Online Earn Money

To earn money online you don’t necessarily need a website of your own but I highly recommend it! Sure, you could write a lot of articles and submit them to directories with links to a sales page as an affiliate, or use social media marketing to link to loads of products with your affiliate links, but these methods are not what I’d recommend.

Instead, I suggest you build your own website that you have total control over and fully own; you never know, you might even decide to sell it one day. So what do you do once you build your website? Well you need people to visit your site to begin with and offer them great quality content when they arrive.

Keyword Traffic

One way to attract web traffic is by having your website rank highly in the search engines for keyword phrases related to your website’s content and products. There are a number of ways to find out what people are searching for; paid tools and free ones abound. To begin with, why not use Google’s keyword tool to get familiar with search phrases and volume, it’s free and easy to use.

Ensure you search under ‘phrase’ match, which you can select from the left navigation column once you’ve searched your main phrase in the search box. Another thing to do is search all English speaking countries; explore around and you will see these options on the search page.

To begin you can type in your main market of interest such as: solar lighting. If you’re planning a green energy site around lighting then you will see a number of search phrases and their monthly search volume according to the Google keyword tool. To gain traffic to your website you can target specific keyword phrases from the list you see.

The Long-Tail

The thing is that you might want to rank for the phrases with the most search volume but they are also most likely to be highly competitive. What do you do? You go after what are known as the ‘long-tail’ keyword phrases; those phrases with three or more words in them and medium to low search volume. You can get lucky and find highly searched phrases without much competition but you need better tools than Google’s free one to determine those quickly and easily. In my next post I’ll write about the best keyword research tool I recommend.

So once you find a phrase you think you might target type the phrase into your google search engine and examine the top ten ranking sites. Do they look highly popular and authoritative? There are many factors that determine who Google will choose to show in the top ten but for beginners, just get a feel for whether you think the sites currently ranking are so popular that they might be too difficult to beat. If not then you can try and rank for that phrase.

On-Site SEO

To rank for a certain phrase it helps that you use those phrases in your content on your site. This is part of your ‘on-site’ search engine optimization (SEO) that will become second nature to you before long. So if you were to write a post on hanging solar lights then you should ensure you use that keyword phrase in the title and content of the article. To make sure the urls of your site are optimized for the search engines, download the two free Vred reports Create a Blog and Setting the Right Foundations here.

It’s absolutely imperative that you don’t overdo your keyword phrases in your content. If you write your phrase into your content so many times that it undermines the quality of what your site visitors will read, not only will your readers not bother coming back you could also be penalized for keyword-stuffing by the search engines. That’s right, there are words that describe all the silly ways that web masters try to fool the search engines into ranking them highly. I’m sure you would agree that just because an article mentions a certain phrase regularly that it wouldn’t mean the article is deserving of ranking highly.

Don’t stuff your keywords into your articles. Write first for your readers and integrate some basic SEO into your site. Stick to a keyword density of no more than two percent, even as low as 1 percent is fine. There will be exceptions of course but they really are the exception not the rule and Google can detect when things just aren’t natural.

Customers Come First

Remember, if you offer things of value on your website and get the word out about it then your readers will tell others and bring you traffic that way too; the search engines are not the be all and end all but they do help tremendously! Keep things balanced and you’ll be sure to see traffic and rankings increase over time.