Today I wanted to cover one of the most important aspects of Internet marketing and making money online – search engine optimization. Yes you can make money online with only very basic knowledge of SEO but it involves other more complicated methods like affiliate marketing using PPC or other methods which are best saved for another post. Making money online becomes so much easier once you understand how to rank sites in Google, Yahoo, and Bing and get top 4 and even #1 results. The most important of these search engines is big G since they have about 72% of the market share followed by Yahoo with 16% and Bing with only 7%. Not only is search engine traffic free, but it is also targeted traffic. Targeted traffic equals more clicks, affiliate sales, leads, and more money – which is what internet marketing is all about.
There are two basic categories of SEO: onsite and offsite. Onsite SEO are the things that you can change on your site to make it more search engine friendly and in turn increase rankings. Offsite SEO are the links pointing to your site. Both are very important if you’re interested in ranking well in search engines.
The first thing you have to understand about SEO is that it’s not an exact science. Although we do know certain factor’s that help to rank a site higher in search engines, the algorithms that they use are constantly changing and adapting so that they can achieve the best results. What worked six months ago may not work next week. However there are some factors that have remained pretty consistent throughout the years:
Onsite SEO Ranking Factors
Keyword in the title tag
The title tag is what appears at the top of your browser window. If you look at your site’s source code it is what goes between <title>keyword</title> This is one of the most important factors when it comes to ranking a page for a particular keyword phrase. It also gets bolded in search results which helps your page stand out more which can help with CTR (click through rate). Just make sure that you have a unique title tag on every page or you can get into duplicate content issues. And limit the length of your title tag to around 50 characters including spaces and hyphens (search engines only pay attention to so many characters anyway). Also don’t use your keyword(s) more than once or twice – it can look spammy and unnatural.
Keyword and cousin keywords somewhere in the body text
Although it is possible to rank for a keyword without it appearing somewhere on the page, it is much easier to just make sure you use it at least once somewhere in the body text. Otherwise you have to make up for it with other factors listed here. A strategy that I use is to look for long tails in Statcounter and try to include the top ones on the page if it’s not already there.
Cousin keywords are keywords that are semantically related to your main keyword. So if your keyword is “bad credit student loans” then a cousin would be “student loans for people with bad credit”. Including the cousins is great not only for letting the Google bot know what your site is about, but it can also bring in tons of long tail traffic. It is one of the easiest ways to increase traffic once you hit a number 1 ranking for your main keyword.
Keyword in the domain name
This one is not quite as important as some of the others but it defiantly never hurts. Having an exact match domain name can help with CTR as well. If you’re looking for “cheap dog collars”, then cheapdogcollars.com might stand out to you in the SERPs. I always try to have the exact keyword in the domain for my niche sites and if I can’t get a .com or .net then I go for “keyword+guide” or “the+keyword”, really just any other word that makes sense with the keyword. Don’t worry if you already have a site and your brand name or something is in the site title, it won’t hurt you – this site is an example of that.
Other Search Engine Ranking Factors
Age of Site
The age of a site is the length of time since Google first visited and indexed your site. This has become a big part of the algorithm and sadly is part of your site that you cannot change. It also has a big role to play in the Google sandbox effect. The sandbox is basically a waiting period where Google figures out if your site is spam or not. If you have a legit site, you come out anywhere from a month to a year or more.
Anchor text of links point to the site
Learn Internet Marketing vs Matt Balthis. The first will help me rank for “learn internet marketing” while the second helps me rank for my name and who searches for that? This is what goes between the <a>anchor text</a> tags and is probably the most important factor in offsite SEO.
Global link popularity
How many total links are pointing at your site. This takes into account links to the homepage and also to individual pages.
Content of site linking to you
Is the site linking to you relevant? A pink laptop site getting a link from a PC site would be an example of a good link while that same site getting a link from a gambling site might raise suspicion.
Outbound links
What is your site linking to? Is it a spam or porn site? If so you might get a penalty for being related to a bad neighborhood. It is also believed that linking to authority sites in your niche can help. Also if you have tons of inbound links but aren’t linking out to any other sites it can look strange to the search engines.
Inbound link growth rate
Search engines take into account how quickly you accumulate links. A brand new site that has 1,000 links the next day will almost certainly be sandboxed and will be harder to get trusted by Google. The more trust you have, the faster you can get links. A site like CNN may get tens of thousands of links for a breaking news story.
Duplicate content
Search engines only need one copy of an article so they tend to push the others into the supplemental results (pretty much you just won’t show up in the SERPs). If you have lot’s of duplicate content on your site it will be harder to rank those pages. Google usually determines what the original copy is by domain trust/authority and the number of links it has pointing to the page.
Size of the site
This is also another factor that has become increasingly more important. It is pretty hard to rank a five page or less site anymore. Sites with thousands of indexed pages usually rank much better than those with only a hundred or so. It makes sense if you think about. Who knows more about a subject? The site that only has five pages about the subject or the one with ten thousand.
Domain trust/authority
How much Google trusts your site as an authority on your keyword. This is a combination of several factors like link popularity, age, trust of inbound links, and several other factors. This has become a very important factor in Google’s rankings. This is why you see so many Wikipedia pages at the top of search results.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization can be a lot to take in for beginners and can get pretty confusing really fast. Just take this post for example – 12 factors that effect how search engines rank your site and I haven’t even scratched the surface of all the factors that are actually considered by Google’s algorithm. I did try to include the most important and the ones that are easiest to implement. If you’re having a tough time grasping all this I strong recommend Court and Mark’s Keyword Academy. They are SEO geniuses and have constructed a simple video course that takes you through all the basics of setting up niche sites to make money. They walk you through picking out keywords, buying a domain, installing Wordpress, posting content, getting backlinks, and even setting up Adsense. Can’t beat that for a dollar!
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