I believe many people fall in the second group but I would to bring to your attention that search engine traffic should be the major traffic you can rely on.

One thing for sure. Traffic from search engines is definitely more targeted than traffic from social networks. This may not be so obvious if your blog monetization model is based solely on AdSense because you just have to place ads at obvious place where your visitors can see and click with their itchy fingers.

If you plan to monetize your blog through affiliate program, then search engine optimization (SEO) is even more critical for your blog.

Why? When your visitors come to your blog through the targeted keywords, they are more likely to make a purchase if your post can relate to their problem and offer an irresistable solution. I believe search engine traffic is far better than pay per click since visitors may not have the mindset that you are trying to sell something before they read your post. Selling to a person who is off guarded has higher probability of closing a sale. These people will tend to believe that you are trying to provide a solution to their problem though your intention may be to sell them the solution.

The best thing about SEO is that it is free. Just that you need to put in a bit of effort to master SEO. If you have a blog, then it is even easier to target for specfic keywords since Google loves blogs for its ever new freshly updated contents.

Here’s are some general guidelines for doing SEO and all of them are from my experience with SEO.

Make sure to use the keyword phrase in your post a few times. Using related phrases to the keyword phrase might help too.

Just remember that before you target any keywords, you got to research the keywords search volume. This is to make sure that there are people searching for that set of keywords which you target. My favourite free keyword tool is Google AdWords keyword tool.

Lastly, get some backlinks from authoritative sites, eg. social networks. It is better if you can get sites with related themes to link to you. Provide a link to point to another authoritative site which is targeting the same set of keywords as your site. This helps in ranking too.

If you have any SEO tips to contribute or have any queries on SEO, feel free to leave your comments.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization for blog, SEO for blog

One thing for sure, webmasters will have to tweak and make adjustments to their websites if they want to get their website on that search engine. Having high page ranks, more backlinks and putting in keywords into the url or the title will not be enough to get featured in this new semantic Hakia search engine.

I am not sure if this means that more people will start to use Hakia or Google will change its strategies and work towards semantics too. But in all instances, the one of the best ways, which in my opinion, to optimise for all types of search engines is still to provide good content. Only with good and relevant content, then we will not have to worry what if a new search engine have taken over the existing one, because eventually, the basic need of a search engine is to enable users to get relevant answers or content. Users are not interested if the webpage has high ranking or not.

They are just interested if they can get what they want.

Tags: search engine, search engine optimisation, Hakia, Google

Do you know that you can use it to analyse your competitors in Google?

As you know that I am promoting the Autopilot Profits system by Ewen Chia, I decided that instead of using PPC to drive traffic alone, I might as well do some search engine optimization on the keywords “Ewen Chia Autopilot Profits”, so I can get some targeted organic traffic as well.

In order to rank at the top of the search engine result page, I got to check out my competitors’ Pagerank. So I make use of a tool called IWebTool which can give visual PageRank on all the links shown on any webpage. Luckily for me, as Autopilot profits is quite new and most of my competitors have PR lesser than 2, it is easy for me to outrank everybody using my blog.

Basically there are 2 steps to using IwebTool.

1) Use Google to search for any search term you want to be ranked at the top. Eg. “Ewen Chia Autopilot Profits”

2) Copy the link from your address bar and paste it into IwebTool and click Check.

Thats it. Click here to see an example.

Know who you are dealing with. If your competitors have results with high PR, I guess you just have to put in more effort in your search engine optimization as it would be really difficult to overtake them in the search results.

To your search engine domination success!

Tags: Search Engine Optimization, IwebTool, Visual PageRank, Autopilot Profits, Ewen Chia

1. Choose a domain name which is related to the product which you are selling

Say for an example, you are a florist and you sell flowers. It will be best to include the word “flowers” into your domain name. It will be even better just to have your domain name as www.flowers.com. So when buyers who type in flowers.com, they will go straight to your website. However, such generic domain names are most likely be taken up by others already. Hence, you might want to add some adjectives into your domain name to make it slightly different. For instance, tropicalflowers.com. if you are selling mostly tropical flowers. In this way, your website is still given higher priority when comes to search engine results, while your “type-in” customers are not all lost. This is definitely a good method to gain both the “type-in-to-address-bar” customers and customers from search engines, because search engines will give higher priorities to websites have the exact searched word in their domain name.

2. Choose a domain name which ends with a .com

Forget using a domain name with a .net or a .org. A .com domain name is easier to remember than the rest. Most of the people are more likely to type .com, instead of a .net. Hence, do not try to be unique in this sense, because eventually it will hurt the amount of traffic going to your website.

3. Look out for expired domain names

If you dont mind using “second-hand”domain names, you can check out those expired domain names. Some of these may have done some SEO and attracted much traffic previously. The previous owners may have too many domain names to handle or they may simply forgotten to renew them. Hence, if you are able to get hold of such domain names, then much work and optimisation have been done for you. In fact, you will have instant traffic from them, right away. However, a word of caution, do really check out what that domain name is being used for. They might be used by spammers and being banned by search engines. You dont want to be associated with the wrong things and have a bad start instead.

4. Choose a short, easy to remember domain name

It is better to choose one which is easy to remember, easy to pronounce and easy to spell domain name. Though sometimes we may like to choose some thing which is unique for our domain name, we still like to make it not too confusing for our potential customers. Also, if your domain name consists of words starting and ending with the same letter, note that there many be potential confusion. For instance, Charles Socks.com. People maybe wondering if it is charlesocks.com or charlessocks.com. Sometimes, people may be confused if they should add a “s” behind the word or not. Hence, do consider all these factors, because you dont want to lose those valuable traffic away.

With these 4 points, I hope that you are able to come up with a high traffic domain name for your website.

Tags: high traffic domain names, domain names, SEO, expired domain names, address bar

If two sites ever published the same article at the same time, the website with the lower PR may even worse not be ranked at all in Google since the first site which have the content indexed is the owner of the content and all subsequent indexing of the same content may be considered as duplicates.

So this could potentially happen if a website with a high PR hosts your original article before your low PR blog get indexed for the effort. The high PR site could simply return a reference to your blog and gets away with it. In this way, all the organic traffic which could be yours in the first place become theirs.

Is there any way we can stop this?

The answer is no as there is no way to manipulate Google search engine results. The site with the higher PR will always be on top of you in terms of search engine result for the same set of keywords.

For those with high PR, you may well make this your advantage and increase your profits through the efforts of other poor souls.

For those with low PR, you can only hope that your article is spidered first before anybody comes along and remove you from the search engine result. And please re-edit the PLR articles before publishing it since duplicate content will penalise your site even more. Lastly, try to practise some search engine optimisation to improve your PR to prevent this from ever happening.

Tags: Pagerank, search engine optimisation, Google

Though it has become more challenging nowadays, SEO is still very effective in getting traffic to our site or blog,  SEO is now not as simple as adding a few keywords in your meta tags. It has evolved into a new science. The techniques available are also classified into two main stream as “white hat” and “black hat”.

Personally, I think that there is no right or wrong in using “black hat” techniques as long as you use it with good intent, just like there is always a grey area even in our law system. As long as real content is being put up, black hat techniques can be a good way to generate more traffic to increase visibility in addition to white hat methods.

Here is one basic technique which I used to get my site on Google search engine and this is applicable on any search engine. You may or may not know this already but to get a website listed on Google, you can submit your url using the Google submission form. But I would like to tell you that this is not the way to do it.

First, you should get a backlink from a website with a high PR. To check a PR of a website, you can use the Google toolbar which is freely downloadable. If you could get a website with a high PR to link to you, your site will be in Google’s index in under 24 hours. This is the fastest it can get!

If you can’t get what I mean, just put up a link from your own blogger blog to your website. The Google spiders will crawl from your blog to your site and index your new site within a few days.

Tags: Search engine optimization, backlink, social media optimization