How To Make Money with SEO
My introductory post which was creatively entitled Make Money,got the ball rolling here in this new blog that I’ve put together to help people to learn how to make money online using what they have in front of them and without having to spend any money on useless eBooks or products that they don’t really need.
This post will look at one of the most important factors of making money online when it comes to monetising a free blog and that’s what’s known as search engine optimization, or SEO.
SEO is just a fancy way of describing the methods used to cause your free blog to rank well in the search engine results pages, or SERPs. OK, you’ll get to learn some of the jargon and mnemonics that go with this whacky online business too as we go along! You see, its one thing putting together your very own free Blogger blog with the intention of slapping up some adsense ads and expecting to make money right off the bat, and the reality which is far more disappointing.
In fact its the reality of blogging which causes around 95% of would-be Internet marketers to fail, simply because the Internet did not meet up with their expectations.
The reality is a little harder to swallow, but a determined person can do well in this business with a combination of tenacity, persistence (ok they’re similar), patience and knowledge. Not necessarily in that order. You see once you’ve built your first blog and written a few posts on there about its main topic, you’re going to start wondering why no one is reading it. Except you, your partner and maybe your dog if you bribe him to sit still long enough.
Enter Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short (I already did that).
By using SEO techniques, you can get your little blog to feature in Google’s index for the main search terms that people will find your blog by. The main search term is what a surfer would type into Google’s search box when looking for relevant sites. Say, for example, your blog was all about how to make money. Ok, a really bad choice of niche as its one of the most competitive, but as this is only an example and I need to use these keywords in here too, it’ll suffice!
Ok, someone looking for information on that subject would, in most cases, go to Google and type into the search box: how to make money online and see what they got. That phrase is known as a keyword phrase, or simply a keyword (even though there’s several words). What they’d get is probably in the realm of millions of competing pages. Told you it was competitive.
Your little blog wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell against so many other sites. But say your blog was more about how to make money selling junk on eBay and all your posts were reviews of certain items of junk you’d successfully sold for a good profit. Now a person searching for that kindf of thing would go to Google and type in: how to make money selling junk on eBay and he’d get far less competing sites. Ok, there is a trade off here, as there would be far fewer people keying that particular phrase into Google’s search box in the first place. But for the purposes of this example, let’s say there are 100 people a day that do that.
To attract those 100 people a day, your blog would need to be right at the top of page one for that search term, or keyword. Here’s where SEO comes into its own.
Google ranks websites and blogs according to several criteria, not least of those being a site containing original and relevant content for the keywords. Also it ranks sites according to authority. Sites with more authority are those that have acquired links from other authority websites and blogs. Those links are special kinds of links in that they are what is known as keyword anchored links. A keyword anchored link will link to your blog using your blog’s main keywords in the anchor text.
In SEO terms, the simple equation here is whichever website or blog gets the most of and the highest quality of these links, gets to the number one spot in the SERPs for their keyword.
If you want to know how to get these links, that’s a subject for a future post. See you next time…