Welcome back to part two of my Google Keyword SEO project, right here on theNetFool.com. In case you missed it, in week one we talked about setting up the stage for our keyword domination. By exploring the best keyword phrases available, we can learn how to rank higher for more terms… and bring in more traffic through organic hits. After a bit of brainstorming, it’s time to start phase two of the process… so let’s get started!

Understanding The Reasoning

What we want to do here to maximize the chances that Google gives us a top spot on serach results is make a new post/page in WordPress that is dedicated to search engine optimization. But why on Earth would I want to go through the seemingly unnecessary steps of setting up a dedicated page for this, when I could just as easily direct traffic to my homepage? Google worships accuracy.

Accuracy? What the heck is he talking about, right? When you search for a term in Google, they are processing this keyword phrase through every indexed website on the internet to find the best result. Because of this, Google naturally feels that an actual webpage (as opposed to a website) is a far better resource than a generalized website. They give the “page” a lot more juice than the “site.”

The “Link Bait” Landing Page

I am a firm believer that the most effective way to rank well in Google is to direct targeted keyword traffic toward a landing page that you designate on your blog. Following from this, the most effective landing page, in my opinion, is a “link bait” page. What do I mean by this? Basically, we want to write up a page that is relevant to our targeted phrase that will perform well in social media websites.

What is a link bait page? I actually wrote up a killer guide on link bait pages over the summer, so if you do not understand the concept or simply want to sharpen your skills, I suggest that you check it out. To summarize for the purposes of this article, I like to use lists of “top tens” or “top fives” as an easy template to rank well in social media sites.

In addition to a section about the topic that you are targeting, you should feel free to add in a top section to promote your own website, product or blog. For my landing page, I decided to use a horizontal bar on my page to separate a top “promo” section of my actual blog from the bottom “content” section that has my link bait material. This one-two combo punch is a pretty neat way to provide a linkable section while not missing out on potential revenue.

Setting It All Up

Now that we understand what we are doing, let’s set up a winning landing page that will have us ranking higher than anyone else in Google search engines. As you can see, this has already worked for my other blog “Bullish Bankers,” as we have the #2 slot for the popular keyword “investing ideas.” I am fully intending on exploiting this again for the phrase “make money online,” and feel like I can pull it off.

I feel like it is much better to make a “page” in WordPress, than a “page.” Why? More static. In addition, I would go so far as to modify a custom page template just so you can have a wider content area to deal with. Not sure how to do this? WordPress wrote a nice walkthrough for just this purpose. Don’t forget that you can exclude pages from your menu if you don’t want them to appear when you publish with this neat “Exclude Pages” plugin for your blog.

For Jimvesting’s link bait landing page, I have decided to write about how to make money online called, “Ten Fool-Proof Ways to Make Money Online.” Notice how my targeted term is in the title, and how i have added my targeted phrase again to the page description via All-In-One SEO. By having your phrase in the title and page description, you are going to maximize your ability to rank well in Google. Getting back on track, I wrote about the best ways to make money online because it is a subject that i feel places like Digg and StumbleUpon will eat up once I start to promote it on them. Consider social media when you write your link bait post.

On top of writing about a popular and catchy subject, I have attempted to maximize the effectiveness of this landing page by adding an obvious newsletter subscription option to anyone who sees the page. Along with this is a list of reasons why subscribing is a smart thing to do, and I even offer a free eBook to boot! Offering an option to subscribe to the traffic that comes in could not only maintain a high search ranking, but could increase my RSS subscribers as well!

Bottom Line: The landing page could just be the most effective part of your marketing campaign. Understanding how Google looks at pages versus websites is quite important in determining the best way to attack this problem. Over the next few days, we are going to take a look back on our link bait page and find out how to maximize the value behind it to drive our success.

-Jimvesting

Welcome back folks,
It’s a LINK LOVE SUNDAY!

This week was chaotic to say the least, a lot of stuff happened in my own world, in the stock market and in the blogging world. Really, it would take multiple posts to fully explain all that went down, but let’s do our best to recap here so you can get a grip on what went down. Before we get into all of that though, let’s run through some of the best posts from the week ending September, 27 2008.

• Affiliate Confession – Myspace Ads Review and Tutorial
• ProBlogger – Launching Your Next Venture Using Social Media
• Suite J – Why Website Flipping Is Too Easy
• Blogging Tips – Do You Write Positive Paid Reviews on Your Blog?
• The University Kid – Step-by-Step Guide to Promote Your Own Product

With the launch of MySpace Ads, we have an extensive “trial run” conducted by Affiliate Confession. Check this one out to get a look at the new system in use. ProBlogger had an awesome write-up on using social media to propel a new venture. Suite J gave us some reasoning behind website flipping. Blogging Tips ran through the basics on writing positive reviews and the ethics behind it. Finally, The Uni Kid wrote up a dynamic guide on how to promote and sell your own product online.

Stock Market Update
Things were volatile again this week, as much of the news focused on the United States’ government bailout plan for poorly-financed and illiquid assets, hoping to help move these items off the books of major financial firms in America. After Congress appeared ready and willing to stand behind the plan proposed by the U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Tuesday yielded an intense Q&A round by the hostile Senate Banking Committee that made the two look downright unprepared. Now, we stand in the mix… deciding whether to compose a large-scale $700 billion plan as originally proposed, tone it down a notch, make things a bit bigger or eliminate the plan completely.

News that somehow went mostly uncovered was the failure of Washington Mutual (or “WaMu”), as they were sold off to J.P. Morgan. This is by far the largest bank failure in U.S. History, as federal regulators came in to take control… striking a deal that would sell WaMu to J.P. Morgan. What happened was very interesting. Essentially, consumers withdrew a massive $16.7 BILLION in deposits since just September 15th. When you have no money in the reserve, you break all sorts of lending laws and restrictions that I’m not even going to get into right now with all the volatility.

Let’s wait for the dust to clear and talk more about this financial crisis. What you want to take out of this week is that federal officials are still wary of this proposed bailout plan, and news is coming out literally by the hour as we face to form a deal. Other than that plan formation, we have the massive failure of yet another financial institution, WaMu, in what has been a wild ride over the past month.

Blogosphere Update
Where to start, where to start… I suppose the news that would effect most of you is that Google is now updating their PageRank metric. I know a lot of you newer bloggers are hungry for some PageRank, hungry for an upgrade to your existing ranking… or hoping not to completely fall off. It appears that Google is slapping me in the face despite record growth and handing me a PR3 for Jimvesting.com. It’s okay, I can survive. Besides, it would also seem true that Bullish Bankers is getting a PR3… so that’s good news. Stay tuned over the next few days to get a complete picture.

EntreCard is for sale!? You betcha! Everybody and their mothers were talking about this news story, as EntreCard, one of the biggest blogging destinations for traffic-exchange went up for sale this week with a minimum bid of $100,000… looking for $1 million. Not Anymore! Breaking news is that Graham (owner) came out yesterday and posted on his blog that he was indeed taking his proposal back off of the offering table. This was basically because he was bombarded with offers from people interested in buying the company… which made him second-guess his logic.

“The 48 hours that transpired since listing my site on Sitepoint have been incredible. In fact, no less than 20 people have reached out to me and gave me a phone call. Over the past two days, I’ve talked to business leaders, CEOs, advertising execs, Tony the CEO of BlogCatalog, VCs, biz dev people, a gaming company in Israel, companies in the UK, and more. I’ve been on the phone so long I’m probably developing a tumor.” – Graham, Owner of Entrecard

That’s a pretty interesting news item, and a lot of people were ready to jump on board. You can read Graham’s post here. My personal belief is that he should indeed sell it. Normally, when people get the inclination to sell something, it is because they are no longer interested the project. The same holds true for Graham, but the bump from the morale-boosting community telling him how great the thing is will change his mind in the short term. Give it a month, and he’ll be trying to ditch the site again.

The Week In Focus
We started out a look at keyword research and Google search engine rankings last week. This week, I am hoping to get into the heart of this process and teach you guys from square one how I would go about ranking higher for any keyword phrase. It’s a process that does take a bit of time, so be prepared to do your work and have to wait a bit to see the fruits of your labor. Once PageRank comes in, I can hopefully offer up a post to analyze the changes that went through and what I think of the update. I really want to post a video about the stock market, but the rate at which new news comes in is a bit unbelievable, so it is going to be a question of finding a lull in the market so I can make that post more effective.

Stay Bullish on the Net!
-Jimvesting

Blog traffic has become one of the most desired commodities around, and a well-received website can command increased RSS numbers, higher advertising power and a niche authority that can be leveraged for big gains. Organic traffic comes primarily from three sources: direct traffic, referred traffic and search engine rankings. Understandably, we can’t control the first two very well because they rely heavily on pre-established reputations; therefore, let’s see how we can manipulate our search engine ranking positions for higher traffic to our blog.

But how do you take a blog from zero to hero? How does anyone come up on the first page of Google results anyway? It’s really got little to do with actual power, Google results are driven by linking from other authority websites… so we are going to try to exploit this for all it’s worth and land a front-page placement for our keyword phrase.

Researching Your Keyword Term

The first step in any successful keyword optimization campaign is finding that special keyword term that you think you can dominate. If you haven’t done this before, I would recommend seeking out an easier term to rank as a “trial run” of sorts. Regardless of how much competition you think that you can overcome, the process is the same.

I will be following along in this process with my targeted phrase “make money online.” This phrase is one of the most competitive in my niche, and I have been working up to the task by originally using “ways to make money online” and changing that most recently to “making money online.” I have had relative success without much of any effort, which leads me to believe that I may be able to stay competitive on this ultra-high trafficked term.

A good keyword for your blog has the following:

1. A high number of searches by the public, so you know that people are interested in learning a bit more about it
2. Low competition from other websites so that you have a chance to rank higher

This is not a post about researching keyword terms, but I will recommend a few tips and articles to get you started, and save you time. When I look at keywords, I typically start by opening up a Microsoft excel file to write down and remember all of my ideas. Google’s new Keyword Tool is my new “go to” research strategy. This thing is powerful and can get you relevant terms that show competition clearly. My other favorite is WordTracker’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. This one has a Google Trend analysis so you can really get a perspective on competition and ranking power.

Good Articles to Read More About Keyword SEO:

Caroline Middlebrook: Finding Good Keywords For Your Niche
CopyBlogger: Keyword Research Can Help You Make Money
SuiteJ: Using Google Analytics to Find Hidden Gems in Keywords

It is always important to realize that you are not competing against a search engine, you are competing against other websites. Knowing this, you may run across a highly “competitive” keyword, but when you actually search with it, you may feel that the top results can be beaten… and this is all that really matters.

Modifying Your Site’s Title & Description

Before we get into the actual marketing aspect of keyword optimization, you need to make sure that your website is tailor-made to house traffic from your targeted term. What exactly am I referring to? That’s right. The classic Meta tags! Now instead of coding this by hand, I recommend installing a plugin to handle this for you. WordPress is not very “SEO-friendly,” so you will probably have a heck of a time setting all the Meta tags correctly without a great plugin like All-In-One SEO or Platinum SEO.

What we do here is pretty much a no-brainer, we want a title and a description that includes our keywords somewhere inside of it! For example: since I am targeting the phrase “make money online,” the title of my website is now “Make Money Online by Turning TIme Into Cash!”

Let’s continue on with our description: “Jimvesting teaches how to make money online through stock market basics, blogging tips, get paid to take surveys, affiliate marketing tips and more!”

Changing around your Meta title and description (and keywords) is pretty much square one when you set up your blog to benefit from a keyword marketing campaign. It’s easy to do, and should always be done if you are looking to maximize your traffic and search engine ranking positions (SERPs). After all, Google looks to the title FIRST when they rank different sites on each search. I would maintain that it is the most important factor of all.

Starting The Idea Machine

Over the next few days, we are going to be doing some creative marketing techniques to fully capture traffic from search engine terms. Because of this, it’s important to realize that we are going to be writing some bum marketing articles, getting our reciprocal links out on other blogs, making a link bait page, cross-linking through social media and ensuring that we are linked back to in the most effective way possible. There are going to be a lot of ideas floating around, so start brainstorming about how you can capture the most traffic from your targeted term… this can be anything from article ideas to giveaways and incentives in order to encourage reciprocal linking.

Bottom Line: Let’s set things up and get ready to dominate our keywords! You can start the process right now by writing (or paying for) generalized 500 word articles about your niche area. Or, you can start to collect a list of websites where you currently have links or are looking for placements. We’ll get into the specifics soon, but by now you should be in position to succeed!

-Jimvesting

Back to work…
…but not without some Link Love!

How I got four quality posts out on a week where I was completely swamped with job-related activity, I’m really not sure! Despite the fact that I was really over-booked, we heard some good things about Alexa on Tuesday, checked out my FREE blog domination package on Thursday, worked through a review on Bryn Youngblut on Friday and rounded out the weekend with a sarcastic homage to all the generic guest posters out there. Before we set our sights ahead, let’s check out some of the coolest posts for the week ending September 20th, 2008!

• John Chow – Market Leverage Cashinator Challenge
• Click Consultants – Is Affiliate Marketing For You?
• Uber Affiliate – 5 Ways to Get Serious About Affiliate Marketing
• ProBlogger – How to Avoid the Physical Hazards of Blogging
• The Blackhat Way – Let’s Use Yahoo! Answers (Part 2)

I decided to go with some big names this week because I really enjoyed the stuff brought to the table. John Chow’s awesome video of Blog World Expo really got me motivated to blog again. Check out his clip for a change of pace! Click Consultants put out an interesting expose to find out if you are really cut out for affiliate marketing. Uber Affiliate gets serious on affiliate marketing in one of his classic run-downs. ProBlogger’s guest post talks about some ways to make your blogging environment more “healthy” and comfortable (different, but a fun read!). And finally, The Blackhat Way follows with a simple but powerful method that uses Yahoo! Answers to mine for blogging ideas.

Stock Market Update
Okay, first things first, everything has gone down the drain in the past two weeks. There is too much news to ever fit into a few paragraphs here, so I think that I am going to make a video about the chaos that has unfolded on Wall Street over the past weeks shortly. Breaking news on Sunday night was that the last two major investment banks, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, will now be “bank holding companies.” This shift is historic, and makes America looks like the Japanese in the 90s. I’m very upset about the news, but it looks like one of my colleagues, Steve Murray, accurately predicted this exact fortune on my financial blog Bullish Bankers.

Here’s what happened this week in a nutshell. We open the week with the announcement that Lehman Brothers (LEH) was filing for bankruptcy. Wow. One of the largest investment firms in history now bankrupt, despite a decent amount of liquidity, on bad loans and shorters driving the stock price down the drain. Then, Merrill Lynch (MER) announced that they had agreed to sell themselves to Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) in a hastily arranged contract that many think was overpaid. Wow. Finally, AIG was on the brink of declaring bankruptcy on capital-raising issues. AIG was then effectively bailed out by the government, who supplied them with a 1yr loan… they now control 79.9% of the company and the stock is worthless. Wow.

These are big banks. Big. Big. Companies. Collectively, the failing of these powerhouses is more catastrophic than you can probably imagine at this point in time. We’ll be feeling these effects for a long, long time. To top it all off, Dell warned of slowing demand and Best Buy disappointed on earnings. The Federal Reserve met, and didn’t change rates ( ), they sit at 2.00% currently. Finally, the government talked about creating a mortgage trust to bail out ailing banks from their bad debts and bookings… and the news sent the market upward. This rally is fake, the news is bad and the economy will stay bad for at least another quarter. Buying opportunity? I say go for it if you can stomach short-term volatility.

Blogosphere Update
What a fun week in the blogging world? Blogging World Expo had a couple of funny videos come out from the attendees. I actually ended up watching a lot of them from the likes of ShoeMoney, John Chow, Tyler Cruz and Zac Johnson. John Cow released the second John Cow TV video… this was great stuff and one of the funniest I have seen in a while. I really liked the overall “feel” to the week, and watching a few of these creative videos got me motivated to blog a bit more.

You want some comedy? I got it for you. Last week my friend over at NickyCakes.com wrote a humorous post about the top affiliate program rewards that you will never see. Unfortunately, Advaliant actually send out a “bathtub full of cash” to Nicky just a few days ago! They mailed him a replica tub with a few dollar bills stuffed inside of it, definitely a funny marketing ploy, eh?

A lot of activity in general for the blogging world. My buddy Jason at The University Kid still refuses to make an actual post (I kid, haha) and Normal Joe from IM With Joe not only forgets to post for days, but doesn’t link me at all. See the power of link love? Both of these guys are going to see that I linked them and will be back here to plead their case… so let’s hear them out before we pass judgment.

The Week In Focus
I’m going to be buckling down on my investments this week. I am thinking of doubling down on the stock market over the next two weeks now that things are so ultra-attractive. In addition, I’ve got a meeting planned almost every night this week, so hopefully I’ll be able to squeeze in a post here or there.

I am switching plans and marketing “make money online” instead of “making money online.” Big step, huh? Well, I was actually on the front page of Google for “making money online” this week without doing much of anything… so I figure that I mine as well go for the gold on this one. I’ll be taking you all through my process once I start so you can follow along.

It looks like I sparked a good amount of conversation this week, with each of my posts pulling around 20 comments a piece. Things are increasingly steadily here at Jimvesting… so despite a few tough posting periods, I’m coming out on top… and I’m staying BULLISH on the net!

-Jimvesting

Let’s start with a little introduction. Usually, bloggers like to use the first paragraph to say something personal to their readers. This can be anything from disclaiming a sponsored post, to talking about how they promise not to post anymore “fluff” on their websites. Usually, neither fact is true, and the first paragraph becomes some of the fluffiest fluff you’ve ever come across.

Maybe in paragraph two it will get a little more exciting? Nope, probably not. Most of the blog posts we find nowadays have two paragraphs that will be used to lead into the main point. It’s pretty effective to build into an argument like this… but many people actually abuse this area with a plug for a product they want you to buy to make them rich, or maybe a link to another post they made that they want you to comment on. Let’s add an emoticon for style points.

Introducing Something You Already Know About!
hmm… maybe that’s not really big enough…

Introducing Something You Already Know About!

…yeah, that’s much better.

I’m going to use this first “real” paragraph to talk about how smart and revolutionary this post really is. More than likely, I am reiterating something that you already know. But still, I’m going to act like I am helping you out big time. I’ve got a secret that nobody else knows, and you should be happy that I am telling you.

This Will Help You – Look At How Smart I Am!
Now is where the “point” is really driven home. Usually, when people run out of ideas for blog posts… they feel like they NEED to post something. What it turns out to be is a lame list of things you can do to improve your life, a generic message on how to boost your traffic or perhaps some kind of weak “lesson” that really doesn’t tell you anything. The image next to this paragraph will somehow validate my smartness.

By this point, if it’s not something obvious like “Comment on other blogs to boost your traffic!” or “Make Money By Getting Referral Commission!“… it’s going to be a list of things that you’ve already heard about. Need an example? How about “Top Five Ice Cream Flavors” or “The Best Ways to Gain Web Traffic.” At any rate, 90% of blogs will now post a useless list here:

1. Product I am Promoting, or Top Method
   People are sneaky, so in many cases people take advantage of the #1 slot to push a product or website that really isn’t the best… but they want you to buy. If it isn’t a product, then they probably have an obvious #1 technique like “post quality material” in the number one slot.
2. The Opposite of Number One
   Pretty self explanatory, if they didn’t take the front spot to push a product… it’s usually going to happen in number two. If they did, than #2 will contain the real “top method” to use.
3. Bland Technique You Already Know
   Usually, the only thing in a list that is actually worth your while is #1 or #2. Because of this, people feel found to list at least a top five… so #3 will be something that “works,” just very poorly. This is probably a waste of time.
4. You Have to Work Hard To Succeed!
   No kidding!? The fourth item on most lists will be something that is really quite obvious. In most cases, people will talk about “working hard,” “posting more often” or “marketing your idea.” At any rate, it’s something to which your real response should be “duh!” if anything else. Things are clearly going downhill.
5. Concluding Point? Irrelevant Point?
   If the author is smart, they will use #5 to wrap-up their point or add in a concluding statement. Otherwise, we find a lot of irrelevant and completely off-base number fives. This could be something like “you can make more money by selling girl scout cookies.” Basically, look out for points that sound good, but actually don’t even fit in the list in the first place.

I just wasted your time. Now I’ll slip in a cunning paragraph at the end of the list to try and drive my generic post home. Here is where I am going to convince you that I just made a good post. Now, this is probably not true… because more than likely I just said something along the lines of “take a break if you can’t think of anything to write.” Again, the message is pretty lame by this point.

Conclusion
Please, please, please buy my product. If I haven’t convinced you to either buy into my idea or website here… then I am probably rounding out an annoying post about how to tie your shoes “more effectively.” Most writers will use the conclusion as a way to boost their word count and look like they honestly put a lot of thought and effort into the topic. Others will try to make the final sell here. If you are a generic post writer, don’t take this post the wrong way… we’ve all been there. Maybe next time you just hold off on posting until you think of something more useful before you make us read through it, eh? Insert another smiley here to round things out on a good note.

-Jimvesting