Screw You Google

Ok, so on to step two, which is a step a lot of people have trouble with needlessly. If you want to make money you must to DO GOOD KEYWORD RESEARCH. Your keywords affect sooooo many things from how often people will search for your site everyday, to how “valuable” your keyword is, to how high you can realistically (which I’ll talk about in step #3 ). There are a lot of tools out there, some free and some paid but all useful.

The way keyword research tools work is that they get a small bit of information on internet searches and extrapolate that into total searches on the internet. I personally use Wordze and this it is the best tool out there (Sometimes they give away free 30-day trials so sign up for my RSS and keep an eye out… I’ll let you know). Another useful FREE tool is Wordtracker.

What I will generally do is start with a very general one or two word term in Wordze. I search for my term using “broad search” and have a look down the list. Generally I target keyword sets that are 3 words and have 6,000-10,000ish searches per month (200-300ish per day). If a set of keywords look too weird to be true they probably are (If “parrot umbrella Sunday” is being searched 10,000 times a month something is probably fucked up). Secondly (because keyword tools are quit inaccurate) I use Wordtracker to verify my search volume for the topic (Note Wordtracker uses daily searches so look for 200-300ish).

**REVISED Aug 13, 2008 – One of the most important developments for SEO site makers happened when google put actual search data into it’s keyword tool. Now there is no need for these paid tools when you can get better, more accurate information here.

Ok so now you’ve found a decent keyword the last step is to check the value of your keyword using Keyword Enchanter’s CPC Tool. Who cares if you find the world greatest keyword, but it doesn’t have any affiliates and pays $0.05 per click. Don’t panic if your EXACT keyword has a high CPC, if related keywords (Keyword Enchanter shows them automatically). AdSense is the standard measure of the “value” of a keyword.

Anyway I’m away for the weekend so subscribe to my RSS feed so you get notified when I post up Step #3.

Ok so it’s time for Step one of how to build a good money make, high SERP ranking website. This step seems to “make sense” but it’s not always as clear as one would think.

First: PICK A TOPIC YOU KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT AND WRITE ABOUT IT. I have even been guilty of building sites trying to get into some higher paying niches, but the fact is if you don’t know about it, things will take you 10x longer to write, ideas will be 100x harder to think of, and your content will be 1000x more painful to make. I made a site about snowboarding a while ago and it was BRUTAL. I couldn’t write my own content and ended up just taking it off the product I was promoting’s site.

If you don’t know about a topic how are you going to find a niche? Using any search information software you’ll get screwed because they always have crappy not-real search terms in them. “OH WOW! ‘Forex for your mom with banana syrup’ gets 1000000 searches a day!” it happens and makes it very painful when you build a nice site, get a #1 ranking for your keyword, and then get 1 hit a week.

**Revised Aug 13, 2008 – Now Google is releasing search numbers so you can get much more accurate results about related keywords here; however, still write about stuff you know about.

Second: PICK A TOPIC THAT YOU LIKE. It can be a bad idea is blogging about your job (especially if you hate what you do). This is strange advice for me to give because I am a law student and I frequently make blogs about the law, but hey, I like the law, I talk all day about the law, and when I go home I watch TV about the law and think about the law.

If you have a hobby write about it. If you like it so do other people and you can make it work.

Today was sort of a touchy feely topic, which I don’t love, but it needs to be said. Check back over the next few days when I’ll write about “Keyword Research”, a topic that mystifies a lot of people.