Taking advantage of organic keywords rock - showing up on page 1 on Google or Yahoo for key terms is a great way to build traffic and is the dream of many webmasters. Lets look at how you can use organic keywords coupled with a little PPC to generate your site some amazing search results.

So, what is ‘organic keywords’? Organic keywords are those that appear naturally on your web site and contribute to the search engine ranking of the page. By taking advantage of those keywords, you can improve your site rankings without putting out additional budget dollars. The problem, however, is that gaining organic ranking alone can take four to six months or longer. To help speed the time it takes to achieve good rankings, many organizations (or individuals) will use organic keywords in addition to some type of PPC  or pay for inclusion service.

To take advantage of organic keywords, you first need to know what those keywords are. One way to find out is to us a web-site metric application, like the one that Google provides. Some of these services track the keywords that push users to your site. When viewing the reports associated with keywords, you can quickly see how your PPC keywords draw traffic, and also what keywords in which you’re not investing still draw traffic.

Another way to discover what could possibly be organic keywords is to consider the words that would be associated with your web site, product, or business name. For example, a writer might include various keywords about the area in which she specializes, but one keyword she won’t necessarily want to purchase is the word “writer,” which should be naturally occurring on the site.

The word won’t necessarily garner high traffic for you, but when that word is combined with more specific keywords, perhaps keywords that you acquire through a PPC service, the organic words can help to push traffic to your site. Going back to our writer example, if the writer specializes in writing about AJAX, the word writer might be an organic keyword, and AJAX might be a keyword that the writer bids for in a PPC service.

Now, when potential visitors use a search engine to search for AJAX writer, the writer’s site has a better chance of being listed higher in the results rankings. Of course, by using more specific terms related to AJAX in addition to “writer,” the chance is pretty good that the organic keyword combined with the PPC keywords will improve search rankings.

So when you come to consider organic keywords, think of words that you might not be willing to spend your budget on, but which could help improve your search rankings, either alone or when combined with keywords that you are willing to invest in.

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Inbound links are now so important in the constant battle to achieve top search engine rankings, that tons of people are using every tactic under the sun to gain that one additional link. You must be careful when it comes to linking though. You could jeopardize your whole linking plan by getting links in a shady manner which could have an adverse affect on your search rankings. These inbound links are seen by search engines as votes for your site within a particular community of sites.

Anytime you’re being voted for, you want to have as many votes as possible. however you want to be using tactics which are going to pay dividends in your linking strategy, not do more harm then good. Below i list some of the best and safest methods around for generating inbound links for your website. Some can be more effective than others:

• Requesting Links: The oldest method of gaining inbound links is to request them. This requires that you study your market to find out who the players involved in the market are. Then, you contact each one of the sites and ask them to link to your site. In most cases, the person you contact receives your request, but providing links to other sites is the least of their worries, so you may never hear from them. If you do, it can sometimes be months later. So, you put a lot of time into requesting links from other sites for a relatively small return on your efforts. For more on requesting links, i recommend you checkout The Do’s & Dont’s of Requesting Links.

• Writing Articles: One of the most effective methods of gaining inbound links is to offer an article for other companies to use as long as they include a paragraph at the bottom that includes credits for you as well as a link back to your site. This method of gaining inbound links works well, because web sites are always looking for good content to include on their pages. The catch here is that the article you write should be well written, accurate, and useful to other sites in your industry. Once you’ve produced an article that meets these requirements, you can begin to let others know you have content available for them to use for free; you can do this by having a ‘free articles’ page on your site or submit the content to article directories. For more on article marketing, view Bill Platt’s in-depth article, Article Marketing for Links.

• Blogs: Another way to get links back to your site is from bloggers. What started as a strange phenomenon that was mostly personal has now become a powerful business tool; many businesses rely on links back to their sites from the various industry bloggers out there. In most cases, though, bloggers aren’t just going to stumble onto your web site. It’s far better for you to contact the blogger with information about your organization, some product that you offer, or with news that would interest them. This information then gives the blogger something to use in his or her regular posts. Keep in mind, however, that you can’t control what a blogger might say, so it’s possible that the review you get won’t be favorable. Its possible to get reviews from small to mid-sized blogs without too much of a problem, but when it comes to getting reviews from the most popular blogger in your niche, it may cost you a few hundred $$$. For example, John Chow charges a whopping $500 for a review, which he doesn’t even write himself.

• Press Releases: Press releases are one of the mainstays of any marketing program. It can be so effective that many organizations hire companies to do nothing but distribute their press releases. What’s so powerful about a press release? It’s just the facts, including benefits, sent out to publications and organizations that might publish all or part of the press release. Use press release marketing to send out new items of all types, and send them as widely as you can. New organizations, publications, newsletters, even some forums will post press releases. When you write it, make sure a link back to your site is included.

• Affiliate Programs: Affiliate programs are a type of paid advertising. You provide a link to people who want to link back to your web site. They place the link on their site and when someone clicks through that link and makes a purchase (or converts any other goal you have arranged), the affiliate — the person who placed your link on their site — gets paid a small percentage. Usually the payment for affiliate programs is very low ($.01 to $.05 per click or a small percentage of the sale). But some people make a good living being affiliates, and many organizations receive additional traffic because of their affiliate programs. The trick with affiliate programs is to not allow them to be your sole source of incoming links.

• PPC and Paid Links: Pay-per-click advertisements are an acceptable business practice. There is no problem with using PPC advertisements to achieve inbound links to your site. Remember that, like affiliate links, PPC links are not direct links to your site. Paid links, on the other hand, are different from affiliate links — you pay to have a direct, or flat link, placed on a page. Some search engines frown on the practice of using these types of links. Using paid links (especially those that land on link farms) is a practice that carries some business risk.

• Link to Yourself: Linking to yourself is a technique that sits right on the line between ethical and unethical. Linking to yourself from other sites that you might own is an acceptable practice. But if you set up other sites simply to be able to link back to your own site and create the illusion of popularity, you’re going to do more damage than it’s probably worth to you. If you are linking to yourself and you suspect that you might be doing something that would adversely affect your search engine ranking, then you shouldn’t do it. There are plenty of links to be had without linking back to your own web sites; you just have to work a little harder for the higher quality links.

Inbound links are such an important part of any online marketing strategies that some organizations find themselves caught up in the process of learning who is linking back to them. It’s not a bad thing to want to know where your links are coming from. And one of the places you can gather that information is from your web-analytics application. A great and free analytics program available is Google Analytics. Check it out.

So there are my top link snagging tips which i actively employ for most of my online businesses. Which tactics do you use for your website, and have i missed out any good link-snagging techniques? Have your say by leaving me a comment.

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Tagging used to refer just to the tags that you placed in your web site’s HTML to indicate certain types of formatting or commands. Tagging today often refers to something entirely different. When you hear the terms “tagged” or “tagging” in conversation today, it could very well refer to a phenomenon called social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, share, classify, and search Internet bookmarks. There is some debate over how important social bookmarking is in SEO, but the consensus seems to be leaning toward the idea that social bookmarking, along with many other social media optimization (SMO) strategies, is quickly becoming a serious consideration for SEO. So let’s look at social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is provided by services such as de.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, StumbleUpon, and Furl.net, which are taking the Internet by storm. They’re often referred to as Web 2.0 services, because they involve a high level of social interaction, which is the fastest growing element of the Internet today.

In social bookmarking, people create their own topics and lists for places on the Internet that they like or dislike. Those people can then give the places they choose a category (or tag) and a rank. Once they’ve ranked a site, they have the option to send that ranking out to anyone who is subscribed to their RSS feed.

The implications this can have on SEO are dramatic. For example, let’s say that one person visits your site during a web search and finds that it’s easy to use, and contains all the information they were looking for. That person could very well tag your site. The tag is then distributed to the people who are subscribed to his or her RSS feed. It’s word-of-mouth marketing — called viral marketing in today’s world — at its best.

One person tells 25, who then visit your site. Then maybe 15 of those people (60 percent) tell another 25 people each. The list keeps growing and growing. This means a huge amount of traffic for the website which has been tagged. For example, one of my articles got Dugg & Stumbled a few weeks back which sent in excess of 16,000 visitors to my website in the space of only 24 hours.

So, the question, “Should you pay any attention to social bookmarking?” becomes “How do I take advantage of social bookmarking?” And the answer is, make your site worthy of bookmarking. Bookmarks appear to web crawlers as links to your page, and that makes them very valuable SEO tools. For some search engines, the more bookmarks that lead back to your site, the more “votes” you have on their popularity scale.

So, visit some of the social bookmarking sites on the Internet. Learn how they work. And set up your own account. Then, create your own list of links that includes your web sites, as well as other web sites that users might find relevant or useful.

On the web-site side, be sure to include the code snippets provided by social bookmarking organizations that allow users to tag your site easily. Then, maintain it all. Don’t just forget your account completely. If you do, eventually it will disappear and all the advantage of having one will go as well. Instead, continue using social bookmarking. Over time, the rewards will be increased traffic to your web site.

Want to give it a go? If you liked this article, you can give social bookmarking a try today. Just click on the Digg This or Add to Delicious links at the bottom of the page to cast your ‘vote’ on this article. It will give you your first try at social bookmarking, and will help me spread the word about this article too!

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There’s an old adage in the business world: If you want to improve something, you have to work at it some more. If you’re going to get serious about increasing your audience, you need to get from the how many read me” to the “what do they like” data, and that’s going to mean using some free tools and marketing methods.

Here’s a longer than usual list of small but useful things you can do to build your blog. We’ll start with some basic, cover-your-bases stuff and move on from there to more advanced techniques.

• Know your stats. At a bare minimum, you need to know where to find your stats in your blogging software and/or have a Site Meter badge. As RSS continues to ramp up, an absolute must, is a free or paid FeedBurner account!

• Who are you? Don’t be coy about your About page and profile if you want to garner readers. Even if you are blogging anonymously, give your readers something. Checkout Darren’s post, on How to Write Your “About Me” Page.

• Master basic social skills. Whether you love or hate social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us, at least some of your readers love them, so make it easy to vote for your posts. There’s a multitude of ways of doing this, but the easiest and the one i recommend is the ShareThis plugin which creates a popup menu when clicked, with links to all of the major social bookmarking sites to submit your content. You can see an example of this plugin at the bottom of this post. Try it out.

• RSS above the fold. For blogs, “above the fold” means before you need to scroll, and that’s where you want your RSS stuff. For example, this is the location you will want your standard, FeedBurner, or specific RSS reader badges to reside. Making it as easy as possible for readers to subscribe to your blog and save clicks pays off.

• Get listed. Multitudes of blog directories are out there. Three you should make the effort to check out and get listed in are MyBlogLog, Globe of Blogs, and Blogarama. Looking for more blog directories? See Kevin’s post, 75 Websites You Can Submit Your Blog To for an excellent list.

• Get listed, part 2. Don’t forget website directories that accept blogs, such as the Yahoo Directory (paid), the Open Directory Project, and specialty directories in your industry or geographic location.

• Respond to comments. At the risk of boring you, let me say it again: Blogs are a conversation, and that means you absolutely should respond to comments. Doing so will turn first-time visitors into loyal readers. For more information on getting more comments, see Start The Blogging Conversation.

• Post on weekends. Conventional blogging wisdom is you shouldn’t post on weekends because fewer people read blogs then. By the same token, there are fewer posts competing for attention.

• Show your back stock. One way or another, get a list of your best/most popular posts onto the front page of your blog. There’s no better way of turning a chance meeting into the start of a lasting relationship with your blog. A good wordpress plugin for this is MostWanted.

• Give credit and links where they are due. Simply put, the more links out of your blog, the more people will link to your blog. So even when you can’t pin to a specific post, link to that blog or website and give credit where it’s due.

• Post when your readers expect you to post. When you post creates expectations. If you post twice a day for months then not at all for two weeks, your readership will drift away. Know what your posting goal is and keep to it, and don’t be shy sharing that with your readers.

• Make use of trackbacks. When you’re blogging about some major blogger’s post, either positively or negatively, use your blogging software’s ability to send a trackback to that blogger. You will be surprised how often the trackback recipient will comment on your posts. This technique works only if you’re blogging in earnest, not fishing for links. For more on Trackbacks see Darren’s post, Introduction to Trackbacks.

All done? Here are more ways to get more readers that take more effort:

• Make friends with fellow bloggers. That means follow their blogs, be helpful, get to know them, and comment intelligently. Don’t ask for links up front. Don’t expect instant acceptance. Don’t be irrelevant. And don’t nag!

• Use photos. The right photo triples the impact of a good post. Take them yourself, find them at Flickr already permissioned at  (2.7 million and counting), or spend a dollar each at iStockPhoto.

• Post your photos at Flickr. People are interested in seeing themselves and other people. If you take digital photos, post them to Flickr and include a Flickr gallery on your blog.

• Participate in newsgroups. While newsgroups have faded in recent years, you’ll find at least one very active newsgroups covering just about every topic imaginable. Dive right in. And don’t forget to include your blog’s URL in your signature line.

• Use Squidoo. Build one or more lenses to showcase your best blogs about a given topic, or which together form a great tutorial, or just to establish your reputation as someone who knows a thing or two. Checkout Pigboom’s post on Improving SEO with Squidoo.

• Convert old posts into new ezine articles. What’s the difference between a great post you did on a subject six months ago and a free ezine article that drives traffic to your blog? About ten minutes’ effort on your part at ezine sites like iSnare, Ezine Articles, and especially the SiteProNews directory of article directories.

• Guest post. This technique has worked wonders for me over the last few months. Offer another (more influential) blogger guest posts to keep the content rolling while that blogger is on vacation, overextended, and so on. This technique presupposes you have some sort of relationship going, that the other blogger has either asked for guest posts or seems ready for the idea, and that you have at least a few posts that would fit the bill.

• Provide answers. In just about every area, there are current questions that need answers. Think about the subjects you blog on. What questions could a little non-blog research or data-gathering answer? A good tool for finding subjects that people are currently in need of answers for is Yahoo! Answers.

So there are my 20 top tips for building the reader base of your blog. Of course, there are many more methods available to bloggers to aid them in building their blog, whats your methods do you use? How did you generate the amount of subscribers you have at your blog, and how long did it take?

If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us or StumbleUpon. I’d appreciate it.

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