Keyword Density

Ok so you’ve all probably heard that you need to repeat your keywords several times, or Google will never find you for it. This may be true for the first few months after getting indexed by Google, but once you have been indexed longer than 6 months; keyword density is not a big contributing factor in SEO. If you have your keyword in your title tag and the page is highly relevant to the keyword, then you should rank well for it, it may not be straight away, but with SEO you have to be patient. So if your looking for big rankings then repeating your keyword every 4 words is not the way to go.

Avoid Nofollow links

Webmasters are informed to avoid nofollow links at all cost. This is entirely untrue in my opinion. If you follow a blog which has a nofollow plugin installed on it’s comments then this should not let this stop you posting a link to your site, aslong as you have got something useful to say. You don’t necessarily have to use your keyword as your anchor text. If you write good comments, people will come to your site because you know what you are doing, people don’t click on spam comments. So even if you don’t get any improvements in Google, nofollow links may give you higher traffic from other high traffic blogs.

Spamming Keywords in Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords

This should not be done. The Meta keyword tag is no longer used by any big search engines, but you should still include it for the smaller ones, just have about 3 of your main keywords, to give you the least possible chance of getting penalised for spamming. The Meta description tag is used by the search engines, but not for ranking purposes. All it does is give you the chance to write something interesting about your web pages, to influence people to click on your site. So if your site is top of the rankings and your meta description doesn’t sell your site, peoples sites in 3^rd and 4^th positions may get more traffic than your site in 1^st.

SEO is not simple by any means. It is the most talked about subject on the internet, with so many conspiracies to what may get you “overnight top rankings”. In my experience as a webmaster, there is no such thing. You must link build and update your content regularly just to even stand a chance against other websites. People are all trying to SEO for the wrong reason, hence the millions of competitors you have for such simple search terms. If you want to blog for a living, in my opinion, you must drop everything and put nearly 100% of your time into it.

Here is what you should spend your time doing:

Content Writing – 45%
Link Building – 45%
On Site Optimization (Making sure your pages HTML validate) – 10%

Your content writing and link building merge together. When I say content writing it doesn’t just mean content for your site. It means that you can submit articles to other sites with your link included in the article. This is the easiest method I have found to gain fast links without spamming. Out of all the content you write, about 60% should be for your own site and 40% to article directories and to partner sites with the same topic.

When you are link building, you shouldn’t make your links to generic. For example I’m trying to optimize my site for the keywords “seo tips”, this means I shouldn’t have “seo tips” as the anchor text for every back link to my site, as it looks like spam and un-natural to Google.

Other ways I have found of link building are just contacting other related topic website owners and just asking them if they want to swap links. A good mixture of reciprocal and one way links is always healthy. You need to mix it up as much as you can so Google doesn’t see your link building as predictable. You need to keep shocking it with new links from different domains with different anchor text.

Not even all your links have to go to your home page. Deep links (links that point to individual pages in your site that may not be in the top level directory) are always good to have, as this gives off the impression that people are linking to your content because they find it useful. Google loves good content.

Before you attempt to make money from the internet you must realise that it will take time and it will require a lot of writing. If you don’t like writing then you could buy content from someone else (providing it is unique) or your probably best just giving up. Before reading this I would advise swatting up on the Wordpress system and reading about Adsense in forums. Just to familiarise yourself with how the system works. I didn’t want to go into it in great detail, so I just skipped straight to the interesting bits and made references to useful resources so hopefully you won’t get stuck.

1 Choosing Your Niche and Keyword Research

Before you start your internet venture you need to put a lot of thought about what you are going to write or blog about. The blogging software we are going to use to create your blog is Wordpress. Wordpress is a blogging system that a lot of webmasters use to blog about absolutely anything. It is free of charge and one of the most powerful and flexible tools available on the web today.

Keyword research is essential before you go jumping into your chosen topic. You need to choose a keyword with a relatively high search volume (4,000 searches or more) and a low competition. The lower the competition the less time it is going to take you to rank well for that keyword. You can use the Adwords keyword tool to help you choose the keywords you should optimize for. For example if your chosen niche is “dogs” then you could optimize for the keyword “dog training” or “dog behaviour” as long as they don’t have much competition and there search volume is quite high. You can try and optimize for the higher competition keywords once your blog is a bit more established. All this research is extremely important for your next step… Choosing Your Domain Name.

2 Choosing Your Domain Name

By this stage you should have chosen what keywords you are going to optimize your blog for. For this example I will stay consistent and say we are going to optimize for the keyword “dog training”. For you to rank well for this keyword in the shortest space of time your domain name should try and include your keywords. “http://www.dog-training.com” would be the best possible domain name for these keywords. It has the maximum possible relevancy and “.com” is not just focussed at one country like “.co.uk” for example. You could search for and register your domain name at Nativespace which is an extremely cheap and reliable hosting company which I use to host my websites (they have never let me down yet). Once you have signed up for hosting you are ready to install Wordpress on your server. This very simple with Nativespace.

3 Installing Wordpress and Configuring Plugins

Log into your Nativespace or other hosting account. I am going to use Nativespace for this example as it is the only one I have access to. This is where Nativespace comes in useful. It has a built in MySQL wizard that lets you bypass complicated commands. Just set up a MySQL database by choosing the option below after you have logged into your admin area of your hosting account. Add yourself as a user and note your username and password for Wordpress as you will need these later on. Everything you need for your website is in the control panel. One thing I like about this hosting provider is that it comes with lot’s of useful out of the box packages that you can implement yourself into your website.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress is a guide if you get stuck when you are installing Wordpress.

Customising and Optimizing Wordpress

The first thing you should do after installing Wordpress is get the template or theme looking how you want it. You can download Wordpress themes from http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ or if you can’t find the one you want from there you could do a search for “Wordpress themes”. Many themes are available to download for free and depending on your confidence you can edit them to look exactly how you want to.

A good e-book for optimizing Wordpress for SEO is : http://www.top10seotips.com/pdf/SEO-in-a-Day.pdf I suggest you read this book from beginning to end as it will provide you will all the information you need to optimize your Wordpress for SEO. It will tell you about all the plugins you need as well as how to configure them to work the best.

4 Writing Your Content

This is by far the most important part of the whole system. Without any content unless you have some super secret way of getting mass traffic (please email me how) you will not make any money what so ever. Once you have your Wordpress theme looking how you want it, it is finally time to start blogging. The better and more relevant your content is the better your content is the better you will get ranked in Google and the more chance there is of people linking to it. This will also work with the more content you have there will be more chance of someone linking to it. So how much do I mean when I mean you need to create a lot of content? You need to be writing about 5, 400-450 word articles every day and for every 3 articles you write the other 2 should be submitted in article directories such as Ezine Articles. When you submit your articles to directories you should include 2 links back to your site in the author bio. 1 back to your home page and the other to a sub page of your blog. For example:

For more information visit my <link to home page>seo</link> website for <link to subpage>ppc tips</link>.

This way you have promoted two pages and Google likes it a lot when you have deep links to your pages. “Deep links” is just a term for when somebody links to a content page on your site which is not your home page.  You should link to a different content page in every article you submit to an article directory. The more deep links you have to other pages the better your site is going to perform and the more chance you have of getting more links to your site.

Just remember if you get stuck with anything or have absolutely any question you can always Google your problem or email me and I will be more than happy to help.

5. Stick at it … Don’t Give Up

It’s took me absolutely ages to write this article, in hope that someone will read it, find it useful and maybe link to it..? I hope this helps and gives some of you the motivation you need, not to give up and to carry on writing about the subject you love. Don’t concentrate on your Advertising revenue, that should just be a bonus. You won’t get anywhere if you give up! .. Please also keep me updated on your progress with the comment form below.



So what do you class as a mistake in SEO? Well I just think to myself, would I do that if I was just trying to design a website well? For example if I was designing a website, would I decide to keyword stuff for no apparent reason? If I thought I wouldn’t then I would class it as a mistake. Anything that goes against good web design practice is bad SEO.

Do you really think that you can get your site higher in the search engines by spamming blogs? Regardless of whether they are do-follow or no-follow? I really don’t think this will work, so don’t waste your time doing this. I would spend the time submitting your sites to directories or requesting links from other webmasters.

Another mistake that people think is “you will not get anywhere without backlinks”, this is partially true. However you shouldn’t just to decide to start a massive link building campaign. The best links that get you to the top are the ones that are formed organically. The ones when people link to your site because it is useful and not because you have asked them too. Do you think Google email people asking them to place a link to there site?, but yet they still have more backlinks than anyone else in the game!

Spend your time wisely with SEO, bettering your sites usability and accessibility, keeping your content up to date and maybe requesting the odd link every now and then and I promise you, you will get to the top with hard work.