Keywords are vital to your online success. Your goal is to organically (naturally) rank high in Google in and other search engines, so you need to implement certain SEO (search engine optimization) strategies and keywords will play an important role in those.

When you conduct keyword research, you’re doing it to learn how your prospective customer is utilizing search engines to find the information or products that they want. You then take the words (and phrases) and use them on your site, to ensure it’s relevant for your target audience.

In the old days, keywords could be stuffed and hidden all over a website to trick search engines into helping a site rank high. Now that they’ve caught on, you have to use them with a more whitehat approach or risk getting de-indexed in Google and other search giants.

Where do your keywords generally need to be? Don’t discount Meta tags in your HTML code. These are still important, but they may not be the most important tactic to use anymore. 

Keyword placement depends on what type of page you’re building. If it’s a web 2.0 property such as a Squidoo lens, Hub Page or Google Knol, then you want a keyword in the URL that you register, in the titles, subtitles and content that you write, and also in any tagging space they give you the opportunity to fill in.

If you’re making a blog post on your blog, then the keyword should be in the URL, too. But you may have to check to ensure that your blog template is using this strategy. Under settings and then permalinks, you’ll be able to set your preferences.

For instance, many blogs default to give your post a number like this: http://www.yourblogname.com/?p=123.  You’ll need to choose custom structure and enter this code: /%postname%.html – this will make your blog post URL appear with the title of the post, where your keywords will be, like this: http://www.yourblogname.com/title-of-blog-post 

Use keywords within all of your content, especially the first paragraph and preferably in the first sentence, so that the initial snippet Google shows has your keyword included (it will appear bold if the person searching uses this exact keyword in their search).

Experts disagree about what density you have in regards to keywords. Some say 2% and others go as high as 10%. What you really need to do is write both human visitors and search engine spiders alike. That means enough keywords so that the searchbots see your content’s relevancy and not so many that it turns off your reader because it reads awkwardly. 

Visit http://affiliatemarketingdiary.com for more marketing tips.

You must know how to find a profitable niche to make money online. Learn about the 12 top affiliate marketing niche research sites online.

affiliate marketing with Wealthy Affiliate

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The affiliate marketing University

One of the easiest ways to make money online is with Affiliate Marketing!
But to become successful you need the right resources and tools.
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Here are just some of the features inside Wealthy Affiliate:
Free downloads, Tutorials, Courses, Keyword tools, Google Adwords research tools, Clickbank research tools, WA Myspace, Internet Marketing tools, Squeeze pages, Pre made websites, Affiliate link clocker, Tracking tools, free credit to Yahoo Marketing, Feeder sites, Built in affiliate program, One of the best forums I’ve ever been part of and much more.

The WealthyAffiliate community is full of great members all willing to help each other out to become successful, I’d class the forums as the best tool in WA, they cover every Internet marketing topic out there.

Almost everyday there are a new posts in the General Success section from members getting there first sale or pay check, generally these are people that have tried many other methods online and failed but because they’ve followed the tutorials/courses and had access to all the necessary tools there have success at last.

Before joining WA I’d not long just spent over 0CAN on a Affiliate Marketing
keyword research tool, I ended up getting a refund as Google was giving me trouble with my searches, Wealthy Affiliate tools do all this but with out the headache.

If your into Affiliate Marketing this is for you. http://TheWiseAffiliate.com

Wealthy Affiliate is by far the best program for anyone looking to make money online. Whether you are just starting out with no experience, or your a veteran internet marketer, Wealthy Affiliate has something to offer everyone. If you were to become a part of anything online, I recommend that your absolute first choice should be Wealthy Affiliate then once your comfortable grab a copy of “Who Love Money”. The support within this community is unheard of and well worth the monthly fee alone, the resources and tools are updated weekly. You have access to a vast amount of resources tutorials, guides and tools, Clickbank Tools, keyword research tools, Campaign Management and much more within the Wealthy Affiliate membership area.

It’s time you started making money from Affiliate Marketing.

Author: Lance Jepson

In 1993, when I first began making websites, I knew nothing about marketing. I was a graphic and layout guy. I was not a sales copy writer. I designed web sites that had a sidebar on the left with links and a header at the top. In many instances I would make two sidebars filled with hyperlinks, one on the right, another on the left, with content in the middle.

One day I received an email from a business owner who had paid me $650 to make a beautiful looking website:

“Dear Lance,
Your website design looks fantastic but a strange happened after I put it up. My sales dropped by 20%. I don’t understand it. My website looks so much better than it use to. Why are people no longer buying my products?”

I was totally mortified. The issue was the number of links on the website. Where blank, dead space had been, we replaced with the following links: Press Release, Awards, Screen Shots, Books, Magazines, About Us, and Privacy Statement.

I put the old website back up and sales, almost instantly, improved.

KISS (Keep It Super Simple)

What this experience taught me about web design is that you need to keep it super simple. Website visitors had so many hyperlinks to choose from that the website had no focus. There was no clear instruction on what we wanted visitors to do. Way back in 1993, we did not even know the single action we wanted visitors to take, other than to buy from us. The web logs showed that very few people even visited the new links we added.

The lesson I learned is that people do not care about your business. Your visitors could care less about your awards or press releases. All that your visitors want to know is what your service costs and is it the solution they are looking for. It really is as animal simple as that.

Many beginners in ecommerce make the critical mistake of hiring a web designer to design their site. The result is a fancy looking website, that can’t convert prospects into customers.

You have 10 seconds to grab your prospects attention. If she feels overwhelmed by 5, 12, or 20 different hyperlinks, she will simply click the back button on her browser and pick the next site listed in Google. If she has so many options presented to her that she can not find what she wants, she will click the back button on her browser and pick the next site listed in Google.

A simple, attention grabbing headline with good sales copy, and a single call to action that you want her to take, beats layout and design when it comes to converting prospects into paying customers.

You must use the precious seconds you have to grab your prospect’s attention and present them with only one option, THE option that you want them to take.

By Lance Jepsen author of Profits That Lie Hidden In Your Web Site

A Little Mistake That Cost An Internet Business Everything (video)

Every internet marketer knows the importance of discovering good and profitable
niches. Many internet marketing gurus have a very simplistic way of teaching
about niche discovery. The sum total of some gurus’ teaching on this can be
summarized as:

1. Choose a topic that you like, have experience or are interested in.

2. Take the main keyword from this topic and plug it into a keyword research
tool.

3. Look at the search count. If it is about 30,000 per month, it’s a good niche.
If it is below 30,000 searches, there is very little market and therefore it is
not a good niche. If it is way above 30,000 searches, there is probably too much
competition and therefore it is risky to enter this niche market.

That’s it. Based on those three steps, you are supposed to find a niche. What’s
wrong with such a teaching?

Firstly, there is no research into the competition. No step is taken to discover
how strong a competition you face in that niche.

Secondly, there is no research into long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are
defined as keyword phrases of at least 4 words (the more words, the better).
Every marketer knows the importance of long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords
can lead you to lucrative sub-niches.

Thirdly, there is no research into the tendency of the searchers to buy. It’s
not only a matter of whether the searchers have money or not. Some people in a
particular niche market may have money but are not intending to buy anything.

So here’s how the gurus really do their niche and keyword research:

1. Examine your own interests, abilities, knowledge, experiences. Anything from
these may be a potentially good niche to market to.

2. Identify what’s hot in the market i.e. what is currently the most
talked-about thing, what’s buzzing or new in town. Is this a potential niche?

3. From the above two steps, identify potential niches. Then run these potential
niches through these ‘filters’:

a. Are people in this niche ready to buy and not merely information seekers or
looking for freebies? For example, ‘how to score an ‘A’ in your SAT examination’
would probably not be a very lucrative niche because it would interest only
students who may not have the money to buy anything much.

b. Is there a problem that the people in this niche cannot solve themselves? Any
niche involving technical expertise would nicely fit into this criteria. For
example, ‘how to solve Windows Vista registry problems’ would likely be a good
niche because very few people are technologically competent enough to deal with
these problems.

c. Do the people in this niche have an urgent crisis that needs to be overcome?
The more urgent the better. For example, ‘how to stop your teenager’s drug
habit’ is an extremely urgent crisis that begs for answers.

d. Is there an ‘evergreen’ need in this niche that is not a just a fad? ‘How to
improve your golf swing’ is an evergreen need compared to ‘strategies for World
of Warcraft’ (World of Warcraft is a PC game). Once the fad for World of
Warcraft is over, the market in this niche disappears.

Obviously, the more ‘yes’ answers you get to the above questions the more
potentially profitable a niche is.

4. Once you have identified a potentially profitable niche based on the steps
above, it is time to look for some long-tail keywords. These long-tail keywords
will reveal some sub-niches which you can further profit from. For example, if
you type in ‘golf swing’ into Wordtracker, you would get a whole list of related
searches. Look for keyword phrases with four words or more. Some of them are
‘stack and tilt golf swing’, ‘biomechanics of golf swing’, ‘what is the proper
weight distribution during the golf swing’ etc.

5. To find out how much competition there is in this niche, simply type in all
the keywords you have into Google’s free keyword analysis tool. This tool will
give you the estimated advertiser competition (which is the same as marketer
competition), average search volume for the previous month and average monthly
search volume. The great thing is that this tool also gives you synonyms for the
keywords which means you get more keyword suggestions. You identify keywords
with as little competition but as many searches as possible.

The steps above represent a much more complete way of niche discovery. You will
not only find profitable niches but also the relevant keywords that go with
these niches. By doing this you make a solid start in your niche marketing.