I like getting as much free organic search engine traffic as I can for my keywords as I work from home full time and my only money comes from the money I make online.

IMPORTANT: You do not need to quit your day job to work at home full time to make good money online. You can accomplish this in your spare time. It may take a little longer to get the ball rolling but once you do you are on the road to success. But please keep your day job until you are making far more online than at your current job.

For me, because I work from home blogging full time, I use my spare time to enjoy my gardening, fishing, guitar playing and marketing online hobbies. You will be able to do this as well once you have built up a good income over time.

Follow these 6 tips to increase your search engine ranking and you can start making more money online, sooner.

NOTE: I don’t do PPC (Pay Per Click) instead I make my sites search engine friendly and I write content focused on keywords that make money. I use free organic search engine traffic to make money through affiliate marketing to feed and clothe my family.

1. First And Most Important Are Your Keywords

I said I am a blogger but really it doesn’t matter if you blog or have a static site you can make money but it’s all about the keywords you use when you are creating content.

Your keyword choices can make or break you.

I suggest you use the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool, just do a search in Google for Adwords Keyword Tool. It’s usually the first one listed in the search engines results.

I am not going into a lesson on how to use it. Go to Youtube and look for some videos on the Adwords keyword tool there.

You will be able to find a lot of variations of your keyword but you will also be able to see the amount of searches that term get monthly along with an indicator bar showing competition.

Competition is Your Friend

Don’t be fooled into thinking you will get rich because you have found a phrase without any competition. Those days are pretty much gone unless you are dealing with something brand new and new words become available.

Just remember competition is important and means people are most likely making money with those keywords and you can too, if you put in the time.

Go for longtail keywords, which are keywords that are usually more than 3 words in length. So 4-7 words seem to work best for me, sometimes I use slightly longer phrases.

2. Purchase A Keyword Domain Name

Okay, this is not absolutely vital to your success but it is an important factor in the overall picture.

If your niche is gardening and you give tips and you are going to be talking about your backyard a lot then you should buy a domain that using those keywords, something like backyardgardeningtips.com

If you find that backyardgardeningtips.com is taken you could use a hyphen between backyard and gardeningtips to see if that is available or you could get it with a different extender than .com

When the search engines spider your site and see that keyword domain name it gives them a starting point while figuring out what your site is about.

3. Keyworded Navigation Menus And Categories

Your menus are hyperlinks to other pages on your site so you want them to be keyworded. This makes your menu more relevant to your content in the eyes of the search engines.

Note: If you are a blogger like I am you want to use your keyword phrases in your categories.

I have created blogs where I did use keyword phrases in the categories and some without. The content was very similar but the results in the search engines were not. Those that were keyworded were always found much closer to the #1 spot in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

On static web sites your links to your inner pages should use your keyworded titles as much as possible.

4. Your HyperLinks Should Be Keyworded

Search engines look at your pages but they have to make a decision as to what your page is about so if you don’t learn how to use your keyword phrase properly and in the right places the SEs could make the wrong evaluation.

Getting your focus wrong means you won’t be found in the search engines for what you think.

Step one and two are important but step 3 is just as important and that is to use keyword phrases in your hyperlinks.

Because I am discussing keywords let’s use the Google Keyword Tool as an example. If I were to link to the tool I would want to make the link as relevant as possible so I would actually use ‘Google Keyword Tool’ as the text for the link. I would not use something like ‘great tool‘ as the search engines could interpret that as just about anything.

I use Keyword Elite 2 for my keyword research as it gives me so much more information about the keywords that will

5. Keep Your Sites Update With Relevant Content

I said I am a blogger so for updating my sites is normal, however, those with static web sites quite often build the site and never update it again.

It is better to update, even a static site, periodically with well written keyworded content. The search engines eat it up as fast as they can get it.

6. Submit An Article Instead of Submitting Your Web Site

I may be off a bit here but I truly believe it’s better to get someone else to say my site is worth spidering than it is to submit my site to the search engines.

To me it makes more sense to let the search engines find your site naturally.

If you were to write a few good keyworded articles and have them published on the top article directories you would have better results and in my experience much faster as it can take a long time to get indexed by submitting your site alone.

Most article directories don’t allow you to use hyperlinks in your bio section so you end up with the domain name only, but if you purchased a keyworded domain name like I mention in tip #2 you will do better than those that didn’t.

I use SEOLinkVine to get free content when I need it but more importantly I use SEOLinkVine to publish my articles across hundreds, even thousands of other blogs.

Note: Online success these days is won by those that apply the most relevance to their sites and of course get lots of backlinks from other relevant sites.

Filed under: Home Based Business • small business • work from home

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