SEO Tools Of The Trade

Archive for August, 2006

Here’s a lesson on getting ranked for niche keywords.

I was checking my stats the other day on this site and was quite surprised to see that my previous article underground post had gotten indexed by Google.  In fact, as of this writing www.zomoca.com is ranked #4 on Google for the keyword “articleunderground.” 

At first I thought this was an amazing testament to my SEO skills.  However, my feat is a little tempered considering that the one-word phrase “articleunderground” only has 427 competing websites.  The two-word phrase “article underground” however has 43,600,000 competing sites.

I’m still somewhat pleased by my one-word ranking since this shows that if you choose the right niche keyword — the kind without tons of competition — you can get ranked very quickly. 

In addition to the number of competitve sites you also need to consider how often a keyphrase is being searched.  According to the keyword selector tool at Overture, my one-word “articleunderground” gets 0 searches.  Gee, not very good for traffic, is it?

The two-word “article underground” only gets 26 searches a month.  Still not very sought after.  I’m a little puzzled by this considering the high number of websites…

So maybe building a site around the article underground phrase may not be such a great idea.  At least not at this point since it gets so few searches.

Still, the lesson here is to go after niche keywords that do not have tons of competition yet still have enough of a demand that will generate you some traffic.  You essentially want to be the big fish in a little pond.  A lot of little ponds, actually.

In subsequent postings I plan to go over in more detail how you can do keyword research to find out which keywords fit this big-fish-in-a-little-pond criteria.

I’ve become a big advocate of using Wordpress to quickly create sites that are easy to modify and maintain. What I like about Wordpress is that I can add content and grow the site from anywhere I have internet access.

I don’t need to be carrying around a laptop with all my website tools like XsitePro, Frontpage, etc. I don’t even need to have an FTP account to upload the new content. If I’m travelling I can simply go to the nearest internet cafe and just type in the latest page of information.

Search engines love finding new content and that helps with getting more traffic. And more traffic means it is easier to monetize the site.

That said, there are a lot of other things that can be done to a Wordpress site to make it even more search engine friendly.

Here is a great site http://www.marketingop.us/2006/06/13/steps-wordpress-seo/ that has a nice summary of plugins and tips to make your Wordpress site more SEO friendly.

The 4 plugins mentioned on this site are:

1. Ultimate Tag Warrior 3.

2. Google Sitemaps.

3. Related Posts.

4. WordPress SEO plugin from Marketingop.us

Here’s another good link on SEO tips, although his suggestions may already be implemented in some of the above plugins. I need to check it out more…
http://www.dech.co.uk/2005/11/ultimate-WordPress-seo-tips/

Yet another good site explaining tags for SEO.

http://seo.blorc.com/seo/wordpress-seo-first-steps/

In addition to installing the Ultimate Tag Warrior this site suggests installing the plugin Tags In The Head as well.

Most people doing SEO realize that Google gets their directory information from DMOZ.org.

However, the editors at DMOZ sometimes do not create very compelling listings for your site. As a result, *when* you get indexed by Google you run the risk of having a dull search engine listing that does not entice users to click on your link.

Now you can tell Google to not use the titles and descriptions from the ODP — that’s Open Directory Project — listing. Add these meta tags to your pages:

<meta name=”robots” content=”NOODP”>
<meta name=”msnbot” content=”NOODP”>
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”NOODP”>

This tells both MSN and Google to NOT use the ODP titles and descriptions.

ArticleUnderground uses a clever approach to providing content for websites. Unlike a lot of software utilities that literally scrape words off of existing websites to create *ahem* original content, ArticleUnderground hires a group of copywriters to write 400 original articles each month that are keyword specific. ArticleUnderground then sells the articles to a limited number of 350 members. Membership is $97 per month so ArticleUnderground collects a tidy 350 x $97 = $33,950 per month. Not bad. Of course, out of that income comes the copywriting fees, marketing costs, website maintenance, etc.

In addition, ArticleUnderground has set up a series of blogs — 20 or more — in which members can post the articles and set up links to their own sites. The linking is probably worth the $97 per month, provided ArticleUnderground content and blog sites don’t get banned for some arcane reason.

In general I see two techniques for this service:

1) You use the articles as a supplement to already existing sites. Hopefully, among the 400 articles each month you can find topics that are related to your existing site and add the articles to create more content pages.

2) You create brand new sites based on the articles. Group the 400 articles each month into related topics and create new sites that are centered around a theme.

Here is a fellow who is using ArticleUnderground as in 2) above. Still too new to claim whether or not it works.

http://www.blogtrafficschool.com/forums/index.php?act=Print&client=printer&f=6&t=161

If you want to do an availability search for multiple domains, a good one to use is here: http://www.000domains.com/

Matt Cutts reveals some Google tips in a series of videos.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=matt%20cutts