Whenever we read or speak, we are thinking on keywords. Sometimes we forget an idea while we are speaking and then we remember it because of a word related with it. As you can imagine, keywords are everywhere, specially on Internet. Every blog, forum, social community or any other website has keywords which characterize it.

So what are keywords and how can I choose the correct ones?

Well my friend, keywords are basically that words with special significance, in particular any word used to reference something else. They link to other words or other information.

The term keyword in reference to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) usually refers to a word or keyword phrase (combination of words, such as ‘best paid advertising’) used to find relevant and useful web pages. Ok now you know what are the keywords, but how could you know which ones are the proper for your website?

Well first of all, you need to have in mind something. Internet is a big virtual world, and many people are competing at the same time for specific keywords, specially the short ones, i.e. diets, money, finance, music, etc…

I suggest you to have in mind the following 2 things when you are going to select your keywords:

1. The keywords should drive traffic: This means that they should be search on search engines in order to drive traffic. If you select keywords which nobody looks for you will be wasting your time.
2. The keywords should not be too targeted: This is a little obvious for someone who knows how this works, but it couldn’t be for a newbie. If you select highly-targeted keywords, it would be very difficult for you to rank for them.

Once you learned that you may have many questions, for example, how do you know when a keyword is highly-targeted? Everything will be asnwered in this post my friend, so be quiet and keep reading. Now, let’s review the procedure of selecting good keywords.

Selecting The Keywords

To start, make a list with the most basics things you have in your mind. What? Are you telling me that you don’t have anything in mind? Don’t worry, I’m going to help you with that. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my site about?
• What will I offer there?
• What kind of people will visit my blog?
• What are the keywords of my competitors?

Once you thought in those questions, you will have many keywords in mind. Write them in a paper or in a blank document because now we are going to explode and optimize them with some web tools.

Wordtracker GTrends

GTrends is a free tool which you can generate 100 keywords by entering just one, and get the estimate of search volume as well as the competition on Google. Let’s see how it looks:

Then you need to enter a keyword very related with your website and click on Hit Me.

I searched for “affiliate marketing” and I got 100 potential related keywords, the most searched on Google. At the left you will see the searches, and if you click in the icon of the right, you will see the competition of the selected keyword in Google.

It is recommendable to take keywords with a competition less than 50K. If you take one with more than 50,000 it will be hard for you to rank for it. Also if you get a keyword with less than 20K, you will probably rank in the first places of Google.

Also, there are other web services which you can use to fetch keywords, and they are the following ones:

• Traffic Travis: This is a good tool which you can take your market research, search engine optimization and PPC campaigns to a whole new level with this suite of tools. This software is available for windows, and it has 2 versions, a free -which let you fetch just 200 keywords- and a paid one, which let you fetch more than that.
• Digital Point Keyword Suggestion: This is a web based application of the DigitalPoint’s team.
• Google Keyword SandBox: You can also find this tool in your Adsense account under Tools > Keyword Tool. ith this you can generate a big list of keywords by giving a couple of them. It explores and gives you synonyms of the entered keywords.
• Google Sets: Another great tool of Google. You need to type some words and you will get a list of related keywords.
• Good Keywords: This is a simple and good Windows software to find the right keywords for your web pages.

Using Google Keyword Tool

By entering some keywords you will get hundreds of them by using synonyms. You can fetch keywords by Descriptive words/phrases or by Website content (this last one works to “steal” other people’s keywords).

Then you will get a list of 100 keywords or more, with detailed information such as competition, search volume and others. In the last screenshot you can see how these result looks like, the green bars are the competitions which as you can see, there are keywords more targeted than others…

What next? Export all the keywords to a .txt file and then go to the tool called Traffic Estimator. Then, open the .txt and copy-paste all the keywords into the box. It is very important to set the maximum CPC for ever keyword, which is $100. By doing this you will get the highest priority for the keywords that you are looking for.

Then you need to process that and export them the results as .cvs. Then, I invite you to check this video made by John Cow to learn how to use a program called KeywordCorral, which is free and will help you to choose the right keywords for your website. The video of Cow is oriented to Blog Titles, but it is perfectly applicable to website keywords.

Recommendations

Short keywords are really hard to rank for, and you should look for another alternatives. I suggest you to use Long Tail keywords, which are those ones formed by two or more words, i.e. lose weight fast, bes affiliate networks, climbing everest mountain, etc… Nowadays, these kind of keywords are much better for everything, because they are more specific and they have less competition.

Note: Remember to get keywords with less than 50k competitors.

Daily, thousand blogs are created and added to search engines, thought there are another thousand people who want to create a blog or website, but they don’t have idea about the niche they want to blog. I recommend to all these people to visit Vivid Lamp.

What Vivid Lamp Offer?

Vivid Lamp is a blog that offers help to find, promote and create ideas. Website creation, ideas and niche discovery related to marketing, are the topics covered by Simon at his blog.

There you can find a very useful free tool called Niche Warehouse. The idea behind this tool is to attempt to simplify the process of finding long tail keywords and to speed up the filtering out of poorly performing niche phrases specifically in Google.

What are these long tail keywords? These keywords are an expansion of a core keyword. Many people use them attempting to rank higher in search engines because people usually don’t use them. By using them, you have a better chance of ranking high when people use a search engine such as Google due to less competition.

The Ideas

In the section of ideas, you could find great video posts, which can help you open your mind to new concepts. The best video I could find there, talk about Secrets Of Success, where the success is explained in 8 simple words: Passion, Work, Good, Focus, Push, Serve, Ideas and Persist.

Definitively, Vivid Lamp is a blog that worth to read, specially if you want to create a project, and innovate with it. Using the tool called Niche Warehouse, you can optimize your existing website or guide you with finding a new niche. To optimize your searching, you could combine that tool with the resources provided on the posts related to Niche Discovery.

Writing is the essence of bloggers. Besides the knowledge of HTML code, the participation in social networks or building a marketplace at their blog, writing is the basic of every blogger, making us writers.

I have read about some ideas to organize your thoughts before to write a post. From making drawings, I will give you my techniques to organize my ideas before to write a post:

• Making Mind Maps: A mind map is a visual representation of chunks of information and the relationships between those chunks. Starting with a central idea, you would create a basic mind map by writing a phrase that identifies the central idea in a piece of paper. Then, you should write keywords based on the main idea, linking them with lines. By following the lines, you will be able to visualize how you can detach the topic. After that, the ideas will start to drain through your neurons and you will write without problems. The concept of mind maps, is to connect the general idea with the most detailed ones.
• Writing Keywords: This can be or not, part of the Mind Maps. Writing many keywords will help you to have an idea about the things you can mention in your post. Once you wrote a keyword, is good to write a little text or whatever you have in mind, relating the keyword and the main topic. Sometimes, I use Google Sets, which automatically create sets of items from a few examples.
• FreeWriting: Sometimes, when you want to write something, you get stuck thinking in front the screen, trying to get something good. After a moment, you still thinking and having nothing of your post, something that can be frustrating. In these cases, you should write everything you think, being good or bad. You have not the need to write it with sense, the order doesn’t matter here, just write all the ideas that crosses your mind. Then, read and underline the good things you can use on your post, and your mind will link all the ideas automatically. Generally, I do this in a paper, and not in the computer.
• Setting Categories: Before to write about a topic, you should think big. More general than the idea itself, the category is an important factor which can help you to canalize your idea. In fact, the category is the major keyword of your post.

I know that sometimes, many bloggers get stuck writing a post, it happens to all us eventually. By following the four things listed above, you could easily organize and environment your post. If you have another way to organize your ideas before to write, comment it here, will be fine to hear other voices.

As you know, Social Networks are a powerful tool to expand your brand. Besides to make friends and share the content you like, social networks are being used to promote many Internet businesses. This month, someone of my network has been attracting my attention due to his dedication.

Don’t forget this face, he could be the next millionaire entrepreneur.

His name is Patrick Hankinson. With only 20 years old, he is making thousand dollars with his website, with the help of social networks.

In these times, many Internet entrepreneurs present old and overloaded ideas, but not this one. At The Social Millionaire, Patrick presents a new business idea, combining the keywords with the social networks. His website connects consumers from all the major social networks to advertisers who want to reach this audience by keywords. Basically, he drive all the traffic he gets through the social networks, to the advertiser’s websites.

The Keywords

The keyword’s price starts on $5, but you can buy them for any higher price. The more you pay, the more visibility you’ll have in his website. Also, the advertiser who pays the highest price for a certain keyword, will appear the highest. If two advertisers bid under the same keyword for the same price, the advertiser who bought first will appear higher. There are several keywords there, and all them of advertisers who wants to promote their services through keywords, including me. As you can see, the system is very simple.

The Power Of Social Networks

Patrick uses the major social networks to promote his service. Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, are some of the networks where you can find him. Is very interesting how he has promoted his service, let’s take a look in the Alexa statistics:

With thousand daily visits in the first month, The Social Millionaire has a rank of 177k over million sites. In the chart, you can see all these peaks product of the social networks and all the reviews purchased by him.

Personally, I think that Patrick really knows what he is doing. Checking a review made on March 8th, I could noticed the number of friends and sales has increased considerably. In just 19 days, he increased his statistics from 122 friends and $106.5 on sales, to 354 friends and $2522.36 on sales! And I’m sure that this guy will continue increasing his traffic, friends, rank and sales in the next months.

As well as promote your brand, buying keywords in this site you will get a backlink. With the elimination of the Nofollow attribute, you will get a backlink, helping you to improve your rank in the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Are you still reading this? You should be buying keywords at The Social Millionaire!

There are too many plugins for wordpress which help you to improve your search engine optimization, but you can eventually download and install a couple of them and test which one work best for you, because in the blogsphere there are many plugins which do exactly the same.

Now I’m going to share with you a couple of plugins excellent for SEO, but also you can check the wordpress plugins data base for other plugins.

SEO Title Tag

As you now the page titles are very powerful in the Search Engines, so this plugin really helps your WordPress blog’s optimization allowing you to give to each post its own unique title tag – one that is uncoupled from the title of the post. This enables you to write a title tag what is good for the Search Engines while keeping a post title that will appeal to humans. If you want to improve your SEO, you should start by downloading this plugin .

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using. It have too many useful options as for example, add a description of the post for the meta tag, so when a potential reader find your post in a search engine it will see that description you wrote. Download this great plugin, I recommend it !.

Related Posts

Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts list based on your tags, and also it add the related posts to your feed. You can set the mount of related posts you want to show plus another features like showing a comment counter.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

This plugin creates a tag cloud for your blog by enabling you to group posts together based on “tags” you include when you write your posts. Tag clouds help your SEO by creating internal links to relevant pages using good keywords. Ultimate Tag Warrior is not compatible with WordPress 2.0 by itself, so be sure you download the Compatibility Thing. This plugin may be a bit difficult for non-coders to get working right.

Lucia’s Linky Love

This is a variety of “dofollow” plugin. It’s main function is to strip “nofollow” tags from links in comments. The purpose is to encourage comments by rewarding commenters with “dofollow” links which boosts their rank in search engine. However, this particular plugin also has features that thwart human’s who are paid to visit blogs and leave insipid comments simply to boost their companies back links.

Social Bookmarking

I personally dislike this plugin, I don’t like to see all those many little icons at the bottom of my posts. Instead, I prefer to use the feedflares of feeburner, with them you can see a couple of links which I previous selected them.

If you use another plugin and you consider it’s very useful, please comment on this post to share it with all the community. In the following days I will be talking about search engine optimization on wordpress, stay closer !.