How to increase traffic by targeting your main keyword

If article marketing is not done correctly you won’t increase visitors to your web site. Some folks write articles without targeting a specific keyword or keyword phrase. The more tightly focused your article is the better your chances of receiving high rankings and getting more traffic.

The problem

Search engines don’t want to show duplicate content in their results pages. They want searches to be as targeted as possible. If you write your article based on your main keyword their is a greater chance of it being indexed by them.

How to target your best keywords

1. Create a list of your main keywords

Place yourself in your customers shoes for a few minutes and think what particular keywords they would enter in the search engines to find your web site. Keep adding to the list until you’ve exhausted all your ideas.

2. Use a keyword research tool

Open a free keyword research tool such as WordTracker or Keyword Discovery and enter each keyword from the list above. You’ll get a list of keyword results that show how
many times that word has been searched on in one month. Repeat this procedure for each keyword.

3. Select the long tail keywords

Keywords that receive the highest number of searches are generally the most popular. This makes it very difficult to rank high for these keywords. Select the keyword phrases with a low number of searches (long tail). These are less competitive so you’ll have a better chance of getting high rankings for your article.

4. Weave the targeted keyword phrase into your content

Include the keyword phrase naturally throughout your content. Don’t overdo it as it will look like spam and won’t read well for your visitors. Remember it’s more important to write your article so it appeals to your visitors than the search engines.

5. Include your keyword phrase in the title and resource box.

Place your keyword at the beginning of your article title like I’ve done for this article. Instead of writing:

“How to increase traffic by targeting your main keyword”

Write…

“Article Marketing - How to increase traffic by targeting your main keyword”

6. Include your keyword phrase in the anchor text

Anchor text are the words contained in your hyperlink. The resource box at the end of your article allows you to place anchor text in it that links back to your site. This not only directs visitors to your web site but builds valuable backlinks that help increase your rankings in the search engines

7. Include your keyword phrase in links pointing to your web site

When visiting blogs, forums or doing link exchanges be sure to include your keywords in the anchor text of your incoming links. Google ranks your web site according to the number and quality of links leading back to your site.

Free Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic

1) Comment on Blogs
Look for large traffic Blogs in your niche, visit them and leave your comments on their blogs posts. You may use blog search engine like www.blogsearchengine.com, www.google.com/blogsearch and www.searchengineblog.com to find blogs in your niche.

2) Submit Articles
Write articles that are related to your blog and submit them to popular article directories such as ezinearticles.com, Isnare.com, Articledashboard.com, Articlealley.com and goarticle.com. Quality articles may drive you a lot of free targeted traffic.

3) Participate in Community Forums
Use google to search for forums that are related to your blog. Look for forums that has over 10,000 members and read the rules of the forums to see whether you can promote your blogs and websites in your signature. Join forums that allow you to add a link to your blog in the signature and start participating in discussion. You can ask questions, answer other members questions and post your articles, ideas and thought in the forums.

4) Submit Your Blog to Directories
This isn't working to me but some bloggers claim that they gain a good amount of traffic from their listings in directories.

5) Post Often
You can lose traffic if you seldom update you blog, try to make it at least 5 posts per week. This not only will maintain your traffic but possibly attract more readers.

6) Write about Blogging
Write helpful and quality articles related to blogging can attract other bloggers link to your articles and gain may be truckload of free traffic.

7) Post Breaking News
If your found a breaking news of your niche very earlier, post it to your blog. It may give your blog's traffic a boost.

8) Social Bookmarking
Bookmark you blog posts in the large social bookmarking sites like Netscape.com, Digg.com, Simply and Reddit.com.

9) Run a Contest
Start a contest on your blog. Think about the prizes that people really want. It will create a viral effect and bring in new visitors.

10) On-page Optimization
Make sure your blog's title tag and description tag contain your targeted keywords. When you have posted plenty of quality blog post and done a lot of blog promotion, don't be surprise to see your blog ranks top 10 in Google and get free search engine traffic daily.

6 Ways to Make Money Blogging

6 Ways to Make Money Blogging

1) Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Advertising Programs
CPC advertising programs are the best money making programs for most of the bloggers. They are suitable to all kind of blogs with family-friendly content regardless of their traffic level and age. CPC programs work well on blog because they display contextual ads that are highly relevant to blogs content and bloggers will earn anywhere between 10 cents to 50 cents for each contextual ads click by their visitors. With proper CPC ads optimization and consistent amount of traffic, a blogger can earn a steady amount of money displaying CPC ads on his/her blog. Google AdSense is no doubt, the undisputed king of CPC advertising programs and Yahoo Publisher Network is the closest alternative of AdSense.

2) Cost-Per-Action (CPA) Advertising Programs
CPA programs is quite similar to CPC programs except CPA programs don't pay bloggers for each click on the CPA ads hosted by bloggers. The blogger only makes money when the visitor takes an action on the CPA advertiser website. The action can be a sign up, making a purchase, generating a lead, downloading a product and more. CPA networks pay a lot more than CPC programs, for a visitor sent by the blogger from his/her blog to a CPA advertiser website and the visitor taken an action on the advertiser site, the blogger can earn few dollar to fifty dollar depend on the niche. But CPA ads tend to work well on large traffic blogs only. AzoogleAds.com, Commission Junction and Advertising.com are some of the largest CPA networks.

3) Promote Affiliate Programs
Marketing affiliate programs is very common nowadays. You sign up with affiliate program of an online company, then decide whether to use the company's text link or banner ads on your blog to promote the company's products or services and earn affiliate commission when a visitor make a purchase through your affiliate link. Affiliate programs can be promoted without a website and blog too.

4) Pay Per Post Programs
Pay per post programs started last year. The programs pay bloggers to write a blog post about a sponsor's website. The paid blog post can be a review or an introduction on the advertiser's website, products or services. The blogger will be paid a least $5 for each sponsor post. Blogs that have massive traffic, high Google PR and large number of subscribers can charge a few hundred dollar for just writing one sponsor post. Here's are the two most popular Pay per post networks that offer this type of earning opportunities:

www.reviewme.com
www.payperpost.com

The downside of pay per post is that writing too many sponsor posts that are not relevant to your blog content can seriously affect your traffic.

5) Sell Text Link Ads
Selling text links on your blog can be a great source of additional online revenue. It is not difficult to get started, just go to Text-link-ads.com to sign up an account, then decide which part of your pages you want to display paid text links, set your price and you are ready to take order. Text-link-ads.com will handle all the promotional works. Another company that offers the similar services as Text-link-ads.com is Reverselinks.com

6) Hosting Web Poll
Vizu Answer offers a pretty new way to monetize your blog's and website's traffic. The pays the publishers on a cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) basis for hosting targeted web poll. The money a blogger can earn from hosting poll is depending on the page views. The more page views, the higher the earning.

Optimizing your search box

Following on the five tips on AdSense for content optimization our Sydney team presented a couple weeks back, now let's turn to AdSense for search. As you may know, we recently integrated Custom Search Engine into AdSense for search to provide additional customization options and improved targeting. Whether you've already implemented an AdSense for search box on your site or you're just getting started with this feature, we recommend these five optimization tips:

1. Place your search boxes in visible locations.

Integrate your search boxes in easy-to-find locations, such as under the header or in your left navigation. Also, keep the placement of your search boxes consistent on all your pages, so users will know where to look if they need help finding something.

2. Add two search boxes to content-rich pages.

For pages with a lot of content or which require scrolling, try placing one search box at the top of the page and another at the bottom. A box at the top of the page will allow users to perform a search immediately, and a box at the bottom will provide a search option to users who've just finished reading your content. You can also track and compare the performance of each search box by creating custom channels.

3. Host your search results on your own site.

To keep users on your pages, you can host your search results and ads within your own pages. If your users don't find what they're looking for in the search results or ads, they'll still be able to to navigate to other sections of your site using your site's template. In addition, you can further integrate your search results into your site by customizing the colors of the results page.

4. Add a search box to your search results pages.

Similar to #3, try placing a search box on your search results pages so users can perform additional searches from your site.

5. Customize your ad locations.

Place ads at the top and right sidebar of your search results pages. This layout offers added visibility, and our tests have shown that these ad locations can improve monetization.

After you've optimized where search boxes are placed on your site, don't forget to try new targeting options such as keyword refinements and vertical search. To generate AdSense for search code and take advantage of these features, sign in and visit your AdSense Setup tab. You can also find more information in our Help Center.

Celebrating 50,000 of you

This week, the 50,000th person subscribed to the English AdSense Help Group. To mark this milestone, the AdSensePro Team would like to extend a special word of thanks to all the folks who use our forums, particularly everyone who takes the time to share their knowledge with other publishers. Thank you for providing useful help and advice, and for contributing to the AdSense community.

If you're not familiar with the Help Group, do check it out to share your AdSense experience. Members of the AdSensePro team will also be on hand to help answer questions, raise issues to our product and engineering teams, and collect your valuable feedback. And if you'd prefer to discuss AdSense in a language other than English, feel free to visit one of our international forums: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Turkish.

Google Knowledge will Help You Make Money Online

Google officially launched a new web authoring tool called Knol on Jul 23. Google Knol is free and opened to everyone. It is a content sharing network where you can write and publish articles in most of the topics. Each article page or content page you created is called a Knol. Publishing a Knol is quite similar to publishing a blog post except the tone is more formal. You can insert related picture or image to your Knol and once your Knol created, readers are allowed to comment and rate your article in the Knol. What Benefits You'll Gain from Publishing Google Knols? AdSense Ads is Allowed in Knols Google said that the authors can choose to include AdSense ads in all their Knols. So, each of your Knols that attract traffic may earn you some AdSense ad revenue. But, if you are actively creating Knols that share useful content, it is possible to earn a nice AdSense income every month as you will have more Knols gaining traffic. Get Free Google Traffic The Google knol homepage http://knol.google.com gained thousands of quality backlinks in less than a week. It is expected that it will gain decent of backlinks just like the other two content sharing networks, Hubpages and Squidoo. Because of the huge amount of backlinks Hubpages and Squidoo have gained, they are now getting million of visitors from search engines like Google and Yahoo every month (I believe most are from Google). This will happen to Google Knol as well. Google Knol will soon gain huge amount of backlinks and many of the Knols created by different authors will start ranking high on Google search engine and enjoy free Google traffic. Those who manage to get their knols ranked on a competitive keyword will receive steady traffic. They can include links in their Knols to direct these Google traffic to their website or blog or choose to monetize their Knols with AdSense ads so that these Google traffic can be converted into AdSense revenue. Google Knol has their own content policy and term of service. You should read and understand them before creating a Knol to publishing your content. Google doesn’t allow spamming, any Knol that against their policy will be deleted.