A working knowledge of keyword research and search optimization is vital for any Internet Marketing endeavor. Generally speaking, the more one has studied and practiced in the field of keyword research, the faster and simpler it becomes.

An asterisk (*) has been placed by the most highly recommended resources.

Keyword Research Tools and Training

The following keyword research tools are providing along with training, both in the subject of keyword research itself, and in the use of the tools provided.

* Keyword Elite 2.0 – This is the most highly recommended Keyword Research Tools. It also comes with over 40 hours of video training, and access to a members forum. One time payment.

* Web 2.0 Mayhem – Includes Keyword Research Tools as well as a full set of link building and SEO tools. Also includes a complete training program, videos, tutorials, and step-by-step instructions for an entire traffic generation strategy from start to end (including but not limited to keyword research). Paid monthly.

Niche Profit Classroom – Includes a special keyword research tool to help find long-tail keywords which can be used to generate traffic to newer blogs and websites which have not yet built up size, age, or authority. Paid monthly.

Wordtracker – Online keyword research tool which includes training. Paid monthly, after free trial.

Traffic Travis – There is a free version and a paid upgrade.  Includes keyword research tools, SEO tools, and five-part mini training course.

Training and eBooks on Keyword Research and Related Aspects of SEO

* Free eBook by Brad Callen: SEO Made Easy – Free eBook with all of the Basics on Search Engine Optimization, including basics on Keyword Research. Free of charge.

* Keyword Research 101 from Pot Pie Girl – Very good basic information on keyword research, with additional approaches not available in other texts on the subject. This book is very beginner-friendly but also enlightening to experienced internet marketers. One time payment.

* The Master Plan by Charles Heflin – On intermediate to advanced onsite and offsite SEO (including keyword research information). Includes important information on basic principals which hold true through any fluctuation of search engine algorithms. One time payment.

SEO Mindset – Hard copy book on long-term strategies for getting and keeping top search engine rankings.

Search Marketing Elite – A membership site which offers 40+ hours of training videos, software, a forum, and website reviews.

Free Keyword Research Tools

* Google Keyword Tool

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

SEO 20/20 Keyword Suggestion Tool

Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool

Keyword Discovery Free Keyword Research Tool

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This post was originally published on Websites and Webhosting at Keyword Research Training and Tools.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most popular form of hosting right now, probably due to its price (extremely cheap) and convenience (no technical knowledge needed). This is the best plan for a small, personal, or business site. Included in this plan are free domains, unlimited traffic, and more than enough disk space. It is rare that a website exceeds its bandwidth or CPU allowance, and when that happens, something is probably wrong. Shared hosting also includes easy options to install different CMS systems.

There are a couple of downsides to using shared hosting. The security is not at the same level as it is with dedicated hosting. The other downside is that you will be sharing space with thousands of other sites on the same server. You may experience more outages, as a result of others overloading their sites. However, this will not kill your site, and hosting companies do warn or even suspend accounts that exceed their bandwidth limites, so that the server is not destabilized.

WordPress Hosting

Another form of hosting, that has recently exploded in popularity, is hosting for blogs, specifically WordPress. There are quite a few advantages with WordPress hosting if you are a blogger. By letting the web host install and configure the WordPress files, you will not only save time, but will also avoid the risk of things going wrong during a self-install. WordPress hosting is an all-inclusive deal that takes care of everything, and allows you to  get a website/blog up and running in no time at all.

Dedicated Vs Shared Web Hosting

When it is time to upgrade to a dedicated hosting plan, your needs will change. Your website would be drawing at least 3000 visitors per day, and you would need more flexibility to control your site. While it depends on which operating system you prefer, you might choose  dedicated Linux hosting. Linux is a very flexible, popular operating system, which is often used in web servers, and is based on open-source technology. The other alternative is to use dedicated windows hosting, which is beneficial as well (yes, windows is not so bad).

Dedicated web hosting gives you a server, storage space, bandwidth, and memory – all to yourself. It is costlier but you should be able to afford it, to make your website grow faster and to generate more traffic.

You’re On Your Own

Well, not entirely. Your web host company will maintain the nature of your server, and will often offer support, with back-ups and customer service. Nevertheless, having a dedicated server is a bigger responsibility than simply being a part of a shared hosting server. It demands more knowledge, and you might want to consider securing that knowledge before signing up for a dedicated server.

Bottom line

If you are facing a hard time in deciding whether to get a dedicated web-hosting plan, then we can make it easier for you. A website that is constantly expanding and generating a lot of traffic simply needs a dedicated server, in order to maintain its online existence. If you just want something simple, to present your design portfolio or blog, get WordPress or shared hosting.

This post was originally published on Websites and Webhosting at Types of Web Hosting.

We don’t believe in dishonest techniques or shortcuts, and we won’t promote a website that doesn’t contain useful quality content.  But don’t worry – if your website needs a bit more work to bring it up to snuff, we can help you with that too.

Needless to say, any search engine optimization (SEO) strategies we use are white-hat and in compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

For more information on website promotion and search engine optimization, please visit the following sections of our site:

• Search Engine Optimization Services
• Content Syndication Services

This post was originally published on Websites and Webhosting at Search Engine Optimization Services.

1. Search Engines – People type in certain terms to a search engine (such as Google), and websites connected with those terms come up as search results.  Example: A person types “how can I help African children” into a search engine, and one of the pages “shoesforall.org” comes up as a result, explaining how their donation will help get shoes to African children.
2. Direct referrals from other websites – Example: Another charity which provides food to poor children has a website called food4all.org, (a made-up name at the time of this writing) which has a page with links to other charities. One of these links leads to to shoesforall.org. A person visits food4all.org, arrives to the “links” page, and clicks on the link to shoesforall.org.
3. Word of mouth and offline Advertising – This includes offline referrals, where people tell others to visit your Shoes For All website, people emailing eachother about the Shoes for All movement, people passing around business cards with URLs of shoesforall.org websites, and even notices and billboards which advertise the URLs of the websites, bumper stickers, etc.

The first method – search engines – is possibly the most important one, because of its potentials to reach anyone and everyone who might be interested in the “Shoes for All” movement (even if they have never heard of the movement before).

Your goal is to have your website come up as often as possible in search results, whenever people search for related keywords.

There will be a few main keywords that result in visits to your sites, and there will be some variations of those keywords.

For example, your sites might receive traffic from these main keywords:

A bar graph of these keywords would look like this:

If you look at the above bar graph and imagine that the blue bars represent an animal, with the head on the left and a long tail on the right.

This is where the term “long tail” comes from.

Long tail keywords are the words and terms which individually are not searched for often, but cumulatively can add up to a lot of traffic.

Long tail keywords basically include the many variations of your main keywords, which can be used to find your organization’s websites. Each variation in itself does not get a large volume of searches, but all combined, they get a considerable amount.

Sometimes when you are driving traffic to a new website, its best to start off by focusing on the long-tail keywords.  The reason for this is that they often have far less competition than your main keywords.  Once you have begun to rank well for plenty of long tail keywords, and receive good traffic from them, it is much easier to go after your main keywords.  On could say that you have your foot on the first rung of the ladder.

It’s also good to research long-tail keywords because it gives you an idea of what information people are looking for.

When people type in a search term, they are generally stating their problem. It is something they are trying to solve – whether they are trying to find out the location of the nearest pizza parlor, how to pay less taxes, or where they can find a funny video so they can forget about life for a little while!

When your website appears in the search result, it should give the solution to that problem. People may have never heard of your organization before. All they know is that they are looking for information on something, and they are trying to solve some kind of problem. If your organization has a solution, or an answer to that problem, it should come up as a result when people type in those search terms!

That seems obvious, but it is far too often overlooked.

When a person types in “charity for children,” your shoesforall.org website should be amongst the search results.  And it should also be there when they type in “shoes for children,” “help Burmese kids,” “donate to charity in Ecuador,” or whatever the case may be – providing that the organization has branches in those areas, and providing that it runs programs which help solve those problems.

In the beginning it takes work to get traffic to a website and get it up in the rankings.  By targeting long-tail keywords to start off with, you can build a stable base of traffic and start building up some momentum.  Then you can go after the big ones.

This post was originally published on Websites and Webhosting at Driving Traffic to Your Website.

The Purpose of a Search Engine

When you go to a website like Google and type a word or phrase into the search engine, you probably are hoping to find results which are:

• Relevant
• Good Quality
• Useful
• Varied

Imagine if you went to a search engine and typed in “dog collars,” but then got results such as the following:

• Websites about coffee cups
• Pages written in unclear English with bad grammar, difficult to read, and uninformative.
• The same website appearing over and over in the top 10 positions, instead of a variety of different websites with information on dog collars
• Or, even worse yet, pages of incoherent gibberish which simply have the word “dog collars” repeated over and over in their text.

You would probably feel that search engine was not very useful, and you wouldn’t use that search engine again. You would look for a better one.

Those who program search engines and who write their algorithms are aware of this fact. They want their seach engines to provide results which are as useful, relevant, and high-quality as possible. This will make people want to use those search engines more.

On the other side of the coin, there are people who work against the search engines.

How and why would they do that?

Well, usually these are people who own websites. They want their websites to rank well in the search engines, but they don’t want to work too hard to get them there. So they try to short-cut the system and cheat their way to the top.

Its okay to practice SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in order to try to get to the top. But that includes building high-quality and useful websites which will provide useful and relevant information to the people who are searching for information online. When webmasters try to trick the search engines into giving them a higher ranking or more traffic than they deserve, this is called “black hat SEO.”

In an effort to combat black-hat SEO and to maintain the integrity of their search results, search engines (or, the people who program them, that is) are continually modifying and improving their algorithms. Every time someone comes up with a new trick they can use to get around the algorithms, the search engine companies come out with a new algorithm in response – and so it goes.

Search engines algorithms are kept a secret, in order to make it harder for people to try to shortcut them. Therefore, Search Engine Pptimization is an interesting field. It is an area of constant change, some mystery, and lots of room for opinion.

At the same time, there are many key basic facts that you can learn and apply, successfully and ethically, in order to get more relevant traffic to a website or websites. And most importantly, keep in mind what the purpose of a search engine is – so that you can work with it, and not against it. Good website content and good SEO go hand-in-hand. Together they are a highly powerful combination. One without the other is not.

This post was originally published on Websites and Webhosting at What a Search Engine is and Does.