Search Engine Optimization and Making Money Online

The key to making money online is to build a website with relevant key words for the niche you are targeting and then drive traffic. There are two distinct types of traffic: social and search engine. One of them will not make you any money and the other one will.

The main reason that people do not make money online is because they see bloggers like Problogger with thousands of subscribers and assume that he is making lots of money from them. But social bloggers don't make money and here's why: the people who read their sites are other social bloggers. People who have their own blogs don't usually buy stuff from other people's blogs, they know what an affiliate link is and if they do buy something they will put in their own affiliate link to get the comission. People who have been online already know the game that people like Darren Rowse are playing. They chase social traffic by writing posts that will get people to read, tell their readers how much money they make by blogging, and then sell advertising.

Besides being hard work, social traffic does not convert nor do they click on your adsense links. They make money by selling advertising space to companies that still think that because a blog has a couple thousand subscribers they will convert lots of the traffic. But these companies fail to realize that social traffic does not convert.

Normal people that don't know what an affiliate link is are not going to go to Problogger to find out how make money online. They are going to use a search engine, probably Google, and they are going to type in something like 'how to make money online.' They are then going to click on the sites that come up on the first page, probably only the couple at the top. Those are the people that are actually going to buy something from your affiliate link or when they see how ugly your blog is they will immediately click out, hopefully through one of your adsense links. This is where the money is, at the top of the Google search engine for your niche.

How do you get to the top? This is the hard part and this is where most people that try to make money online fail. They use up all their time and energy chasing social traffic and they don't pay any attention to search engine optimization. These bloggers usually figure out that they need backlinks from other relevant sites to get traffic. This is true but the purpose of getting backlinks is not to direct traffic from the link. The link is there to give you authority for your targeted keywords. Most social traffic doesn't understand the importance of the keyword anchored backlinks. Let's use Problogger as an example. I'm not bashing Darren Rowse here, I like the guy and he is good at what he does but for most people being on the A-list is not a possibility and even if you come close it will not make you very much money for the amount of time and effort you put into your blog. Since social bloggers don't understand the important of keyword anchored backlinks they will link to your article by saying something like, "This blog called Problogger is really great. Check it out here."

A backlink like that is useless. Google will see that and rank Darren's blog for the word here. Other people will use the word Problogger or Daren Rowse as a link anchor. This is equally useless. A backlink with those anchors will tell the Google bots to rank that site for the keywords Problogger and Daren Rowse. Nobody who is interested in wanting to make money online will search in Google for either of those terms. So the only way Darren is going to get traffic is to chase it with Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and all those other social blogs that nobody not already online knows anything about. The problem with this kind of traffic is that they will not click on adsense and if they do they will not convert.

This is the reason that 95% of people that are trying to make money online will give up in six months. They will realize that they are not getting any return for the massive amount of time and effort they are putting into their blogs and into digging, commenting, and stumbling. That's not even to mention the heavy toll that spending all their time online had on their relationships with their family and friends. And then they will be bitter and write posts about how it is impossible to make money online and how adsense is dead. Well, they are right, it is impossible to make money from blogging.

If you want to be a blogger, if you want friends, if you having something important to impart on the rest of humanity, then by all means keep blogging. But if you want to make money then start optimizing your sites for Google.

All right, let's talk about how to optimize for search engine traffic. Keep in mind when you read the rest of this post that when I talk about search engines I am really referring to Google. This is for a couple reasons. Most people that go online to find out something use Google to search. Also, other search engines like Yahoo use meta tags to rank pages. Google does not use meta tags because people use to load them down with everything they could think of to rank for.

So how does Google figure out the websites to pull up for people that type in the search term "how to make money online?" Google ranks sites first for relevant content. This is on-page optimization. Write content that has the keywords you want to rank for in the title, subtitle, headers, and throughout the post. This will let Google know without a doubt what your site and post are about. The Google bots are not smart. They bots cannot tell what content is quality for readers. They cannot tell how good of a write you are. What they search for is relevant keywords and then they rank your site accordingly.

So to rank well for your site with on-page optimization you have to have your keywords in your title, subtitle, post titles, and in your content. This is key. Without this you don't stand a chance ranking on the top of G where all the money is. A strategy that people who actually make money online is to target a post for a certain key word and then try to add as many long tail keywords to the post as possible. An easy way to achieve this is to write epic posts. Think about it. You can only put in your main keyword a couple times per one hundred words. Most people will write 500 to 1000 word posts. So what if I write a 2000 word post. I get to put in my main keyword twice as much as other people. I also get to put in way more long tail keywords.

Another advantage that the epic post strategy is ranking well for long tail keywords that you are not even trying to target. Try to write a long post and let G tell you what long tails that people are finding your site with.

If you get your site optimized you might rank well and other people might link to you if your content is good. But on page SEO is only about 10 to 20 percent of the battle to rank well with Google. Most of the ability to rank well happens with off page optimization and this comes in the form of keyword anchored backlinks. We all ready went over the importance of getting people to link to your site with relevant keywords. But if I get 2000 relevant keyword anchored backlinks all from PR0 webpages that might or might not be relevant to the content on my page and you get 2 or 3 keyword anchored links from PR3 and PR4 sites that are relevant to your site, then you will rank better than me.

This is the hard part. How do you get a relevant site to give you a link? People are stingy with their link juice and it's understandable. The more links you give out on your site the less juice that each link will give out. Also there are different ways for other sites to link to you. A link to your site from a relevant blog with a site wide link in their side bar will help you. But a keyword anchored backlink from a relevant blog from inside a post that also deals with your blog will help you more. So their are different quality backlinks.

What are the different ways to get backlinks? The cheapest way to get relevant links is to do article marketing. You can sign up for free with eZineArticles or GoArticles, write your own relevant articles, and use keyword anchored backlinks to give some juice to your site. Another way is to make your own Hubpage or Squidoo Lens that has a link to your site. The easiest way to get links is to write quality material that will be link bait for other blogs. It is important to get them to use keyword relevant links though otherwise it will not be of any help. One way you can help them use the keywords you want to link to you is to put a link in the first paragraph yourself so that when they copy your article your link will automatically be there. There are other ways to get links, some of which G does not like. Paying for links is one way to fast track your page rank but if G finds out they might de index you. Black hatting and spamming are pretty much out. I'm not going to go into those methods because they are short sighted and will get your adsense account banned if Google finds out.

If you really want to make money online then you are going to have to bunker down for the long term. You are not going to get rich overnight so don't believe any of those bloggers trying to sell you their membership site or ebook that will tell you how to get rich overnight.

I'll talk more specifically about search engine optimization techniques in my next post about how to make money online.