Keyword research tools will give you long lists of keywords that you can target but you will only find out which ones will result in a positive response to what you are offering if you test. You might think that you already know which keywords will bring in the cash, and you might be right, but what if you are wrong. Hours, maybe even days or weeks, of wasted effort targeting traffic that will never give you a return. There is no substitute for testing, no shortcut, no secret pill. And how do you get the traffic to test the profitability of different keywords? That depends on how quick you want to know the results.

When I need to know the answer quickly, which is almost always the case, I use Adwords. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money and, if your instincts are anywhere near right, you should be able to make a return on your testing or at least cover your costs. If you can’t at least generate a small return before you use up your testing budget (for me that is normally $30-$40 per campaign), you need to move on. Why? Because, even if you eventually get free traffic to those keywords you won’t earn anything so don’t waste your time. If you break even on certain keywords they can still generate a decent income in the future when the traffic is free, so they are Cash Keywords, worth investing your time and SEO efforts in.

That does not mean that working with other webmasters for your mutual benefit is a bad thing or that there is no SEO benefit to be gained. The one thing that you should always bear in mind is that, if the visitor benefits, so does the site. This is the theme I shall be writing on over the next few days, so subscribe to my feed or watch out for my Twitter updates if you want to learn how you can get good mileage out of genuine reciprocal linking arrangements with other sites in your market.

Anyway this should have fixed it. I don’t like having 404s.

To make this a useful post I could point out that I found this 404 error by looking in my Google Webmaster Tools under the “Crawl Errors” section. If you don’t have a Google Webmaster Account I recommend you get one here www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

In order to maintain control of my domain registrations, I have one email address that I use solely for this purpose. As anyone who has had a domain name registered for more than a few months will know, domain registrars send out emails periodically to all registered owners, asking them to confirm or update their registration details in order to comply with ICANN regulations and maintain current, accurate registration data.

The emails that are sent out are worded in an official way and carry a link to the registrar’s website so that the domain registrant can check their details and amend if necessary. Once you have seen a few of these, it is almost a reflex to just click the link and confirm the details, especially if you know they haven’t changed. There are always more important things to do, so it is just another admin task that can be dealt with quickly and then forgotten. Not any more.

Over the years I have registered domains with various different registrars, both for myself and for my clients. As more competition entered the domain registration market, prices have fallen and I have tested most of them out, not only for price, but also for ease of maintenance and customer service. Although most of my domains are now centralized in one of my two favorite registrar accounts at GoDaddy.com and NameCheap.com, I still have a few scattered round at Network Solutions, Tucows and country specific registrars like 123-Reg in the UK and Hostinet in Spain.

This week, as usual, emails arrived to my domains@ email account asking me to confirm my registration details. All I can say is, thankfully, I was on the ball. It has now become a habit for me to check the information that pops up when I hover over a link in an email, in order to confirm that the link actually goes where it says it is going, before I click on it. I consider this a good habit and I do it faithfully every time, regardless of how professional or genuine the email looks.

So far this week I have received scam emails purporting to be from Enom.com (NameCheap.com’s registrar) and Network Solutions. I have no doubt that over the next few days I shall receive more emails that claim to be from other registrars and I shall be on my guard, as you should be if you have domains registered. Just like the Bank phishing emails, it is easy to spot a fake one when you know you don’t have an account with that institution but when you get one from “your bank” it is tempting to just check it out.

So, webmasters and website owners, be warned. You will still be getting genuine ICANN compliance emails but before you click on any link in any email check it out. The phishing emails will display a link that looks like www.myregistrar.com but the underlying shortcut will take you to something like www.myregistrar.com.update08.cn. Anything that appears after the .com should immediately ring alarm bells. If you have the time, contact your registrar and inform them of the email you received and they will provide you an email address where you can forward the bogus message so that they can try to trace the sender from the header information.

© Andy Smith 2008

Firstly, phrases like “anchor text” and “link popularity” are normally associated with off-page SEO efforts like getting links from other sites and making sure the text that links to your site is relevant to the content of the page on your site that the link points to. What is too often overlooked is the fact that these considerations are just as important when it comes to internal linking and the page structure within your own website. A large part of onpage SEO revolves around contextual linking between the various pages of your site. A relevant text link is a vote for that page, even if it comes from another one of your own pages.

Secondly, when it comes to local search, where your geographical location plays an important part in defining your target market, onpage optimisation can often be enough on its own to secure a good SERP ranking. Strategically placing geographical keywords, like towns, cities, counties, states and provinces, throughout the pages of your site can establish you as a dominant authority in your local marketplace.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I’m sure I don’t need to point out that offpage optimisation can often be really hard work. Offpage promotion predominantly comes down to getting quality backlinks to your site from other sites on the Internet. If your page contains keywords that relate to the anchor text used in the incoming link it helps the Search Engines to establish that your page deserves to be treated as an authority for the keywords you have optimised your page for. If your page has not been given any onpage optimisation you will almost certainly need more incoming links to achieve the same results.

So, I think it is fair to say that, a little bit of time spent on optimising your pages as you create them, can save you a lot of time and effort later, when you are trying to promote them. Onpage optimisation might not have the same power or influence as a link from a top authority site in your market but it is still definitely worth the effort when establishing a solid overall SEO strategy for your site. Ignore it at your peril.

© Andy Smith 2008

The Google Keyword Research Tool, which many of you will already be familiar with, is now able to produce very usable output in a wide range of foreign languages. You can access the Google Keyword Tool in Spanish (Herramienta para palabras clave) here and can change to just about any language when you are inside.

My personal experience with foreign SEO is limited to Spanish but my research indicates that other nationalities are also finding it easier to achieve good results by applying only basic on-page SEO strategies coupled with a limited amount of link promotion. I am sure that as time goes on it will become as competitive as it is in English but for the time being, “any SEO is better than none”, will go a long way in foreign language search results.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is made up of two parts. Those parts are on-page SEO factors and off-page promotion. It is widely recognized that, in general, off-page promotion has by far the larger influence in determining the position of a page in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). So the question is, “Can your page achieve top rankings in Google and the other major search engines using ONLY on-page optimisation factors?

Depending on the content of your page and the keywords you are targeting, the answer can be a resounding YES. In addition, the circumstances under which a solely on-page strategy is most effective are pretty much the same as those where the Google sandbox is less likely to come into play. In other words, it should be possible for you to see an almost instant benefit from the work that you do on the HTML and content of your page.

Well then, I guess you want to know what the circumstances are, that would allow your page to rank well WITHOUT the benefit of off-page optimization i.e. with NO external promotion and NO links from other websites.

It all comes down to the keywords that your page is going to target and that can be further broken down into two main categories. Either your page should target a less popular keyword phrase, often called “long-tail” because it consists of at least three or four words, or your page targets a popular keyword phrase, but with geographical qualifiers like your country, state or city. The easiest way to explain this is with examples.

“Weight Loss” is a very popular keyword phrase and returns over 80 million results in Google, so the chances of ranking high quickly are non-existent. “Gradual weight loss” returns about 700,000 without “quote marks” and only around 45,000 with. Putting your search term inside “quote marks” shows the number of web pages that are actively targeted at a given keyword phrase. If we add the word “program”, at the time of writing this report, only 253 pages are targeted at the keyword phrase “gradual weight loss program”, which makes it a viable phrase to target using onpage SEO.

Another example would be to take the same popular phrase “weight loss” and see what happens when you qualify it with your target geographical location. It is interesting to note that certain keywords are geographically weighted already as you can see when you compare “weight loss California”, with over 23,000 pages against “weight loss Wyoming” with less than 2,000 pages. If we narrow it down further to state capitals, you can see that it would be far easier to get a high ranking for “weight loss Cheyenne” with around 200 targeted pages, than it would for “weight loss Sacramento” with over 1,000. Another quick tip when targeting by location is to embed Google Maps in your page.

As you can see from the above examples, by applying sound on-page SEO strategies, on pages that are targeted at geographical or long-tail keyword phrases, it is very possible to quickly make your presence felt in the top results of the major search engines. For complete guidance on how to apply the best on-page SEO techniques you should consult The Definitive On-Page SEO Handbook.

© Andy Smith 2008

I’m desperately trying to meet my launch date which is next tuesday 28th October so I’d better get back to it now.