Yesterday this lady from facebook asked me to share a secret about the SEO work I have now started doing for a small fee. She wanted to know how I did so much of keyword research so fast and precisely… to be able to offer it as a freebie on a $10 charge. And since I shared the secret with her, I will tell you too… because you deserve to know as an Internet Marketer on my blog.

Fact is, thousands of marketers have already invested in Market Samurai, and armed with the tools inside Market Samurai, they are avoiding the mistakes that cause 99% of online marketers to fail – picking the wrong keywords, going into markets with too little traffic or too little value, or trying to break into markets that are far too competitive. As a result, they’ll profit where most others fail.

Here’s what Market Samurai does over and above the basics:

* Effectively analyzes your SEO competition instead of fighting and losing costly and time-consuming battles against almost unbeatable competitors.

* Finds relevant web content that fits your chosen keywords instead of being forced to research and write content the old way – from start-to-finish by yourself, or paying for outsourcing.

* Finds opportunities to build high-value backlinks to your content from relevant sites, practically on autopilot – including valuable blog pingback links.

The training at the Market Samurai back-office is exceptional to say the least. It equips you through 3 golden rules that nobody else will tell you (nobody didn’t tell me at least).

* SEO Golden Rule #1 – Pick keywords that ATTRACT TRAFFIC, and avoid 90% of all keywords that will NOT attract traffic.

* SEO Golden Rule #2 – Pick keywords that have COMMERCIAL VALUE, and avoid all of the unprofitable, useless-traffic keywords.

* SEO Golden Rule #3 – Pick keywords with LOW LEVELS OF COMPETITION – and avoid keywords that give you have no chance to get front-page Google rankings.

Only around 1% of all keywords fit within these 3 Golden Rules. So if you EVER want to drive free search engine traffic to your website, then without Market Samurai you’re playing “SEO Roulette” with the odds stacked against you at 100 to 1, trying to “GUESS” the right keywords to target!

Don’t get left behind by those that take action while you sit there and wonder. Make sure you also get Market Samurai… and if your drop your details in here I’ll work a way for you to get the ONLY drop-dead-deal on it… a 35% discount! Click it now.

Yes I have been working for free on SEO jobs till now. But with this video I have conclusive proof that your paying me for my services will be well worth your money. In case you haven’t watched the video yet, watch it now.

The way I would work with you is as follows:

1. You will mail me a note to get started. Click here.

2. I understand your space and provide you free advice on how to choose your domain and keywords for it.

3. You agree to 10 sessions with me of 10 minutes each @USD 10 per session. Here I’ll guide you on site development.

4. I work on your keyword research and backlinking for free during the course of these sessions.

5. You have a perfectly optimized site up and running inside of 2 weeks!

Howzatt? Get started by mailing me now.

If you are exploring online business opportunities you would have seen that the internet is huge as an ocean. And lot of people are writing blogs and encouraging you to do so as well. So what are the right things to do in blogging? This is a huge subject but here are the top 3 todos that would benefit you.

One , if your blog is pointing to your business (highly recommended, but ask me about this separately) your blog posts must be structured on keywords. Do you know how to find good keywords ? Click and read. Keywords are like the skeleton of your business… giving the frame for money to be pegged on. Keywords – with search engine optimization (SEO) techniques – help you to be found… and what can be found can be bought. Simple.

Two , get backlinks for your blog. Backlinks are like bridges from the mainland to an island. If you imagine the internet as an ocean and your blog as an island, you would use the links to your blogposts as ‘flares’… which you send out to catch the attention of passing ships and people on the mainland. They would then follow the direction of the flares and build a bridge. But here’s the catch! Not everyone who sees your flares would be an engineer. Which means they might not be qualified to make a good bridge over which a search engine could drive. So spend your time putting your flares (links) on sites that have these two facilities:

1. The offer back links (they are do-follow sites)

2. They have a high page rank / Alexa rating

These two concepts stumped me as a beginner, but they’re easy to understand really. Sites having page ranks closest to 10 – or Alexa ratings closest to 1 – are indications of ‘authority sites’. An authority (obviously) would build a strong ‘bridge’. But most high authorities ‘do not follow’ links. For example, Facebook is ‘Alexa 3′ but no link you post on it will be recognized by search engines. So you’ll be shooting flares all day and night and nobody will be seeing them!

On the other hand, an article site like ezinearticles.com offers an author resource box that backlinks to the (blog) site specified by the author. Since ezinearticles has a page rank of 6 and an Alexa of 162, it has a very good rub-off on your blog. So the time you spend posting articles on ezinearticles, with good links in the author resource box, is time well spent.

I must clarify here, that page rank (PR) is scaled from 0 to 10 and by and large all sites are zero. A PR of 2 or 3 means your site is in very elite company. Alexa on the other hand ranks upto 22 million or so, and any count below a million signals a respectable site. Now you see why I’m showing off mine at 587,238

To get the tool bar you see in this picture, download the SearchStatus bar free here . This bar also tells you whether the site you are on is a ‘do-follow’ or not. The best way to waste time is by posting links on a high Alexa no-follow site. A good thing to do is post comments on Alexa 1 million and below blogs, so google’s attention comes in the direction of your blog as well. Get the idea?

And three , get a diagnostic report on the health of your website in SEO terms by visiting www.websitegrader.com This is a phenomenal free service that runs a scan and exposes your blog’s skeleton, tissues, fat and everything in minutes. Consequently you know exactly what needs work. Visit the site now and say wow. You can even use it to know what your competition is doing right!

That said, I’ll wind this up here. Trust you have developed your gameplan for how to market online . Else click (<) for tips. If you find inputs like these useful, pop your details here and I’ll put you on a 30 day program to have you dancing on your ‘Malibu island’ online. No worry – I won’t share the list and don’t spam See you around!

How to find a good keyword? When I was a beginner in internet marketing, every webinar I attended, every talk I heard, emphasized the need to find good keywords. Aha, I thought… keywords… those are the words people search for. If their search and my specified keywords match, my ad / article / post / video will show up high on the search engine. Cool. How complicated can that be? Of course I know what people are searching for… “make money, work at home, online business ”… I’ll use those words, I thought… simple.

Over time, I got not-overwhelmingly-great results. Hmmm. Actually nothing showed up on google in the first 10 pages. Hmmm. SEO. Search Engine Optimization. People seem to be making a lot of money with it. These techniques place keywords at the ‘right spots’ for the search engines spiders (bots) to ‘crawl over’ to them.

Now I am not one to spend money on something I know I can learn by putting two and two together. So I just spent a lot more time. And learned what I share here. To be sure you are not wasting your time reading this, go to google and type ‘nucerity distributors’. My blog [ www.DoOnlineBusiness.info ] will show up on page 1. And I am not even a nucerity distributor! So now I know something.

What I know can be split in 3 parts:

1. What search engines look for
2. Where you can look for what they look for
3. Where you can place what you found

What search engines look for

Initially it was a mystery to me how google* can ‘see’ a video and know where to classify it and when to bring it up. Now if you have ever posted a video, you’ll recall there are 3 things you feed in. The title, the description and the tags. You also save your video with a ‘filename’. Remember that.

Google is looking to serve content that its users will be happy to read. Why? Because if google understands what they are searching for they will keep searching. So google uses lots of programming to constantly ‘prune its garden’ of content grass.

Yes, google is a living organism. The biggest artificial intelligence on the planet. It knows what everyone in the connected world is thinking (searching for) and carefully organizes what it serves you. Scary? Live with it! And read the book Perry Marshall’s definitive guide to google adwords [ adw.DoOnlineBusiness.info ] to master google with authority.

So google will constantly stay in touch with places where content comes up. Youtube , Squidoo , Ezine articles , Free Press Release are some places like that. It will check for new tags, descriptions, names and titles every few hours and index them. Then it will serve and watch. If people click your content (because the keyword/tag matched) but press the ‘back’ button in a few seconds and came back to search, google will know your content is not really matching your words. “Shady guy. Says something… does something else.” Google will make a mental note.

Similarly, the search engines will (on a lesser frequency) check for what’s new on all sites on the net. You may use www.pingomatic.com once a week to ‘ping’ the spiders so they know you’re generally posting something new every week. Don’t ping very often. Remember how irritating it is when the doorbell keeps ringing? Same with google. You want it to like you.

This apart, search engines also look for picture names, headings, link text and URLs. Let us understand these by example. Say you are into dog food. Now you will do just great if you can get these in order:

1. Get a URL like www.dogfood.com Generally this will not be available. So try www.welovedogfood.com A great site to check for these is www.pcnames.com Once you have a name, register it at www.namecheap.com or any service you find ok.
2. If you already have a blog domain like www.youname.com and dogfood is an interest area, create a permalink www.yourname.com/dogfood This is more easily available but less authoritative.
3. Now your title. This is the part that appears in the blue band on top (left side of the minimize-close buttons). Make sure the words ‘dog food’ are there.
4. In your headline, use the words ‘dog food’. Doing so will automatically put it in your blogpost permalink.
   
5. Putting up a picture of your product? Name it “yourname dog food”
6. Filling out a description box? Use dog food several times. Also /Alternatively in the first para, with other words around it eg ‘dog food lovers buy yourname dog food because dog food from yourcompany is dof good’.
7. Select the tags as dog food, dog food lovers, yourname dogfood, yourcompany dog food etc. Notice the inane repetition. Also notice variations… with and without spaces dogfood and dog food. All these count.
8. Wherever you can, especially towards the beginning and end of text, incorporate “yourname dog food” and hyperlink it to your site. This is called anchor text and the link helps score brownie points for your site on the keyword/s in anchor text.
9. Lastly, note down all the keywords you’ve used so you can check how well they’re showing up. You are into a scientific experiment on artificial intelligence! Congrats!

Where you can look for what they look for

Now this is the most borinnnnng part. Also the most fundamental. Like most things in life, veggies included

It’s best to keep a pen and scribble pad handy. This is very important advice. Do it now.

As we go through, we’ll follow a 3 step process. Just know that we are aiming to figure out 3 things:

1. What words do people search for
2. How many people search, how often and where (traffic)
3. How many sites use the same keyword (competition)

In case you are doing keyword research for pay per click (PPC) advertising you would also need to consider ‘commercial value’ of your keyword (will it be profitable). But this is what the paid keyword softwares are about and beyond the scope of SEO here. Click the link [ ppc.DoOnlineBusiness.info ] to learn more.

So here goes:

Step 1 : Think of a seed keyword and type it in this tool (for now it will be ‘dog food’).

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This tool will throw up lots of phrases related to dog food along with number of searches per month. This keeps changing with time… what I see now are (top 5):

dog food – 2,740,000 searches /month

dry dog food – 165,000 searches /month

dogs food – 135,000 searches /month

best dog food – 110,000 searches /month

natural dog food – 110,000 searches /month

Try it. That’s the best way to learn.

Step 2 : Pick some of these search words that relate to you (maybe you are not into ‘dry dog food’ so don’t bother with it) and hop across to

http://www.google.com/insights/search

Here you’ll get trends of how much the search word is searched for. Which countries / states. Any seasonality and so on. Change the filters to find out. Now you have some relevant keywords that work in your area. Right?

Step 3 : Go to www.google.com and type your selected 10 (or so) keywords in. Look for the number of sites it displays on the top right. For dog food I see:

“ Results 1 – 10 of about 43,400,000 for dog food with Safesearch on”

Phew! 43 million is a very big number. Try ‘dogs food’ and it will show up 25 million. That’s still a lot. Go down the list in step 1 and add a word or two till you can hit a sweet spot less than 500,000. A well optimized site will rank high in that kind of competition. Now you see why it’s tedious and boring? Well you can buy a keyword research software tool to help you. Go to [ gcd.DoOnlineBusiness.info ] for tons of free videos! Keyword research is life and death online.

Where you can place what you found

Now you finally have 10 (or so) keywords that work and for you exclusively. Follow the 9 points of section 1 (above) to place them at the right places in your content. That’s obvious.

Also get back to google.com with the keywords you dropped (now you see why you needed the scribble pad?). Look up which sites score well on them. For instance, for ‘dog food recipes’ I find 20 million competitors… but there is a youtube video at spot # 5. This tells us youtube is being tracked by google on this word. Study that video. Do better keyword packing and post your video on youtube. In a day or two, if this video is replaced by yours… bingo you have your site linked from the first page of google (be sure to start your description with your site address)!

If this last part got you, that’s the law of the jungle… you don’t have to be the fastest deer… you have to be faster than the slowest to not be eaten!

But it’s not always so simple. The site on top may have a history, lot of back-links, links from authority sites like .gov and .edu… all of which give it credibility. So you can’t ever say for sure. What you can do however, is keep posting good stuff on popular sites with your keywords matched… and who knows, maybe a .gov site will link back to you!

If you’ve read this far with a bit of follow-the-instructions, congratulations! For one, you are not a beginner anymore. So while I’m seeing whether this article will rank for “keyword research for beginners”, the subject keyword research for beginners doesn’t apply to you now! Trust this helped! Enjoy your journey as you do online business!

Let me start with a disclaimer here. This topic can be controversial. And I am no expert. The world of network marketing is evolving and booming before our eyes like the world of Internet itself. Today a technology can come which can wipe out all known paradigms of yesterday. Google did that. Not that Alta Vista was not a great search engine… but well, google’s algorithms were worth billions more. Tomorrow there may be another. Same about network marketing.

So, as a student of this fine discipline of network marketing, I attempt to put here 5 things that you might think of as ‘baseline requirements’ to check of any network marketing company that you evaluate:

1. How old is it?

Whatever might be said about technology and methodologies, the saying "old is gold" is sound. If you have been hearing of the Amway name since 50 years, it is also the largest holder of product patents, has the most companies tied up to its distribution network, and is the most respected direct sales corporation by United Nations and Governments worldwide. An older organization has "roots", which are ‘built to last’ as per the principles of any corporate business.

2. Who are the leaders?

Network marketing is a leveraged people’s business. Consequently, if a company’s founding leadership is strong, it will duplicate well. There will be values, integrity and commitment. So who are the leaders? What has motivated them to pick their opportunities? What are the stated values? Are they living up to them? Do they have a stated vision? Is it real or fluff? For instance, Amway expressed its ‘commitment to the environment’ as a founding principle… and all product and packaging innovation has been abiding by this standard well before ‘eco-friendly’ became fashionable.

3. How widespread are they?

If you are getting into a business of your own piggybacking on the franchise of a known brand, you may as well pick the brand that is spread all over the world. I assume here that your goal is not to make small change… it is to build a legacy… because that’s what this business model is capable of… for those who are willing to learn it . An international company also means it is one that has seen numerous cultures, legalities, psychographics and prepared itself for succeeding through them all. Amway, for instance, is in 90+ territories and has never pulled out of even one!

4. How are they funded?

The good thing about network marketing is cash. It is a cash business – no credit. No debt. No liabilities. And that’s the mindset its partners also eventually get into… So you would like to check if this is true of your opportunity. If not, why not? Is it a justifiable loan they’ve taken? When partners (associates / distributors / members) join on cash, will the company repay or can they possibly pocket the money and fly away into the night? Again, ‘how old it is’ helps. Plus there are published facts. This is not something you learn by hearsay… find out from Euromonitor or some large data house.

5. Do they have training support?

Without training your business is like a vehicle you don’t know how to drive… Just a shiny object in the garage. I have a bias to companies that have product training but also have separate Training and Support Systems which have been set up by successful affiliates of the company. These systems are good because they are practical. For example, a guy who works at the Ferrari factory would not be able to teach you how to drive a Ferrari as well as a race car driver would. So the System set up by race car drivers using Ferrari is better than Ferrari’s own training. That’s why it makes sense to look for a ‘combination’ to make the infrastructure work harder for your success!

Before I conclude, allow me to mention that the fact that "Product" and "Compensation plan" do not figure on this list deliberately… not oversight. The reason is, they really don’t matter. Why? Every network marketing company will have a product that is amenable to large numbers of people (since they are planning to survive). And they will price it and distribute the monies in such a way that many people are happy, whether new or old in their association. So if either of these things do not agree with you, that’s just a symptom of the fact that you’ve either not understood the opportunity or the network marketing model itself. Live and learn!