SEO To Make Money Online

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a big buzzword that has been echoing around the make money online fraternity for several years now. But it seems that only recently has several of SEO’s biggest kept secrets been blown wide open to anyone who wants to hear about them. This is a change of scenery from my last post here at How To Make Money Online where I looked at How to Make Money Flipping Websites and building up new websites and then selling them for big profits was the order of the day.

However, SEO is also a part of that business, as the better optimized a website is, the better it will rank in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, the more traffic it will attract and therefore the more money it will make. Which will make it sell for more money, of course.

By SEO, I mean the process of obtaining high calibre back links to your site and not really much else. Sure, there are books that will teach you all about so-called on-site SEO, but in the real world, 90% of SEO is about accruing strong, authority one-way links to your site. I’ve probably already explained that part in earlier posts in this How to Make Money Online blog, so I won’t go back over them again here. Suffice it to say, links are SEO and SEO is all about links.

But if you weren’t in the market to sell your website after careful search engine optimization has boosted it to the lofty perches atop page one in Google’s index for some heavily searched terms, then of course it make sense to keep hold of them. Why? Because you can monetise them and probably, assuming you’d chosen a nice hot niche, have found out how to make money online hand over fist.

So what is a hot niche?

Well now, a hot niche is a piece of pure solid gold that many Internet marketers are searching high and low for. A hot niche is one where the following criteria exist:

  • Its main keyword is heavily searched for in Google’s index
  • There is scant competition from other SEO savvy Internet marketers
  • There are plenty of advertisers who pay top dollar per click for their adsense campaigns
  • People searching on the keyword terms are looking for something in the guise of information or merchandise

This all ads up to a veritable goldmine if you can find it.

Ok, these goldmines are like real ones in many ways. There are out there all right but they’re damn hard to find. So when you do stumble upon one of these goldmines, what do you do to make money from them?

Well, this is where a lot of luck comes into play. If you have the luck with you, then you’ll already have a website that occupies a very similar niche where some of the keywords overlap. Your site already has authority for similar keywords and you have access to other sites that can link to your main site using the new goldmine keywords as the anchor. Then you need to write a long, keyword rich article, publish on your main site and then link to it from as many different sources as possible using the main keywords in the anchor. If you can get links from other authority sites in similar niches, all the better.

If you do it right and there is not other serious competition, you can quickly dominate the niche and take the spoils in the form of PPC (adsense) or affiliate merchandise, or both, whichever the niche will support the best.

If the luck is not with you, then you’ll have to sit down and have a re-think about how to make money online from that niche. SEO is the key to the equation for sure, but if you don’t already have a suitable website with authority, you are going to have to start at the bottom and work your way up. Now in a highly competitive niche, such as Make Money Online, you would have a real fight on your hands and it would be one that you wouldn’t expect to win for a long time without a mountain of high grade link sources to draw upon.

But if the niche were not so competitive, then you could still expect to do well relatively quickly even with a new website. Of course, you’ll need to be able to avoid the dreaded Google sandbox, which is not always possible even with the best will in the world. If Google see a new site appearing high in its index and it suddenly starts attracting a lot of traffic, chances are that site is destined for the box. Its merely Google’s way of protecting their index from the scourge of spammers, which is perfectly understandable. As long as your site is completely legitimate, has plenty of relevant original content and complies with Google’s quality guidelines, you’ll be out of the box again pretty soon and back in a hot spot in the index.

A lot of marketers have a keen interest in trying to game that system in some way or another, but to be honest, there is no need and often no point. If you get caught, your site risks getting de-indexed for a long time which will render your attempts to dominate any niche stone cold dead.

The sticking point for most people is that part where they need the links to rank high in the SERPs and fulfill the SEO that is necessary to dominate a niche. Many resort to buying links, or getting tangled up paying for the services of a link farm. These actions are in contravention of Google’s guidelines and will get you penalised if caught. And they are very good at catching people who disregard their guidelines.

Better to do it naturally. Let your site grow naturally over time and let people link to you because you have something worth linking to. Or you can go a little more quickly and procure links from authority sites by using guile. I don’t mean cheat, exactly, but there’s no reason you can’t contact the owner of a high ranking website and draw their attention to a relevant article you just published on your site and ask them if they would be kind enough to link to it. In all honesty, ot won’t work in most cases, but in some it will as long as the site you are approaching is in the same niche as yours and they don’t view you as competition. Y

ou could even offer to write an article for publishing on their site free of charge, and put your own anchored link in there. There are several authority blogs around that also accept articles from third parties. You may have to write one and submit it for free to begin with as a show of goodwill, but if you could get to write a relevant post with your anchored link in it once a month, you’ll be doing your site no end of good. And that is one form of SEO that is perfectly legit and win-win for all concerned. The blog owner gets free content, you get am authority link!

Ok, that’s enough on the subject of SEO for this post, which seems to have run on for longer than I had initially anticipated. Oh well, at least it means I have had the chance to add plenty of my own keywords to it as part of this site’s own on page SEO is concerned. While its only a small part of search engine optimization, every little helps in the advancement up the SERPs ladder as I help people to learn how to make money online!

Terry Didcott
How To Make Money Online

 

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