Put The Research Of A $60 Billion Company To Work For You

There are dozens, and dozens of good keyword utilities out there.  They perform a wide variety of tasks – they will probably query multiple search engines and grab data, others will scour top websites and pull out their keywords but they all cost money.

So why not put the research of a $60 billion company to work for you?  I’m talking about Google of course.

Google offers many cool toys from their R&D department but perhaps one of the best has got to be the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is fast, and best of all it’s cheap – FREE!

The tool gives you insight into the billions of searches that Google executes every day.

Lets step through a keyword search on “weight loss”.  Here is the first screen that you are shown after you enter the keyword or phrase you want to get information on.

This gives you some information – but the search period is for May.  If you scroll down the list, you’ll see where the goldmine is.

This is what you are looking for.

But you don’t necessarily want to go after the keywords that have the most hits to them – these are going to be even more competetive.  Instead go after the “low hanging fruit” – the keywords that you will be able to score high for due to the low number of searches against them – BUT nevertheless searches were made for those keywords.

In this case, the low-hanging fruits (or longtail keywords) could be weight loss plans, weight loss plan, free weight loss, effective weight loss, weight loss recipes, weight loss advise, weight loss supplements, weight control, weight loss pictures, easy weight loss, weight loss products, quick weight loss diet, healthy weight loss, safe weight loss, weight loss diets and weight loss exercise.

Now the strategy would be to write posts on your blog with these keywords and possibly articles around these keywords which would then be posted to the various article directories out there.

Targetting the highest searches isn’t always a good idea – unless you have some good black-hat techniques that can help you without getting you in trouble.  Otherwise strategies such as longtail keyword or the low-hanging fruit will get you hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site.

Good luck!

Mohamed

Cross Linking Keywords With Redirection

On one of my other affiliate blogs, I was looking for an easy way to cross link keywords with simple redirection to an affiliate site.

Initially I was going to write my own plugin to handle this, so it could be done dynamically.

I started developing this – but then thought, there has to be an easier way.  Remember as a former IT guru and programmer, we always look for the easy way out.  So I searched and found two WordPress plugins that, after experimenting a little, did the trick.

The first plugin, which I’ve talked about before on the blog is called REDIRECTION.  You can download it from http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/.

This plugin allows you to set-up a pre-defined URL to be redirected to another URL and you can even set the redirection type.

The sweet thing is that the redirections are even tracked – you see the number of hits and the last time the URL was accessed.

Sorry – the image isn’t the greatest (this theme isn’t the widest, and I don’t want to mess with trying to make it wider).

So you enter your SOURCE URL, how you want to MATCH, set the ACTION and check-off REGULAR EXPRESSION and enter your TARGET URL and click ADD and you’re done.

Then in your post when you link a keyword for example “internet marketing” to the URL http://www.oibo.org/internet-marketing and the actual URL goes to http://www.oibo.org – when the user clicks on the full URL it will redirect them to the REDIRECT.

Now that is powerful.  But combine this with cross-linking and you get something that can’t be beat!

The cross-linking plugin that can be found here – http://www.web-developers.net/blog/?page_id=28 - allows you to specify a keyword or phrase and have it link to a URL.  So I use this tool to cross-link a keyword “internet marketing” to a URL specified in the REDIRECTION plugin.

So you’re thinking.  Big deal.

It is.  Because the cross-linking works accross ALL POSTS.  So if I have 500 posts with a specific keyword, I can now link each instance of that keyword to a particular URL rather than doing it one-by-one.

The advantage – I can switch affiliate links quickly and easily and your blog turns into one BIG marketing tool.

While you may not want to cross-link common words otherwise your page will look pretty messy there are alot of other techniques you can use to “hide” the link so that it doesn’t look ugly — for example, just remove the underline or change the color of links to be lighter or darker than the other text.

If you sit and think about it, you can use the cross-linking tool along with redirection to help in boosting the value of another site or blog post. 

Both tools used together are very powerful!

Mohamed