Make Money Online With Keyword Optimization

If you just read my recent earnings report, you probably feel bad for me - don't - $1.92 can score me 100 acres of rich farming land...if I could just fix this damn flux capacitor. 1.21 Gigawatts!

Ok, that was fun. Now let's get Back to The Business. No, but seriously, I have to tell you about the future plans for this site.

Yeh...I'm done.

Those of you who have been following my posts from the beginning (thanks by the way) know that for some reason, I have some sick love affair with eHow. Well, I think that all that trouble they've been having with their site for the past two weeks is a sign from above. The pay-per-article model that fuels eHow still intrigues me, and I plan on making further contributions, but I'm no longer convinced that it has to be a staple feature in my online earnings efforts. From now on, I plan on making eHow a source of supplemental income to my supplemental income.

As you know, I've been doing a lot of reading on SEO practices lately. I've also been consistently bringing down the intelligence level on the Digital Point message boards for the past week with my Noob Saibot questions. I think, however, that I've finally nailed down some core "blogging for money" principals. By doing so, I've not only decided on the niche market that I'll be blogging on for the next few months, but I've also realized that as I currently post to this blog on "making money online", I'm drowning in a pair of concrete clown shoes. Let me show you what I mean.

Throughout the remaining course of this post, I'll show you how I arrived at my new niche topic (I'll reveal it when I go live - hopefully by next month), and I'll explain using this blog's operating keyword, "make money online" as an example.

The following is an interpretation of my recent research - I'm not yet an expert, so please don't make this your only source for establishing an SEO strategy.

In order to really dominate the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) with your blog, you need to choose a keyword that meets a balance between high search volume and low competition, and once you find it, you need to weave it into the content of your site. Of course, if generating income is a priority, you'll need to find a keyword with a high CPC (cost per click) to yield higher revenue.

It's more or less accepted that having your keyword or phrase included in your URL (makemoneyonline.com) is very heavily weighted in the eyes of search engines like Google. If you can't make that happen, you at least have to work it into your page titles. For example, your posts may be titled, How To Make Money Online, Make Money Online While You Sleep, or Name Your Blog 'Cash Money Retards' If You Don't Want To Make Money Online. Finally, in your content, make sure that you mention the exact keyword or phrase several times, but without going overboard. Search engines tend to penalize keyword density surpassing 5-7%.

So how did I find the magical keyword that I've chosen to write on? I've struggled a bit here, but I think I've come pretty close to figuring out the basics:

First, I thought of a subject that interests me, but lacks the mainstream popularity of something like, "make money online" (smooth). After writing down a few subject ideas, I pay Mr. Google Adwords Keyword Tool a visit to figure out how to tastefully exploit the niche, while putting a little money in my pocket. I enter my subject of choice into "Descriptive words or phrases" field and hit the "Get keyword ideas" button.

In one or two seconds, I'm looking at a massive spreadsheet-style data report. Something like this:














All of this data is valuable in its own right, but for my immediate purposes, I'm gonna clean it up a little. First, under the "Match Type" drop-down menu, I'm going to select "Exact". Then, in "Show Columns to Display", I'm going to add "Show Estimated Avg. CPC". Finally, I'm going to sort by CPC from highest to lowest by clicking the CPC column title twice. Now let's take a look:
















Because I'm planning on incorporating Adsense ads into my blog, I want the keywords that are going to payout the fattest. Let's look at the top of the list - we have, the keyword phrase "marketing make money online" coming in at $5.06/click. I mentioned how much Google keeps from adsense clicks in a previous post - and 78.5% of $5.06 is a nice chunk of change! When you look over in the "Local Search Volume" column, however, you find that only 480 people went searching for that phrase last month. If I conned all 480 suckers to hit my site, that'd be super, but realistically, I should probably choose a phrase that more people are searching for.

Oh golly, why there's one! The phrase "make money online" pulled in 135,000 Google searches in the US last month...when I started this blog a week and a half ago, that's where I stopped... Let's go ahead and find out why I have a ton of work to do if I want to beat out the 'Cash Money Retards' competition.

I'm going to pull up a plain old Google.com page and do a search. In the search field, I'm going to type in "make money online" and hit enter. Geez - 17.1 million results. Now I want to see who the real competition is, so I'll search 'intitle:"makemoneyonline"'...cheese and crackers - 7.57 million results!

In Google, the "intitle" operator returns all indexed pages that include the search phrase in the title. Remember when I said that anyone who knows what they're doing includes their keyword in the title? Using the intitle operator helps isolate your true competition. In this case, I have a little bit.





Let's just pretend for a second that I had less than 2000 results, which according to my friends on Digital Point, may give me a fighting chance without requiring too much blood, sweat, and tears. Even with a low results count, we aren't out of the woods yet.

A huge red flag when trying to choose a profitable keyword with this method is seeing .gov or .edu sites crowned at the top of the SERP. Google, education, and government sites are all in bed together. I've been told to abandon ship if I see these suckers occupying the top spots.

Another red flag is if the sites at the top are considered authoritative (think IMDB). If you're unsure about their power, let me make a suggestion. Install an SEO reporting tool like the SEOTools Firefox extension, and examine the competition directly. Check out the screen shot below and pay extra special attention to the Google PR (Page Ranking - between 0 and 10) and the number of external links pointing to the site (often a direct result of the Google PR).





















Hmmm, 1,134 backlinks and a Google Page Ranking of 5. Again, I have some work to do to get this blog to the top of the SERP with a keyword like "make money online".

There's still hope for me though. The niche blog that I plan to start as soon as tomorrow focuses on a keyword that receives 5,000 monthly searches, a CPC of $5.50, returns only 580 "intitle" search results, of which the top spot has a Google PR of 0 and just 23 backlinks (which I think I can duplicate or better with enough effort).

This keyword, which again, I plan to reveal once I've completed a decent foundation of keyword-rich articles, should take me one step closer to successfully blogging for money (I hope anyway).