Most affiliate marketers are not designing sites with 735 pages too often, but yes that can involve a lot of tracking. However, there are programs that do that automatically for you (RankTracker, Market Samurai, etc.).
Personally, I'd be more likely to develope 70 10-page sites than one 735 page site, but that's my business model that I work. Of course, a 735 page site that grabs feeds from Ezinearticles wouldn't be hard to create.
Although, it may take a few minutes here and there, tracking is vital.
I see messages all the time in forums of people saying their web traffic dropped by XX% and they have no idea why.
Well, if you aren't tracking your traffic sources and keywords, you never will know why. On the other hand if I can quickly look at a report and see that one of my main keywords dropped from #1 to #5, then I know where to focus my efforts to get that traffic back.
keyword are most important factor in Search Engine Optimization. For every search engine, the most important SEO items are the keywords. They are matched against the search strings. Optimizing website for right keywords is necessary. You will have to put in equal effort in keyword research as you put in the SEO work.
Enage and Mike: Fascinating discussion! If I could find a way to do both keyword research AND getting links, I'd be happy. It's the HOW that eludes me.
Engage - What are 2 good ways to get links? Let's say you convinced me. What would be my action items to "get more links?"
Mike: In terms simple enough so....well....I can understand it (forget my grandmother...she's smarter than me), what 2 steps would I take AFTER I've done my keyword research? I use Market Samurai. Let's say I discover 3 keyword phrases that have SEOV over 30, SEOC under 30K, SEOT min of 80, and a PBR min of 15 (in other words...excellent keywords for my page). What would I do then? Currently I write a post optimizing for those keyword phrases. Then how do I track the effectiveness of those keywords for my efforts?
Okay, so you have written a keyword optimized post... I'm going to give you more than 2 steps in no particular order because I can't decide which 2 I would do.
I would submit that post to Ezinearticles. Once it is accepted, I would submit it to about another 300 article directories. I hand submit to some of the bigger ones, Ezine, Go-articles, etc., and use ArticleBot for the rest of the submissions.
Now many people will say to spin the article so that you have different unique variations. People insist that if you don't it is duplicate content and Google doesn't like that. That is completely wrong. If it was true, news sites would have awful rankings. Most of their stories are syndicated from the AP and other sources. What Google doesn't like is the exact same content on the exact same website. That's duplicate content.
Now that being said, I do usually spin my articles before submitting them. I do it because Google and other search engines may someday change the rules.
Next I would bookmark your post on your website and the Ezine article to social bookmarking sites. There are free services to do this (SocialMarker, OnlyWire, and others) or paid programs to do it like SocialBot and Bookmarking Demon. Bookmarking Demon is awesome. However, if you are just getting started and have just one website, it may be a little more than you need right now. SocialBot can be picked up pretty cheaply. If you are going the free route, OnlyWire is the best in my opinion. The worst part about all of these programs (other than Bookmarking Demon) is the account setup. Once that is done, it's a breeze to submit pages. BMD has auto account creation, a huge timesaver.
I would also submit the RSS feed of your site if you haven't already. If you have already, than I would ping the feeds since you added a new post. RSSBot is probably the simplest and cheapest paid option for this.
After all this is done, I'd start building some other backlinks both to the page with yoru post and to the main domain. Blog commenting is a good idea. To do it manually, I'd recommend Coment Kahuna. It's free. It has a pretty good search function to find different types of blogs. It will sort them by pagerank, and then you can visit them 1 by 1 and do some commenting.
Then it's time to write more content and do it all over again...
Thanks Mike! That was pretty awesome. Not overload at all. I appreciate all the info. You mentioned tracking the effectiveness of keywords once you do all this. How would I do that? I do have Google Analytics (probably haven't figured out half of how I can use it), and my site does have CPanel, so there are some stats being collected. What do you think is the best way to track one keyword/keyword phrase?
You have a couple of options for tracking your keyword rankings. Google analytics and Awstats from cPanel will just tell you about your traffic sources, but not where you rank for your keywords.
Seo PowerSuite has a Rank Tracker module that is pretty good. There is a free version. If I remember correctly, you can't save projects in the free version. What that means is that it won't keep track for you if your keywords are moving up or down in the search engines. You would have to do that by hand.
There is a Rank Tracker plugin for Firefox called Rank Checker. It's a bit limited, but it's free. Not a bad place to start.
I like Market Samurai. You can download a free trial. I love the rank tracker module. It tracks everything I need for my keywords. I can export it easily to an Excel sheet, graph it, whatever I want to do. And I can track as many keywords as I want with just the push of a few buttons. Market Samurai is not free, but it has a free trial, so you can try it out for yourself and see what you think.
Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss it further.
Last edited by MikeF421; July 12th, 2010 at 09:09 PM.
One of the big strengths of Market Samurai is the training videos. I think they are the best training to come with any IM tool I have ever bought. All the videos in the 'Dojo' are well worth watching.
The Rank Tracker module is pretty useful. I probably use the Rank Tracker and SEO Competition modules the most.
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), what 2 steps would I take AFTER I've done my keyword research? I use Market Samurai. Let's say I discover 3 keyword phrases that have SEOV over 30, SEOC under 30K, SEOT min of 80, and a PBR min of 15 (in other words...excellent keywords for my page). What would I do then? Currently I write a post optimizing for those keyword phrases. Then how do I track the effectiveness of those keywords for my efforts?
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