But how to do that is often explained very differently and also very confusingly.

So let’s simplify this is as much as possible.

I’ll be using the SBI’s Brainstormer (the alternative is Wordtracker) and Google Adwords to show you how to build a keyword list in 4 easy steps.

1.    Determine your main theme (site concept) keyword

What is the key keyword of your site? What is the crux of the information you want to share?

This keyword is typically a one or two word keyword (rarely three word).

It can be:
-    tennis, golf
-    barcelona, london
-    digital photography, home theater
-    horror movies, birthday cakes
-    vegan food, baby food recipes
-    herbal remedies, acne
-    home decorating, cleaning tips
-    etc.

2.    Select good keywords from the initial vertical Brainstorm of your main keyword

Let’s choose the example of digital photography. A vertical Brainstorm – sorted by demand – looks like this:

Your goal now is to start building the blueprint of your main site. You’re going to build a small foundation on which you will add more related keywords later.

In my opinion, it’s good to start building your site around one main theme so that when search engines first find your site they know exactly what it is about.

SO what are good keywords?

Based on SBI Brainstormer numbers, I typically select Tier 2 keywords with demand over 1000 and supply below 1000 and Tier 3 keywords with demand over 300 and supply below 500.

This is of course just guidelines – and not rules. Use common sense to deviate from these numbers…

3.    Find related (seed) keywords with Google Adwords

You will need to add more keywords to your blueprint, but as I mentioned before, once you start building your site, start with keywords derived from your main (initial) vertical Brainstorm. (Step 1)

What you need to do now is to find keywords that are tightly related to your main theme.

Login to Google Adwords and go to Keyword Tool (under Tools and Analysis):

Enter your main keyword, uncheck “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” (that is basically a vertical brainstorm if you check the box), Locations should be set to All.

Do a search and something like this will show:

As you can see, the search results start with keywords that include digital photography – which is what you already have from your initial vertical brainstorm in the Brainstormer.

We need to find other related keywords. This is very easy to do – under “Exclude terms” enter your main keyword and click the “+” button.

You will now remove your main keyword from results and see only other related terms. By default, these keywords are sorted by Relevance.

That’s good because we want to see the most relevant keywords to our main keyword based on what Google believes is the most relevant.

I selected some of the keywords that would make the most sense regarding my topic – although all keywords here are good.

You need to go down through this list and write down (in Notepad) ALL keywords that make sense when it comes to the main site concept of your site.

So for example, if you want to teach about digital photography on your site, you’ll want to use the keywords I selected but not keywords like canon cameras or fine art photos or camera.

Find at least 5 to 10 main keywords. If there are much more, choose just the  5-10 most relevant now.

4.    Do vertical Brainstorms on ALL related keywords and complete the blueprint

Now you need to do vertical Brainstorm (in SBI Brainstormer again) on ALL these 5-10 related seed words that you found and select good keywords based on demand and supply numbers.

Once you have this full list of keywords, fill in your basic blueprint by adding more T2 and more T3 keywords / pages.

For example, I did vertical brainstorms on photography tutorial, photography course, learning photography, photo classes and camera lessons.

(Since MKL holds only 1000 keywords, you’ll may have to delete some keywords after each brainstorm so that you make space for more – typically I delete all keywords with demand lower than 200 and supply higher than 3000.)

After applying the filter of demand over 300 and supply below 1000 I got 20 more keywords that are tightly related to my main keyword / theme.

If I repeat the process with other keywords from the previous step in Google Adwords, I can build a list of hundreds more related keywords.

Now it’s just a matter of common sense and logic how you’ll position them in the blueprint.

SUMMARY

While there’s a lot of text above to explain the process (almost 800 words) it really boils down to 4 simple steps:

1.    Determine your main keyword

2.    Do a vertical Brainstorm, select good keywords and build your initial T1-T2-T3 blueprint

3.    Find related keywords with Google Adwords by researching your main keyword and excluding it from results

4.    Select most relevant keywords from the list, do vertical Brainstorms on them, select good keywords and expand your blueprint

Ok, maybe there are more than 4 steps but generally it comes down to 4 main tasks you’ll be doing.

You may be wondering – what about my T1 keyword? I’ve explained before how you should optimize the homepage…

It rarely is more simple than this – but sometimes there’s a topic like Anguilla where almost all keywords in the blueprint are based on this main seed word…

One more exception to this method – in case your main keyword is very broad –like tennis…

If you research tennis in Google Adwords keyword tool and exclude tennis from results, you’ll get very few related keywords.

In that case it’s better to enter A FEW two word keywords for the initial search like tennis instruction, tennis lessons, tennis tips, tennis serve and so on.

Experiment and see what works best for your particular case. What’s important is that you know how to use Google Adwords for keyword research and how it can show you tons of related keywords if you use it correctly.

It is human nature to believe that current trends, especially favorable ones that help us, will continue forever.

John Mauldin, from his book Endgame.

The above quote from the book Endgame is written in the context of the recent global financial crisis where one of the fundamental root causes of the crisis was the belief that real estate prices will increase forever.

Sure, it sounds stupid when you read that right now but when you’re “in the game” and you’re benefiting from such rising prices (by trading stocks, capitalising from increases in real estate, etc.), your smart, logical mind loses the battle with the emotional, hedonistic mind which just wants to enjoy the bliss and doesn’t want to be interrupted by negative thoughts about the future.

As I was looking at many sites affected by Google Panda algorithms in 2011, this same quote came to my mind. And not surprisingly – the graph of affected sites looks very similar to the stock market crash graph…

Here’s why so many websites were reduced to ashes:

Reason #1: Believing that the current trend will continue forever.

Some types of websites were working for a while and while it’s NOW very obvious that these websites are REALLY NOT that good, webmasters (we) actually believed that this was going to work forever.

We did not want to hear our logical mind telling us that it’s not good enough to work for the next 10 years. As long as it works today (“I can see my earnings, so it works! I have proof!”) – it will work all the time.

Reason #2: Energy conservation (survival instinct)

One part of human nature, or actually the nature of all living beings, is the survival instinct – and by that I am referring to survival by energy conservation.

All animals instinctively conserve energy their whole life.

They move only when they have to …  when they have to eat, find food, find a mate, go to the bathroom and teach their cubs how to hunt. Young animals also play a lot but that´s also a natural instinct that helps them develop hunting skills.

A biologist would add a few more details but I think you get the point.

If animals are not hungry, in danger, are hunting, or mating, they DON’T MOVE. They don’t do anything – they just “are”. They stand and breathe, they lie down and simply breathe or they sleep.

We have the same system in place. Our natural tendency is to conserve energy.

Some like to call this lazyness but in fact it’s just mother nature looking for the MINIMUM investment of energy in order to get the MOST OUTPUT.

The “most output” of course differs for every individual. For some it’s just having enough food (of any kind) so as not to be hungry and to sit on a sofa and switch TV channels.

For someone else the most output is striving to provide for their kids without having to ask for help from a spouse.

Whatever the case, subconsciously we are programmed to use as little energy as possible in order to get what we want.

This subconscious programming has caused webmasters (us) to build websites that required minimum invested energy to get the most benefit.

Of course, that approach was successful – but only in the short term. In fact, we can always find shortcuts to get the best result with the least amount of effort.

Except that this approach works only until Google changes the algorithm. Then you’re back to square one.

Problem #3 – Google Panda algorithm doesn’t give us immediate feedback

If I am learning to drive a car, then I get immediate feedback on anything I do. If I turn the steering wheel slightly too much to the left, the car goes IMMEDIATELY to the left.

This causes me to CORRECT immediately and adjust. This type of immediate feedback helps me learn very fast and I learn to drive the car correctly and safely.

In tennis, your goal is to hit a certain target and with every shot you make, you can see where the ball lands and you can make adjustments – longer, shorter, more to the left, more to the right.

You get immediate feedback and you can adjust quickly and learn how to hit the ball the right way quite fast.

With Google Panda periodic updates, you DO NOT get immediate feedback about what you’re doing wrong!

One day things are working well, the next day you wake up in Google Hell.

So what happened this year to thousands of webmasters (and what will continue to happen) is the deadly combination of:

• human nature – believing that when things go well they will go well forever;
• survival instinct – our tendency to expend the least amount of work needed to be put into a website that makes money
• Google Panda algorithm not giving immediate feedback when you do something wrong – but being applied suddenly without any warning

The end result?

Tons of poor websites that were doing fine until (insert a Panda date here) – and stopped getting much Google traffic after that date.

How To Become Panda Proof

Is there a way to avoid this massacre again? Here’s what you should do:

1. Get yourself a Panda punch t-shirt and wear it often. It will keep reminding you of what you’re up against.

If you “fall asleep” and don’t do the following 3 steps, Panda will slap you again.

Promise yourself now, that if you get Panda slapped again, you’ll wear the Panda Killing t-shirt for the whole week without changing it.

And yes, you´ll have to sleep in it too.

2. Be aware of your mind’s tendency to be overly optimistic. If things are going well, that doesn’t mean that they will go on forever.

It just means that at this point in time, Google’s current algorithm ranks your website well. That’s all.

3. Be aware of your natural instinct that always wants to conserve energy.

The survival instinct is crucial for animals (except pets ) which are in a constant battle of survival – the food is scarce and they may be hunted down and eaten.

The same survival instinct was crucial for humans 50,000 years ago in the African savannas when food was scarce. (It still is for most African people.)

Now food is not scarce and we are in no danger of dying from hunger (at least us lucky ones in the western world).

Therefore the survival instinct doesn’t apply to you any more – so ignore it.

Yes, you don’t want to become a workaholic – there’s always a balance you need to find – but there’s also no real danger of dying because of loss of energy.

4. Be aware that Google’s Panda algorithm does not give you immediate feedback if you do something wrong.

Instead of waiting to be Google slapped again before making improvements on your site, know that it is possible that your website is not really the best it can be.

Action Steps

If you’re really aware of the above factors, a simple question lingers in your mind:

Is this website good enough to pass Google Panda’s scrutiny and succeed in the long term?

By good enough I mean the quality of content, quality of design and if the site is easy to navigate and is user friendly.

But worrying every day if your site is good enough won’t get you anywhere. You’ll just be tweaking small details all the time instead of taking on bigger projects that really make a difference in the long term.

Critically assessing your site in comparison to the top dogs in your niche every 6 months is a much better plan.

That’s when you should ask yourself these questions:

Did I do the best I could?

Is this the maximum potential of my capability?

Is this something that I can show to the experts in my field and be proud of?

With this kind of thinking awareness you’ll shift from the subconscious drive to work with shortcuts and from the blind belief that everything will be good forever – to creating something that will be successful in the long term.

The best way to assess your website is not on your own though.

You’re too much in love with your site. You treat your site the same way as a grandmother treats her granddaughter – too lenient!

Instead, do it with a group of people to whom you promise a free drink for every mistake, error or poor thing they find on your website.

The more poor stuff (poorly written content, poorly presented content, confusing navigation, confusing pages, confusing tools, …) they find, the more drinks you owe them.

If you catch them being nice when evaluating your site, they owe you a drink.

Schedule these meetings every 6 months and you’ll never hear from Panda again.

Summary

It is actually very likely that now that you’ve finished reading this blog post you’ll actually agree and see that all this makes sense, but in the long term, your mind’s tendency to be overly optimistic and your survival instinct that always looks for shortcuts will eventually take over again.

Open your calendar now and mark two dates in 2012 where you’ll critically assess your site with a group of friends (who promise not to be nice).

Do it now.

If your goal is to receive free search engine traffic (and lots of it), you need to create lots of quality content.

But how does adding fresh content affect your traffic? What if you don’t add new content?

I have a smaller blog where I was observing the answers to these questions. Keep in mind that this is just one example and that in now way I can sayI have figured out Google’s algorithm – but I hope this gives you some food for thought.

The blog in question had 69 posts for quite a long time – in fact the last posts before the »experiment« were posted on 4/29/2010 as you can see below.

So for more than a year I did not post any new posts and my traffic was at around 400-600 daily visitors until June this year.

At around 16th of June traffic dropped by around 40%. So did the income – mostly Adsense.

So I decided it’s time to work on this blog again. I outsourced some quality articles and eventually published them on 23rd of July. (see the first image in this post.)

Here are the traffic results for July 2011:

Interesting isn’t it?

You can see that until the 23rd of July most days had a traffic number that started with 2 or 3. (so 200+ and 300+ visitors).

After the 23rd of July most days had traffic numbers starting with 4 or 5 (so 400+ and 500+ visitors).

This trend now continues in August – although there’s slightly less traffic – but still much more than after June 16th when the traffic dropped.

And all I did was to publish 3 articles – and when I look at traffic stats and search for keywords that brought the most traffic I don’t really see that these 3 new articles are bringing in the extra traffic.

It’s the whole site that started to rank better in general.

My first idea based on these results is that adding fresh content is quite an important ranking factor in search engines.

Your thoughts?

Since all search engines try to avoid manipulation of their rankings they also avoid telling you exactly what you need to do – but they do give good hints which you need to interpret correctly.

I’ve taken some of the more interesting and important hints from the above article and tried to interpret them (when needed) in my own way.

1. Keyword Density

Years ago there was the concept of “keyword density”.  The idea being there was an ideal number of times for the keyword to appear within a page of content – a sweet spot, that the engines liked to see.  Don’t focus any time on this tactic.  It was marginal then and is a waste of time today.

Forget about keyword density – Bing tells you to »use the targeted keyword a few times« – and that’s about it.

In 99,99% of the time you will use the targeted keyword a few times in the article if you just write naturally.

2. Three Tiered Site Structure

If you’re just building your site, or redesigning an old one, referencing keyword research can help you understand how to build your site structure.  It can help you see which topics should be main pages, and which should be lower-level pages. It will also help when it comes to labeling your website navigation.

In my opinion Bing hints at a simple 3-level structure (homepage, main pages, lower level pages) with which we SBI-ers are very familiar.

3. Link Building

Encourage visitors to share links from your website.  Including easy copy-and-paste code with the anchor text embedded can make it much easier for visitors to share your site with others.  Make sure you integrate the usual social program enablers as well, making it easy for a visitor to tweet out or post about your content on their Facebook page.

While you can’t do much to force a targeted keyword into any anchor text shared socially, it can still help build links.  And while guest blogging or asking a website to post a link to you isn’t strickly organic link building in the truest sense, if you take this path, be sure to manage that anchor text properly.

Wow, this is a good one.

Bing suggests “copy/ paste code with anchor text embedded”  – which tells us that anchor text is very important for Bing.

They also mention the »unfortunate fact« that you cannot “force a targeted keyword into any anchor text shared socially” – which again tells you that in their view it would be better if you could – Bing search engine would have a much easier task of ranking pages correctly.

Guest posting is the first thing mentioned when it comes to link building – and the second one is asking a site to link to you.

This also tells us that Bing does not believe you can just produce quality content and links will magically happen. You need to work on them – in a way that’s acceptable for search engines.

Bing also mentions “manage your anchor text” – which I interpret as vary your anchor text.

While their first priority is to get the ideal anchor text (copy / paste code with anchor text) for the search engine to really understand what you want to rank for, they also suggest some variation of anchor text when you’re building links.

And how would you interpret Bing’s hints on keyword research and link building?

But since the latest Panda / Farmer algorithm change things may have changed as even sites like ezinearticles.com lost tons of traffic.

This is causing many webmasters to lose trust in Google and worry that Google might penalize more of their sites if they find out about them.

Why would Google penalize more of your sites?

Well, because you’ve probably used the same strategies of building content and links and you may have interlinked the sites and so on.

So there have been all sorts of ideas on how to hide from Google:

• Use separate Google Analytic and webmaster accounts for each website
• Don’t use Google Analytics at all, a good alternative is Clicky
• Host your website with different hosts
• Hide WHOIS info
• Don’t interlink your sites

Any of that does not work if you want to hide from Google.

Here’s why – every time you register a domain, that domain is associated with you and that data is stored with the registrars or most likely ICANN.

Here’s an example – let’s say we want to see who owns the domain mattcutts.com.

You can go to http://whois.domaintools.com/ and enter that domain. Interestingly, Matt owns his own domain.

But he owns some more domains!

If you click on that link (3 other domains), you’ll have the option of paying for the data and finding out which domains Matt actually owns!

This information cannot be hidden. If you registered a domain under your name, it will be associated with you.

Whether you want to hide that in Google Webmasters tools or Analytics or want to use WHOIS privacy doesn’t matter – the domain and its owner are stored with the registrars.

Do you think Google has access to this data? Can they look at all your domains if they want to?

I bet they can.

So what should you do to hide your websites?

Nothing. Don’t hide them.

What if you do everything suggested above to hide your connection with multiple domains and a Google engineer looks at all your domains through whois and sees that you’re actively trying to hide your association with them?

Well, you immediately look guilty since you’re trying to hide something.

I don’t think you can hide.

Perhaps if you have a friend in another country ask him to buy a domain in his name and allow you to use it for your own purposes. Just make sure you don’t use Gmail to arrange that.

The problem with all that information is that it’s all speculation. Google wouldn’t really tell what’s going on.

But now they have shared more details and I’ll try to read between the lines and see what they are really saying.

SearchEngineLand posted a summary of Google’s advice so let’s see if we can decipher that advice…

1. “Substantial low quality on a site can cause the rankings for the entire site to decline (even for the high quality pages). Evaluate your web site for poor quality pages (not useful, poorly written, non-unique, or thin) and remove them.”

How does Google measure these things? Keep in mind that although the advice is somewhat vague for a person, it MUST be exactly mathematically defined – since Google is a computer algorithm and not a human.

Here’s my interpretation of these hints:

a) Not useful – if the content is not useful, the person will soon recognize that. They’ll read just a few lines and realize that the content sucks. They’ll hit the Back button or close that tab. Google measures that with Bounce rate and time spent on each page.

b) Poorly written – incorrect English, grammar and syntax errors. Make sure your content passes spell checks. I am sure Google can tell if your grammar is good too – if not now then soon.

c) Non-unique – That’s an easy one – checking your content for duplication. Don’t copy anything.

d) Thin – Not enough words. How much does Google want? I am not sure but I’d aim in most cases at around 1000 words and more to be safe in the long term.

2. “Look at both content and page templates (do the templates overwhelm the pages with ads? Provide a poor user interface?) After ensuring all content on the site is high quality, focus on engagement and awareness (through social media and other channels).”

a) “Do the templates overwhelm the pages with ads?” – How easy it is for Google to count the number of their own ads on a page? Do you think they can recognize ads from Chitika, Amazon affiliate link, CJ affiliate links and other advertisements?

Sure, they can. So what is your ratio between content and ads? 600 words and 10 ads & links? That won’t work. I am not sure what is the right ratio but I’d probably aim for 1 ad or aff. link for every 300 words to be safe in the long term.

(Yes, the Adsense team keep telling you to place more ads on your sites but it seems that they are sitting in a different office. I’d ignore their recommendations and keep the number of ads low – especially above the fold.)

b) “Focus on engagement and awareness”. – Engagement is in my opinion measured by comments and user generated content and awareness is measured by Facebook Likes and Tweets and other signals from Social Media sites.

Action Steps To Escape The Google Panda Claws

1. Remove or rewrite short pages. If there are many of them, remove them so that they don’t hurt your site and in time you’ll build them again with better content.

2. Check your syntax and grammar and fix mistakes.

3. Check your pages for duplicate content – just test a few sentences in quotes in Google and see what comes up. If there are hundreds copies of your sentences all over the web, then perhaps it’s better to rewrite them than to pursue bad guys with legal action.

4. Improve the template of your site if needed and show the visitors (and Google) that your site has a lot to offer and that it’s present on Facebook, Twitter and possibly even Youtube.

I think these 4 action steps are the 80/20 of things you can do right now to get your site back.

I also think that you need to be patient and let this unfold. It might take a while (3-12 months maybe) but if Google is successful in eliminating crappy sites, the bad guys eventually won’t put them up any more.

That means less duplicate content taken from your site and less scrapers. Take your online business seriously and consider it a fresh start.

Sure, it might have been easy now that you already had a website and things were so passive – but this Google thing is a great wake up call to take your business to a new level.

These things can break you or make you.

In most cases, the bad guys will quit since they don’t ever want to work hard. And that’s your chance.

It’s very likely that a year from now you’ll look back on this and see that it caused you to raise your level of work and commitment. And the results will follow…

The first changes were not so drastic as only a few webmasters here and there got a shock when they checked their traffic stats. Some even returned to almost previous levels with their traffic after 3 months.

The second wave of cleaning up their index came with the February 9th algorithm change and then the famous Farmer Update happened on February 24th. Many well known sites lost their rankings while some miraculously kept their rankings.

This is just a quick overview of the things currently going on around the Web and what Google is up to – in case you weren’t familiar with them.

The Product Review Websites

Product review websites became more and more popular in the last 3 years or so. When some of us started with a product review website in 2005 or 2006, we didn’t know the effectiveness of such sites.

I was definitely surprised at how well such a site earns relative to the amount of daily visitors.

But after a few years, the idea of product review websites as your own ATM machines became very popular. Bloggers, SEO guys, Clickbank sellers and others shared their views on how to make the most money with a product review website.

The “product review site” gold rush began.

Most webmasters looked for short-cuts – they simply copied the layout and site structure of successful websites, copied parts of text of those websites and just changed the product name (if they targeted a different product).

What those webmasters are not aware of is how easy it is for a search engine (Google at the moment) to identify such thefts of the content.

Here’s how Matt Cutts explains to a webmaster how Google finds copied content:

Matt Cutts: “If you read both articles, while the wording may not be exactly duplicate, there are very strong similarities.

First sentence from your site: “The Prince serenaded Leighton Meester during his concert at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night (Jan. 18).”

First sentence from Just Jared: “Leighton Meester gets serenaded by the legendary Prince during his sold-out concert at New York Ctiy’s Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night (January 18).”

Note these phrases: “serenaded,” “New York City’s Madison Square Garden,” “Tuesday night (Jan[uary] 18)”

You can read the whole discussion here.

Second, try this Google search based on a part of a sentence from a homepage on one of my websites:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22You%27ll+find+lots+of+easy-to-follow+information+about%22+reviews&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Funny, isn’t it? There are 973 results and the sites are remarkably similar – in fact, you could probably find many more parts of the sentences shared among those sites.

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

And Google can see that too – except that in much more detail. And all those copied parts definitely raise red flags in Google’s ranking algorithm.

As Paul Kedrosky found out, “To a first approximation, the entire web is spam when it comes to appliance reviews”.

Those of you who are doing product review websites, keep in mind that Google knows about you. Take a look at only your niche and you’ll see that there are tens if not hundreds of sites based on the exact same system as yours.

The problem right now is that even though our content might be original, Google is getting harsher and harsher and the difference between really useful content and some outsourced articles for $5 per 500 words is not so clear to Google.

There have been tons of good sites taken down basically as collateral damage and it’s really hard to tell what the reason is.

So in order to survive with product review sites, I have only one advice: review the products.

Really review the products so that you’ll be a different kind of site compared to the rest.

Your content will not be comparable to the outsourced and rewritten content on gazillion other websites.

Keep in mind, that Google has also guidelines on sites that earn money with affiliate programs and their main advice is this: “Affiliate program content should form only a small part of the content of your site. “

Therefore your articles / review need to be fairly long – I’d aim for at least 1500 if not more words and very few affiliate links.

With lots of images, your own Youtube channel, Facebook page and a Twitter account you should be able to distinguish your site from millions of other crappy websites that have now clogged the web and are pulling all of us down in the same mess.

The game has become harder. In fact, don’t think of an internet business as a game where you’re going to make money, but think of it as a serious business in which you’re going to invest a significant amount of money, time and effort in order to benefit from passive income.

And if you’re considering a product review website but you’re not going to go all the way, then I personally advise you not to start such a site. It’s not going to work in the long term.

There are literally thousands of people thinking and doing exactly the same as you and sooner or later, Google is going to clean this up – perhaps in a similar way as Blekko did.

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The search will become more social and search engines will become smarter. If your site if crap, they’ll figure this out much sooner than they did in the past.

It’s not even worth trying.

Build a site based on your passion if you’re not willing to build a great online business on something else and that passion will most likely help you succeed online.

It’s one of those things that are in fact all the time right in front of your nose and yet you can’t see them.

How do you optimize an article for multiple keywords?

Should you use all of them in the URL?

Isn’t an article optimized just for one keyword?

Let’s start at the beginning…

If you have a keyword green widget info, then your URL would say /green-widget-info.html and your title might say: Green Widget Info – How And Where To Buy Cheap Widgets

What if you want to optimize an article for the keyword green widget tips too?

Should your URL now say: /green-widget-info-green-widget-tips.html?

And your title Green Widget Info – Green Widget Tips – How And Where To Buy Cheap Widgets ?

NO.

You might be going overboard with the keywords and Google might not like that. They’ve become very stringent lately.

First, you don’t need to change the URL. It’s really not that important for good rankings.

Second, simply COMBINE the keywords like this:

Green Widget Info – Tips, Tricks And Advice On Widgets

You can see that your second keyword green widget tips is in there except there’s the word info in between.

Does that count?

OF COURSE!

Sure, it’s slightly less effective than having the words together but if there’s just one or even two words in between Google can still see what your keyword is.

Here’s a Google search for the main keyword of this article: SEO title optimization:

As you can see, even the first result doesn’t have the words together – there’s a Tutorial in between.

In fact, only 2 titles of the first 7 have SEO title optimization words together and all the rest have some words in between or even have a different word order or even not use all words in the title!

You’ve been Googling for so long and yet you haven’t noticed that even in the top 10 the words are not always together?

Sure, if you go to very competitive topics all the smart webmasters and SEO experts will optimize the articles for those exact keywords so you won’t see many other variations.

But in reality, there are still millions of keywords where the articles and titles have not been optimally optimized and you can then easily rank for 1, 2, 3 and even more high demand keywords with a single article.

By optimizing your title Green Widget Info – Tips, … you’re ideally optimizing for the Info part and almost ideally optimizing for the Tips part.

Simply look at the long tail of your main keyword and add those long tails in the title if they make sense.

No need to exaggerate this approach as tricks won’t work long, but adding one or two key long tail words to your title can basically double the traffic of that page.

Take a look at a similar article on title optimization to get an even better understanding of good on-page SEO.

The drop in traffic looks like this:

At first the drop looked so severe that I thought the servers where I host my site were down but I soon found out that my site was almost completely removed from Google’s index.

After some Googling I found the post from on Seroundtable.com describing what might have happened with the latest Google ranking changes.

It looks like Google is after duplicate content and is penalizing the sites with duplicate content.

In my case, the problem is that Google still cannot determine who the original author of the text is.

I have personally written the homepage of my site (did not outsource it!) and I still found over 100 copies of exact paragraphs taken from my site.

After some more detailed researching I found that many paragraphs from many other pages have been copied too.

So far it’s my best explanation for this drop in Google.

Have you experienced a drop in traffic too?

My first idea is that we’ll need to rewrite and change our main pages (especially the homepage) more often – as I think this is a much easier way than legally fighting cheaters all over the world.

Update: My best day of all time on Amazon

Update 2: According to Matt Cutts, the penalties are not permanent. In fact, I’ve heard of the 3 month, 6 month and 1 year penalties so far in various forums and talking with other webmasters…

At least I can help with one link – since they’re so darn difficult to get…

Here’s our Q&A:

Jo: I’ve been doing my best on manually trying to get links, by using Yahoo site explorer. So far I haven’t gotten a single reply from the websites I’ve contacted, and although I know you think this is probably normal, I would like to send my template email to you for review just to make sure (you can find it below).

Please feel free to point out what it is you would change, remove or add to ensure the best result. Obviously I change the template slightly for each mail I send, since some of the websites are blogs and accept articles rather than exchange links.

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Subject: Question from a stevia related website owner

Dear NAME,

My name is Jo and I maintain a website about stevia, the all-natural sweetener. This little plant has changed my life and I want to share my passion with others.

Although my site is still young, I’m constantly adding quality content to it, and my goals are to provide the most information on stevia found on a single website, and to answer all the questions or concerns people may have about stevia as well as other sweeteners, while offering them recipes to try out, teaching about how to grow stevia, and more!

Currently, I’m working on getting links so my site can grow. I just stumbled upon your website and e-mail address, and saw that you have a page on stevia. I was wondering if you would be willing to exchange links with me, between any one of my site’s pages and your stevia page, so I can help the search engines find my website.

You can find my home page at http://www.sugarfreestevia.net/index.html

I also very much appreciate any feedback you are willing to give me. I’ve worked very hard on it, hoping the enthusiasm will jump right off the pages! If you have any questions, you can reach me at this address: jo @ …

Best regards,

Jo from sugarfreestevia.net

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Tomaz: If I got an email like that and read your explanation, my first response would be “I don’t care.” I don’t care how stevia has changed your life, I don’t care what your goals are, I don’t care if you’re working on links now.

All that people care about is themselves. (until we’re friends)

So you need to talk to the webmaster and how they can benefit from your link and how you like some specific part of their site – or that it matches your content. Do not talk about yourself or your story because 99% of the people are not interested and you’re wasting their valuable time by forcing them to read long explanations.

Most will not appreciate that and immediately delete your email. So get to the point quickly!

Also, build more links now with article submissions and other crappy ways of building links (go through Link Building Checklist from the SBI TNT section).

You can also comment on a few related blogs a few times and have the owner get to know you. Contribute. Then, after 2 weeks or so contact them and remind them who you are and then ask for a link exchange.

That should help…