In the last post you'll remember that I spoke about using the FREE keyword tools available to you, such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and the Google Keyword Tool to find article ideas for your niche website. In this post I just want to briefly touch on the main things to consider before pursuing one of these phrases.

Before you go after any keyword or phrase you are going to want to ask yourself a couple of questions before you spend the time trying to get your site to rank well for it:

1. What are the searchers intentions?
2. How will you 'monetize/convert' a visitor to a sale?
3. How well can you rank for your chosen phrase and is it worth it?

What are the searchers intentions?

This is probably the most important out of all factors to consider. If the person searching types a phrase which demonstrates no commerical intent whatsoever then there is going to be very little point in targeting it. By using our 'query' keywords and 'buying' keywords in the last post to search for a target phrase we should have been able to identify potential phrases which do offer some degree of commercial intent. Taking the phrase "how to buy a hybrid golf club" as an example, this phrase recieves around 20-30 daily searches, depending on which tool you use, which is a pretty decent volume Read the rest of this entry »

As we all know content is king, there is no denying that adding fresh, relevant content to your website will help with your rankings in the search engines providing it is done correctly. But one thing which people often struggle with is what content topics to use on their website, I know this is something I used to struggle with when I first started out online. But it doesn't have to be as hard as you think.

There are essentailly two things you need your content to have and they are:

1. Relevance to your reader and to the theme of your niche website
2. A demand for that content in the organic searches

This sort of content isn't at all hard to create and can be even easier to rank well for providing you know where to look for the right keyword phrases. Two excellent tools I love to use to find article ideas for my website are the FREE Wordtracker keyword tool and the FREE Keyword Discovery tool. Both of these tools generate some great long tail keyword phrases which can give you some great ideas for articles, better still because the phrases are longtail and very specific they are often very easy to rank for. Read the rest of this entry »

Building a healthy portfolio of product based niche affiliate websites has been dubbed the N1Way to make money online. However, building a portfolio which is large enough to bring you in a significant amount of income is something which the majority of people struggle to achieve on their own. That said, it's entirely possible to build a portfolio of websites on your own which consistently bring you in enough money to work from home it's just going to take you significant longer to do so.

Outsourcing is a good way of speeding up this process and it's covered fully as a step in the N1Way e-guide. The entire process of site building can be outsourced from niche research right thought to actually putting the site together and submitting it to the first search engine, however outsourcing costs money! Read the rest of this entry »

Well okay I didn't actually do it in the hope of achieving much other than what I expected, which was to have one of my sites pushed deep down into the depths of the SE's. So what did I do and why did I do it?

I had a Wordpress site which basically wasn't doing much, I hadn't bothered to monetize it but it was ranking well for a couple of search terms; ranking on the first and second pages in yahoo.com, google.com and Live.com. But the terms it was ranking well for didn't bring it a huge amount of traffic, which, as I say, wasn't a problem because I hadn't bothered with it in any case. So what I decided to do was try a little plugin I had lying around from a while back which I had a feeling could only be bad but I wanted to try it anyway just to see how the SE's would react to it.

The plugin once installed basically claimed to make your content unique. The site I had built was using caffinated content and was automatically updated so obviously the content was not unique. So I went ahead and uploaded the plugin, activated it and volla my content passed copyscape. Looking further into it, the way the plugin worked was by inserting small snippets of meaningless Javascript directly into the source code of the content meaning that from the way the SE's view content it was truely unqiue.

Using SEO Elite I regularly check the position of my sites for certain keywords I am trying to rank for and within 2 days this site had gone from the 1st and 2nd pages of all the major SE's to......well to nowhere really, they had dropped down to position 600. Almost immediately the plugin had completed smashed any SEO the site currently had and it was dropped to the back of beyond.

Now in conclusion there would have been a couple of main reasons for this:

1) The javascript affected how the main ranking keywords were seen by the SE's, meaning the site no longer ranked well for them;
2) The site became untrustworthy and the SE's dropped it.

Either way it doesn't really matter, the fact is that it happened. The site was dropped from page 1/2 all the way down to page 60/70 in a matter of two days.

So why am I telling you this? I am telling you this because there are so many people out there who try to fool the search engines, they try to get around well designed algorithms which aren't designed to make life awkward but are designed so useless sites (like mine) are removed from the search results. So no matter what anyone tells you, you shouldn't try to fool the SE's. Your time is much better spent trying to learn how they work and what they like and don't like. Certain tricks and work-arounds may get you ranking well for a time, in my case it didn't, but eventually the SE's become wise and you will be the only one losing out.

You will often here the statement "Content is King!" This statement is completely true; content is amongst one of the most important things you will be adding to your website and yet it is one of the most common things which is often neglected or left out completely.

Building an affiliate site is easy, right? Well the answer to that is yes and no; building an affiliate site which will be very successful is very easy indeed but actually building a site which your visitors want to visit and spend time browsing and searching through is another matter entirely. Scripts such as BANS, storestacker and other affiliate store builders have made it incredibly easy just to slap an ugly, contentless, non-SE optimized site together in the space of around 10 minutes or less. This has meant there are a lot of people out there trying to build a site which works by putting a 'thinly vieled' affiliate site together in around 10 minutes flat. As I am sure you can guess these sites do not usually do very well and normally disappear from the SE listings.

There is one main thing which I always do when I am building a new site and that is sit back and ask myself, would I buy from this site or spend any time on this site if I happened to come across it during my search? If the answer is yes then the chances are that I'm are on the right lines.

There are two main reasons why getting your content right is so important and they are:

1) You want to engage your visitors, keep them interested and make them want to come back.
2) You want to please the search engines, this means don't try any deceptive or manipulative methods in your site building, the SE's will only penalize you for it in the long run.

When you are creating your content you obviously want to consider your keyword research which you will have been doing during your preparation process. The keyword lists you have obtained will generally dictate the sort of content you are going to place on your site.

Don't get too carried away with your content keyword density. What I mean by this is that you are building the pages for your visitors to read and not just for the search engines to give you a good ranking. It's no use whatsoever if you build fantastic pages which the search engines love if the content just isn't up to scratch from a reader's point of view. You have to find a balance between the two, of course you want the get good search engines rankings but you also want the content to be relevant and of interest to your readers as well.

Don't try to manipulate or fool the SE's. I have seen this in particular with Wordpress, there are several plugins out there which insert small snipets of javascript directly into the text content which is only viewable by the search engine spiders. This little trick allows people to re-use content over and over again without being slapped for duplicate content. The fact is though that as much as you try to deceive the search engines there will come a point in time when they become wise to this trick and start to build ways to get around it. You also have to ask yourself the question why you would want a site full of content which has already been published around the web before. I know many of you will argue that duplicate content penalties only apply when your own site has the same content on multiple pages but Google quite clearly states that you should not 'create multiple pages, subdomains or domains with substantially duplicate content.' My advice is don't be lazy, do the work yourself and the rewards will come.

My advice would be the following:

• Always abide by the SE webmaster guidelines. The links for some of those are below:

For Google: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
For Yahoo: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics

• For MSN: 18.htmlhttp://help.live.com/help.aspx?mkt=en-gb&project=wl_webmasters

• Create content which is both relevant to your visitors and rich for the search engine spiders. Find a balance.

• Create content for each page of your site and never leave pages with just affiliate listings on.

• Don't use duplicated content unless you have re written it and it now passes copyscape without any devious tactics and don't use duplicate content inside your own site.

• Always place content around your affiliate listings, above and below. Don't just place content above.

• Don't try and decieve the search engines with blackhat techniques, it will do you no favours in the long run.

• Ask yourself, would you visit your site and if so would you come back again.

• Write content related to your keyword lists generated from your extensive keyword research.

• Build your site slowly from the ground upwards, don't build sites too quickly, remember it's about quality and not quantity.

• Lastly, win the trust of the SE's and you won't go far wrong.