Yesterday, we have seen some common mistakes that can be made when it comes to SEO. These are errors that plenty of webmasters make, regardless of their level of experience, as they are often caused by following bad advice and not researching things thoroughly enough, rather than by simple ineptitude. There are also a few other mistakes that are made by webmasters which are important to know, so that you can avoid them on your website. Here are some more things that you should be aware of when dealing with SEO issues.

Not Optimizing For the Proper Keywords

There are some keywords that you will want to target on your site and these would be the keywords that your site visitors would be the most likely to use when they search for something you would be offering. Your website visitors will probably not be typing in industry jargon, or obscure names for products when they search for them, but rather words that they would commonly use in everyday conversations. So for example instead of using “hooded sweatshirts”, they would use the keyword “hoodie”, which is far more popular in current language.

Not Using the Title Tag Right

The title tag is very important, as it is the place where you can include a keyword or keywords that accurately describe your site or page on your site. So instead of having just “Welcome” on your title, having something like “New York Real Estate” or “Discount Electronics Imports” would be far better for SEO.

Relying on Software Tools Too Much

Despite what some sales pitches and self proclaimed gurus will tell you, there’s no software, script or plugin that will make your website go from page 20 on Google to page 1 in just a few days with no work on your part. This is something that simply doesn’t exist, no matter what the tool costs or what testimonials it has. If it were true, then the word would spread like wildfire (the webmaster community is one where information is shared a lot) and everyone would begin to use.

This is especially true with regards to tools that claim they can instantly generate tons of high quality backlinks for your website. While these tools can definitely submit your site to directories, or submit your articles to content sites that accept them, their usefulness is often questionable at best. In many cases, the backlinks come from obscure directories that themselves are not well ranked in search engines. Also, the article directories where these tools submit to are basically repositories filled with low quality spam articles that were clearly designed only to have SEO in mind and not actual readability.

While there are some tools that could work well and help analyze your pages, plus in some cases make the needed changes automatically, if you want to have some SEO success, then you need to use your brain and take action, rather than simply relying on a tool to do everything for you.

We’ve seen all the good design elements which make a blog useful and likely to be profitable for you. But now there’s one important thing that you need to figure out: the content of your new blog. Your visitors will come to your blog to read something that is interesting and informative in their eyes. Therefore, you will need to ensure that what you have on your blog will keep your readers happy and make them want to come back to it for more. Here is some good advice on how you can accomplish this:

Make Regular Posts

If you want your readers to stay interested in your blog, then you would need to make new posts on a regular basis. This doesn’t mean you have to post every day if you’re just going to end up repeating what you’ve said in the past few days. But you shouldn’t leave your blog without any new updates for several weeks, as people may think that the blog is “dead” and that you’re no longer actively maintaining it. By making regular posts, readers will be more eager to know when you’ve added something to your blog.

Keep Your Posts Brief and to the Point

If you have a lot to say about a certain topic, then it would be better for you to break it up into several different posts that discuss the main points you would like to make. You could have a “series” of posts that focus on a certain aspect of your niche.

Format Your Posts Well

One good example of this would be just reading this post. As you can see, it is formatted in paragraphs with sub headers. Nobody wants to read a wall of text, as it’s simply hard to follow. If you’re going to make a post that is say 500 words long, then you will need to divide it into paragraphs that are structured according to the points that you’re making in your post. So if you’re reviewing a new digital camera, one paragraph could deal with the performance and the other one about the price and availability.

Include Multimedia Content

While it’s true that blogs are mainly used for sharing text, it doesn’t mean you can’t include anything else. Adding a thumbnail image that is relevant to the topic at hand will make the blog post more attractive to readers. If you need to include a photo, graphic or diagram that will provide explanation or reinforce the point that you’re trying to make, then you can do so as well. Of course, it is possible to add video content to a blog post quite easily too. Some topics, especially if you’re showing the reader how to do something, such as installing a graphics card in a computer or navigating their way around a certain piece of software, could be much easier to understand for your blog visitors if you included a video in addition to text instructions. To save bandwidth, you can host the videos on an external video sharing service like YouTube.

When it comes to getting visitors to your business website, there are plenty of ways to do it. Some of these methods are free, while some others require an investment to be made in terms of advertising budget. But what if you don’t have that much money to get started? Is it still possible to get free visitors to your website? The answer would be yes. Here are some of the ways that you can employ.

• Get Listed in Google Places

Time and time again, online marketing experts will recommend that anyone who has a website for their business gets a free listing in Google Places. Why? A few simple reasons: its free and can help you get visitors, both to your website and to your actual business. All you need to do would be to list your business and it would appear in a few days.

• Put your website on your receipts, bags, printed materials, etc.

Some of your existing and potential clients may not even know that you have a website. By putting it out in front of them, you are increasing the chance that they will see it and go visit it. This also has the effect of increasing customer loyalty. A customer who visits your website will be more likely to buy from you again in the future, as it serves as a reminder that your business exists.

• Use social networking

Facebook is the second most popular website in the world, right after Google. So if you don’t have a Facebook page, then you are leaving traffic on the table. Simply create a Facebook page for your business, filled with information about your latest offerings, and prominently include links to the relevant portions of your website. Create special, Facebook only discounts and promotions to boost its efficiency.

Twitter is also a popular social networking service. It works a bit differently from Facebook: you send out short messages to your followers, called Tweets. These Tweets can include a link to the relevant part of your site, such as the page for a new product, or to a promotion that you are having for the season.

• Have your website on your business sign, your vehicles, etc.

This can serve as a very effective way of getting free traffic. For example, if your business is closed and someone passes by who might be interested in what you have to offer, they could remember your website and then check it out later. Keep in mind that very few people will actually note down your website URL, but will rather remember it from memory. Therefore, it needs to be something that is memorable and something that would not be confused with one of your competitors websites. Remember, you can have multiple domain names pointing to your main website, so if you think your main domain would be too hard to remember, consider getting an alternate one. This definitely has the potential of getting a few extra visitors to your site when you need them.

Previously, we’ve seen how having quality, well organized content can help you improve or maintain your ranking on search engines. But is there more? Definitely. There are a few things that you need to keep in mind if you are serious about your SEO objectives. Here are some more examples:

• Ensure your content is unique

While this may seem obvious, some webmasters still don’t seem to get it. Using content that is scraped from other sites, or is comprised of PLR articles or is taken from PLR ebooks is not a good idea. Why? Because it is not unique. There are probably thousands of web pages out there with the same exact content that you have. This will obviously penalize you when it comes to SEO.

If you need to use PLR content or other “open source” materials, such as info from Wikipedia, then you will need to rewrite it to make it unique. This has to be done by hand. While there are software programs and scripts which claim they can generate unique articles, usually you will end up with some gibberish that will be hard to understand for users and will also be bad for SEO. So the bottom line is, your stuff needs to be unique.

• Don’t buy backlinks from shady sources

This comes back to the point about not using Black Hat SEO tactics if you want long term growth for your website. While you may find plenty of “quality backlink sellers” on web forums everywhere, you should be aware of the fact that these backlinks are rarely of any good quality. Most of the time, they are included in websites that are simply link dumps, where there are plenty of links to irrelevant web pages. Or, they simply spam forums and blog comments with your website link. Of course, these links will get removed after a few days and this may even get your site blacklisted for link spam. If you have to deal with a backlink seller, then make sure that you are dealing with someone who knows what they are doing. The best backlinks will come from places that have a high amount of relevance to your website. For example, niche blogs.

• Remember to keep building quality backlinks

Instead of buying backinks, you can build them yourself. How? This is a lot easier than it sounds. You can start by creating a profile on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Include the URL of your website in your profile. Then, submit some articles to directories which have a good reputation with search engines. If you have a local business, see if you can be linked to on the website of your local chamber of commerce or other community business groups. Include your URL when you advertise on classified ads sites. All of this will get you good quality backlinks which are worth more than hundreds of backlinks from some shady sites which are nothing but a repository of spam posts.

When it comes to SEO, there are plenty of misconceptions, especially among new webmasters and those who have just started out in online business. Some people seem to believe that just by doing the most basic SEO work or by hiring some SEO “expert” for $5 at Digital Point, they would be able to propel their site to 1^st place on Google within a few days. For anyone that thinks that way, well sorry but this is just not how SEO works.

If you want to improve your websites ranking on the search engines, then your goals will need to be realistic. One of the ways of doing so would be to take a look at the websites that are already ranked for the keywords that you are targeting. Do a keyword analysis of your site to see which keywords you would be better off targeting. In many cases, you will be able to find some long tail keywords that are more specific to your offerings and that have less competition. If you do business at a local level, then targeting some local keywords can also be very helpful. Once again, the reason behind this is that the competition for local keywords is a lot lower than for the more general ones, thus it would be much easier for you to rank for them.

One thing that you will need to understand about SEO is that it is more of a long term process, rather than an instant solution to get traffic to your website right away. If you have just created your website, then it can take several weeks or even months before you are able to get any decent amount of traffic from natural search engine results in certain high competition, popular niches.

For this reason, you need to consider using some other advertising methods in the meantime to bring some traffic to your website. Pay per click search advertising obviously comes to mind here. Many would say that it brings you the same results than SEO, but is able to do so a lot faster. The major drawback, however is that you will need to spend some money on it, sometimes considerable amounts if the keywords that you are targeting are quite competitive and thus very valuable.

If you truly want your website to bring you the money that you want, then you would need to understand that online advertising is a very diverse environment, where you have dozens of different ways to generate traffic to your website besides using SEO. Using media buying, article marketing, social media marketing or video marketing are all things that you can do alongside SEO to make your site more popular. Remember what the main focus behind creating a website is: to make money for you. By employing the proper strategies to get the visitors that you need, you will be able to improve your ROI by getting more visitors and turning these website visitors into profitable clients for your business.

We have previously seen that there are many different categories of online business objectives. The main difference between them is the amount of money that could be made, as well as the amount of commitment (time and money) that the online entrepreneur will need to make.

Let’s first take a look at the micro online business model. Basically here, you will be making up to $500 a month and putting in 10 to 20 hours a week maximum, with little or no investment on your part.

This business model is basically service based. This essentially means that you will be offering some services to other webmasters, online entrepreneurs as well as business owners. What are some examples of services that you can offer, which will not demand too much time or effort from you? Here is a short list:

• Article writing
• Translation
• Video transcription
• Graphic design
• Very basic web design
• Writing reviews
• Creating backlinks
• Doing short online videos
• etc…

Of course, this is not a complete list, there are many more services that you could offer, based on your skills and the demand that is on the market right now.

The main question is: where do you go to find projects that you can do? The top places are freelancing sites, where people from everywhere gather together to offer or request services. The most useful sites for easy tasks are:

Microworkers – www.microworkers.com

Amazon Mechanical Turk – www.mturk.com

Fiverr – www.fiverr.com

Internet marketing forums also have a section for freelance work. Here are some of the best ones:

Warrior Forum www.warriorforum.com

Digital Point www.digitalpoint.com

Black Hat World www.blackhatworld.com

However, do take note that if you want to find work on forums, you should first spend a few days making USEFUL posts to build up your reputation and get your name seen by the other members.

In these sites, you will find tens of thousands of different tasks that you can do. The pay isn’t especially great, however, if you work in an efficient way without distractions, you can make something approaching $10 to $15 an hour. The tasks could sometimes be quite repetitive and tedious, which is why most people do not spend more than one or two hours working on them per day. But still, you can make a few hundred dollars a month from these sites.

Always strive to do quality work, follow instructions accurately and complete the projects on time. Not only will this help boost your feedback on the sites, but will also allow you to make some useful contacts and potentially earn you some regular projects to do.

Here’s a tip: working with the same people on a regular basis is much better and will make the time you spend online much more productive and efficient. The reason: you will be spending a lot less time hunting for tasks to do and projects you can participate in and much more time actually doing work that will be profitable for you.

In the online world, there are plenty of business opportunities that you can take advantage of. But is the one you are looking at legitimate? Here is part 2 of some of the things you should be looking at.

Watch out for hidden costs and other tricks

Many business opportunity sites try to entice you to join a program without fully telling you how much it will cost you up front. The most common tactics are:

The free (or very low cost) trial. Here you are told that you can get your very own money making website, training, or tools for nothing or just a tiny cost. The problem is that once the trial period, which can vary between a few days and a few weeks, runs out you will be dinged a hefty monthly fee unless you cancel. Many people have reported that they were still charged even though they had called to cancel and needed to call the company several times to get these charges reversed.

Hidden fees to join that are not disclosed up front. Some business opportunity sites tell you that all you need to get information and join is to pay a relatively small amount of around $50. The problem is, once you pay that fee, you quickly realize that in order to truly take part in the opportunity and earn money, you would need to make additional investments which would often run up into several hundred or even thousands of dollars.

Incessant pressure to “upgrade”. You may be allowed to join a site for free or at a very low cost. But then, as soon as you sign up, you will be incessantly pressured to take the “premium/platinum/gold/big boss/etc.” package. They will tell you that by upgrading your membership, you will get even more opportunities to make money that you wouldn’t have with the free option. This is a widely used marketing tactic called an “upsell” in which you are baited with a free offer and then constantly pressured to upgrade/

Ask yourself, do you really NEED to join this site?

Many business opportunity sites promise you things such as: free hosting, free website templates and building software, access to “exclusive” information such as lists of wholesalers and “top secret” money making training courses. Are these really worth the $99.95 a month that you are being charged? While, I admit, it may be convenient to have all these tools in one place, anyone with a bit of time and resourcefulness (things that you will need anyways to succeed in ANY business) can put together their own toolkit.

Think about it: a webhosting account with unlimited websites costs less than $10 a month. Free web design software and website templates are available to be downloaded all over the web. Very often, the “secret” money making techniques are the same ones that you will find in online business forums for free and the “exclusive wholesaler lists” are little more than links to well known sites such as AliBaba or iOffer.

Keeping your email opt in page clean and professional is important to showing your users trust and respect. Make sure you emphasize privacy and the purpose of your list. List the benefits of being a member of your email list such as giveaways, free information, gifts, or whatever benefits your list might have. This helps gain trust right away from your users and makes them feel like they will benefit from joining your list, rather than giving away their privacy to a third party. Trust is the most important thing you can build on your opt in page.

The opt in email page takes some time to perfect, but the main objective is to keep the person interested enough to want to give you their personal information such as an email address to offer them solicited information. This is known as opting in to receive the information and allows you to send them related information. Most people will not simply put in their information if they see no incentive or gains that they would receive for doing so. This is where you would provide a free gift for giving you their information. This allows you to provide a free gift as the ethical bribe to earn their email address information.

This means that you will be tasked with gaining the trust of opt in subscribers. The more that you work to gain the trust of the potential subscribers, the more likely they will be to opt in. Once you do get their trust to give you their information you will have to continue earning their trust. Sending them the free gift via auto-response scripts is important to utilize. Do not bombard them with spam and offers they do not need.

Delivering on the join request is very important. You will have to ensure that they will be receiving important information that they will want to read without asking them to buy anything at first. Once gaining their trust has gone on for a few days to a week, your email responses could be tailored to ask them politely to purchase a product. If they do not continue on, the next email should outline why they should buy it. After this, the emails should explain why not using the product is less effective than other products or methods. This will usually provide them with a reason to purchase within a set time frame if their interest is caught well enough.

EzineArticles.com is one of the leading article directories online today and has been established for a very long time in the marketing and article space.

Ezine Articles essentially lets your post your articles (rewritten for Ezine or as you posted on your own blog) to their database of articles with millions of visits each month. What that does, is it brings you visitors and backlinks to your website creating a lot of value for your business.

Some people make a living by posting to Ezine and linking out to affiliate products or their own products and selling people from their articles on the products and websites.

Ezine is a very powerful tool that should be in every internet marketers business plan.

There are two differing camps when it comes to article publishing on article directories. Some people believe that all the content must be unique that you post on your blog, therefore you should never post vanilla posts from your blog onto article directories. Then, there are other internet marketers who have claimed they have had no ill effects from publishing the same article from their blog a few days later on the most popular article directories. Personally, I have no problem posting my articles from my own blog onto article directories, but I usually wait at least a week before I do so, that way I have time for my own articles to be indexed and to appear as the original article source.

Once you are ready to start publishing, it is a good idea to go through and read some of the Ezine Articles to see what style are most popular and which topics seem to be as well.

You are not allowed to use affiliate links directly in your Ezine articles, so instead you need to set up a sub directory with 301 redirect to your affiliate link, if that is the way you are going to go.

Linking is also very closely monitored, you can not have links in the first 2/3rd’s of the article, so be conscience of that so that you can save yourself some frustration, there is also a limit on the number of links that are allowed.

Ezine Articles can be a very powerful tool to incorporate into your business, learning the ropes first and taking it slowly (so you don’t get banned) is important so that you can create unique content that will garner you some great responses to your links, in turn making you some money.