Kathy Smith’s Blog and Your Gateway to Success

It doesn’t matter where you want to start marketing on the internet, whether it’s your first blog; a lens; facebook; building a website, the first SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tip is understanding keywords.

What is a keyword? Every time you search on the internet and enter in words describing what you’re searching for — that’s a keyword. Ideally, you will want to identify the keywords that your prospects and potential customers are actually typing into the search engines, and create content on your website based on those keywords. There are many more SEO tips I will be blogging about, but if you learn this first, you will be successful in whatever you choose to do.

Keywords are the foundation to your building a successful presence on the internet. The keywords or phrases (long tail keywords) you choose will determine how your posts (pages, blogs, etc) rank in the search engines. This is the most important SEO tip I can give to you.

If you consider all the SEO tips you will learn, it will always go back to what is your target and you identify your target by your keywords. Think about reading an article in the newspaper. The reporter’s keyword is their title and their article expands on it. That’s the same way with Internet Marketing. Another SEO tip is to consider your competition. You can find many keywords when seeking your target, but you also want to make sure there’s not too much competition. An easy way to see if there is a lot of competition is to go to Google and start typing in the keyword and you will see results next to the word. For example, if you typed in weight loss, you would find 84,500,000 results for weight loss and if you put quotes around it, it brings it down to about 8,000,000 but that’s still a lot. Do you think it will be easy to get to the top of the search engine where people can find out about you with that type of competition?

Of course, there are ways you can narrow this down from searching on title; looking at what your competition is doing, etc. but that’s for another blog. Right now I want to focus on the first SEO tip which is keywords. Let’s take this a step further. What if you had a great plan for weight loss and instead of choosing a keyword weight loss, you chose weight loss plans. When I check to see how many people are searching for it, I find 479 actual visitors in Google per day and there’s 2,250,000 results in Google and if I put it in quotes (meaning people are looking for it in that order) there is only about 518,000 in Google Competition. If you just type in weight loss plans, you’ll notice you’ll find results like weight loss diet plans or meal replacement plan, etc. By typing it in without the quotes, Google finds all or part of the words. When you include quotes, Google only returns the exact match.

Another SEO tip is to know your search engine. There are tools on the internet that will help you in finding competition and keywords but they may be pulling from different search engines. Google is the standard that you should use. There are many other search engines and when you want to get involved with PPC and other internet marketing, I’ll talk about the other search engines but Google is, hands down, the most popular one.

Finding keywords or phrases that people are currently searching for and with low competition will help you to be listed organically in the search engine. You can write a blog or lens or whatever vehicle you choose on weight loss plans. The next SEO tips is you want Weight Loss Plans in your title and within the body you want to have the keywords’ weight to be around 3%, which is every 100 words, the keyword (phrase) should be repeated 3 times. You don’t want to repeat it too much because Google will consider that keyword stuffing and you could be banned or tagged as using black hat SEO techniques and you don’t want that. Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. What’s funny is it will work at first, but then you’ll end up getting penalized and that’s not fun.

I’ll go into creating blogs; best services and how to optimize your blog in another post, as well as talk about getting traffic.

Another reason not to choose single word keywords is it won’t get you targeted traffic. For example if someone was searching for tourism and you were a travel agent for destinations in Australia that may or may not be the customer for you. But if someone was searching for “tourist destinations in Australia”, he/she is your potential customer.

Also, the latter is called “long tail keywords”. “Long Tail Keywords” is another important SEO tip. When writing information for the internet, you want to have content and bring something of value to your readers, but you also want to be smart about it and optimize it for a keyword or preferably a long tail keyword. A long tail keyword is someone who could be your potential customer. There are two types of people browsing the internet – the curious and the serious. You want the serious because they will opt in to your website or even better, purchase your products or join you in your business. Just because you have a long phrase does not make it a long tail keywords. It means having the right combination of words reflecting someone who is getting ready to make a decision.

When starting to learn about SEO and reading tips and information on the internet, I want you to realize that Keywords and SEO is not rocket science. It’s just being aware of it and knowing the tools to use to help you to get the information you need.

To find out more about what keywords to use, you can use a free version of WordTracker. They have a new one where you can look at the trends.
It’s: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/

You may notice that the results that WordTracker displays is different that what you would see with Google. WordTracker assumes the “quotes”.

If you detail down on the results, you can check the search volume. If you have hardly any competition but there’s no one searching for those keywords, it doesn’t matter if you are in the top of the search engine because no one will be looking. Kind of like having a McDonalds in the middle of the Sahara Desert. I am sure there may be some lost soul who will be grateful to come upon a McDonalds but the bottom line for that McDonald’s store would be terrible!

So to summarize, before starting to write anything for the internet, you want to know the keyword(s) you will be focusing on and you want to make sure those keyword(s) are reflective of what someone is searching for and that there isn’t too much competition. You’ll also preferably be using long tail keywords instead of single words.

More information to come on this and if you’d like to get a jumpstart on Internet Marketing, enter in your name and email and take my course.

The key to success in a home based business will surprise you. Many gurus out there will start with the research you must do to find the right business, and I agree that the selection process is very important. In fact, I have a list of criteria that you should consider as well as an explanation of why but I’ll expand on that in a later post. Other gurus will tell you it’s finding the “why”. Why do you want to be in a home based business; why are you seeking extra income; why are you unhappy with where you are now. By understanding your reasons, you’re building the foundation to accomplishing your goals. Goals are just as important because unless you have a map of how you want to get there, you could end up taking those side roads that will take you much longer to achieve success.

But there’s an even more important key to success.

You can know your why; the perfect business and the blueprint to get there, but if you don’t have this one key element, you will not be successful. The funny part is it’s a very simple concept but not taken seriously.

THE MOST IMPORTANT ACT YOU CAN TAKE IS VERY SIMPLE . . .

MAKE THE COMMITMENT TO YOURSELF TO BE SUCCESSFUL.

It doesn’t matter what brand of success we’re chasing after. The fact still remains: We will not succeed in attaining any dream until we first make a commitment. To be successful you can’t have just one foot in – you need to jump in.

Persistence and commitment is equal to success but it first comes with the decision to make that commitment. Some of you may choose not to commit because you want a guarantee that everything will work out. But the only guarantee is that if you do not commit you will not succeed.

You must eliminate options and excuses that get in the way of making real commitments. You will not get it done with “maybe someday” If you want to truly succeed, don’t allow giving up to be an option.

Those that are hesitant to commit will be ineffective in receiving success. On the other hand, when you are committed powerful things occur that would not have occurred without the strength of your commitment.

I am sure you have heard the definition of insanity – continuing to do the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Your past has affected your life up to where you are right now. You must make the decision be fully committed to being successful and then take action.

Right now, make the commitment to change your life. Make the decision, take the action, and don’t wait any longer! Nobody can make you do this but YOU. Make 2009 YOUR YEAR!