Choosing your keywords and writing your articles is only a percentage of what you need to do to make money.  If you’re serious about making money online you need to learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  This blog post will cover the basics of what is known as off page SEO.

Basically in order to prove to the search engines that your website is legit and full of great content that would be useful to it’s searchers you need to have other websites link to you.  Basically it’s like getting votes in an election but the difference is that not all votes are equal.

Now before you go getting as many sites to link to you as possible you need to understand a little thing called anchor text.  Anchor text is simply the text used when one website links to another.  Most people who don’t understand anchor text for off page SEO purposes will simply use things like “click here”, “visit Bob’s blog” and such like. 

However if you are wanting to rank for specific keywords this won’t help you much at all. Instead you want to make sure that you use the keywords you are wanting to rank for.  For example, here is the prefect anchor text for linking to the home page of this blog:  how to make money online.

However be careful because if we suddenly got hundreds of links with the above anchor text we could get into a bit of trouble with the search engines who would penalize us.  It simply looks a bit fishy.  Instead we would request people use a variety of different anchors such as:

Making money online
How to make money with a website
Earn money from the internet
Make money
Ways to make online money

OK, so for the sake of example, let’s say you have an article titled “How to Stop Your Dog Barking,” you would want to think of other things that people would search for or you could even do a bit of keyword research.  So here are a few examples:-

stop dog barking
stop dog from barking
how do I stop my dog from barking
dog training barking advice

You want to vary the anchor text because it look more natural to the search engines and also because it will help you to rank for these keywords too.

Not wanting to get too bogged down by this aspect what you need to know at this stage where you are able to get these links.  You will get some ideas here:-

Article Directories

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of article directories on the internet.  One of the most highly-regarded is ezinearticles.com as they receive loads of submissions every day and many of their articles rank very highly for some competitive keywords.

It shouldn’t cost you anything to submit to these directories however with so many to submit to you could take days creating accounts and submitting your articles.  This just doesn’t make financial sense as time is money.

So in order to speed up the process you will find that there are many companies who offer software and membership services.  The prices all vary greatly depending on what features they offer

Web Directories

These are simply sites that list websites in different categories with a description.  They don’t hold an awful lot of weight in terms of SEO but they are pretty simple to acquire and add a bit of variety to your incoming links.  Again, there are a number of software applications out there that offer to make things much easier for you.

Social Bookmarking

There are lots of sites that allow people to create account and submit sites that they like.  The idea is that people can see your bookmarks and find sites that could be of interest to them.  Also, if a sites gets lots of people bookmarking it, it will possibly appear on the home page providing extra exposure.

We’re not really interested in having people find our sites via social bookmarking, we simply want the back links.  Again, there are some companies who have created software to make this really fast and easy.  Probably the most popular is Bookmarking Demon.  It’s not all that cheap but you’ll get upgrades for life and it’s very quick and easy to use once you get to grips with it.

Often you if you read blogs and websites about SEO, you will come away thinking that it must be really difficult.  The truth is that often people make it seem more complicated than it really is.  If you stick to the basics as described above you should be able to do pretty well.  Also, bear in mind that it can take the search engines a while to rank your website well.  So the work that you do today could take weeks or even months to take effect.  Don’t let that put you off, just be patient and have faith.

OK, by now you should know what a buying keyword is, if not please read about Buying v Browsing Keywords first.  If you have already read it then it’s time to get cracking.

I will be showing you a variety of different methods of keyword research here and in this example I’m using the buying keyword “buy” along with a pretty generic word “stick.”

1.  Free Keyword Suggestion Tool From Wordtracker

Simply visit the site here and enter “buy stick” (without the quotes) and you should see something that looks like this:-




Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

Again simply pop in your keywords and choose “show all” from the columns to be displayed drop-down menu.  You’ll find a great selection of keywords here to pick from.

Amazon

If you are wanting to promote products on Amazon then simply go to their website and make use of their search box which works a bit like predictive text.





Ebay

If the keywords you found above isn’t enough for you, you can enter your keyword at ebay and have a look at the related searches.  If you click on one of the results you will be led to even more keywords that you’d never have thought of in a million years!





Google Wonderwheel

This is a pretty fun way of researching keywords because it’s very visual.  A spider graph is created and you can keep clicking on different words in order to throw up even more!
 

Are all of the keywords above automatically “buying” keywords?  Unfortunately not.  Before you write an article about one of the keywords above you need to ask yourself a couple of questions?

What is the product?
Are there enough products or advertisers available that you can promote easily? 
What is the cost?

Let’s take “walking stick bugs” for instance.  Walking stick bugs are also known as stick insects and people who are interested in keeping unusual pets tend to buy them.

Doing a search on ebay and Amazon doesn’t bring up all that much.  All the products that I can see are items featuring images of the bugs, books about them or such like.  The person who wants to buy the live insects are not going to be interested in these products.  In terms of Adsense, the CPC (cost per click) is only 5 cents which is abysmal.  Personally I wouldn’t go with this keyword.

“Stick vacuum cleaners” on the other hand is much more attractive to me because there are plenty of them being sold on both Amazon and eBay.  The cost is pretty low which means shoppers won’t have to worry about the cost too much.  Also, vacuum cleaners are the sort of items that everyone has and needs to replace every now and again because they break down and they’re too costly to have repaired.

In terms of choosing an article title for this I would chose something along the lines of…

Where to Buy Stick Vacuum Cleaners?
How to Buy Stick Vacuum Cleaners
Black & Decker Cordless Stick Vacuum:  Buyers Guide

Also, don’t forget to throw in words like cheap, low cost and affordable into the article as most of the time other websites won’t target them yet you can get quite nice traffic from it.  However please make sure you don't go overboad with these words.  If you have an article titled "Cheap Stick Vacuum Cleaners" and then it turns out your only writing about them, people can get pretty mad.

Most people find that doing keyword research is the hardest part of making money online but it starts to get easier the more you do it.  Will you be able to make money with every keyword you choose?  No, not even the “experts” will get it right every time.  A lot of people simply use the internet to find out about products and compare prices.  They will then print off some details and take them along to their local shop and ask “can you match this price?”