Search Engine Optimization Basics

In my last post when I was talking about how to make money online I discussed the importance of Search Engine Optimization. I was saying that if you want to make money with your blog then you are going to have to optimize it for search engine traffic because social traffic does not click your adds or buy your products. If you are trying to get people to read your blog then you are not going to make very much money unless you are an A-lister and that list is pretty short. Even if you do just want to get people to read your blog it would help you out to learn about search engine optimization.

As I've said before and I'll say it many more times throughout this blog if you are writing for people to read then you are a blogger. Bloggers don't make money, internet marketers make money. Internet marketers know about SEO and how to make money with a webpage and it has nothing to do with writing quality content. Internet marketers actually don't want you to read anything they write. If you are reading what they wrote then you aren't clicking on their adsense.

There are two ways to optimize your blog. On and off page site optimization. We'll start by talking about on page SEO. The first thing you do when you create a blog is decide on the layout. This will dramatically affect your on site SEO. When the Google spiders crawl your page they start at the top left of your header, then down the tool bars, then your content, then your footer. You want to make it as easy as possible for the bots to figure out what keywords you are targeting. So put your main keyword in your title. Then in your subtitle put your long tail keywords. This will tell the G bots exactly what keywords you are targeting.

The beauty of using a blogger blog, besides it being free, is that layouts like I use are perfectly optimized for Google right out of the box. That is one of the reasons I am using a free blogger. So when the bots are done reading the header they go down the side bar so it will be beneficial to your page ranking to use your keywords and longtails there along with pictures. The key to putting pictures in your blog is to use the alt tags. All you have to do to put alt tags is go into the html of your picture and put your keywords as an alt tag.

Then the bots come to your content. The first thing they read is the title of your post. So put your keyword and a longtail in the title of your post, that pertains to your content of course. Then the bot reads your post so use your keyword and long tails as many times as you can without setting off a red flag a G. The norm is about 3 to 6 times per one hundred words. Anything above a 7% keyword density is going to make Google suspicious of you keyword loading your blog so don't do it.

SEO Tip: Write long posts. A long post gives you the chance to have more keywords. If someone else writes a 500 word post about SEO optimization they can have around 25 of their main keyword in their. But if I write a 1000 word post then I can have twice as much. Writing a long post also gives you the chance to accidentally put in a keyword that could rank high in G and give you traffic you weren't even consciously targeting.

If you are trying to make money with adsense it is smart to only have one post per page or only posts that are targeting the same keywords. The reason for this is that having multiple posts on one page about different subjects will confuse the google bots and they will not know which ads to put on your site. This will prompt G to give you Public Service Announcement ads or blogger ads that will give you anywhere between 1 to 3 cents each and you can't live on that. Having unrelated posts will also give you untargeted traffic which will not click your ads and they will not buy your products.

On page optimization is important. It will get you higher in the rankings even you don't do any off page optimization but it will take a lot longer. So let's get into the real important aspects of how to rank high in Google, which is the easiest way to make money online for free. The main idea that you should take away from this post is get backlinks. Backlinks. Backlinks. Backlinks. This is the key to making money online. This is what everyone is after.

There is a difference in the quality of backlinks though. The best backlink you can get would be from an relevant anchored keyword link inside an article relevant to your site from a PR10 that has a similar subject to you. This is pretty much impossible, but it is the highest quality link you can get. The quality of the backlink is degrade as it gets farther away from this. Blogroll links are not as good quality as an relevant anchored keyword link from inside a relevant article. If you get a link from inside an article from an unrelated site with a high PR then it is not as good as the same link in a relevant article from a related site with slightly lower PR. In any case even a bad backlink is better than no links at all.

So the problem that people have is how to get backlinks? What do you do to get good keyword anchored backlinks? Well, the easiest way to do this is to write a quality article with your link already embedded in in the first paragraph. It's important that the link be in the first paragraph because some sites post article snippets where they take just the first or first couple of paragraphs and post that as a preview with a read more link. If your link is in the last paragraph then you are missing out on that backlink. This is called link baiting and you can do it with quality articles. This is the easiest way to get backlinks but it there is no guarantee and it is slow to work.

After you have created your blog, optimized it, and written a couple posts the next thing to do is to post a Hubpage and a Squidoo Lense about your subject with keyword anchored backlinks to your site. An important part of this strategy that many people mess up on is to send all your links to your homepage. This is a mistake. Would this happen if you were getting organic links? The point to creating your own backlinks is to make it look as normal as possible. So point some of your links to your deep articles. And don't put too many links on one lens or hub. This won't help you. It bleeds the link juice that these pages have in too many places to have a good effect.

You can also create an account on the biggest online article publishers. Publishers like eZineArticles and GoArticles both have high page ranks so they are crawled multiple times a day by the G bots which means that when your article is published with a backlink to your page the bot with crawl through your link to your money blog. This is also a strategy to get indexed quickly.

Another way to get backlinks is to buy them. This is less than ethical and there's a possible of Google finding out and punishing you. But still, some people who have the money will contact other sites in the same niche that aren't a direct competition and purchasing a keyword anchored backlink.

A less expensive way to get links that you don't directly pay for but still costs money is joining a community that have blogs you can post to with high PR.

Some people will join forums with do follow links in their signatures or post on blogs like wordpress that allow do follow links. The problem with this is that it is very time consuming and most of the time the keywords on the page are not very relevant to your blog.

These are the basic search engine optimization techniques that people use to make money online.