Articles

Articles are great for a number of reasons:

• You can submit them to multiple directories
• They continue to work for you over long periods of time
• They can be re-purposed
• You are in control of the link
• They’re easy to produce

I’ll address the last point first:  they’re easy to produce.  People make too much of article writing.  They see it as this big obstacle to overcome so avoid it.  In fact, anyone who’s serious about marketing online MUST master article writing at some point if they want to achieve everything that they can.  It really doesn’t have to be hard – you only need about 500 words, which is less than one page!

Anyone who maintains a blog is also an article writer; most peoples blog posts are around the 400-800 word mark which would make great articles.  In fact, I’ve re-purposed several of my blog posts as articles with only a few tweaks.

This is another great point: once you have the articles, you can use them to create other content, such as audios, videos or even social media sites.

Videos

It’s no secret that the search engines love videos.  I’ve had videos rank on the first page of Google for my major search terms within 24 hours, which is next to impossible using any other technique that I know of.  The most important things with videos are:

• Keep them short (5 minutes seems to be about right)
• Make sure you link to your site as the first thing in your description
• At the end of your video, tell people to click the link in your description
• Make sure your title is keyword optimized
• Submit to as many video sharing sites as you can find

If you follow these few tips, you’ll find that video can work really well for you, too.

Web 2.0

OK, so technically Web 2.0 encompasses video sites, but I like to separate them out for these purposes due to their ability to get ranked so quickly.  In this section I’m talking about other sites such as Squidoo, HubPages, Scribd, etc.  All of these (and similar) sites allow you to re-use your articles to build something new that generates additional backlinks to your site.  If you make good use of them, they can have a huge impact on your search engine rankings as these sites too are rated pretty well by Google et al.

I would encourage you to take some time to consider your strategy for building backlinks to your primary sites.  As I said, it’s still one of the best ways to improve your rankings and hence your organic traffic without the cost of PPC.

Please share your tips for gaining backlinks in the comments.

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Related Posts:

• Review: Submit Your Article
• Video Made Simple

This article will arm you with 7 great keyword research tools that you can access for free to help you to build your online business to a point where the professional tools are within your reach.

1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool – This should be your first port of call for keyword research.  Think about it, who knows more about search volume on Google than Google themselves?  The great thing about this tool is that not only does it suggest synonyms to expand your list of potential keywords, it also lets you download the results into a spreadsheet.  I always start out here then update the spreadsheet as I go.

2. Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool – Another great tool that you’ve probably come across already!  The full subscription to Wordtracker is worth every penny that they charge, but when starting out, the free version is great for finding related keywords.

3. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – This is one of my favorites – despite owning some professional tools!  The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool effectively gives you everything that you’d get from the AdWords tool and from Wordtracker (plus more) all combined in one easy to use page.  The only reason to use the other tools is that I find them a little quicker, plus only Google has access to “actual” search data…!

4. KwMap.com – I already wrote a post on this yesterday as I was so impressed with this new tool!  It performs in a similar manner to the Wordtracker free keyword tool, but presents the related terms visually along two differing threads.  This allows you to see two sets of related terms which slowly converge in their meanings.  To be honest, it’s hard to describe – check it out to see what great potential it has!

5. SpyFu – Want to know how your biggest competitors are getting ranked well in the search engines?  SpyFu can help you!  OK, to be fair, you still need to do the work, but it can give you great insight.  And that’s just the free version….!

6. Quantcast – Using Quantcast is like having Google analytics on your competitors domains!  It gives you the ability to dig into not only their traffic, but also their demographics, giving you an indication if the traffic that you’re going after fits the profile that you’re looking for.  For example, if you have a product that will sell well to young professionals and your research indicates that for your chosen keywords your main competitors are getting traffic from mainly over 50′s, then I would suggest that you need new keywords!

7. SEO Chat PageRank Search – SEO Chat has a whole goodie bag of free SEO related tools and I’d recommend you spend some time exploring them.  For keyword research, you can use their excellent PageRank Search to get an idea of the strength of your competition for your chosen keywords.  (Note that SEO Book mentioned above offers a great add-in for Firefox called SEO for Firefox that offers the same, plus much more, but is ONLY for Firefox, which is why it’s not one of my top 7!)

This list is not meant to be exhaustive, just to get you started.  If you’re serious about SEO, I would recommend that you read The SEO Mindset by Brad Callen which is one of the best, most comprehensive introductions that I’ve come across.

Enjoy!

In essence, when you query on a specific keyword, it returns a visual display of the keyword with two strands of related keywords associated with it.  You can navigate through these related keywords to follow the relations and identify some interesting phrases that you might otherwise never have thought of.

It’s early days in terms of predicting whether or not this will take off, but I for one will certainly be including it in my keyword research sessions!

On his blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/) Matt links to a recent video interview that he did at PubCon where he talks about how ranking is having less impact on SEO.  Watch the video and see what you think!

(BTW, for my UK readers, Matt does acknowledge on his blog that “Thomas Cook” is NOT a UK bank….!)

I’ve heard some talk recently in search engine optimization circles that Google and the other major search engines are looking to provide more relevant data by getting to know out preferences.  For example, if I search for “Java”, I might prefer to see results on the programming language, coffee, or the country depending on my own interests.  If Google could find a way to tap into my preferences, they could start tailoring their results specifically to me.

That’s where I see SearchWiki coming in.  It provides a mechanism for me to re-rank any search results that I get so that they’re listed in MY order of preference, and that sites that don’t interest me are excluded.  As Google starts to build a picture of what I like and what I don’t like, how much attention do you think it will pay to (for example) keyword density when it returns results for me?  I would imagine very little!

From Google’s perspective, this means that they provide more and more relevant searches to me as their end-user which will encourage me to use them over, say, Yahoo.  For Internet Marketers though, this shift in SEO strategy means that sites now really do have to provide value in order to stay in the listings.  In particular, how likely is it that single page sales letters will get shown (in spite of SEO) if many people remove them from their listings???

Now, I also consider the timing of this announcement interesting.  I blogged last week about how Google had finally opened up how to do SEO (See Google Spills The Beans).  So they finally come clean on SEO, then turn it on it’s head – you’ve got to love the irony in that!  However, even in their own document they state:

Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.

This is very much in line with other wisdom on SEO (study the SEO Mindset for more great SEO strategies).

So How Do You Access SearchWiki?

Well, that’s the interesting part…!  Google are not making it generally available at the moment – rather they’re going to serve it up randomly to guage the takeup (see the SearchWiki FAQ for more details).  In my opinion, this is a mistake as I could imagine that many of those who get to see the SearchWiki options won’t know what to do with them.  I would have thought that a better approach would be to have a beta programme available to anyone who wishes to participate.

Google, if you’re listening, I volunteer to beta test SearchWiki for you!

For example, did you know that Google have a Conversion University?  Or that they regularly post helpful videos on YouTube, cunningly disguised as the user “Google“???   Of particular note on Google is a great video that they provide on the Google “Trifecta”, which covers Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Website Optimizer in an hour long webinar!

Believe me – this stuff’s great!  I’d encourage everyone to study all of this content – it’s not often you get something for nothing!  It provides a wonderful foundation onto which the rest of your SEO learning can be built.  Even if you consider yourself proficient with SEO, wouldn’t you like to have your assumptions confirmed or debunked by Google themselves?

As I said, all this information will get you on the right track.  Once started though, I would strongly recommend that you build on these foundations whilst it’s all still fresh with something link Brad Callen’s excellent SEO Mindset.  He comes from the “school of hard knocks” branch of SEO and has figured out all the basics that Google have now publicly confirmed, then built a sound methodology on top of it for getting strong search engine rankings.

Before I leave this post, I have just one question:  Why do you think Google haven’t made this new guide easier to find???

So there it is – up on the top left of the page!

Please use the comments on this entry to share your thoughts on this.  Was I right to move it, or is it better to have it lower down so that Entrecarders are forced to at least look at my blog before they can click???