If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re either a marketing professional or a business owner. 

And you understand that the traditional marketing methods no longer work. You also know that you cannot neglect your business and stop marketing. So you are either already making a living online and are wanting to learn more or you are considering starting a business and are looking into marketing in the most powerful and effective marketing network of our time, the internet.

It doesn’t matter whether your business is just getting started with Internet marketing or you just want to brush up on your basic skills, this website can help you in setting up and implementing a successful Internet marketing website design and marketing plan.

From establishing your keyword strategy to leveraging social media sites all the way up to refining and fine tuning your strategies it doesn’t matter if you’re an attorney, Dr., chimney sweep, deck builder, fence company, or marketing agency.

So let’s get started!

If you talk to anyone that knows anything about internet marketing they will tell you the first thing you need to do is come up with a keyword list.

It does not matter if you are wanting to market on a search engine like Google, Bing, or even a social media site like Facebook, Tweeter, or LinkedIn. You need to figure out what keywords people are searching for when they are looking for your business.

Most consumers find businesses online using the search engines and searching for specific keywords that best describe what they are looking for. This puts us in a unique position of being able to put our websites between the search engines and the consumers. That’s why optimizing our websites around keywords that are more likely to be searched for when someone is looking for the type of products or services we provide is important.

It’s sometimes difficult to know exactly what keywords are going give the most targeted traffic for our products or services however; there are ways of determining our many searches or how competitive a keyword is.

To understand what keywords will drive the most relevant traffic to our websites, we first have to understand that keyword research is ongoing and never ending. Good keyword research can help grow a business in both organic and pay per click traffic. And save you from spending money on keywords that are not converting.

It’s important to preplan your website and if you already have a website don’t worry because we are going to be building feeder sites. So the information you are going to learn here will be important in just a moment.

By understanding what keywords our clients would search for to find our business it allows us to build our website around those keywords.

It’s for this reason that it’s important to understand what keyword you want to rank your website for. Then we build the website and marketing around that keyword. Keep in mind that if you want to rank for the keyword insurance, the traffic you’re getting would not be the kind that would convert very well, if you’re selling car insurance.

So basically if you’re selling car insurance then you want a website that focuses on car insurance and not just insurance. So the problem is that if we rank for insurance we will get people who were looking for flood insurance, boat insurance, health insurance and the list goes on and on. Those people are not going to be looking for car insurance. So… it’s harder to rank for the keyword insurance and the traffic is not going to convert as well as it would if our site was focused on car insurance.

Initially it is more difficult to rank for smaller keywords like insurance, we can eventually rank for insurance but it would be easier to rank for a keyword like car insurance then it would be to rank for the keyword insurance.

So we want to eventually go I after the more none specific keywords like insurance but starting out we want to be very specific with the keywords we are targeting.

So the idea is to build a theme website around our most import keyword, which would be a nonspecific keyword and branch out from there like limbs on a tree and go after the more specific keywords that are focused around the same theme.

So the theme of the website may be insurance or car insurance but the branches coming off would be easier to rank for and more specific keywords. Then once the site builds some authority and gets stronger (maybe a year down the road or six months down the road) we would rank the site for the non-specific keyword like car insurance.

So the idea is that eventually were going to rank for the keyword car insurance but at this time we realize the competition is too competitive and our website has no authority and is not placed it well enough to compete for that keyword.

So the theme of the website would be our main keyword “car insurance” then following the theme of the website would be our category keywords. The category keywords would be things like sports car insurance, Corvette insurance, cheap car insurance and so on and so on. These are basically topics within the website.

After is these we have our niche keywords. These are basically keywords more specific to the topic. So we would have buy car insurance, Atlanta Georgia car insurance and so on and so on.

Now following our niche keywords are our micro niche and action keywords. These are keywords like buy Corvette car insurance in Atlanta Georgia. These are very specific to a niche, location, and type of product. These are called buying keywords, because this is what somebody’s going to type in when they’re ready to make a purchase. Someone who types in a product name, along with a phrase like free shipping, on sale or something similar is more likely to make a purchase then someone who just types in toys.

And then we have our longtail keywords. These are like our micro niche and action keywords but longer. An example would be, “where can I buy car insurance for my Corvette in Atlanta Georgia”?

These keywords are very much like questions and statements. They are easy to rank for but don’t get much traffic.

It seems every time I turn around someone is bragging about all the traffic they get from article marketing. Now…I am naturally a lazy person and not big on writing and if I have to write articles then I want to get the most bang out of each article I write.

So here’s how I do it, I first go to Google and type in MY KEYWORD site:ezinearticles.com *this article has been viewed 5000…10000 time(s)” “Article submitted on **,2009” this allows me to see all the articles under my keyword that have been viewed over 5000 times.

The reason it has been viewed so many times is because it ranks in the search engines. I’ll visit the article and even checkout their landing page to see what they are doing with the traffic.

From here I’ll go to Google’s keyword tool, enter the ezine article page URL and find out what keywords Google feels are relevant to this page. Now I have a list of keywords, I’ll take that list and remove all the keywords that are not driving traffic.  Now it’s time to use a free rank tracker tool from http://www.link-assistant.com/, Rank Tracker is a free tool that will allow me to find out where sites or rather pages are ranking in the search engines. There are a ton of search engines I can look at. And the really cool thing is that I can paste my whole list into this tool.

From here this tool will scan all my keywords looking for that site to see which keywords they rank for and where they rank.

Now, I’ll sort my results by their rankings, I only care about the keywords they are ranking in the top 20 for.

Once I put together my list of keywords, I’ll write an article for each keyword and I’ll make sure that each article is better, more engaging and more keyword specific then the guy that is already getting traffic from these keywords.

I’ll then submit the articles to article sites and use Onlywire.com to build me some backlinks to my new articles. I know these are easy to rank for keywords because this guy is already ranking for them using ezine articles. I’ll also do some videos and build some backlinks to those videos from Onlywire.com.

Before the week is out I will have pushed this guys article out of the way and replaced those rankings with my own.

There are a lot of things that go into how competitive a keyword is or isn’t and you should keep in mind that each page on the site should be focusing on ranking for a specific search term and you are not trying to rank the whole site for that search term.

The % below is just a guess but it is what I look at when I get ready to rank a page for a specific keyword. Check in Google and see how the competition looks in the below areas.

• 24% Trust/Authority and age of the domain name
• 22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page
• 18% Anchor Text of External Links
• 12% On-Page Keyword Usage

Now, when doing keyword research you want to find keywords that someone who is about to make a purchase would be searching for and that there is not a lot of competition for.

Let’s take a look at Joe, a guy from Georgia who’s looking for car insurance.

He starts off by going to Google and typing in “insurance”, (now insurance is a competitive keyword and one that could take years to rank for) Joe is immediately overwhelmed by all the types of insurances, home insurance, boat insurance, life insurance, flood insurance so Joe returns to Google.

This time he types in “car insurance”, ( a competitive keyword but not as competitive as insurance) this is more in line with what Joe is looking for but there is still too much information to digest, so he returns to Google again.

This time he does a search result for “best prices on car insurance” ( a lot less competitive and fairly easy to rank for) and he gets a really good idea on prices and what he’ll be spending, so he is now ready to make a purchase.

So…Joe returns to Google and does a search for “best prices on car insurance in Stockbridge Georgia” and he buys himself some car insurance. And the guy that ranked for the search result that sold Joe the car insurance was the less competitive out of all them.

Other words, the more specific a search term the easier it is to rank for and the better the conversion will be.
Build your site like a pyramid.

The main page being the most competitive search term and the inner pages breaking down into less competitive search terms. My main page might be trying to rank for website design, an inner page ranking for website designers and under website designers another page trying to rank for custom website designers.

Then we have affordable custom website designers. I’d start at the bottom of the pyramid trying to rank the less competitive pages first and working my way to the top of the pyramid trying to rank for the more competitive keywords.

A website should have three levels, the home page for your most competitive keyword then coming off the home page we should have our medium competitive keywords.

Then under each of those we should have related theme keyword phrases that are extremely specific.

The extremely specific keyword phrases would be the long tail keywords.

This allows us to build a theme based website; each keyword is based on the same theme as the one above it and links back to the category above it.

Now, keeping in mind that all pages start with some type of PR, by building long tail keyword specific pages and linking those pages back to the page above it, we are making that page stronger. At the same time we are making that page stronger, we are also driving qualified leads to our site from the long tail keyword.

A competitive keyword can bring tons of search visitors to our site everyday however, due to the fact that it is not a targeted search visitor, the chances of them buying is less.

If someone is searching for a used Ford Mustang for under $5,000.00 and they live in Atlanta Georgia then doing a search on Google for the keyword “cars” is not going to allow them to find what they are looking for.

Doing a search for “Ford Mustang” is also going to make it difficult to find what they are looking for.

“Used Ford Mustang” and we are getting closer but the person that ranks in the top of the search engines for “Used Ford Mustang Atlanta Georgia under $5,000.00” stands a better chance of making the sale then the guy that worked is butt of to rank for Cars.

My point, the long tail keywords will allow you to make money quickly as well as help you rank for the competitive keywords.