Welcome to The Truth About Internet Marketing - Internet Marketing Solution

I’ve been spending my time much of this week looking at other blogs that deal with topics that are similar to the one’s here on this blog. I check other blog sites for a couple of reasons, one is to get new ideas to write about, and the other to find posts to comment to, to get some good back links to this site.

Anyway, there was a post that said that back links are king and not content. I know that both are really important but I’ll have to disagree with that post.

Everyone wants good back links so that the search engines will rank their website better however, content has been the only constant when it comes to the web in general. It has been this way since day one. The World Wide Web was created on the basis that people from anywhere in the world can share and get information. That’s what the Internet was built around and that will never change because that’s what the World Wide Web is, and always will be.

Search engines, (especially Google) will always put content in front of anything else no matter what it is. The web as a whole could not survive without the information that is provided. That’s what the majority of web surfers do on the Internet. For the most part they buy things on a whim when they find something of interest on the web page they are reading. Without the information the Internet user would never have found that product to buy.

Traffic and rankings are really important but without good quality, and frequently updated content, those back links are totally useless. What good is the extra traffic and the better ranking, if the website has nothing of substance on it?

An incoming links number is the number of incoming links to a website from other websites. The more incoming links from relevant websites, a website gets the better.

The higher the incoming links number is and the more relevant those incoming links are, the higher the website will rank with the search engines.

It won’t do you much good if you get incoming links from websites that are not related to what your website is about. In fact it can do more harm than good. That’s why it is important that your incoming links number is related to your website.

The best place to check what your incoming links number is for your website is through Yahoo. Because Google will only show a partial list of your incoming links you won’t be able to get the whole picture. Go to Yahoo and type in the search box link:yourdomain.com replacing yourdomain with the actual name of your domain.

The higher the relevant incoming links number of incoming links to your website, the higher your website will rank on the search engines for your keywords and the more likely your website will be found.

It is very important to accumulate a high incoming links number because the more incoming links that you have the more the search engines will like you and index you well on their index.

The easiest and quickest ways of increasing your incoming links number is by posting on relevant blogs, forums, submitting to directories, (in relevant categories) submitting articles to article sites, and submitting press releases on a regular basis just to name a few.

Getting relevant high quality incoming links is a vital part of SEO. Read the four posts linked below to get a better idea of how to increase your incoming links number using directories, articles, and press releases. To get a list of blogs related to yours go to http://technorati.com and run a search.

Link Building

How to Get Indexed Really Fast

How to Write a press Release

Article Writing

Many Internet marketers seek free Internet marketing tools because they are either on a tight budget or simply don’t want to pay for a marketing tool that may or may not work.

Internet marketing tools come in many different forms. The most valuable free Internet marketing tools are those that provide good solid information that will help the marketer to better market his or her product.

I came across a great free Internet marketing tool in the form of information that teaches the basics of SEO. I can tell you that this is an excellent guide that teaches the same things that other SEO guides teach you for a price and claim that what you will learn is secret seo techniques to justify the cost.

If you are new to seo or even if you know seo, I’m sure that this free Internet marketing tool will teach you something. You can get the free internet marketing tool here.

Some webmasters use black hat strategies to give their website a boost on the search engines index. Using black hat methods is a bad idea because it can get you banned by the search engines. If you know about black hat strategies you can bet that the search engines do too.

In case you don’t know what black hat is, here is a very short and basic description. Black hat is methods that are used to optimize a website in a way that violates the search engines guidelines.

Here are the most commonly used Black Hat SEO practices.

1.) Keyword stuffing is probably the most used black hat method. Keyword stuffing is overusing keywords throughout the web page. What black hat SEO’s do is repetitively use their target keyword phrase throughout the web page. For example, instead of using a keyword phrase once in the title, a black hat method may use that keyword phrase 4 or 5 times. Basically, keyword stuffing is the use of keywords more often than needed and because of this overuse the content on the web page often doesn’t make a lot of sense.

2.) Another black hat method is inserting hidden text on the web page. This is accomplished by making the text color the same as the background color of the web page allowing the black hat SEO to place the keywords on the web page hundreds of times but the visitor will never see them. The insertion of the hidden text is for the benefit of search engines only.

3.) Redirecting visitors from one web page to another. This is done with a META REFRESH tag or with a javascript. The idea behind this method is to optimize one page for the search engines and the other is a readable version for human visitors.

4.) Web page cloaking is another commonly used black hat method. Cloaking is used to trick the search engine spiders by pointing one page to the search engines and the other is another version of the web page and is pointed to the website visitors. The search engine version is optimized for the search engine spiders and the visitor version is human readable.

The four above strategies are not all of the black hat methods that are used but they are the most widely used.

Using black hat methods may get your website an initial boost on the major search engines but somewhere down the line they will detect these methods and will surely ban any website that is optimized using black hat methods.

Stick with the methods that are allowed by the search engines otherwise you will find yourself with a website that you can’t do anything with because it has been banned by the search engines.

This is something that I do on a regular basis. You really want to do this when you start a new website or when you get on the top of the index.

If you have started a new website and have done all of the things that you need to do when starting a website you really should find out where you are listed on the major search engines so that you will know if your new website is going in the right direction or not.

In the beginning it will take time to find where you are positioned however it is well worth taking the time to do this.

There are a few ways to check where you are and how you are doing. You should do all of them when doing your evaluation. What you will want to do is to search your main keywords and keyword phrases as follows. Type these in the search field on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Run these three searches to see where you are listed. The allintitle you should be able to find somewhere right away providing that you used a keyword or keyword phrase that is not very competitive. If you are using a competitive keyword or keyword phrase you probably don’t have a very good keyword and you won’t be able to compete in the first place.

Click on every page of the results until you find your site using the above criteria. Use a spread sheet and type your position on each search engine no matter what position it may be.

It will probably take you some time the first time that you do this but after that you should be able to find your site pretty quickly for each of the search engines providing you document the results for each.

Check your position every day to see if your position has improved or has gotten worse. If you find that your website is improving, you will know that you are doing the right things to get your website ranked toward the top of the search engines. If it is getting worse then you will know that you need to make some changes to get it going in the right direction.

The thing that you need to understand is that your site will fluctuate up and down on the index. This is quite normal. What you want to look out for is that it is not heading in the wrong direction on a continuous basis.

Once you have found your website on the index of each search engine it won’t take you long to find it after that providing that do this on a daily basis. This is well worth doing and it will save you time and get you on the first page of the major search engines much quicker.

If you are already on the top of the search engines you definitely want to do this to make sure that you stay there. Things can change really quickly on a search engine index and if something happens to your position you want to know about it when it happens so that you can make whatever corrections necessary to get back on top.

I am sure that you have seen the search engine submission services that offer to submit your website to thousands of search engines. If you are thinking about using a search engine submission service, don’t waste your time.

Since the main three search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN handle over 90% of all searches on the Internet paying someone to submit to any other search engine is a waste of time and money.

You don’t need to submit your site to any of the search engines in the first place because if you setup and optimize your website properly you will be found by the search engines. As a matter of fact, it is the preferred way of being indexed. The only submission that you have to make is to MSN and the only thing that you have to submit is the link to the main page of your website and MSN will do the rest. With Google and Yahoo you don’t need to submit at all.

These submission services also tell you that they will resubmit your website to the search engines monthly. Once your website is indexed the search engines will update your website automatically. There is no reason to do this again. You could be banned from the search engine for spamming or at the very least penalized with a worse position in the index.

What you should be submitting to is directories, article sites, and press release sites, along with updating the content on your website on a regular basis. That’s what will get you indexed and get you a better ranking on the search engine index. Good relevant back links and good updated content are the key ingredients to a good search engine position.

Every time that you add new content to your website or acquire relevant back links to your website will have the search engines crawling your website to check what changes have been made. The more you update the more prominent you will be on the search engines.

One other thing to stay away from is those services that guarantee a first page listing on the search engines. Sounds good on the surface but in reality it’s nothing but a scam. What these services do is select a set of non competitive keyword phrases that can get a first page listing easily. The problem with this is they use phrases that no one is searching for and often use phrases that aren’t relevant to your website. They count on your ignorance in search engine optimization. Anyone can list on the first page of Google for keyword phrases that no one uses.

Getting a good position for a quality keyword or keyword phrase on the search engines takes a lot of work and time. The key is that the more relevant Inlinks and content that you have, the more prominent your website will be on the search engines.

I think that so many Internet marketers are so fixated on digital or service related products such as software, ebooks, seo services, etc that they really don’t bother looking into physical products.

To start with most of these types of products are so saturated in the IM market it is almost impossible to find anything worth promoting that is potentially profitable. Have you run keyword searches for digital or service related products? If you have I’m guessing that you haven’t found much that will be profitable or isn’t super competitive.

There are a lot of gems out there when it comes to physical products because most people that do promote physical products are business owners promoting their own products. I can tell you that if you are an Internet marketer who is worth your salt you can blow these business owners out of the water because they don’t know crap about promoting their products online.

I have a couple of products that I have recently found that has very little competition that appears to be extremely profitable. I’m not going to tell you what they are at this time because I just started to promote them and I don’t have any real data at this time. From the early indications it looks like I’ll be able to get on the first page of Google in no time for my main keywords. It only took me 72 hours to get the website that I’m promoting this product on indexed.

If you are having the same problem that most Internet marketers are having of finding decent products and good keywords for those products promoting real physical products is definitely an easier game to play because the playing field is a lot more level and the supposed Gurus don’t seem to like playing on that field.

I can tell you from the research that I’ve done you can find some really nice keywords that are not very competitive at all.

Here’s the key. Find a bunch of physical products that you may consider promoting. It’s important that you find the product that you want to sell first because that’s what you want to build your website around. You will want the type of product that you promote in your domain name if possible as well.

Find a main product and build a niche around that product. For example: If you ran a search on chairs and recliner proved to be a good choice you could build your online business around recliners. Let me say before I go any further that I have no idea whether or not if recliner is a profitable choice or not because I haven’t checked to see if it is or not. I’m using this as an example and nothing else.

Here’s how to determine if a product choice is profitable or not. Run a keyword search with the yahoo keyword suggestion tool. In the above example you would run a search on chairs. You would look at the results that sit under the main keyword of chair and check to see if there is anything there that has a decent amount of searches. In our pretend search above we found that recliner has a decent amount of searches. Let’s pretend that we found 20,000 searches for this keyword.

The best thing to do when running a keyword search is to copy and past the results to a spreadsheet such as excel so that you can further analyze each keyword or keyword phrase result.

Ok. We’ve run our search and have found that recliner looks like it may be a good fit. To see how competitive and profitable the keyword recliner is we will run an allintitle search. Don’t worry, an allintitle search is a very simple process that takes less than a minute to run. Go to Google and type in allintitle:recliner

In our pretend allintitle search we find that recliner is found in the title on 5,000 website web pages. To determine how profitable and how competitive a keyword or keyword phrase is simply divide the search results by the allintitle search results to get your answer. In our recliner example you would take the 20,000 searches and divide it by the 5,000 allintitle searches which would give us a 4.

What we have done is ascertained the supply against the demand for our fictitious keyword search for recliner. In our search we found that the demand is 4-1 against the supply, which is an excellent ratio and a product that is well worth pursuing.

What our keyword search has told us is that there aren’t too many websites that we need to beat and that there are plenty of people out there who are looking for what we want to sell.

I’ve rambled on long enough with this. I’m certain that you get the idea. If you want to see real allintitle search results check out this post to get a better idea of what I’ve been talking about here. http://the-truth-about-internet-marketing.com/2007/03/30/the-all-important-allintitle

Here’s the link to Yahoo’s keyword suggestion tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

If you are a webmaster and Internet marketer and don’t use Google’s webmaster tools you are missing out on a great resource that Google provides for free to all webmasters.

You do have to signup to use this resource. It takes less than a minute to do so. I am not going to go into too much detail of what features are included with Google webmaster tools. You can get that information yourself after you signup with Google.

The nice thing about Google webmaster tools is that you can run diagnostics to check for any potential problems with your website. You will need to verify your website in order to use this feature and any other features before you can start using the tools. This is all explained in Google’s webmaster member area.

If you don’t have a sitemap for your website you can create one using one of the webmaster tools. If you already have a sitemap you can submit it in the webmaster tools member area to ensure that Google crawls and indexes all of the web pages on your website.

Another nice relatively new feature that Google webmaster tools provides is a crawl rate report that tells you the number of pages that Google’s bot crawls a day. This is nice because it will tell you what pages Google is looking at and more importantly what pages they are not looking at which can tell you that there probably is a problem with the web pages that Google’s crawl robot is overlooking. This is an important feature because it will allow you to go back and revisit these pages and make whatever corrections that are necessary to get them indexed. The more web pages that get indexed on your website, will give people more ways of finding you.

Those are just a few features that Google webmaster tools provide for webmasters. There are many more. You can learn about them yourself after you have signed up for Google webmaster tools. You can find the signup page here. Click the Create a Google Account to signup.

So many marketers don’t use the allintitle when running keyword research either because they don’t know about it or just don’t want to bother doing it.

What the allintitle does is it checks how many web pages have an exact keyword phrase in the title. There is no way that you can determine how competitive a chosen keyword or keyword phrase is unless you know how many people are using that keyword or keyword phrase. Using the allintitle will help you determine how competitive and profitable your keyword will be.

Keep in mind the less competitive a keyword is, the easier it is to get a high ranking on the search engines and the more profitable you will be. If you are using a keyword that 10,000,000 others are using you will have very little chance if any at all of being found and the chances of making money with what you are selling will be a lot harder because there will be too many others selling the same product as you.

Here’s how to determine whether or not your keywords will be too competitive or not. Of course you will have to get a list of your keywords before you can do anything at all. You can run keyword searches using the yahoo keyword tool or the new free wordtracker tool. I’d use the yahoo tool if it’s working because the yahoo tool gives you results by the month where wordtracker gives you them by the day. You can still determine approximately how many clicks a month by multiplying the daily number by thirty days.

Copy and paste the keywords that you find into an excel spreadsheet or any comparable spreadsheet. If you don’t have a spreadsheet notepad will do. Using a spreadsheet will make it easier to organize your keyword list but it is not essential that you use it. It just will be a lot easier using a spreadsheet.

What you want to do is go to Google and type in your keyword phrase using allintitle. Say that you are checking the keyword phrase ‘dog collar’, you would type it in the search like this allintitle:dog collar. To see this example in action Click here. If you look in the top right side of the results you will see that 158,000 web pages are using this keyword phrase in the title. The keyword phrase ‘dog collar’ without looking at how many people have searched that phrase is probably too competitive to use. If you were to make a slight change to that keyword phrase ‘dog collar’ and make it ‘dog shock collar’ you will get a very different result. Click here to see the results for dog shock collar. As you can see the results show that 671 web pages use this keyword phrase and you probably will be able to compete with this keyword.

To determine whether a keyword phrase is too competitive or not, you need to compare how many searches were done for the keyword phrase, against how many results there are for the allintitle search. If the searches are higher than the web page results from your allintitle search, then you have a very good keyword phrase. If it’s the other way around, you are better off not using the phrase as it will be very difficult to get a high ranking for the keyword phrase.

Because the search engines place so much weight on the web page title when ranking a site it is really important to do this if you want to have any chance of getting a high ranking for your keyword phrases. The less competitive the keyword phrase is the better your chances are of getting a good ranking on the search engines. You also will learn a lot about the product that you are promoting by going through this process.

You have a website and it now is starting to get some traffic. It has been a long grueling haul but finally some visitors are beginning to find you. Your number one priority is to make sure that they keep coming back by providing them with great information. Your number two priority should be how they are finding you.

It is very important that you know where your traffic is coming from so that you can keep growing that traffic. The more that you know about the origin of your traffic, the more traffic you will get.

The whole idea of evaluating the traffic to your website is to find whatever consistencies there are and build on those that you find. There is an absolute goldmine in doing this as it will allow you to build on what you already have many times over.

For example; let’s say that you suddenly have a big increase in traffic from the search engines. The first thing that you will want to check is to see what keywords are being used to find you. If you find that the majority of your new found traffic is coming from one or two keywords, or keyword phrases, you will want to make appropriate decisions as to how not only to keep that traffic coming but what changes are needed so that you can potentially increase the traffic that you are already getting.

Here are a couple of things that you might do to increase your traffic with the keywords that you find. The first thing that you would want to do is to make those keywords more prominent on your website by using them more often throughout your site. Add it to your title tag, description tag, and keywords tag, and more often in the body, if it’s not already in those places. Just don’t overdue it. Never use your keywords anymore than 3% of the time throughout your website. Anything more than that, will hurt your rankings with the search engines. If your website is a blog or forum writing something that relates directly to the keyword or keyword phrase will help boost your prominence in the search engines as well. You should be able to write quite a few different posts that will relate to the keywords that you find.

You may find that a big chunk of your traffic is coming from a particular blog or forum that you comment or post to. If that were the case, you certainly would want to go there more often and comment or post. However people are finding you, there is always a way to make it better so that you can get even more people to your website.

I have written about the traffic evaluation tool Statcounter before on this blog. If you already have it, start using it. If you don’t, get it. Statcounter works on all websites, including blogs. This is the best traffic evaluation tool that I know of. If you can think of it, statcounter can do it. If you don’t have statcounter, you can get it here. http://statcounter.com Don’t worry; I’m not trying to sell you anything. There is a free version as well as a pay version of statcounter. I recommend you go with the free version because you probably don’t need the pay version at this point in time. Down the road you may need it, but for now, chances are you don’t need it.

You will be amazed at what you will find when doing a quick ten minute traffic evaluation of your website. Since all websites are different and there is no clear cut answer to driving traffic to any, one, website, makes traffic evaluation essential.