Keywords: Matt Cutts

Popularity: 43% [?]

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You now want to find a niche that interest you and that could potentially be profitable. I personally relate to directories to find my niches. You can use for example EBay and scroll through the categories and the sub categories to find that long tail niche which will have less competition. Competition is not a bad thing, in fact the niche that you choose you want to have competition. This tells you right away that there is money to be made in that particular niche.

You may be asking your self how can I figure out if a niche is profitable? The answer is simple, search Google. When you type a key phrase into the Google search or any large search engine you will find sponsored results to the right. Sponsored results mean that marketers are paying to list there ads there to sell or promote that product or similar products. When you find a niche you then want to analyze how much competition there is, for newbie’s I would recommend finding a niche with under a million competitors for the primary keyword. Another rule of thumb is to be sure that your primary keyword gets searched for 1000 times or more per month. These simple tips will help to get you moving in the right direction.

Keep reading and I will walk you through step by step on how to create a successful website. Go find your niche! Do you have tips and tricks that you would like to add? We would love to hear them.

Keywords: Niche research | Tips for niche research

Popularity: 44% [?]

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In the Beginning…

All great web ventures begin in one place, the search for the perfect name. As any marketer will tell you, a name needs to be easy to remember and effectively reflect your brand. This can be done in a variety of ways with domain names:

Memorable names may be clearly associated with the product/service you are selling. Good examples are www.mapquest.com, www.askjeeves.com, www.wikipedia.com, and www.eloan.com. These names are simple and convey what the website does. You can often find these names by brainstorming a phrase that applies to your product and then searching domain alternatives. For example; if you were going to sell model planes you might begin with www.modelplane.com and then the search engine would return that the domain is registered but would offer different combinations that are available such as the following examples taken from www.godaddy.com:

www.modelplanesite.com

www.modelplanesweb.com

www.modelplaneslive.com

Names may also be memorable because they connect indirectly to the product or service you provide. These names are branded by additional marketing and include examples such as: www.google.com, www.ebay.com, and www.amazon.com. Google means to look and can easily be associated with “looking for something”. EBay can be associated with flea markets that typically have “bay assignments” E is of course for “ecommerce” so the name is memorable. Amazon began as the “largest bookstore” therefore connecting with their name.

Names may also be completely dissociated with the product and branded later through advertisement such as: www.yahoo.com and www.godaddy.com. Both of these sites have done a great job of marketing their services and connecting the services to the name instead of the other way around. However, both of these names are memorable meaning the only challenge is to connect the name with the services. In traditional marketing consider such names as: Banana Republic, The Gap, and Sears.

You’re name should be considered carefully but as long as you can make it memorable and are absolutely committed to marketing it effectively it should be workable. Names to avoid are those that are too long or can be confused with others.

Once you have found the perfect name it is time to find a hosting program. We highly recommend both yahoo.com and godaddy.com because of their superior service and economical solutions. Let’s face it not every at bat results in a home run so use economical solutions to minimize your risk. Both of these services have excellent solutions as outlined below:

GoDaddy.com offers the following:

Domains for $8.95 a year
Domain transfers for $6.95 per year and a free 12 month extension
Hosting for free with minimal advertisement
Advertisement free hosting from 3.99 per month
Additional SEO services and free add-ons
Yahoo.com offers:

Domains from 1.99 for the first year ( some restrictions)
Management and website from 7.77 per month for small businesses
$50.00 credit for yahoo.com search advertising/services
35% off of services for new merchants
Excellent 24 hour 7 day a week customer service and discounts for add-ons and additional domains

Keywords: Shopping for a domain name

Popularity: 42% [?]

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Do you remember when search engine optimization meant nothing more then building a website with keywords and search engine submission. The world of the web has changed a great deal since then. In psychology they have a predator/prey relationship known as the ‘Red Queen Theory’. This name comes from famous idea communicated in “Through the Looking Glass”, better known as “Alice in Wonderland”. Upon arriving in the kingdom of the Red Queen, Alice discovers that people have to run as fast as they can just to stay in place. The same is true in the world of nature. The ‘Red Queen Theory’ represents the idea that for every advancement of the predator the prey also advances; thus we all run as fast as we can to keep our place. So, what does this have to do with SEO?

In the beginning we all figured out how the search engines were rating pages; the methods were pretty straight forward. Pages were basically ranked by the number of relevant keywords and popularity. Popularity could be established via search engines, advertising, or paying firms to directly visit a number of times. However, as people began to exploit the weaknesses of this system, the system evolved. In fact, no one but a precious few Google employees knows how they rate their websites in total now. However, there are some methods being promoted that have come to light that are proven to improve your web site rankings. The following is the first in a series directing you on how to use the most common methods and an explanation of the correct/incorrect ways to utilize them.

Unique and Constant Users: It is nice to get unique users but there is reason to believe that pages are also ranked by the amount of consistent traffic they receive. It is pretty easy and cheap to get a “one hit wonder” site and search engines have figured this out. You can go to an outsourcing site and for about $.25 per hit, you can pay for as many ‘unique’ web hits as you want. This is why most sites now consider not only unique users but consistent users. To gain this audience it is important to provide content that is useful and compelling. You must offer content that will draw visitors which brings us to…

Article/Web Content: Article and web content can also be obtained through outsourcing. Understand, the days of plagiarism whether from another source or yourself are over. Search engines will penalize you if they see the same content repeated on more than one page. ‘Article Spinning’ was created to provide a simple answer to this. Simply put, ‘Article Spinning’ is taking the content from one article and changing the words just enough to try and fool the search engines so they recognize it as new content. There are even software programs to take a single article and spin it into many. This is still somewhat effective, however, search engines have begun more extensive searches to look for this method and as the software is introduced to the public, it is also incorporated by the search engines. If you want to effectively promote your site…it is important that you have authentically valuable content. The web has grown to large to compete with anything less. You can still use outsourcing, but put thought into what content you want to offer and specify your articles as much as possible.

Keywords: SEO 101

Popularity: 38% [?]

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Understanding the meaning of search engine optimization (SEO) - It’s the process of improving the amount of volume of traffic to a website via natural or organic results through the search engines. The higher you rank, ultimately the more visitors you will receive depending on if your site is optimized for the proper keywords.

SEO can target many different types of natural searches, from image search, video search and local search. To really understand SEO you must have a somewhat understanding of how the algorithms work and what people search for. Things that help to create higher rankings include:

• Making sure your code is clean
• Using the proper linking structure
• Making sure your site can be crawled
• Using the proper meta data
• Adding good unique content

There are different kinds of SEO, white hat and “Black Hat” tactics being the more popular terms that you will hear about. You want to steer clear of blackout SEO which is any method that tries to trick the search engines into giving you a higher ranking. Things that are considered black hat SEO tricks: Using link farms and keyword stuffing. I hope this post helps clarify and explain exactly what SEO is in Layman’s terms.

Keywords: What is SEO | SEO | SEO for beginners

Popularity: 46% [?]

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I frequently get asked how to create a successful profitable online business. Most people that start online businesses are just thinking about one thing, “money, money and more money”. Money should not be your first and primary objective. Money is important of course, but shouldn’t be the main reason for wanting to create your online business. You first need to get the right mindset, your asking what mindset?

To be successful online you must first find something you have a true passion for, something that you can write about that can help or truly interest and grab your reader’s attention. This is important for many reasons, when you truly have passion for something, your writing really appeals to your audience. You want to try and make your writing have its own original personality that people can relate to. So your first steps to starting and building a successful business includes:

• Creating a plan
• Understanding why you want to create your website (For the people not just the money)
• Finding a niche to write on that you are truly passionate about

Now these are the very first steps to creating a successful online business, follow these simple steps at the very beginning and your site will flourish in the end. My next post for this category will take you through the process of finding niches to create your site around. Get ready and hang on, over the next few months, I am going to teach you step by step, how to create a successful online business, watch for my next post!

Popularity: 52% [?]

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