All Posts Tagged With: "13"

Whenever someone goes to start a new blog, one of the most crucial decisions they will make is to select the niche they will be writing in. Unfortunately, many of these same bloggers are setting themselves up for disappointment, or failure altogether because they chose a niche that is already packed. This may not be a problem if you are blogging for fun, but entering a popular niche is extremely difficult for anyone trying to make some money from their blog.

If you look at closely at the many bloggers that are making money online without having a large audience, you will probably notice that they do so by having a large number of small blogs that strategically fill search engine gaps. The idea is to go out and find under represented keywords and starting these gaps with a website or blog of your own. Another benefit to using this method is that you can usually find a good keyword-rich domain because the lack of competition for that keyword.

One example of this would be starting a “Make Money Online” blog. You might have a great blog, but you are going to be competing with 200,000 other people, and many have established audiences. If you jump into a small keyword, but only have 1,000 people to compete with for traffic on that keyword, some simple SEO techniques could easily get you into the top 3 and net a lot more traffic than a low ranking on a high traffic keyword.

So, sounds great, but easier said than done, right? While it sounds difficult, it doesn’t have to be with the right tools. Micro Niche Finder is a tool that makes it easy to find under represented niches. What this tool does is search for the keyword you specify and provide you everything you need to know. It will go calculate the top searches using that keyword for you, then display the number of other sites that show up under that keyword and allow you to determine the strength of the competition.

One example would be if you entered a keyword such as “online coupons”, you would see that some good keywords to target are “dell online coupons” and “amazon online coupons”. Some keywords to avoid competing in are “grocery coupons” and “free online coupons”, as they have a lot more people competing for a lot less search engine traffic. The goal is to find keywords with good traffic and less competition (supply and demand).

For some videos and additional information about Micro Niche Finder, you’ll want to click here.

Overall, I find Micro Niche Finder to be very useful when I’m out shopping for domains and looking to launch a new website. It can also be useful when trying to select meta keywords to use with an individual post.

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), there are all sorts of techniques you can practice to try to get your site indexed as high as possible in the search engine rankings. In addition to these many techniques, there are also a variety of guides and tools found around the internet that webmasters can use, many of which are completely free to anyone.

This post is an attempt to collect the best available search engine optimization resources from around the web and provide them to you in one post. If you know of any useful ones that I’ve missed, please let me know in the comments below!

Search Engine Optimization Guides

• The Bloggers Guide to Search Engine Optimization - SEO Book provides a detailed write up of everything SEO, with a focus on blogs. This should be your very first stop whenever you set out to learn about search engine optimization.
• Beginners Guide to SEO - Free single page detailed guide designed to teach beginners the basics of SEO.
• Complete Guide to SEO for WordPress - Jim Westergren provides a detailed guide to SEO specifically for WordPress users.

Search Engine Optimization Tools

• Advanced Google Search Methods - Tool that allows you to search Google in a variety of unique ways. Great for keyword research.
• Backlink Analyzer - Popularity and link analysis tool.  It shows what anchor text is linking into a page or site.
• Backlink Checker - Checks backlinks pointing towards your website. Also great for checking out competitors backlinks.
• Blacklink Watch - Shows you the anchor text and PageRank of inbound links for free
• Digital Point Keyword Tracking Tool - Tool that shows you the results of your query from both Wordtracker and Overture for determining which phrases are searched most often.
• Google Datacenter Watch Tool - Lets you do a search on Google from their 700+ data centers.
• Google Rank Position - Shows Google PageRank and PageRank position, number of indexed entries, and Google directory status.
• Keyword Density and Prominence Tool - Allows you to analyze keyword density of a specific web page and its tags.
• Keyword Selector Tool - Lets you easily enter keywords and search for related searches and how often those keywords were searched for in the last month.
• MultiRank Checker - Allows you to check your sites ranking while at the same time checking up to 9 competitors.
• Ranking Tool - Tool by SEOMoz that lets you check your search engine ranking of up to 5 keywords per day.
• SEO Analyzer - Provides a report that gives a quick analysis of your website.
• Strongest Subpages Tool - Provides an organized report of the top pages on your website.
• Tattler - Link analysis tool that allows you to pull backlinks from Yahoo Site Explorer. You can run a single URL, or multiple URLs, and you can grab additional backlinks from the returned results simply by right-clicking on any URL. Can also export all your data to an Excel spreadsheet.
• Top 10 Analysis Tool - Shows how your link profile compares with the link profiles of the top 10 ranked sites.
• Yahoo Search Rankings - Free online tool to check your Yahoo! search ranking position.

Search Engine Optimiation Firefox Extensions

• SEO For Firefox - Provides a ton of information directly from the web page or the search engine results page. Includes Google PageRank, cache date, domain age, backlinks in Yahoo, number of .edu links, the number of cached pages, and many other stats with a simple right clic.
• SEO Quake - Adds SEO results to search results and on top of each webpage.
• RankQuest SEO Toolbar - Provides access to more than 30 SEO tools in a web browser toolbar.

Is their a free SEO guide, tool, or Firefox extension that you use?  Let me know in the comments below!

When it comes to search engine optimization, I’ve always had a strong admiration for people that write about it on their blogs.   SEO stuff has always just been common sense to me, but I’ve always had difficulty explaining it in writing.  I’ve noticed many SEO experts try to add visual elements to their writing to help explain what they are trying to say, so I know I’m not the only one. 

On two separate occasions I’ve probably close to an hour each trying to write a post explaining internal linking and the idea of link juice, but I always end up getting frustrated and deleting it.   Sometimes analogies are the best way to explain this kind of stuff, and I’ve never been good with analogies.  With that said, recently I was excited to run across a post by Josh Spaulding on Blogging Tips called Increasing PageRank through Smart Internal Linking. 

In his post, Josh gives a great explanation of Google PageRank, link juice, and provides tips on improving your internal linking structure.   This is probably the best written post I’ve run across to date and I think its written in a way that even someone new to blogging could easily understand.