SEO TIPS

Here’s a quick list of tips and techniques for those who are just venturing into the SEO space or already have some knowledge. I don’t claim what I am writing below is revolutionary in any way. Its what everyone should know if they are considering optimizing their site for the Search Engines, in particular, Google.
SEO Tip #1. Get into Google’s head - think and act like Google. Understand what PageRank is and how Google rewards pages for having good PageRank and inbound links. This is the very basic that you ought to know. I wont go into details here, and if you’re a noob (newbie), just look it up.
Tip #2. Make sure the keywords you choose are not highly competitive. You want keywords which have high searches and minimum competition. When you blog or add content to your site make sure you do on-site optimization in the best possible manner. This means that you must include your keyword in the title of your post and atleast 2 to 3 times in the body. Just do it. Don’t ask why. Google likes this.
Tip #3. Focus first on good “onpage optmization” as they call it. Try and have atleast 2 to 3 variants of your primary “keyword” in your title. Example - “Download Album Name Review of Album Name Free Album Name” . Google likes titles like this. Make sure your body of the article includes one of these variants atleast 2 to 3 times. You can also write these keywords in bold for better effect. Write naturally and optimize naturally also - dont go about spamming and repeating the keywords too much. You can search for your keyword on Google and see how the resulting pages are going about their on-page optimization and try to copy them. Why? … because its working for them! Make sure you bold your keywords and italicize them too for additional benefit. Aim for around 3% to 5% keyword density. Try to include your target keywords in your domain name or permalink URL.
Make sure to include your keywords in -. your site’s title tags. your headings. at the top of the page. in the middle of the page. at the bottom of the page
Tip #4. Offpage Optmization - once your article or post is done and live, you need to go about building your links… “link building strategy” is what they call this. Basically, go to RELEVANT blogs, RELEVANT forums, RELEVANT directories, RELEVANT portals and write INTELLIGENT and thought provoking stuff - all the time linking back to your post with a varying set of 4 to 5 combination keywords. These keywords or “anchor text” as they are called - should all point back to your specific page that you are trying to optimize. They should all have a common keywords set and the rest of the anchor text link can be different. Example - Download Movie Name, Watch Movie Name, Free Torrent Movie Name. So now, if I find 20 forums in my niche, and I go into them and read the posts and find a relevant post where I can post a comment and link back to my site - then I can use my first keyword variant on it. Then I hop on to the next forum or blog or whatever RELATED CONTENT site and post my second set of keywords on it… all the time linking back to the same URL post on my site. Don’t do this too fast. Do about 15 a day. Go to related places on Social Media sites too. Also, remember that the pages must have do-follow turned on, so you get the PageRank love.
Ranking for “long tail keywords” is relatively easier to achieve than going for popular keywords. Aim to find keywords that have less than 10,000 to 20,000 competing sites… by just going to Google and searching for your keyword or keyphrase within quotes.
Tip #5. You can simply study what your competition is doing and copy them AND do more than them. That will ensure you overtake them in the rankings for those keywords. This is a very good strategy and there is a great piece of software called SEO Elite that can help you manage this whole process efficiently and perfectly. I strongly suggest you get a hold of it. Read the free copy of SEO Elite to get into SEO more deeply if you are just starting out. This is an absolute must have for anyone who wants to trounce their competition quickly. Get SEO Elite here.
Tip #6. You need to find a sweet spot between the number of searches being conducted for your keyword and the number of sites that show up. Its a bit of an art and you’ll get a grip of it with practice.
Tip #7. Make sure your URLs and page titles are “permalinks” format and spell out your title / keywords.
Tip #8. While posting on your site try linking to other articles within your site. Google likes this.
This ends the first part of basic SEO tips that I recommend everyone should know. I will cover some more in depth tricks and techniques in my next post that will be titled Advanced SEO Tips. You may want to download and read Google’s list of what NOT to do during SEO.

12 Niche Dot Com Models - To make easy cash, on a shoestring budget

Everyone knows that there is a lot of potential in taking a wildly successful dot com model, and spinning off the same model for a niche audience. The “niche” audience can be across a specific Vertical (think Christian Dating and Matchmaking), or even localized to a specific country (think Digg clone for India). There IS plenty of money to be made if you move early and capture the attention of your specific targeted audience.

So, if you’re thinking of throwing up a copycat dot com model for a specific target niche - and you’re reading this article - you’re in luck. Why? Because I am going to show you how you can get your site up with as many features as there are in the professional dot com global leaders - for a few dollars of investment and in many cases zero investment in the backend software that will power your site.

Before I get on to specifics, there is one very important issue. You must be interested in your niche and making your site a success. Their is considerable effort in taking care of your “baby” once it is born - and once it enters the world - you will need to get visitors and users. You can read other articles on this blog to learn various means through which you can make this happen - but, be warned that it will take time and effort and therefore you must enjoy this if you need to make a success of it in the long run!

While trying to install these free / low cost scripts on your webiste, if you know how to configure a basic php script, you can do this yourself. Otherwise, go ahead and hire a webmaster for under $5 per hour to help you get this up in as little as 2 to 3 hours. There are plenty on the Elance type freelancer project posting websites.

The biggest and most interesting fact here is that you can start this business on a Credit Card with no upfront money. You can get a good hosting company and Virtual Private server with unlimited domains for little $17 per month. If you just need one website - there are plenty of offers for $5 per month. You can literally start a dot com business worth hundreds of thousands of dollars without spending much and just for a few dollars. The software scripts that power your website can be purchased for a few dollars and in many cases for free. These are stable - tried and tested scripts being used by many people the world over and are in NO WAY INFERIOR. On the contrary, some of them, by their very nature of being Open Source are More stable than the commercial grade software scripts out their. So, take heed - if a commercial grade software provider is trying to mislead you telling you that their solution is more stable than the free Open Source alternative. This is many a times NOT the case. Just look at Open Office as compared to Microsoft Word - as a first example.

Once your site is up - the most important part is to invest you time in Online Marketing. Either, you learn this from scratch, or expand upon what you already know - or you hire a professional agency to help you market your website. I prefer learning the tricks as its fun!

So now, here is the list of ideas that you can spin off with almost no money. I have given some suggestions of niche markets - feel free to apply thought to branch out into your own niche ideas. These are listed in no particular order of preference.

1. Dating and Matchmaking

Use script OS date. Its free. They have many “skins” or “themes” which you can purchase each for $5 only. Very stable script with a large number of modules. Highly recommended for anyone looking to start a dating / matchmaking or matrimonial portal. Spin off a niche model based on say “country” example - India, Pakistan, Australia or even Americans living in India. Another niche can be for specific religious sects that like to date and meet people within their sect. your niche can even be targeting for example “high net worth individuals” - the rich who earn over $1 million per year with over $10 million in assets. It could also be Blacks in NY, or Hispanics in USA. There are countless possibilities. Just make sure that there are not already too many players in the niche and that you will enjoy doing this in the long run.

2. YouTube Clone

There are plenty of “scripts” floating out there which you can buy for as little as $100 or even get for free. A good commercial grade script that I recommend is Clip-Share. If you are looking for a free solution - try PHPmotion , its basic and comes with all the stnadard features making it a good starting point if you are on a shoestring budget. Another slightly expensive solution is Rayzz - but it comes with complete social community features and audio, file, video sharing, blogging etc. The biggest problem with this model is finding a good hosting company that allows you to grow as the viral traffic increases. Although, the cost of bandwidth is relatively high, when compared to the money you will make via an ad running on the page or a pre-roll - this model is sustainable - even once you cross the “free” bandwidth quota provided by your hosting company. Most of the top grade hosting companies will give you about 1200 GB of data transfer per month within the cost of the hosting package. But, once your website video traffic crosses that mark you will have to cough up around $2 per GB. So, if a video on your site is of an average size of say 3MB - that will equate to around 650 videos served for $2. Now, on an average you can expect the surfer to surf around 4 pages of non-video streaming content before they finally decide to watch the next video. So thats 5 page views per video. So, 650 videos will cost you $2 and bring in a total of 5×650 = 3250 page views. But, then lets also safely suppose that 50% of the people will watch only half the video and skip. So, thats 650 bonus videos for $2 - or 1.5MB per video. OR a cost of $1 will bring in 3250 page views. Now, if you optimize your ads properly on your video website, you can very easily bring in $1.50 per 1000 page views - at the least - using on Google Adsense. I know, because i’ve done it! So, this equates to $4.50 revenues for every $1.50 spent on bandwidth in EXCESS of the 1200GB free allotment. NOte: If you pre-purchase bandwidht, you can get it for 50 cents per GB - which means your expense goes down 4 times, and you make more money!

Update: There is a great new video share setup software for $10 only… the templates are not that great and futuristic looking - but it has amazing features like youtube video embedding, permalink seo friendly urls, and a host of other features… well worth $10 ! get it here.

3. Digg Clone - Use Pligg or Drupal Digg.

They are both 100% free. My favorite is pligg, but Drupal is also pretty good and will allow you to add on more community features, should your venture take off and thus you will be able to offer more to your community making your site more sticky. I like pligg because it has an active community for support and they have some nice looking skins. The Admin interface is also very neat with a lot of modules and many plugins and configurable elements. There are countless verticals that you can setup as niche Digg clones. Again make sure you will enjoy running this niche Digg clone before you put in the time and effort to set this up (done in 1 hour max) and then customize it, launch it and market it. Some examples of successful niche market Digg clones are - Sphinn, PlugIM, DesignFloat, Dubbagol and Zligg. Visit the Pligg Forums section where people introduce their Pligg sites for more. If there is a niche that interests you, and you feel there is potential - go ahead and start this right away. Some example ideas could be – Bloggers Blogging, Book Site, News sharing for a specific country, news for a specific niche. Just make sure there is potential for fresh news and fresh posts in your chose niche. It should have a large variety of new things being reported on the blogosphere and it should potentially have a large audience.

4. Niche Social Network

There IS still a LOT of potential here - no matter what people are saying. There are as many niches as their are stars in the sky OK maybe not THAT many. But there are plenty of niches just waiting to be socially networked! There are some very good expensive and inexpensive commercial grade softwares. A very stable but expensive solution is OneSite. Then there is Ning.com - which allows you to setup a Social Network with averagely decent features at yoursitename.ning.com and even later on your own domain if things take off. I liked Boonex’s Dolphin solution - but was most impressed with PHPizabi - as it was simply fantastic and has a large number of features that are essential in a Social Network. Some Social Network niche examples - Indians living in USA, Hispanics in USA, Blacks in Australia, Mathematicians, Physicists, Professors worldwide, Skateboarders, Rock Climbers, Programmers, … you can really go on. The key here is - again that you must understand your niche and have an interest in connecting them and running the site. If this is not there - drop the idea. It wont work.

5. Ecommerce Portal

I would highly recommend OSCommerce. You can get your store up at no cost on your own server and domain in as little as day. Customizing it and adding products through the Admin interface is not complicated. There are other hosted solutions or other pay solutions too, but I like OS Commerce. Create a niche store for any category on the planet - Gadgets, Adult Toys, Shoes Store in Australia or even an custom print T-shirt shop.

6. Blogging

I dont have to say much here. Get Wordpress or Typepad - both free. I prefer Wordpress. Unless you’ve just come out of a cave on a deserted island, you’ve already read of the potential of blogging in a niche.

7. Niche Web Advertising Network

For $25 you can start your own niche ad network that looks a lot like Adsense. You can install and use the script by inClick.net guys for 15 days at no cost. If you like it pay them a one time fee of $25 and 15% of your revenues and the script and system is yours. This sounds like a great deal. The only problem here is that you will be essentially competing with Google. But then so are some of the smaller ad networks out there - and the market seems to b there - if you focus on a niche and are confident in your ability to sign up advertisers. The technology used by inClick is obviously far superior than Adsense or Adwords by Google - but if you want to target a small niche and make a little bit of money - this may be plausible. ( off-topic, but relevant - if you’re looking a for a stable Ad Management script that you can run across several sites to manage ads for several clients, get OpenAds.org - its free and fantastic! )

8. Your own Torrent Site - Try / Googling - “TS Special Edition”. I wont say more.

9. Hot or Not Clone

If you have $100 you can get K-rate by Turn-k.net – along with some themes. This is the best of the lot. If you have $45, then try PHPzen solution or even better - RateMyPhoto at built2go.com. The best free solution is at - Destiney, and it has some pretty decent features, given that its free. So, if you are just dabbling and having some fun, go for Destiney. But, if you’re serious go for Krate by Turn-k.net. Possible niche areas? A Hispanic Hot or Not, AsiaHot or Not, Websites Hot or Not, Adult Xrated Hot or Not.

10. del.icio.us clone

There is a free Open Source solution called Scuttle. Perhaps there is room to start a niche social bookmarking site for a specific mindset of people or interest - for example , all graphic designers?

11. Wikipedia clone -

Try the free solutions of - MediaWiki - and Wikiwig. You can start a Mini Wiki site for a specific niches like Web2.0 sites, Bollywood Actor Pages, Marketing Gurus Pages, etc.

12. Project Posting and Bidding Websites

like Elance, WorkExchange or Rentacoder. Try Freelancers for about $50 its an awesome solution. You can well easily start a niche site on this concept that appeals to a closed community, for example for Graphic Designers, Coders in Russia, Lawyers, Software Coders in India and Game Development Community. Basically any vertical that has potential where clients are seeking help to outsource the projects to service providers globally or in specific countries.

There are plenty more dot com models that are being replicated to target niche markets, and I could go on (file uploaders, photo sharing, real estate, classifieds etc) - but I thought these were the signinficant ones. Do let me know if I missed out some important ones and also do post any cheap scripts links that I may have missed out for the above dot com models.

Make Money with Domain Tasting

Make Money with Domain Tasting

Those who do not know what Domain Tasting is… it is a 5 day “grace period” which some domain registrars allow you to hold on to a domain, within which period if you drop it - you get your money back. This has opened up a loop hole which many people are exploiting and making thousands of dollars from. This law allows you to register domains, put up ads on them, measure how much traffic is coming in (mostly from type-in traffic of misspelled words etc) - and then see if you would benefit or make a profit over the yearly cost to book the domain. People use this trick to quickly snap up domains that people forget to renew on time, and measure the traffic and revenues (by putting up adsense ads for instance).

Dynadot.com offers this 5 free day booking. Godaddy.com stopped offering it as it realized that in a period last year over 90% of domains that were booked - were dropped within this 5 day period. But still, everyone here gains… including Google, and now Dynadot - who allows you to use the money for the returned domain to purchase any other service (including another domain). Dynadot wins - because the money remains in their kitty - earning then interest. Google recently announced that they will not allow Adsense ads to run on domains that are less then 5 days old - thus shutting off the possibility to measure how much one can earn in 5 days of ads (and thus apply it to yearly earnings - in order to decide if a profit can be expected) - but Yahoo Publisher Network and MSN have made no such announcement. Also, if ad networks switch to this policy - one can still simply redirect traffic to another domain and still measure additional revenue coming in from redirected traffic. Here is a great post for those who want to learn more about this, and here is an article from Washington Post. If you are clever and move quickly, making even as little as $10 profit per domain per year, if you gradually increase your domain portfolio and holdings to say over 1000 domains - thats $10,000 for your effort. Write special software to snap up names and autoamte the process, and see this figure increase by 100 fold!