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Inner Circle Roundtable of 21st Century Marketers |
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How to Get an Endless River of Traffic for Your Site Without Spending a Penny on Advertising
By Ben Hart
An Edited Transcript of an Inner Circle Teleseminar
A pay-per-click program such as Google AdWords is the quickest way to generate targeted traffic to your site. website. You can have traffic coming into your site 15 minutes from now with a PPC campaign.
But wouldn’t it be great if you could generate an endless river of visitors to your site who want to buy what you are selling . . . without needing to buy any advertising?
That, of course, is the dream of any business selling on the Web.
Free traffic is really the equivalent of free money. All websites want traffic because traffic equals sales. No traffic, no sales.
It’s really no different than a traditional brick-and-mortar retail store. No traffic into your retail store, no sales. That’s why location is so important if you are a physical brick-and-mortar store.
Same on the Internet.
Your location on the Internet is your ranking on search engines for the keywords and phrases that you are building your website around.
In the seminars on “How to Use Google AdWords to Build Your Business,” we covered how your keyword research and selection is the lynchpin of your success in the pay-per-click arena.
It’s no different in the organic search arena. If you want to rank high in the free organic search results, it’s all about building your website and web pages around the right keywords and phrases.
So really, the science of winning the pay-per-click game on Google AdWords is almost the same as winning the “free traffic” game in organic search.
PPC advertising will certainly bring targeted traffic into your site a whole lot faster than an organic traffic-building strategy. But, if you are able to build traffic by getting high rankings for your keywords in the organic search results, its permanent traffic that essentially never needs to end. It’s kind of like striking oil. The trick is striking oil.
But once you’ve found the ocean of oil underground on your land, the oil will never stop flowing (at least not in your lifetime).
Generating traffic consistently from organic search is a lot like that. In that case, not only does the traffic never stop; it has a tendency to continue to increase over time, like a rolling snowball.
By the way, doing this is a whole lot easier than striking oil. Building a high-traffic site from organic search absolutely is doable.
With PPC advertising, the traffic usually stops the instant you stop your ad campaign.
But if you succeed in getting traffic from organic search, the traffic not only never stops; it actually builds.
So that’s the beauty of investing time in learning how to build websites that get the attention of search engines for your niche – because, remember, when people are looking for information about a subject, 8-out-10 people now go first to a search engine on the Internet and start typing in keyword phrases that describe what they are looking for.
80% of all transactions (sales) on the Internet start with someone typing keywords into a search engine.
So mastering search engine marketing (whether pay-per-click or optimizing your website for organic search) is vital to your success on the Internet.
Now, here is a key point to understand. There really is no such thing as free traffic.
You can bring traffic to your website in one of two ways.
You can pay hard cash for it. That’s what you do when you buy advertising.
Or you can pay with “sweat equity.” That is, you can work hard to build a website and to write content that is valuable to search engines. The content that’s valuable to search engines is content that’s valuable to searchers.
You will need at least 50 pages of content, all focused on a narrow subject if your site is to attract the attention of search engines.
So if you have no interest in building an extensive content-based website, if you are not a writer, if you are not passionate about the subject of your website, don’t expect to build a website that will interest search engines . . . or searchers.
You would be much better off going with pay-per-click advertising.
But if you have a penchant for writing and if you have a hobby or subject that you are passionate about, building a website that gets the attention of search engines for your subject is a fantastic way to build an online business . . . because once you get the traffic flowing from organic search, it just continues to build – ASSUMING the content on your site is great.
To succeed in the organic search arena, your website must be a labor of love.
Now, I want to qualify something I said in the seminars on Google AdWords.
You might remember the point I made there – about the competition you face in the organic search arena vs. the competition in the PPC arena.
One example I cited are the 3,000,000-plus sites that come up in a search results under the organic list for the keyword “guinea pig” vs. the just one PPC ad that comes up for “guinea pig.”
That’s right – just one PPC ad for guinea pig compared to 3,000,000 sites for the term “guinea pig” in organic search.
Then I said: Which arena do you want to compete in? Do you want to compete against 3,000,000 or against just one other site?
And that’s certainly true.
What I did not say when I made this point is that very few of the 3,000,000 sites in the organic list for “guinea pig” are any good at all. The sites for “guinea pig” on page one of the search results are pretty good. But the sites on page two are not much good at all. They are mostly off target. The “guinea pig” sites and pages about “guinea pigs” get worse and more off-target after that.
In other words, it really would not be difficult to rank on the first or second page of Google for your “guinea pig” site . . . IF you invest time in creating a really good information site about how to care for your guinea pig.
And that’s the big caveat: “IF you invest time and effort to create a really good site on that topic” . . . it absolutely is doable to rank on the first or second page of Google’s organic search results for the topic you’ve chosen.
So how do you do it?
Or more precisely, what kind of site gets the attention of search engines that will cause your site to rank high on search results for your target subject?
The way to know the answer is first to ask: “What sites are truly valuable to searchers?”
Searchers are the main customers of search engines. Without searchers, the search engines are worthless. Without searchers, there are no advertisers. Yes, people spend time emailing. Yes, people spend time on their favorite sites.
But mostly what people do on the Internet is search for whatever it is that interests them.
So what do the search engines need to deliver to searchers to keep the searches coming back?
They need to deliver great information – information that is exactly on target with what the searcher is looking for. The more extensive an archive on the subject, the better.
Search engines don’t want to serve up one-page sites to their customers – the searchers.
Search engines want to deliver a lot of good material – original material, and of very high quality.
So how does a search engine like Google measure the quality of a site it is delivering to a searcher?
Since Google is by far the biggest, best and most sophisticated search engine, I will use Google here as the generic term for all search engines. Google is to search engines as Kleenex is to tissue paper.
So here I will just use Google as the generic term for search engine.
So what is Google’s goal? What is it that Google most wants to achieve? What is it that makes Google valuable as a search engine?
1) Google wants to deliver a site that has a lot of information that’s precisely on the subject the searcher is looking for.
So if you want your site to rank high on Google, you want your site to be about a specific subject.
The most successful sites are written with a specific target market in mind.
Your “daily journal” probably will not rank high on the search engines because your site will be all over the map. You’ll be writing about whatever thoughts happen to be on your mind that day.
You want your site to be on a subject that is not too broad – or so narrow that you don’t get any traffic.
A site that’s on the subject of cancer is probably too broad.
People don’t usually type just the word “cancer” into a search engine. They have a qualifier word, such as “breast cancer” or “lung cancer.” They are interested in a particular type of cancer. So it would be much better to build your site around a particular kind of cancer than cancer generally.
To succeed in the organic search arena, you must get into the mind of the searcher and understand how people conduct searches. Vary rarely do people just type one word into the search engine. They type a phrase that modifies the main word or category.
Don’t think category when designing your site, think sub-category.
2) Google wants to see great visitor reaction to your site.
No company in the world is better than Google at tracking the behavior of people on the Internet. Google tracks how long people spend on your website and whether people return to your website. Google is keenly interested in visitor reaction to the sites Google delivers to searchers. If Google sees visitors who arrive on your site spend three seconds there and never return, that’s an indication to Google that your site is no good.
To give you an idea of what Google is tracking, you can put Google Analytics code on every page of your website and get reports from Google on exactly what people are doing on your website, how long they are staying on each page and what pages seems to be causing people to leave your website. Go here to learn how to do that: http://www.google.com/analytics
For your site to score well with Google, your site needs to be “sticky.” That means visitors who come to your site are so fascinatedby what they see and read on your site that they stick around and they come back. If your site is as sticky to your visitors as a Stephen King novel is for Stephen King readers, Google will love your site.
As you write content for your site, don’t think what tricks you can use to fool Google into ranking your site high. That’s called Search Engine Optimization. It doesn’t work. Instead think: “How can I make my articles and the information I give to visitors so interesting and valuable that my visitors stay on my site and come back to my site over and over again – and maybe even tell their friends about my site?”
Write your site for people, not machines. Google wants to deliver sites to searchers are interesting to people and exactly on target with what people are looking for.
To continue the offline analogy, how does Stephen King sell books? How does he get readers?
Does he do it by tricking readers into reading his books, or by tricking The New York Times and Amazon into ranking his books high on the bestseller list?
That’s what SEO experts are trying to do to Google.
No. Stephen King ranks high on the bestseller lists by writing great stories for his fans – for his target market.
He does it by creating great content.
Stephen King does not need to know how The New York Times determines what a bestseller is or what book should be ranked #1. Nor does Stephen King need to concern himself with how his publisher prints, manufactures and distributes his books.
It would be a waste of Stephen King’s time to focus on any of this.
Nor does Stephen King need to sell his publisher on publishing his next book. Quite the opposite. The publisher must make a case to Stephen King as to why he should allow this publisher to publish his book.
Stephen King is in the cat-bird seat because he knows how to write great stories for his fans. He knows how to write great content.
When he does that, the money just flows – automatically. Stephen King knows how to generate a ton of traffic (millions of readers) for his books.
Think of Google (and the search engines) as your publisher and your sales force.
If you create a great site that’s full of content that attracts traffic because of its content; and if Google sees that people are coming to your site not just once and then leaving, but are coming back over and over again, Google will know that your site is good. Google will love your site. And Google will be more than happy to deliver your site to people searching for the subject that is the focus of your site.
3) Google wants to see quality links pointing to you site.
One way Google measures the quality of your site is to look at the kinds of links pointing to your site. So if your site is about a kind of cancer such as, say, multiple myeloma, a link coming to your site from the New England Journal of Medicine would carry more weight than an article on the same subject in the National Enquirer.
If links are coming into your site from other respected sites that cover this subject, that’s a big plus.
So Google looks carefully at links coming into your site and where the links are from. Google wants to see links from other sites that rank high on its search results for your market niche as described by the keyword phrases you have selected to connect with your site.
I also need to note that Google has not perfected this – which is why you see Wikipedia ranking so high in organic search for so many subjects. If you are a doctor (or a patient for that matter) looking for information about multiple myeloma (a rare type of bone marrow cancer) you are not going to be impressed with Wikipedia’s article on the subject. But there Wikipedia’s article on the subject will be – in the #2 position on the first page of Google’s search results. This seems to be the case for almost every search about a subject one does on Google – Wikipedia in the #2 position on page one. This is annoying.
Certainly the information in Wikipedia is not reliable since anyone can go in there in change the information, and edit the articles. For Wikipedia, I guess, the facts are whatever any Tom, Dick or Harry say they are.
I don’t know why Google always ranks Wikipedia so high for almost any search on a subject. I hope Google does something about this problem soon.
So Google has not yet entirely succeeded in figuring out how to ensure it is delivering the highest quality information to searchers. But it will. Its algorhythms are getting better at this everyday.
4) Google wants the right traffic on your site.
What matters to Google is not the amount of traffic coming through your site. Traffic can be bought with advertising.
Google is always striving to improve the quality of the sites it delivers to searcher – quality meaning the quality of the information on the site – because that’s what makes Google valuable as a search engine. Google does not care if your site is beautifully designed. What matters to Google is the quality of the information on your site, the relevance of the information on your site to what the searcher is looking for, and visitor reaction to your site.
So Google looks at where your traffic is coming from. If i’ts coming from visitors returning to your site over and over again, that’s good. If it’s coming through links from other highly-ranked quality sites in your market niche, that’s good.
If your traffic is coming from TV ads you are running, that won’t count for much, if anything to Google.
5) Google wants information on your site to be current.
Google rewards sites that are constantly updated with new information (which is part of the reason Wikipedia gets such a high ranking all the time).
If you neglect to add new material to your site, you will see your site drop in the rankings – and rather quickly. You might have the definitive archive on your subject. And that’s good. Google likes that. But if Google sees no new info on your site in quite some time (say, two weeks) your site’s ranking will slip. I guess Google figures if you don’t think your site is important, Google’s not going to think it’s important. Simply by updating an article I have seen my site jump from page 20 to page one within minutes of the update. That’s how quickly Google’s spiders are racing through the Internet and re-ranking sites.
In other words, what Google wants to see on your site is exactly what searchers want to see on your site. Write for people, not machines – not for spiders and robots
That’s the #1 key to getting a good ranking for your site on Google.
Now, knowing exactly how Google ranks sites is impossible to know entirely.
Google keeps its methods secret and is changing its alogrhythms all the time – in large part to thwart the Search Engine Optimization gurus from trying to trick Google in ranking their sites (or the sites of their clients) higher than they deserve to be ranked.
Without getting into all the ways that the SEO experts try to do this, my advice to you is to forget all that and just focus of creating a great site, with lots of great articles on wine or cigars (or whatever your subject is) and mostly to forget trying to guess Google’s ever-changing algorythms for ranking sites.
The odds that you will be able to outthink the 300 computer science PhDs who are working on Google’s algorhythms for determining site rankings are just about zero and a big waste of your time.
So mostly forget about SEO. And write your site for people, not for Google’s spiders.
Now, here’s why you need to listen to me seminars on how to use Google AdWords.
If you understand how to make PPC advertising work, you will understand how to compete and win in the organic search arena.
The big different between the two is that with PPC, you are paying for your ranking mostly cash (and some sweat equity, plus good strategy). But in the organic search arena, you pay no cash – just sweat equity plus good strategy.
In both arenas, your content is crucial. And in both arenas your keyword research and selection are critical.
In fact, one of the very best ways to know if you have selected the right keywords to build your site around for organic search is to test your theme and the keywords you’ve selected by launching a PPC ad campaign.
If you find certain keywords and families of keywords are generating a lot of traffic in the PPC arena, for not too high a cost-per-click, you know you will also have a winning theme for a site designed for organic search.
Your site for those keywords might be skimpy for PPC, might only be a landing page. You can’t get away with that if you want to rank high in organic search. But it might be well worth the investment of time and effort to build a content-rich site around those very same keywords.
So a powerful strategy to pursue is to use PPC to generate fast traffic and fast profits, as well as give you some instant, accurate market research on what keywords and phrases are generating the most cost-effective traffic. And then use that information for your long-term project – which is to build a great content-rich site that both people (your target market) and therefore search engines will love.
PPC is your short-term project for quick cash. A site designed for organic search is your long-term project. It’s the difference between doing projects for clients now to bring in cash to pay the rent; and investing time in building a real business (fully automated) that can eventually run itself. That’s what you want for your site designed for organic search.
But can you make money with a site like this, designed for organic search?
Isn’t true that a one page sales letter site will close more sales?
The answer is “yes” to both these questions.
A one-page sales letter site will certainly close more sales faster. If you launch a PPC ad campaign, you are under pressure to bring in money as fast as you can to pay your Google AdWords bill. That’s why PPC ads are usually linked to landing pages that are either designed to capture a lead or close a sale – immediately.
But . . . if you have a wonderful content-rich site that starts to attract a lot of traffic from organic search, this can go on forever. It takes time to build this kind of a site, and it takes time to build organic traffic, but your income stream goes on forever without you ever spending a penny on advertising.
It’s the difference between writing a great novel ( like what Stephen King and J.K Rowling do) and writing a direct mail sales letter. Your direct mail sales letter will bring in a lot more money faster than your novel – which is your labor of love.
But if your novel is great and attracts a readership, and you start building a fan-base, that’s a whole lot better over the long-run than writing a direct mail sales letter. The trick is paying your rent and expenses while you are doing your labor of love and waiting for your fan-base to build.
So here’s a question.
Can you build a successful hybrid site?
Can you build a site that will succeed in PPC as well as attract the attention of search engines?
The answer is “yes,” but it probably won’t succeed as well in either arena. You then have a bit of the Swiss Army Knife problem. That is, you have a site that is not ideal for either organic search or PPC.
But . . . if you go that route, lean more toward making your site attractive to search engines. That is, have a content-rich site. But also make offers throughout your site designed to capture the email addresses of your visitors.
Be sure to offer a free ebook or white paper. I believe in having a sign-up form for your “ethical bribe” free offer on almost every page of your website – so you can get your visitors on your all-important email list . . . so that you have a way to keep bringing your visitors back to your site.
Take a look at the Web Marketing Today site to see how this can be done. You’ll find it at:
The site owner, Dr. Ralph Wilson, runs PPC ads and scores well in the organic search listings for keywords and phrases related to the subject of Internet marketing. This is a brilliant hybrid site.
Wilson has also been working on this site since the mid-1990s. It’s a labor of love for him.
The site makes money mostly from affiliate income. It reviews ecommerce products. Wilson receives a commission from those who click on links he provides to buy the product he’s reviewing. Because he’s an affiliate marketer for what seems like just about every important ecommerce product, his reviews are unbiased and objective. He does not need to slant his reviews. He makes money no matter which of the competing shopping carts, merchant accounts, email marketing programs, or online website builders you might buy. He represents them all as an affiliate.
He gets his traffic because readers trust the objectivity of his reviews and advice. The content is excellent and is not compromised by the fact that the site makes its money largely from affiliate commissions.
He also sells his own products – mostly ebooks and information products related to Internet marketing. You get the sense that Wilson is really not in this for the money. Sure, he’s happy when the money comes in. But mostly he just loves the subject of Internet marketing.
Wilson also has many others – Internet marketing experts -- writing articles for his site. He has a tremendous archive of content on the subject of ecommerce and Internet marketing.
This is the kind of passion you need to build a high-traffic site on the Internet that scores well with search engines . . . because it scores well with people (specifically, Internet marketers who value the information they read in Web Marketing Today).
Okay, so what should your site be about?
How do you determine that question?
Well, you certainly want to devote your life to something that you love – something that you would be doing anyway even if you were not getting paid to do it.
That’s the best kind of business to run – especially when it comes to the Internet.
So that’s criteria #1.
Once you have figured out what you love doing, what you passion is – then you will likely want to pick a sub-category within that larger subject.
At least that’s often the case.
So let’s say you love Spain. You love to travel to Spain. Perhaps you are thinking of quitting your job, moving to Spain and developing a site for tourists that’s all about Spain.
The problem with that is that Spain might be too big a category.
I don’t want to dampen your enthusiasm. If that’s what you want to do, go ahead and do it. You might very well be successful.
But just understand that you will have a lot of competition for that category.
A better bet would be to select a part of Spain, perhaps the Costa Brava area along the Mediterranean coast in Northern Spain, just south of France. Have your site be just about that region. That’s where most of the tourists go. That’s where tourists are spending money. It’s a beautiful area. So a website that focused just on the Cost Brava region could be very successful.
Your site would provide reviews of hotels, where to stay cheap, where to get the best food, where the great sights are – all the information and features you would expect to see on a great travel site.
So that’s the formula for success in a nutshell. Just pick a subject you love and start writing useful, valuable articles that will be of interest to tourists going to the Costa Brava region of Spain.
Now lets do a little market research to see if my theory about building a site for tourists about the Costa Brava region of Spain makes more sense than building a site about all of Spain.
A quick check on Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool reveals that there were 5,925 searches using the term “Costa Brava” in one month compared to 175,946 search for terms using the word “Spain.” So the subject of Costa Brava certainly looking like a niche you could potentially dominate with a really good, content-rich site.
These search numbers are just for Yahoo. So triple these numbers for searches on Google.
Clearly, it would be much tougher to get on the first page of the organic search listings for a site on Spain. For starters, you’d be competing with all the government sites promoting tourism. But it would be relatively easy to make it on to the first page of listings on Yahoo, Google and the other engines for Costa Brava.
An excellent real life example of how to build a site for organic search is the site built by the daughter of my friend Dr. Ken Evoy.
Ken (of www.SiteSell.com fame) is one of the trail-blazing pioneers of Internet marketing. When the Fortune 500 companies were all crashing and burning during the dot-bomb bust period in the late 1990s, Ken had figured it out and was making boatloads of money on the Internet.
But of special interest here is the site that was built by his 14-year old daughter Nori. I love this example because if a 14-year old can do it, you should be able to do it. Nori did it without having any knowledge or even really any interest in Internet marketing.
She certainly knew nothing about Search Engine Optimization. She just built a site around one of her passions – the little-known Caribbean island of Anguilla. The name of the site is www.Anguilla-Beaches.com.
Nori loves Anguilla, so that’s what she wanted her site to be about. She had beautiful photos of the beaches and wrote about all the great things there are to do in Anguilla. She has a section on hotels and houses for rent. She has reviews of the shops and restaurants.
If you type “Anguilla” into Google, you will find it on page one of search results, ranking ahead of the site of the official site of the Anguilla Tourism Board.
Nori’s site makes money from Google AdSense ads that run on the site and commissions she receives from Amazon when visitors click on a link to buy a book about Anguilla. Realtors buy ads on her site. And because most businesses on Anguilla do not have websites, she receives a finder’s fee or commission from visitors her site brings to their physical brick-and-mortar shops, hotels and restaurants.
The result is Nori, now 18 as I write these words, is a mini-celebrity on the Island of Anguilla. Her site is generate thousands of dollars for her every month and is now paying her way through college.
This is how you do a travel site the right way. Nori stumbled into by accident – because she just wanted to create a great site about Anguilla, a place she loves. The site was not designed to make money. It’s a labor of love.
But others who share her passion for the island find the site through a search engine. Traffic slowly builds as more Anguilla lovers find the site. Once you have traffic, making money is easy. There are all kinds of ways to make money when you have traffic – true traffic (not from paid advertising) but from real people using a search engine to find the information that’s the subject of your site.
What most travel agencies do is throw up a brochure-style site about their agency. Borrrrrring.
A good travel site is about a specific place. A good travel site must be a living, breathing organism . . . just like the place you are writing about. And it must reflect the personality of the site owner.
Why did Eugene Fodor’s travel guides become so popular?
Because they were fascinating to read. Because they were about the first-hand travel experiences of the author – including all his personal recommendations. Eugene Fodor is no longer with us. His guides were bought by Random House. They aren’t as interesting any more because they are now written and updated by committees of writers. The original Fodor guides were much more interesting because they really were about the travels and experiences of Eugene Fodor.
That’s what your site should be like. That’s why Nori’s site about Anguilla ranks higher than the official site of the Anguilla Tourism Board (which, by the way, is a creation of a high-priced Madison Avenue ad agency). Nori’s site does much better because her site is so clearly more genuine and real. It’s the product of a teenage mind, not of government officials and Madison Avenue advertisers.
What would you rather read?
The slick, glitzy product of a Madison Avenue ad agency? Or first-hand accounts about the place you are interested in written by a bubbly teenage girl?
Genuine and real is what sells.
That’s the primary way you succeed on the Internet.
Okay, so now that I have trashed the SEO profession, the reality is there are specific steps you must take to improve your chances of being ranked high in the search engines for your market niche.
For example, you do need to tell the search engines what your site is about. The search engines want to hear from you what you think is the subject of your site. So there are some mechanical steps you must take to do that.
Key #1: Select the right keywords and phrases to connect with your site.
This is just as critical for winning in organic search marketing as it is for winning the Google AdWords game. Your keyword selection is just as critical here as it was there because this is how the Internet is organized.
All the rules, methods and tools I cover in the AdWords seminars apply here. So you need to listen to those seminars (or read the transcript) to know also how to build a site that is attractive to search engines.
Just like I showed you in the Google AdWords seminars, your keyword research needs to be exhaustive. And you will want to make use of great keyword research tools I covered such as WordTracker.com, KeyWordDiscovery.com, GoodKeywords.com.
The reason you want your keyword research to be exhaustive is that every keyword combination within your market niche represents a mini-niche.
But the reason this is important is a little different for organic search than it is for PPC.
With PPC, exhaustive keyword phrase research is important to lower the price your are paying per click on your ad . . . and also to increase the click-through-rate on your ads. With PPC, you are trying to maximize your Return on Investment (ROI).
The motive behind exhaustive keyword research is different for organic search.
You are not concerned here with the bill on your credit card statement as you are with AdWords.
What you are trying to do here is move up the organic search engine rankings.
What you will find is that organic traffic for your site will begin to build first around the more unusual keyword combinations searchers are typing into search engines to find what’s on your site.
Remember, keywords and keyword phrases represent categories and types of customers.
Because the human imagination is so vast, there’s a near infinite number of categories – as many as the number of different keyword phrase combinations that people are typing into search engines. The printed Yellow Pages might have a few hundred categories, but the Internet has as many categories as the human mind can think up.
You must do your keyword research and select the right keywords and phrases around which to build your site.
As you a brainstorm your site, and exactly what you site should be about, the lynchpin of your market research is your keyword research (just as it is for PPC). In Internet marketing, market research and keyword research as really the same thing.
To create a profitable site around your product, service, field, hobby or subject, you will need to conduct some solid keyword research to:
1) Find out if the subject you have picked is too broad or too narrow.
2) Find out what your target market is typing into search engines.
3) Measure the level of passion and intensity of your target market.
Your keyword research allows you to refine your idea based on what your target market is actually typing into search engines and the create a site that fits exactly what they are looking for. The more exact the match between your site and the main keyword phrase being searched for, the happier the searchers will be when they arrive at your site.
So, let’s say you’re a dog lover and you are thinking about creating a site about dogs.
Your keyword research will tell you that’s too broad a topic. A better strategy would be to build a site around a particular breed of dog. People don’t usually type just “dog” into search engines. They type in a particular breed of dog – the breed of their dog. Or they type in “dog grooming,” “dog training,” “dog food,” “dog care,” “dog health,” “dog health food.” The breed of dog most searched for is “pit bull dog.”
“Pit Bull” is searched for five times more than “German Shepherd” – also very popular.
So building a site specifically about caring for your pit bull makes great business sense.
Building a site around any of these categories would work well. People love their dogs.
People don’t just type “dog” into a search engine. They add a modifier word – sometimes several modifier words. The modifier words tell you the specific category the searcher is looking for.
Your job as a world-class marketer is to get into the heads of people in your target market. You must imagine what your target market is typing into search engines to find what you are offering – or what you are thinking about offering.
The best approach is to do your brainstorming and keyword research before you actually spend a lot of time building your site. In all marketing, you want to do your market research before you invest a lot of time and money developing your product.
Intensity of interest is a key factor in determining the potential profitability of the niche you are thinking about targeting. Just knowing the number of searches for a term does not necessarily tell you that this is a profitable niche for your online business.
There are lots of searches everyday for the President of the United States, or the latest popular movie, or a celebrity that’s in the news. But that does not mean you should build your business around these subjects.
Tools like WordTracker.com, KeywordDiscovery.com and GoodKeywords.com will help you drill deeply into the passion behind the search term. You will find, for example, that pit bull owners are passionate about their pit bulls.
These tools will also tell you how much competition there is for the niche you are thinking about. Another terrific tool is the Search Guild Query Difficulty Checker at http://www.searchguild.com/difficulty.php.
This tool will tell you how difficult (or easy) it will be to rank on the first page of Google (and other search engines) for any keyword or phrase. Very useful.
Key #2 Find out how much traffic the top sites in your target niche are getting.
You can do this by going to www.Alexa.com.
Just type the URL’s of the top-ranked sites in your market niche and see how much traffic they are getting. If the top sites in your niche are not getting much traffic, this is a sign that the niche is too narrow. You might want to broaden your theme or pick a different niche.
If the traffic is huge for the top sites on the theme you are thinking about, you’ll want to narrow your focus.
There are more than 120,000,000 websites as of this writing. So if your site ranks in the top 1,200,000, that puts you in the top 1% of sites. But that's not all that important (unless you are trying to be a broad-based media property like Yahoo). What’s important is how you are doing compared to your competitors. You can instantly check their rankings on Alexa – saving you hours of market research.
Key #3 Add, update and change articles on your site at least once a week.
Make the content of your site fresh and new. Run your website like a newspaper or magazine. You would stop reading and stop subscribing to your daily newspaper if the exact same issue showed up on your doorstep every morning.
But your accumulating archive of articles is also important.
Search engines (and your readers) love archives. If your site is the most definitive and extensive archive on a specific subject, the search engines will richly reward you.
Key #4 Material on your site should be unique and original.
The search engines will know if your site is just using material from another source. So running Associated Press articles on your site and thinking that’s content will not help you with search engines . . . or readers.
Search engines want to deliver original, unique content to searchers. The search engine would look pretty silly if a list it gives to a searcher contained a lot of duplicate articles, although from different sites.
So running material from other sites will hurt you with search engines.
That’s also why its important to crack down on owners of other sites stealing your material.
You don’t want your own ranking to be hurt because your material is running on the sites of others.
Fortunately, it’s very easy to catch plaigerists and copyright violators. I will periodically type odd or unique phrases that appear in my articles and books to see if anyone out there is ripping me off. I have found several culprits. My pit bull attorney forced them to pay me a significant settlement.
I would not care about it that much, except I don’t want the search engines to think I am copying their material. I want the search engines to know this is my material – that all my content is original to me. I also want my kids to know that. I want the archive of marketing advice, knowledge and resources I’m assembling to help them succeed.
Key #5 Change the titles of your Web site pages every month or so.
There is an easy way to get multiple listings with the same search engines. The trick to this is to change the title of your page every month or so. I have told you not to try to trick Google and the search engines. But this one little step does work at tricking the search engine robots into thinking that it is a new article or page. I’m not sure how long this advice will be valid.
I’m sure Google’s 300 PhDs are working on how to thwart this trick.
Key #6 Get your site linked by other sites that are listed in search engines.
Once you have launched your site and have created at least 50 pages of good content, all focused on your target subject, you will want to start to build incoming links to your site from other sites that cover your subject.
Again, no one knows for sure how Google ranks sites. But most experts believe that Google looks at incoming links from other sites that are on the same or a related subject. If the top sites for your subject link to your site, Google seems to see that as an indication that your site has a good reputation from those who should know.
There are several good ways to have your site linked by other sites. The simplest way is to ask. That is, ask a site you want your link to appear on to link you. Offer to provide a link on your site to their site in exchange. Many will say yes because they know links help them.
You can also find out who is linking to your competitors by using a linking tool such as Zeus, Arelis, or Link Spider. If you enter the URL of your competitor, the program will give you a list of all pages that link to your competitor. Alexa does that also. These programs then allow you to email these sites, or you can contact them directly by phone to ask for a link to your site or to propose a link exchange.
There may be directories of companies in your field or industry. Be sure your site is included in these directories with your link. If your site is included in a directory for your field, industry or subject, Google and the search engines consider this an indication that you are real. A link from a directory in your field or another successful site in your field is considered a high-quality link.
Run ad campaigns on Google AdWords. If you choose to show your ads on Google’s Content Network, your site will be included on the Google AdSense program. My guess is that Google does not count links from the AdSense program as valid incoming links for the purpose of determining your site ranking. But no one really knows. It certainly can’t hurt. Incoming traffic for your site is always good.
Plus, if your site is great, word-of-mouth can spread about your site. Word of the best sites travels fast in cyberspace.
Key #7 Make sure the copy and headlines on your Web site contain a healthy distribution of your keywords and phrases
Search engines want to make sure the content of your site matches the keywords you’ve chosen because the search engines want to provide useful information to those who are searching the Web. Try to include them in the headlines and titles of your Web pages if it makes sense to do so. If the search engines are not finding your keywords in the text of your site, this hurts your site, usually fatally.
Have your keywords and phrases scattered throughout your pages, but only where they make sense. Search engines consider excess repeating of keywords spamming or “stuffing” the search engines. You might put your keywords in bold in a couple of places. Search engines seem to give extra weight to keywords and phrases that appear in special formatting, such as in bold, italics, in large print and in headlines. But don’t overdo it.
Key #8 Understand the purpose of “META Tags”
META Tags are hidden HTML tags that tell search engines what your site is about and how your site should be categorized and indexed.
META Tags alone certainly don’t guarantee a high ranking. But a complete set of META Tags appears to help a site’s chances for a high ranking. The most important META tags appear near the top of the page between the codes <head> and </head> and are divided into the following categories, which control what search engine surfers see when they come to your site’s listing:
TITLE:
DESCRIPTION:
KEYWORDS:
If your site is good with a lot of useful and valuable content, what you will find is that your site will first start to rank high on search engine listings for your second and third-tier keywords and phrases – the very specific phrases that don’t get a lot of searches, but that fit well with your site, or part of your site.
For example, on your Costa Brava site perhaps you have the most comprehensive reviews of restaurants in the Costa Brava region. Your site will then move up the rankings quickly for searches using the term “restaurants Costa Brava.”
As you site builds a reputation and readership, it will move up the organic rankings for the more heavily used Costa Brava search terms as well.
This is not an overnight process. It might take several most of work before you site reaches the first page on the Google list for sites on Costa Brava, or whatever your subject is.
Here’s a complete set of Meta Tags:
<HEAD>
Key #9 Include the most commonly misspelled versions of your keywords in the keyword tag.
Wordtracker.com, KeywordDiscovery.com and GoodKeyWords.com all have tools that that give you commonly missspelled keywords.
If you’d like to see how often this happens, take a look at this Google page that shows you all the ways people spell Britney Spears in their searches: http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html
So when you zero in on the keyword you want connected to your site, be sure to include the common misspellings. Most sites on your topic won’t think to include the most-common misspelling of keywords in their keyword tags. This can zoom your site up to the top of the search engine list for misspelled keywords.
Key #10 Take a look at the META Tags of your competitors.
Before you create your META tags, you might take a look at what’s in the tags of your competitors’ sites. If you use Internet Explorer, you can do this simply by clicking the “View” menu on the tool bar. Then click “Source.” A window will open with the HTML code for you to study.
Key #11 You don’t need to know HTML code to be successful on the internet.
With all the off-the-shelf and online Web site builder programs on the market now, you really don’t need to know any of this code.
You simply type in your META tags in the space where the program tells you to type them. You never see the code. But it is useful to know some code just to have a basic understanding of how the internet works. I also find it’s faster sometimes to make changes directly to the code. Most online and offline Web site building software programs allow you to build your Web pages with HTML code or with a Word-style word processing program, whichever you prefer.
Key #12 Keep your entire META Tag keyword list to under 500 characters.
Most search engines will only read the first 500 characters on your keyword list. Too many keywords is considered spamming the search engines. Search engines favor Web sites that are narrowly focused on specific subjects. A narrow focus is best for your marketing anyway. Don’t try to be all things to all people.
Keep in mind that each page on your site can and should have its own list of keywords and phrases in the Meta Tags. This has the added merit of showing search engines that each page on your site is unique.
Key #13 Have a title for each page that includes your most important keywords.
Search engines want relevant titles of Web pages listed on their searches. A title with the main keywords tells search engines and readers that this Web site is on point and on message.
By title, I don’t mean the headline of the article on your site. I mean the title in the title tag of the HTML code that tells search engines what the page is about. This is the title that appears as the headline in the search results listing that Google delivers to searchers.
Key #14 Have a unique title for every page.
Otherwise the search engines might think you are spamming them or that the material is repetitive. You want every page of your Web site to be unique and interesting, both in the eyes of the reader and the search engine -- but also on target with the keywords and phrases being searched.
Key #15 Make your title one that describes benefits to the reader.
Search engines reward you with higher rankings when lots of people click through to your site.
Remember, your title in your title tag is exactly like the headline on a Google AdWords ad, only these are the organic free listings. Just as the quality of your headline on a pay-per-click ad is the biggest single factor determining the “click-through-rate” on your ad, the same holds true with the title of each of your pages for the organic search listings.
Avoid using empty advertising “hype” words like “greatest” and “best-ever” in the titles of your pages. Both search engines and readers discard such empty hype. Make your titles compellingly factual and on message, with the main keywords you want the search engines (and readers) to latch onto.
Google AdWords allow a maximum of 25 characters for the headline on your ad. That should be about the length of the title in your title tag.
Key #16 Don’t use too much java script or flash programming.
\Search engines don’t like lots of code. Search engines like clean sites with a minimum of code. If a search engine spider runs into code it cannot understand, it often stops and goes onto the next page or next Web site. This means no flash pages. This can hurt your ranking.
Key #17 Include your physical address on your Web site.
You will probably want to include the city you’re in as among your keywords anyway. So you should include your physical address in the text of your site everywhere that it makes sense to do so. I don’t know for sure, but I have a sense that search engines like sites with physical addresses. This will certainly help you if you are a local business with local customers.
Key #18 Submit your site to search engines.
This is easy. There’s no need to hire a company to submit your site for you, but you can if you want. Each search engine shows you how. Follow their instructions very carefully. Here’s an important tip. Include the true and complete URL for your Web site homepage, not another page that is forwarded to your home page.
To add your site to Google, go to http://www.google.com/addurl/.
To add your site to Yahoo, go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit.
About 90 percent of searches are conducted using Google or Yahoo or by search engines that are powered by Google or Yahoo. But it’s just as easy to submit your site to the other search engines as well.
Other search engines to submit your site to include: Inktomi, MSN, Ask.com, Open Directory Project, AltaVista, HotBot.
There many other search engines. But this will accomplish 95 percent of what you need.
Key #19 Have a clean, simple site.
As you are building, editing, and changing your site, a lot of excess code is often left sitting there not doing anything. The site appears to work fine because the excess code is not visible and is not performing any function. Clean it up. Streamline your HTML and other coding.
Key #20 Run pay-per-click ad campaigns on Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing.
This probably does not help your rankings in organic search. But if you have a great site, all traffic you bring will help build word-of-mouth advertising for your site. Word of the great sites spread like wildfire across the Internet.
Plus, if your pay-per-click ads are working for the niche or keywords you’ve selected, your site is also likely to be a success in the free organic search arena.
Key #21 Have your site checked out by a Search Engine Optimization expert.
I know I’ve been critical of SEO as a profession.
I don’t want to overdo the criticism. I am more doing this to emphasize my main point – that content is what counts for your organic search rankings, not trying to game the search engines (which is like trying to cheat the casino).
But SEO experts certainly have their place. And I do know a couple who earn seven-figure incomes consulting with big corporations on SEO.
Every couple of months I’ll have a SEO expert check out my site and eliminate any problems search engines might have with my site. Consider this like taking your car in to have a tune up. I have no idea if this helps. The SEO experts tell me it does. It’s cheap to do and I figure it can’t hurt.
Key #22 Skip trying to fool the search engines.
Trying ttrick the search engines into ranking your site higher than it deserves is not time well spent.
The search engines want to list sites that are truly valuable. They don’t want a lot of junk coming up when surfers conduct searches. They want legitimate companies, legitimate services, and legitimate people to come up in searches. The search engines are on a relentless quest to crush and stamp out spammers and scammers. And the search engines are a lot smarter at this than you and I are. The search engines keep their criteria for listing and ranking sites a secret, and they change their criteria all the time, precisely to make it very difficult to fool them.
So never try to trick search engines into listing you or ranking you high.
That’s about the surest way I know to make sure you are locked out of a search engine. For example, don’t repeat your keywords over and over again in the text of your Web site. This is considered spamming the search engine.
Use your keywords in your text and marketing copy in a way that makes sense, as you would if you were not concerned about the search engines. Don’t try to hide keywords in images or other locations. Don’t keep submitting your site to search engines repeatedly. That’s considered spamming also. Submit your site to the search engines and wait a couple of months.
If your site is still not listed, call the search engine and see if there is something you can do. Probably not.
Just wait, be patient. Submit your site again every couple of months until it appears. But if you’ve followed the steps I’ve outlined here, your site will be listed and should rank high for the searches of your target audience.
Some search engines are now charging a fee for “express” submission. If you pay the fee, the engine says it will review your site for inclusion on the engine within 48 hours or within 8 weeks – whatever the time-frame might be. Just because you pay the fee does not mean your site will be included on the engine. The engines are becoming increasingly picky about the sites they include because they don’t want to serve up junk to their main customers – the billions of searchers.
Key #23 Include a link on every page of your Web site to the home page.
Web surfers are entering your site on various pages and you should make the navigation simple for them. Make it so they can navigate the whole web site and not just one page that they surfed in on. The more time that they spend at your Web site, the more familiar they will become with the products or services you are offering. That’s how customers are created.
Key #24 Try to leave “stop words” out of your Web site copy.
Most search engines skip common words. These are sometimes called "stop words." These are words such as “a”, “and”, “the”, “that”, “of”, “it”, “too”, “web”, “home page”, “index”, etc.
Search engines skip "stop words" to speed up their search. When designing your Web site, try to minimize stop words in your copy. By doing this, you will often make your copy stronger and better anyway. Also if you have the first word in your title tag being "the" or one of the other stop words, this can negatively affect how your site is indexed in the search engine.
Key #25 Don’t use Comment Tags.
Most search engines no longer support them. In the past, many people abused this tag to commit "keyword stuffing." Keyword stuffing is a form of spam. If you "spam" the search engine, you might get booted off the search engine index.
Key #26 Study the rules of each search engine.
The search engines tell you what they want and what they are looking for. Study the rules and comply with them. This is another reason you want to submit your site to each search engine by hand, not with the automatic submission programs you see advertised on the Internet. Avoid using complicated Java scripts for your navigation. Simple HTML links are best because search engine spiders cannot follow java script-based links. The rest of the pages on your site will not be indexed if the spider is not able to navigate to the individual pages.
Key #27 Don't submit your URL address multiple times during the day.
Don't submit hundreds of URLs from the same Web site. A much better approach is to create a site map with all your links on one page. Link to the site map from your home page so that the search engine spider can easily find all your pages.
Key #28 Don’t submit different URLs to the search engines with pages that have the same content.
Again, this is spamming the search engines. That’s a big “no, no.” The search engines like spam even less than you probably do. And they’re experts at detecting it. It’s okay and advisable to submit more than one URL from your web site as long as the URL’s are distinct web pages. Be sure each page on your site has a different title.
Key #29 Don’t select only the obvious keywords.
Think of phrases that don’t necessarily come up in the most searches, but get higher quality visitors. Also, your site will tend to gain traction first with the more obscure key words.
Key #30 Don’t use a cheesy domain name for your site
It’s thought that your domain name should be exactly in line with what you are selling and that this helps your search engine rankings. Not necessarily so. DirectMailOnline.com is fine. AffordableAdvertising.com is fine. JohnSmith.com is fine.
But following this guideline can lead to creating cheesy domain names such as: “MakeMoneyRealFastOnTheInternet.com.” This kind of domain name looks like spam, tends to be treated as such by the search engines . . . and also by the public.
Credibility is everything in internet marketing. A cheesy domain name will hurt your credibility all the way around.
The Bottom Line
The most important factor determining the profitability of your online business is your success at attracting a steady stream of traffic to your web site and landing pages. Getting listed and ranking high on search engines is not an accident.
Generating traffic (“Trafficology”) is is a science and discipline, like all other areas of marketing.
The harder you work at it and the more you study it, the better you will do.
Here’s an excellent resource you should check out for more on this subject. Go to www.onlinetrafficnow.com and you will find hundreds of tips and strategies for increasing organic traffic for your website and landing packages, and surprisingly quickly.
Remember, “location, location, location” are the three major words determining the value of your physical property. Keywords and phrases are the real estate of the Internet.
Your goal is to rule the Internet for the keywords and keyword phrases that best describe your market niche. This is the turf you want to stake out – kind of like staking your claim to a piece of land in the days of the wild West.
But you won’t be successful if you try to stake out too big a piece of land – that is, if your market is too broad, your keyword selection too imprecise. If you stake out to big a piece of land, you won’t be able to defend it. You’ll be overun by Indians.
If you attempt to get on the first page of Google’s organic listing for the word “computers,” you won’t be successful. Too much competition there.
But if you have a computer repair business in Great Falls, Virginia, it would take very little effort to be #1 on Google for the keyword phrase “computers Great Falls Virginia.”
In fact, I just typed that phrase into Google to see if my theory was right. Sure enough, not a single computer repair business in Great Falls, Virginia popped up on the list.
If that does not get you enough traffic, add surrounding towns to your keyword list. If that’s still not bringing in enough traffic, try “Virginia computers” and “computers Virginia.”
The point is, stake out turf (a market) that puts you on the first or second page of a Google search listing for your keywords. It does you no good to be on page 47 of a Google search results list. Start small and narrow. As traffic rolls in and as you move up the rankings, expand out.
Remember, when people are looking for a service locally, 8 out of 10 people now try the Internet first, no longer the printed Yellow Pages. Advertising in the Yellow Pages is expensive.
Doing a little work to get your local business at the top of the organic search listings is both free and far more valuable than a paid advertisement in the Yellow Pages.
People ask me if it’s possible for a local business to market successfully on the Internet.
Absolutely.
It’s even easier (much easier) to market your business on the Internet if you are local . . . because there is almost no local competition on the Internet.
Local businesses still have not figured out how to use the Internet. They know nothing about how to build a site that search engines will notice. If you are a local business with local customers, you can easily be listed #1 in your local area for your category of business now that you have heard this seminar.
For more on this, listen to the seminar on “How to Use the Internet to Build a Local Business.”
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