get your website ranked up in the number one spot for the words of your choice, but what I can do is teach you a great little tip for choosing keywords.

As you know, everyone who has a website has a hosting company, which stores your website online. This company should provide you with some kind of control planel, the most popular being cPanel. cPanel is a tool, which allows you to login to your control panel, and within your control panel, there is a statistics section. If you are interested in making money with your blog/website, then you should know what I am talking about, if not, then I suggest you get hold of your hosting company, and find out how to go about checking your statistics and things immediately!

Within your statistics are of your control panel, there are two very useful sections: “Robots/Spiders visitors” and “Search Keyphrases”. These two sections will tell you which search engines people are using to arrive at your website, and further more, which keyword/phrases people are using to arrive at your website. Now, the aim here is to run your blog/site for a month or two, and carefully study these two sections. Let me explain why below..

Robots/Spiders visitors

This section will allow you to see which search engines are crawling your website. This basically means that your site has been listed with these search engines. For example, this website has been crawled many times by Googlebot, MSNbot and AskJeeves - so from this information I can tell that my site has been listed with these search engines. If your site does not have a Googlebot crawling it, then you should go ahead and take the steps to list yourself with Google!

Search Phrases

This is the most important part of this post. Search Phrases are the phrases and words, which people are using in search engines, that land them up at your website. I will return to my fishing example to explain what I am talking about - If you are looking through your search phrases and see, let’s say, three phrases: “fishing rods”, “surfing”, “tackle”. As the author of the fishing website, I will be happy to see “fishing rods” and “tackle” within those results, as those are popular words within my websites topics. The “surfing” phrase is not very relative, so I can ignore it. Now, the thing to do here is start using the phrases “fishing rods”, and “tackle” more often on my website. It is clear that these words are popular words for people to search and arrive at my website, so I will aim to optimize them. Use these phrases in your titles, and bold them in content of the website, and you will slowly start to “own” the words. The more times you use these phrases (within boundaries obviously), the more chances you have for your website to land in the top search results, when a person searches for them!

This is a process, not something you can just do once, and then stop, unless it just takes off the ground immediately, which is great, but rare. View your search phrases often, they change all the time, and choosing the correct words to optimize is crucial for a blog/site which relies on traffic from search engines.

Lastly, after a good couple months of carefully studying your search phrases, and you have selected a couple which work really well for you, include these words in back links. By this, I mean, when someone offers to link to your website, link it to your website using the key phrases you have studied. I have already talked about this: securing your keywords, if you are not following.

I hope that gives you some more information on getting that site of yours up the ranks!

Here are some of the tools I use when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. I have played around with most of them, and have had great success with them. If you use a combination of these tools together, you will find yourself having a great deal of time when it comes to getting things going, as well as organising yourself effectively.

Multirank Checker

It is very useful to be able to see what your Google PageRank is, especially if you are working on getting your ranking as high as possible, you can do your changes, and keep checking whether they are working. This checker will also tell you what your Alexa Ranking is.

Google PageRank Prediction

An interesting tool, which will give you a useful indication of your future ranking with Google.

Backlink Checker

Knowing where your traffic comes from is extremely useful. Use this tool to see where your users are coming from, and to find out who has been interested in your content. This is a great way to build up your connections to other site owners, and perhaps suggest a banner or link exchange with them.

Advanced Metatags Generator

I have talked about Meta tags here, and this tool will help you prepare your tags effectively.

Keyword Suggestion

Securing your keywords is vital these days, when aiming to tackle a niche market. This wonderful tool, will help you select your keywords!

Domain Popularity

Another useful tool, which will help you find out which websites are linking to your website. The tool comes with a collection of other features, including another Google PageRank checker.

Domain Age Check

Perhaps you have been watching a specific domain for a while, with the hopes of purchasing it - this tool will tell you how old the domain is, and you will be able to decide whether there is a chance that the domain might become free. If the domain has been around for a long time, for example, the chances are that the domain will not become available.

Search Engine Ranking Report

Another search engine ranking tool, this tool will tell you whether you rank in the top 100.

Spider View

This spider tool, will give you an indication as to how search engine spiders view your website. This will help you to optimize your content effectively.

Sitemap Generator

I have talked about this one before, but felt that it just couldn’t be left off the list!

I hope you find some of these useful, I certainly have! Take your time with them, don’t rush to go through all of them at once, as it takes patience and practice to use them effectively. Test other sites, which are similar to yours with these tools, to see what they are doing, you can learn a great deal doing this.

After surfing around the Internet trying to find out how Google ranks your website, you will find information on content, meta tags, domain names, and all sorts. Yes, these aspects do play a role in Search Engine Optimization, but they are not the key to success.

So what is?

Linking! I will remain with my topic of ‘fishing’ to explain how this all works. Let’s say that you think that a great deal of people would use Google to search for fishing rods. Now, what they would do is click to Google and type in ‘fishing rods’ and hit ‘Google Search’, and retrieve their results. How on earth could you get your website to appear in the results? Your website is about fishing, it does have information on fishing rods, but it is not appearing in the results! I have a great solution, and here is comes..

Google crawls through thousands of websites daily, building connections between all of them, reading what links appear on what websites, and basically building a web. What you want to do is get your website to appear on as many other websites as possible, whether it’s a paid link, an inline content link or just any kind of link, this is what you need to aim to do. Now, when you normally put a link on another website, they will ask for a name, this is what the readers will read, for example, you might choose to have them write ‘fishing.co.za’, as your reader visible link if fishing.co.za is your domain name. This is great and all, but NOT what we are aiming to achieve here.

Here is an example of what would work many times better:

As you can see in the image, is a list of three links, each linking to a different website. If you look at position two, ‘Fishing Rods’, this is what we have used to link to fishing.co.za - What this will do, is allow Google to recognize your website with the words ‘Fishing Rod’. If you can setup links the same as this across a number of websites, Google will soon link your website to those words, and list you high up in their search results when people search for ‘Fishing Rods’. The code you would use to do this is:

<a href=”http://www.fishing.co.za”>Fishing Rods</a>

Would produce:

Fishing Rods

John Chow, over at John Chow dot com, has spent the last several weeks/months working on linking his blog to the words ‘make money online’, and the way he has done this is, is by offering people a link from his website to theirs, if they would review his blog on their site, and include a link to his website using the phrase ‘make money online’. Here is the code for this, just to show what I mean..

<a href=”http://www.johnchow.com”>make money online</a> with John Chow.

Would produce:

make money online with John Chow.

It’s an interesting concept all in all, and I hope I have explained it well enough. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a comment, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Good luck with the linking!

In part 1, I talked about: domain names, titles, meta tags, content and valid formatting. Now I am going to talk a bit more about search engine submissions.

Once you have your domain name, and the website is live on the Internet, you face the problem of getting people to your website. The ‘easiest’ way to have people arrive at your website is via a search engine. There are two specific ways to have your website appear in a Google search, for example.

1. Submit your website to Google
In order to submit your website to Google search engines, you will have to do a couple things.

Firstly, you will need to sign up for an account with Google. Once your account is created, you will be able to login to the Google webmaster tools area. Towards the top left of the website, you will be able to add your website. Google will then ask you to verify your website, this can be done in two ways: Either by adding some code to your website, or by uploading a file to where your website is hosted/stored online. I often find it easier to just upload a file, rather than opening up files and editing the source code.

2. Create a site map
In my experience, I have found site maps to be an absolute gift, they have ranked many of my websites as number 1 on Google searches, and would without a doubt say that it is probably one of the most effective ways to get your website listed/indexed with Google. Here is a fantastic little tool, which will create your site map for you - Simply enter in your domain name, let the tool do its thing, and it’ll provide you with a site map. The sitemap.xml file will be downloadable, once downloaded, upload it to your website.

Right, now to tell Google about it. Back to the webmaster tools, there will be a link to provide a sitemap - click this option. Here you will be asked to choose a type of sitemap, choose the “Add General Web Sitemap” option. At this point, it will ask you to enter in the URL (uniform resource locator) for the sitemap. An example would be http://www.webtrepreneur.co.za/sitemap.xml. It is simply asking you to point it in the direction of the sitemap.xml file you uploaded. Once you have completed this step, you are done. Google will send its web spiders out and take a look at your website!

I hope my instructions have not been too complicated or complex, I have tried my best to make them as user friendly as possible, as it is vital to have your website submitted to Google. There are other search engines, which you can list your website on, but Google remains the most popular choice amongst web users.

Please remember: Once you have listed your website with Google, and submitted a sitemap, Google will not immediately rank you on their web searches. There are thousands of websites trying to get listed, so give it a couple days, before you try finding your website on Google! If you click here, you will see an example of webtrepreneur.co.za being ranked as number 1.

We are almost at the point, where we can start looking at advertising on your website!