The Cheap Bastid» SEO Guide

Who says the government never helps anyone?

admin — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:34:45 +0000

When you look around right now, it’s easy to get depressed. You know people who have picked up pink slips. There are houses in your area that have been foreclosed and they are just sitting there like rotting teeth in your neighborhood because no-one’s buying. And what are those guys doing up there in Washington? Well they seem to be doing nothing that’s really going to help the ordinary people of America. They are carrying on with the same old, same old arguments. Tax cuts solve all our problems. We’ve got to spend billions to rebuild America. Like tax cuts are going to help you when you’re unemployed, and planning something to build is going to make for new work opportunities tomorrow. Well, for once, there is some good news. The Stimulus Package has hundreds of pages and thousands of plans but there’s one that might turn out to be a “good thing”. Now don’t you go holding your breath because what it says in something produced by Washington may not work out on Main Street. But let’s look on the bright side for once. This one may just pay off.

If you have the cash or access to credit or you totaled your last vehicle and the insurers paid out a fair value, you’re looking for a new car or truck. Well, hold off for a few days to see how this pans out. The Stimulus Package potentially allows you to deduct sales or excise taxes if the car you buy costs less than $49,500. If confirmed, you can take advantage of this as an above-the-line deduction so long as your personal income as a single person is less than $125,000, married couples qualify when their aggregate income is less than $250,000 – that’s most of us, right? There will be no need for you to itemize to make the claim. So exactly how much will you save? Well, those eager beaver tax experts have been burning the midnight oil so here goes with an example.

Suppose your state has a sales tax of 5% and you spend $40,000 to buy a vehicle, you can deduct $2,000 from your gross income. This offer is limited in time. You have to buy between the date the bill is signed into law and December 31. The hope is this will encourage you to go buy a new car sooner rather than later. Not only will you save money but it will help Detroit as well. So, if you do take advantage of this deal, the terms of your financing package will require a new auto insurance policy, probably with comprehensive and collision included. To get the best deal, you need to hit the online sites to get the maximum number of quotes. Remember, you’re not looking for the cheapest car insurance policy on the planet, you’re looking for the best value-for-money policy on the planet that will give you the best protection for the lowest possible premium.

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A New Keyword Tool | Detecting Commercial Intention

admin — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:41:42 +0000

This is a new keyword tool for you to use. It comes from Microsoft Adcenter. Actually it’s not a new keyword tool, it’s been around for a while. It’s called the Commercial Intent Tool, you can find it here. It’s just another weapon in my arsenal of profit.

Basically, the way it works is you type in your intended keyword and the keyword tool will give you the ‘Commercial Intention’ of it.

In simpler terms, it’ll tell you if people who are searching for that keyword are looking to buy something, or, more importantly, likely to click an ad.

I find this keyword tool useful for when I’m trying to decide on which keyword to use as my traffic keyword in an article, I always choose the one with the highest commercial intent.

Here’s some examples of how it works. Lets say I write an article about barbecue. Should I use barbecue as my traffic driver? Lets see…

Ooowee, not many clickers with this keyword...

Hmm, .61, not good at all. Probably not many clicks with this keyword. Let’s plug ‘barbecue grill’ into the keyword tool…

Better, but still sucks..

A little better, but still not what I’m looking for. How about ‘cheap barbecue grill’

This is much better! I found my keyword!

Holy crap! .98, you really can’t get much better than this. This is the keyword I should use as my traffic driver. Certainly the people arriving at my article are looking to buy and that means more clicks and Amazon sales, and you know what that means… Mo’ Money!

Obviously you need to find a balance between traffic and intent. If a keyword with an intent of .80 gets 60k hits a day it’s probably better than one with a .90 intent that only gets 15k hits a day.

Use this keyword tool to decide on like traffic keywords, sometimes there is an amazing difference.

If you can get high traffic, high intent keywords you WILL get more clicks!

Let me know what you think of this keyword tool and if it makes a difference in your keyword choices and income.

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Adding Keywords to your Articles

admin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 03:24:40 +0000

Another micro-tip here.

If you add a photo to an eHow article there’s a spot to give credit. Well, just put a keyword there too.

Check out this article, notice how I put a keyword in the credit.

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Using the Search Engine Optimization Analysis Tool

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 02:07:23 +0000

The results are in!

I nearly fell off my chair when I found this tool. It’s my dream come true when it comes to SEO, keywords and writing articles.

I’m the kind of guy that loves to crunch numbers, I also don’t give up until I get it right. So when I found this tool I started analyzing my articles and made some startling discoveries, both about the mistakes I’ve been making and the interesting quirks about eHow articles.

With that being said, go to the tool here (make sure you bookmark it).

Open up a new window, go to one of your articles and cut and past the URL into the box on the Analyzer page, you’ll also need to answer (the amazingly weak) security question below it.

There’s only two things we need to look at once the results page comes up. We aren’t building a website, just a one page article. I’ll touch upon the relevant sections.

On the results menu, click on ‘Meta tag analysis’ Here the tool will tell you how well you did with your article in terms of relevancy and making it robot friendly.

Check out the results above for one of my best paying articles.

As you can see for title I did very good, probably didn’t get 100% because I didn’t use the phrase ‘best price’ in my article. Description was at 98% which is excellent. I want to point out something VERY IMPORTANT here, it says robots generally don’t read past the 200th character in the description. So, you eHow’ers who write novels for your description keep in mind any keywords you put in after the 200th character will NOT be seen by the search engines. Keep it short, even better put your keywords as early as possible in your description! I also want to point out where it says ‘No Keyword Meta Data Found!’

Now, here are two quirks about ehow.

Even though the eHow article writing page has an area to enter keywords, it DOES not show up for search engine robots!! This is an error with how the page was programmed, maybe they’ll fix it one day so make sure you use it, but don’t rely on it to get odd keywords onto your page, use the photo trick here.
Further analyses of an eHow article page shows the h2 and h3 tags are NOT being used properly. The h1 tag is the article title and that works OK. h2 is always where it says ‘Instructions’ on the article page. h3 is, amazingly the comments section!!, specifically the first comment written. Once again, you can’t rely on these for page ranking.

Hit the back button to get back to the menu, then click on ‘Keywords found on the page’. Here’s the sweet part.

On the list that comes up scroll past the one word keywords, you certainly didn’t use those, go to the two and three word sections and look for your intended keywords. Hopefully you were able to get to 2% on your targeted keywords. If not, edit your article and improve it. Here’s my results for my article on electric space heater.

1.9% not bad at all

This is an amazing tool, use it after you publish your article to make it as robot friendly as possible as well as to adjust your keyword density.

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Google Search as a Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 01:12:12 +0000

Google search is a keyword tool?? Well, no it isn’t a keyword tool but we’re going to use it like one. After All, it doesn’t make any sense to spend time looking for good keywords to write articles on if when your article gets published it ends up on page 566 of google search.

Here’s how to prevent that.

Open up Google search in Firefox (with the keyword plugin installed) If you don’t have it, read my post on setting up your PC for writing articles here.

When you find a promising keyword, based on traffic and/or CPC go to google search and search that exact keyword.

Open up the last result on page one and look at the bottom right of the Firefox window, it’ll list the PageRank and Alexa rating of the page.

Articles on eHow have an Alexa rating of 468, which is incredible. The page rank starts at ‘Unranked’ and goes up from there.

With that being said, if your article can beat that last result on page one in terms of Alexa rating, then you will probably end up on the coveted first page of results for that keyword. If not, see how far back you’ll end up.

I should also say that, with minimal effort you should at least be able to get your articles PageRank to 1 or even 2, so keep that in mind when you look at the results.

So, armed with this information you can determine if that ‘juicy’ looking keyword is really a good one at all. If necessary go back and look at other keywords using Wordtracker and the Adsense tool. It’ll only take a few minutes but it’ll really payoff when you find one you can rank well AND get paid well for.

We can beat this page!

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Google Adwords Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:05:40 +0000

Probably the most important keyword tool available is the Google Adwords Keyword tool This baby will show you just about everything you need, from search volume to advertiser competition and cost-per-click.

If you already read the Wordtracker quick guide then continue on with this guide, if not, go and read it as these two tools work together.

Once you have a keyword, or keyword phrase you’d like to use from Wordtracker, go to the Google Adwords Keyword tool and type it in. Answer the security question and click the ‘Get keyword ideas’ button.

Once the results come up, enable the CPC column buy clicking the drop down list where it says ‘Choose columns to display’. As you can see, there’s tons of information here. What we’re looking for is a keyword with good traffic, and one that pays well. Hopefully it’ll be the same keyword. Explore different keywords by sorting by highest CPC, as well as traffic. Try to avoid one word keywords as they are already taken by the ‘big boys’

Once again, use this in combination with the Wordtracker tool and Google search, which I’ll cover next. The idea here is to find a good, eHow title friendly, well paying keyword that we can easily get onto page one of Google search.

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Wordtracker Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide

admin — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 22:46:22 +0000

Get article ideas here

I thought it would be nice to give a bit more detailed explanation of how I use the keyword tools out there to make my articles SEO friendly.

First up is the free keyword tool from Wordtracker. It’s extremely easy to use, and like I said, it’s free.

Just go here and type in a word you’re thinking of using and it returns the top related searches.

I like to use this tool when I have a broad idea on a new article, for example, when I want to write something anti virus related, but I’m not sure of the exact subject.

Check out this screenshot to the left. I typed in anti virus and it returned some related searches, as we can see there are some real good ones here, and by good ones I mean eHow article title friendly.

At this point you could click on one of the results and get more detailed search information. This is sometimes a good thing to do if the original keyword is a bit too broad. Either way, if you see more than one result that interests you, write the other ones down so you can come back to them later.

Use this keyword tool for ideas. For the best results though you need to use this in combination with Google Adwords keyword tool and Google Search, as we’ll see next.

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Adding ‘Hidden’ Keywords to your Articles

admin — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:27:14 +0000

This is what I call a little micro-tip on article writing. If you need to get more keywords into your article, or just want to add a really ‘bad English’ keyword, like 17 bag laptop, here’s an easy way.

As you add pictures to your article, just name the file as the keyword you want. like 17 bag laptop.jpg If you’ve got more pictures just add a number at the end like, 17 bag laptop 2.jpg

It’s that easy!

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