Free Leads Using Google SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - Attracting high caliber, high value leads from Google

Part 1- Introduction

Here is part 1 of the series that I am going to write about SEO, and how you can use it to generate leads for your online business free of cost. This is merely an introduction, and the purpose of it, is to help you get the big picture, and understand the whole story. Do not worry if you do not understand some part of what you read. We then are going to go through each part in detail, so you can take action on each part, and optimize your blog or web site. In this article, you can substitute the word “blog” with “web site”, and vice versa wherever you want. I had to write this article this way, so the article directories would accept my article, and would not object on excessive use of certain keywords. SEO is a very powerful strategy, and if you do it right, you can automate your business, and your business keeps running pretty much on its own, even when you are on a vacation or when you are sleeping at night. Okay, let’s get started.

SEO is a traffic strategy to achieve higher search rankings on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.
As you know, people search for what they want on Google, and Google returns the results for their search criteria. Google shows the search results according to some rules and regulations they have, and the keywords specified. If you know about their rules, and how to use them to your advantage, you can have your landing page shown on top of the search results. Once you do this, people searching for a business opportunity that matches yours according to their keywords and Google’s rules, they will get to know about you, and your business, and if they decide that it is beneficial to them, they will join your business.

Some of the benefits of SEO are:
-Free targeted traffic to your web site
-Free ongoing leads, traffic, and customers
-Millions of dollars in free traffic available
-Difficult for competition to compete with you

When you search for something on Google, you get a screen that has two major parts to it:
1- The right hand side of the screen, which is where the results for the Google AdSense appears. This is a paid advertising strategy through which you can find a lot of leads. You would have to pay per click to use this service from Google, and so it is called, "PPC"
2- The left hand side of the screen, which is called the organic search results. This is where Google shows you the results for the pages they have indexed in their directories, and it's free of cost. The pages those links point to, have not paid for this service at all. The purpose of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to get Google to show your blog in those search engine results through the ways you are going to learn from these series of articles.

Researchers have studied human eye attention area on a computer screen, and they have found that the upper left hand side corner of the screen is the place that gets the most attention when somebody looks at a computer screen, and that is the free service that Google offers- SEO.
Since people might misuse this free service if they knew about Google's algorithm of showing web search results, even Google employees do not know how the search engine works. But there are a few points that if you know them, you can have your page/blog/website shown on the first page over time.

Let's go through some of the characteristics of PPC, and SEO, and compare them to each other. Here are some of the characteristics of PPC:
- PPC costs money- $0.03- $10.00 per click
- PPC needs ongoing maintenance
- Others can knock you off of the first ranking simply by paying more than you do.
- You could get instant traffic through PPC.
- PPC forces you to optimize for conversions because you actually have to pay for it.


And here are some of the characteristics of SEO:
Traffic through SEO is free, and you could rank for high value keywords.
It's difficult for others to overtake your position since they need to know SEO better than you, and that is what most of the marketers don't really know.
Through SEO, you would get passive ongoing traffic, but it takes some time to build your campaign. You would not have immediate results, but the results last for a relatively longer time or even for a lifetime.
You would generally get more traffic through SEO than you would get through PPC.

There are three parts to SEO that if you learn them, and do them diligently and consistently, you will get the results in a short amount of time relatively depending upon how you apply them, and how consistent you are. They are as follows:
1- Your keywords
You should research your keywords, and find the keywords that actually convert for you. You also need to understand the intent behind the typical keywords that people use to search for the information they are looking for. You want to focus on the keywords that convert into traffic, leads, and money for you. The 80/20 rule for keywords is that only 20% of the market keywords will convert. If you find a handful of the 20%, you will dominate your market.
2- The content of your web log
The content of your blog/site is very important in that, the search engines determine how important and informative your blog is based on their criteria. You should be very careful about your content, Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, and your blog organization. Google considers those who search for information as their customers. They want to serve them in the best way they can. So Google pays close attention to giving their customers exactly what they are looking for. If someone went to Google, searched for something, and got the results not relative to what they searched for, they would probably not go back to Google for searching for anything again, if that happened a couple of times.
3- Links from other blogs
Incoming links from other blogs/web sites are also very important. Google has to make sure that the link has come from a blog/site that has similar content as there is in your site, and also the ranking of the referrer blog is important.
Also you should use the relevant anchor text to link to the content in your blog. “Anchor Text” is the text that is used in the body of the link. It is actually what you see, read, and click on, when you want to go to some other page. The link should point to what it is supposed to refer to, according to the meaning of the text in the link.

There are different levels of SEO:
1- Rank for your name
When people find their way to your landing page, and they want to buy from you, they definitely will search for your name. They want to know who you are, and what you have been doing online. They want to know what kind of person they are going to work with. So you definitely want to let them know that you are a real person, and you have something to give them, teach them, or they can solve at least one of their problems through you. Build your online presence.
2- Rank for Company/people's names (We will discuss this later)
3- Rank for generic industry terms (We will discuss this later)

If you use SEO to promote your business, you should keep the following points in mind:
1- Do not write any negative content.
2- Do not bash anyone.
3- Be helpful, and add value to people.
4- Write constructive reviews.
5- Comment on news, rumors, or gossip in your industry.
6- Do your research, and be intelligent about the comments and keywords you use to promote your business.

When you write content, keep the following points in mind:
1- Do not promote your opportunity.
2- Do not be biased; be objective.
3- Your goal is to be an information center.

In regards to generating the leads, the following points may help you:
1- Have an opt-in box in your side bar and make a compelling offer.
2- Or simply place a banner in your sidebar to your capture page.

What we have covered so far was the mindset behind SEO. Now we are going to cover some technical aspects of SEO:

The content that you use in your blog, and the way you organize it, are very important in your page ranking with regards to Google. The following points are of great importance:
1- Use your keywords in:
- Title Tags
- Meta Descriptions
- Header Tags
- Your Articles/ Content
2- Do not spam as it will not help you. Try to spread your keyword out all over your content, and use a variety of them.

On organizing your blog, it is important to know that when you organize your blog properly, it is much easier for Google, as well as your readers to find the information they are looking for. Think of your whole blog/web site as a compartment you use to keep the different folders containing your bills. You would not mix your bills all together, or put a mortgage bill in the category that was related to your "electric bills"
You want to have categories, and then sub-categories, that would break the information to digestible pieces, so people can find their way easily through your blog. Also if you do that, it is easier for Google to decide what your blog is all about, and rank it accordingly.

On linking to your blog/web site, pay attention to the following:
1- Create as many inbound links to your blog as you can. Think of links as votes your blog as an entity gets. The more votes an entity gets, the more credibility it has among those who know them, which in this case, would be Google. When Google realizes that you have many links to your blog, they decide that your blog/web site is important to others, simply because they have linked to it, and so they will rank it much higher in their own ranking system.
2- Google wants to know if you trade links with other blogs/sites, or it is just that other blogs link to your blog. If a blog links to yours, and you link back to that blog, which is called a "reciprocal link", you will still be ranked higher, but it is always better to have only inbound links from other blogs wherever possible.
3- Google puts weight on the quality of the link. They decide according to the following criteria:
- Where is the link coming from? Social Media web sites, other blogs, article directories, etc.
- Where is the link pointing to?
- Is the link relevant to the page it points to?

I hope you have found something of value in this article. As I mentioned earlier, it was just an introduction, and I will discuss each aspect of this topic in detail in subsequent articles. If you want to read the rest of this series, please go to my blog below. Thanks for your attention.

The Underlying Principle of Article Marketing

Writing an article, called “article marketing”, is one of the great ways by which you can educate your potential customers, add value to them, and help them know you better. It also can help you have credibility among your followers, and place yourself as an expert in your field.
Most people today believe in reading someone else’s article, rewording it, and publishing it as your own. That would certainly be accepted at many article directories. They would be approved, and if you know Google well, using some of those tricks done as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you could place your links at the very top of the search engine results people would search for. That would certainly be alright. But that kind of article would not show “you”, your personality, and more importantly, who you really are.
As you know, people don’t buy your products or services; they buy “you”, who you are as a person. If anybody anywhere in the world had a product or some service of any kind, and offered it at one thirds the actual market price, nobody would buy from them if they were not sure about the authenticity of the person offering the product or service. You might even have noticed that people would rather buy from the person they trust and have worked with for a while, even if they knew they could buy it somewhere else even at a price much lower than that. So, only getting high rankings on Google pages does not count.
People could actually find their way to your landing page from Google, and still not buy from you, simply because they did not like you as a person, or they did not know you at all.
Apart from the page formatting and structuring, dos and don’ts, those who really know what they are talking about, have done their research, and really want to educate their visitors and reader, usually thrive. Tricks work sometimes, but as you know, get rich quick programs usually expire even sooner than people using them get rich. Thank you for your attention.

How To Ping Your Blog

How would you let the search engines or other directories know that you have updated you blog? For example you have posted a new article or even some people have commented on an existing article. You want to let the search engines know that you have updated your blogs and that those changes should be reflected in their indexes, so if someone searches for what you have posted, your update shows up.
There are some services on the Internet that do this for you. You could go to http://pingomatic.com or http://pingoat.com and there are many more services that do the same thing for you.
It is important to know that you should ping your web site or blog only when some changes have been made to it. If you overdo it, you may be ignored by some of the services, and they may not accept any pings from your address.
When you go to any of the services above, there are three fields you need to fill in so you can ping you blog. “Blog name”, “Blog URL”, and “XML Feed” “XML Feed” is usually optional but you can fill in that one as well. It is actually the RSS Feed of your blog. You can find its address if you right click on the RSS icon on your blog.
Happy pinging….

Write Well-Structured And Compelling Articles

Do you write articles? Does your business need you to publish article, so others know you and your business better? The following points are worth considering when writing articles so your articles are compelling to your audience and are well structured.
Define your audience very closely and based on that, identify what is important and of value to them.
You may be personally very fond of strawberries and cream but fish prefer worms. So when you go fishing, you don’t think about what you want, rather you think about what “fish” like and bait the hook with that. This is what we all do when we go fishing, but we usually don’t apply it to other things in life. When your article is not appealing to the reader group it is supposed to be, they simply don’t read it. So if you want your articles to be read by your audience, you should think of what they like and give it to them through your articles, which by the way might not be what you personally like.
There are a couple of ways to define your target audience: You could either target the people just like you or you could target a completely different type of people. In any case the following questions will help you a lot in deciding what you are going to include in your articles.
1- What do they do for a living?
2- What struggles do they face?
3- What is important to them?
4- What are their core values?
5- What is their current income?
6- What are their income goals?
7- What are their hobbies?
8- How do they define their own success?
Choose your own keywords.
Since you want to post your articles to a 100+ web sites so they show up in the search engine results, and ultimately have the readers click through to your blog or web site, you may want to choose the keywords that are searched by people the most, include them in your article, if they are really relevant. But how do you know about people’s key word choices? Well, there are some web sites that educate you on the key keywords people use, or have used the most. One of them is freekeywords.wordtracker.com. There are two terms that you should familiarize yourself with, “long-tailed keywords”, and “short-tailed keywords” Short-tailed keywords are those suggested by web sites like wordtracker.com to you when you search for a specific word. Long-tailed keywords on the other hand, are those that you make up, for example in your article title using the short-tailed keywords you have found in the search results. For example if you go to freekeywords.wordtracker.com and search for “marketing”, you will be suggested all the short-tailed keywords that have been used by people on the search engines over the past 365 days, like, “marketing”, “internet marketing”, “online marketing”, “email marketing”, etc. These are your short-tailed keywords that you can use in your article.
However, as important it is to organize your article around those keywords, it is not as important as writing your article in a natural way, so they reflect your own authentic natural flow of thought. Your articles are meant to add value to your readers, and more importantly let your audience know you better and familiarize themselves with you as a person.
Since your articles can show up in the search engines for specific keywords, you will want to optimize each article for a long-tailed keyword. Once you have chosen your short-tailed keyword, and based on that, your long-tailed keyword, choose one of your long-tailed keywords for your article.
I will post another article later specifically on this topic so you know how exactly you can optimize your articles based on the keywords that are really converting for you.
Select your topic:
Once you have chosen you long-tailed keyword, choose a topic closely related to it. For example if you choose “best online home based business opportunity”, then your topic could be “How to Find the Best Online Home Based Business Opportunity” or “How to Know If you are in the Best Online Home Based Business Opportunity”
Here is how you can easily come up with article topics:
1- Write down the top 5 concerns you had about starting a new business before joining the company you work with now.
2- Write out the solutions offered and provided by the company you joined to each of the concerns.
Pay attention to the fact that those who are reading your article probably have the same concerns that you had before starting your new business. This way they feel that the article they are reading is perfectly angled towards them; they will like it, and will keep reading to the end of your article where they reach the point where the link to your web site or blog is located. Even if they don’t click on your link, you have built a relationship with them and that alone was worth all the time you spent on your article.
Another important point to bear in mind is that people are highly controlled by their emotions. Your articles are going to be read by human beings mostly governed by their emotions. So if you trigger one of their specific emotions, you will get their emotional response back. For example if you use the word “frustrated” in “Are you frustrated with spending a long time on your MLM business and getting not much back?”, you can make sure that you will get the emotional response right back from those this is a concern to, which by the way is a concern to lot of people working online.
Select your article’s angle:
Based on how you angle your articles, you can create five different kinds of articles having the same keywords and topic:
1- A how-to article
2- A review article
3- A problem and then a solution article
4- A personal experience article
5- A comparison article(You could compare your former profession to what you are doing now)
Write your article:
Writing articles is easy. Your articles do not have to be necessarily perfect. Once you start writing, the words will keep flowing and you will finish your article in less than 20 minutes.
You may want to keep this framework in mind so your articles are easy to understand and readers can take information out of them easily.
1- Make a list of three main points you want to discuss in your article. You will then organize the three main points in the first three sentences of the first three paragraphs of your article.
2- Write down 3-5 sentences that back up and support each of your three main points. For example the first set of back up sentences would look like the following:

Main point #1
Back up sentence #1
Back up sentence #2
Back up sentence #3
Back up sentence #4
Back up sentence #5
And so on for the rest of your main points.
The 3-5 back up sentences you write will make up the body of each paragraph.
3- Write your introductory paragraph.
Tell your readers what you are about to tell them. Write 3-4 sentences that sum up your three main paragraphs.
4- Write your closing paragraph.
Tell your readers what you just told them, again. Write 3-4 sentences that sum up your three main paragraphs and then provide them with a solution.
Write your article title:
Once you have written your article, follow the following points to create a title that really describes your article in a few words.
1- Include your whole keyword in the article title whenever possible.
2- Move the keyword as close as possible to the beginning of the title. If possible, start your title with the keyword.
3- It would be great if you formed a question with your article title. Our brains don’t like it when compelling questions go unanswered. You could keep your readers engaged by posing a question as your article title, give them some solutions in your article body while again keeping them engaged in the article body as well. You could then pose an indirect question in your article body, maybe formed as a result of the combination of the whole main paragraphs, and then have them click on your blog or web site link where they expect to get more information or have the indirect question answered.
Publish your article:
There are a lot of web sites to which you can publish your articles. They are like directories that have a huge data base of articles in there, classified based on the articles’ subjects, and other classification methods. They are called “Article Directories” All you have to do is to register yourself with them and keep publishing your articles on their web sites. If you keep publishing your articles to some of them consistently, you will gain a lot of popularity and credibility on the Internet in a short time, especially if you choose your keywords right. The more your article page is visited by viewers, the higher it moves on the search engine page rankings.
Posting your articles to article directories can take a lot of time especially because the number of the article directories you publish your articles to grows over time as you become more experienced in article marketing. There is some software however, that post your articles to 100+ article directories automatically. Those usually need you to make a one-time payment of around $100. You could go to http://www.automaticarticlesubmitter.com/ for this purpose.
That was all about writing articles I could tell you for now. Remember that practice makes perfect. The more your write, the better you will write. I will write more on writing articles later, but in order not to make this any longer, I will end this here. Thank you for your time and stay tuned.

Do You Know Why Only 3% Of The Internet Marketers Thrive?

It is fairly easy to build a supportive mindset through writing down your goals or affirmations supporting you that you definitely will thrive in your Internet Marketing business. Whatever is reinforced on your mind through repetition and enough emotional intensity will be believed by the mind and ultimately by you, since we are defined by our minds in this world. Our minds control our behavior and how we look at the world around us. There have been many instances we have believed something to be absolutely true, to find later that it is not. We simply live by our perceptions of the truth, and not the truth itself. So it is absolutely imperative that we make sure what we are doing on a day-to-day basis will ultimately take us where we want to end up.

The title of this article has been chosen to be relevant to Internet Marketing, but it relates to just about anything else in our lives. Once you have made sure your goals are in alignment with your core values, you can break them down to a set of identifiable concrete actions, plan and schedule them and ultimately achieve them.

We plan according to the information we receive from our environment. This applies specially when we embark on a new journey, and we are new to what we are about to start. But what if the system you are going to follow, which ultimately guarantees your success, is not so accurate or even wrong?

It’s always very good to follow some proven time-tested system, but there is no such thing as right and wrong, probably except for the law of gravity or the like. Our right and wrong is identified through our circumstances, and the kind of people we are. The most righteous thing in the world might not be right for somebody or even might be wrong for them, and it does not necessarily mean that they are a bad or immoral person, not at all. You do know that we human beings are all different from each other and there are no two identical human beings on earth. So we should choose consciously rather that solely depend on one’s recommendation.

When it comes to Internet Marketing, which is a kind of business, and needs your time, money and all the other resources you would need to start one, you need to know what exactly the company you want to join is about. The most important part that is contributed to you by the company and the community it provides you with, is the education they offer. Otherwise all the companies on earth do have more or less the same system, and proceedings.

As important as the education offered by the company is, it’s you who is going to utilize it. So even if everything education-wise is in place, you won’t get anywhere if you don’t know how to use it in order to produce the results you want. This part again is a part of education that teaches how to use the system right. And even more important than all those factors is that you need to know how to identify what you really really want, and why you want it. So the company should look at you as a real person with valid feelings and your own psychology, and not merely as a machine who is going to be used to promote the company like an ATM machine.

It is very important that you do a thorough research on the company you want to join and find out as much information as you can about the system they have. If you think Internet Marketing is the right business for you, go do your research today, and take action now. It is always my pleasure to help.

Your Income Skyrockets If You Choose The Right Company

Have you ever thought of making money online at home? I am sure you have read those glamorous stories telling you how that person became all so popular online and started making a lot of money online. Companies tell you a lot about how glamorous that career is, and how easily you can make money “from the comfort of your home”
Nobody can tell you if a job is right for you or not unless you experience it for yourself. When I came across the concept of Internet Marketing or becoming an entrepreneur, it did not make any sense to me. I had never done it before, and it was a little bit scary. My sponsor told me a lot about it, although he did not give me a lot of information since he would have scared me off.
So, what factors would you consider before joining a company if you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
This is a very important question you should be able to answer before going about it. You see, making more money or having a better life, no matter how you define “better life” for yourself, does not depend much on what you do or where you work or even how much you work every day. Rather it depends on who you are as a person and the knowledge you have in that field. If you are the best person in the world, but you don’t know much about what you do, you can’t make enough money to even get you going. So the education the company you join gives you is so important as well as the kind of transformation the community you join causes you to undergo into a better person.
The practical education you get enables you to tap into your own resources and make use of them. Without a good, practical, and up to date education, you could not get anywhere. Although mindset is not a good thing to have in general according to psychologists, it is so important that you have the kind of mindset that actually helps you do whatever it is you want to do. It also raises your self-esteem and self-confidence, and causes you to see yourself in a completely new different way. It gives you vision into the future you want to have for yourself.
The transformation you undergo as a result of being a part of that community on the other hand makes you want to help others at least in your community, without expecting anything in return at all or at least right away from the person you have just helped out. The kind of mindset you get into is also the direct result of the community you are a part of. You won’t have the right mindset unless you get around the right people. No wonder we judge people by the kind of friends they have and socialize with on a regular basis.
So your income is in direct relationship with your knowledge, your mindset, and the community you are in touch with on a regular basis, and you would get all of them from the company you join.
So go do your research, and make an informed decision. I hope this article has been of some value to you. Please do inform me if you need any particular information regarding any specific aspect of this business. It is always my pleasure to help.

The Three Rules Of Life...

The three rules of life are:

1- Paradox: Life is a mystery; don't waste time trying to figure it out. Live it.
2- Humor: Always keep a sense of humor.
3- Change: Never nothing remains the same.

Why most Article Marketer don't Thrive

Whatever your business is, you can promote it online by writing quality articles adding value to either those who are going to join your business, or those who are already doing that kind of business and need some more information about some aspect of it. Article marketing a powerful way to promote your business for free and only needs some time to work on them. You do not need to be an expert to start publishing your articles online. A basic knowledge of the language in which you are going to write the article and a good understanding of what you want to talk about to your audience would do. I would say, you current knowledge of whatever you do right now is enough to start publishing your own articles online.

Publishing your articles online could bridge the credibility gap between where you currently are in your business, and where you want to be sometime down the road in the future. What most people do is they go read some article related to their field of expertise, learn something from it, reword the same, and publish it as their own. This definitely would give them some popularity among their community, but the point is, the information was already there in the first place and such authors don’t add anything new to what they find online. We simply are bombarding our search engines with tons of information every day, but none of what we are publishing is new. We are just adding to the traffic, increasing the power consumption rate of the data centers around the world and polluting our own environment, where we are living now, and our children are going to be living some 20 years from now. Moreover, if you really think about it only 3% of the people who are hoping to earn some money online are actually earning, and the rest of them are simply wasting their time and adding to the whole chaos. The top three percent are actually those who are adding some value to what already is. They are not copying someone else’s work and publishing as their own. They may have heard of the saying, “No Pain, No Gain.”

So, it is really important to understand that writing articles and publishing them is not really about just copying someone’s ideas. When you have done your homework, really know something about what you want to talk about, and publish your authentic original ideas, you succeed.