Get Your New Blog Noticed (Part 2)

In my previous posts, I have covered Why Search Engines Love Blogs! And So Should You, and highlighted that search engines do love blogs and bloggers.

Also for those who need a little inspiration on starting your first blog, do read about My Love and Hate Relationship with Blogging which also explores the synergy between blogs, search engines, rankings and keywords.

This article is for those few brave souls, who have just initiated their journey into blogging, and need that amazing high one gets when your blog is finally getting read by a substantial number of readers, please read Get your New Blog Noticed (Part 1) of this article first.

As promised, and a seo expert always keeps his promise, here are some of the strategies that have worked for me:

Deep-Linking

As a SEO expert in Mumbai, I often advise new clients to start a corporate blog for their employees, customer, vendors, associates and investors. The benefits of doing so are many, as seen in the trend where many corporate blogs are doing very well in building brand loyalty, customer loyalty and driving business through existing customers.

I also advise my clients to start a topic specific blog of their expertise. To give you an example of this, my corporate website is www.seo-optimization-experts.com, so I started a blog Zen of SEO, which tells the truth about SEO based on actual experiences and mistakes I made during my journey. My SEO blog attracts marketing professionals, seo students, Internet marketing professionals, readers and businessman like you.

Now comes the easy part; Create relevant deep links between your corporate website pages, corporate blog posts and topic blog posts. Your website, corporate blog and topic blog are treated as separate sites as far as search engines go, so don’t hesitate to use you’re your content for link building purposes.

Each blog post is a potential to build another link to your corporate website. But don’t overdo it. I don’t think the search engines would penalize a site for too many links (unless the site is just a whole bunch of links for the pure purposes of link farming, and trying to trick the search engines to give irrelevant results), but it could a big turn off for your readers who just want to enjoy the story and don’t care much about your hair brained strategies to dominate the internet.

Cross-Linking

It’s easy to create links when you are the master of your website and blogs, but how do we get other websites/ blogs to give the same quality links back to your blog.

As in the real world if you have to build a new contact, you would approach that person, introduce yourself, inform that person of the value you offer, and maintain a good relation with that person.

In the blog world building links is no different.

1. Approach websites that has content/target audience similar to your blogs and offer some additional value to their readers, or even better write a good intelligent review about some service/products that website is offering. Send a nice email highlighting the same with a link back to your blog post. Online marketers like collecting testimonials so there is great probability that they will link back to your blog.

2. Approach other bloggers who command high loyalty. Most of the time if you have a professional approach, a good pitch and a value proposition, most bloggers will not mind writing a small review and linking to your blog. After all the bloggers need to create content daily, so offer then a helping hand. Many bloggers advocate semi-advertising in their posts, and bloggers define their tastes, preferences, likes and dislikes about brands all the time. So why not get onto the bandwagon.

Another way is to leave intelligent comment on the bloggers post with something nice to say about the blogger, and then give a small link to your blog to explain in detail. Most times the blogger will leave a good comment and not delete it. I don’t personally use this method, but as they say, in this matter, flattery may get you what you want.

3. Some SEO experts and bloggers have good relations with other fellow bloggers. A good seo expert should be able to get some of these bloggers to write a good review and link to your blog/ website. It will drive traffic to your website and add to your link building campaign.

Create a RSS Feed

Most blog software’s like Blogger allow users to create an automatic RSS feed Eg. http://www.seo-optimization-experts.com/atom.xml is the feed for my blog. If you notice it’s a very simple page, no major formatting, no pictures and videos.

RSS also knows as “Real Simple Syndication” is a mechanism used to distribute content without depending on the browser or email client. Users subscribe to RSS feeds to get latest updates (headlines with a small brief) about their favorite websites/ blogs across the internet in one place.

In your case, your blog posts form part of content that can be syndicated across news/content feeds. Once your RSS feed is published, you can submit the feed to many of the feed aggregators and have your content/ blog post distributed across their network of users. You can start by using this link http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm to submit your blog to many feeds.

Submit to Article Sites

I have covered article writing in my previous posts, SEO Guide to Article Writing, where I have explained in detail on why to submit to article sites. Article sites are a great way for distributing your content to many sites without the fear of landing into soup for duplicate content. In addition you are building credibility as an expert in your domain, quality links, and driving traffic to your blog.

By submitting your blog posts to article submission sites having high page rank, you are basically syndicating the same content across various channels, getting links, and traffic. Now that’s a good deal!

A note of warning, don’t just submit your article to 1000 sites, rather be wise and work with a few key article sites. In this way it’s easy to build a good relationship with those sites and their audiences, as they feel that you have not plastered your article across every living website in the world.

Also its easy to keep the momentum up, otherwise submitting each blog post to 1000 sites would be rather time consuming I would say.

Go Social with your Blog

Social bookmarking is the next wave to hit the new media landscape. Millions of users surfing the internet now have a voice and can rate/bookmark and suggest websites, blogs and share their likes and dislikes with the billions of surfers.

Wikipedia describes social bookmarking as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Register your blog with services like digg, reddit, del.icio.us and stumbleupon. Give your readers an opportunity to suggest/ bookmark/tag your blog post across the social media landscape and watch the traffic come in.

If you like this blog post, please suggest this post to the social bookmarking sites listed below the post. It will be highly appreciated.

Make a Noise

Hey you have worked hard to get your blog started. Now is the time to announce it to the world, atleast the online world. Submit your blog to blogger search engines like Technorati, and other blogging directories on the net. As you submit your blog to the various directories out there, your blog is reaching out to newer audiences.

You can also submit your blog to PR sites which allow companies to submit press releases and announcements. It may not do much for your rankings, but many journalists are known to scan press release sites for a good story. Could it be you?

You can also announce your blog by putting it on your visiting card, in your email footer, on your corporate website, Facebook (profile, posts on wall, comments etc), Youtube profile, Linkedin profile, and finally the good ol’ word of mouth.

These should keep you busy for the next few months, and by then you will be raring to get into more advanced techniques of marketing and promoting your Blog.

But that my friend’s is another time, another story!

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Get Your New Blog Noticed (Part 1)

In my previous posts, I have covered Why Search Engines Love Blogs! And So Should You, and highlighted that search engines do love blogs and bloggers.

Also for those who need a little inspiration on starting your first blog, do read about My Love and Hate Relationship with Blogging which also explores the synergy between blogs, search engines, rankings and keywords.

This article is for those few brave souls, who have just initiated their journey into blogging, and need that amazing high one gets when your blog is finally getting read by a substantial number of readers.

Please track your blog readers using services like Google Analytics, it just takes 10minutes, and it will provide you with a vault of valuable information on your reader’s preferences, where your readers come from, and how they interact with your blog.

For those of you thinking about right now “Hey, I like writing for the love of it, and I don’t need any readers for approval”, I would like to say kudos to you, and do continue the good work.

But if you are serious about sharing your hard work (its blood sweat and tears when you have to do it 5 times a week) with the millions of users searching blogs daily, then let’s continue our journey down the rabbit hole.

A quick recap on the statistics on Blogging - comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
• Total internet audience 188.9 million
• Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US alone
• Facebook: 41.0 million
• MySpace 75.1 million

Well that the good news!

But the bad news is that with the thousands of new blogs churning out each day, what hope is there for a reader interested in your topic to reach you. You many have written brilliant masterpieces, but how do you let others know that (remember most poets and artists die poor and unrecognized because they don’t reach out to share themselves with others.

In this post, I will not get into details about the quality of your content, and I am assuming you have written good clean copy. Good copy being informative, entertaining and engaging (Don’t forget to get your keywords in the body content as well the labels/tags).

There are various ways to promote your blog and reach out to the millions out there. The strategies below will not only assist you in getting more traffic to your blog, but also get you higher rankings for your blog, as well as corporate site (if you have one).

I have personally applied all the strategies listed below, and learnt the hard way by the many mistakes one makes when trying something new. This is months of hard work on a platter for you! Enjoy.

Since this blog post is going to become too long, I am going to break it up into 2 parts. I will be putting up the blog promotion strategies that have worked for me in the next blog post Get your New Blog Noticed (Part 2).

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My Love and Hate relationship with Blogging

I got involved with blogging a bit late down my SEO journey, and I regret it till date. I remember when I finally got down to writing my first blog entry it was purely with a purpose of experimentation, nothing else.

Little had I imagined on that fateful day, that few months later, I would be sitting up in the middle of night on a Monday night to Blog my way to Tuesday. Trust me, it’s a lazy mans nightmare, all that thinking, planning and writing that goes into finishing your next blog entry.

Then why do I do it?

I would like to lie and say that it possessed me, took me over, and made me into an addict of sorts seeking his next fix. But the truth is I am a selfish man when it comes to ensuring my keywords get higher ranking.

My first blog entry made it to a higher rank than my website and that too within minutes (yes! Google immediately picked up the keywords I had placed in my blog and ranked it higher than my website which was personally optimized by me for that same keyword).

That’s great I thought, I have found the golden goose to rankings! But no sooner than two days later, I witnessed its sad decline back two pages in the search results page. Had I failed, I was hurt and confused. I could not figure out why my golden goose had stopped laying golden eggs?

With view of turning my downer, into a high again, I sat down to write my next blog entry with additional conviction, and I had just 5 visitors to my last blog entry (my direct family, and one friend who owes me money). Before you laugh this one out, you should know that no self respecting SEO expert wants to see his keywords falling back into the search abyss.

As I posted my next blog entry, my ranking for the keywords I was targeting was up once more. Also I linked my website to my blog entries, and my blog linked to my web pages.

Soon I was building quality links for my website with each blog post, indexing more of my pages with the search engines, appeasing the search engines with fresh content, sending traffic from my blog to my website and vice versa, and surely and steadily my keywords rankings for my blog and the website were on the rise.

At that moment as I looked back at the other shore that I had left behind so hesitatingly, I knew I would write again.

And a blogger was born.

In addition my blog was attracting more traffic than my seo website, I was building credibility, and new enquiries began to trickle into my website.

So I wrote, and then I wrote some more, and today I sit before you writing this article with a ray of hope that it will see the light of the day (I will have to cover ideas for promoting your blog in another post).

Well anyways, whether someone else like you is reading my blog post or not, atleast I sleep well knowing that it’s getting me higher rankings for my keywords, and with that my friends I bid you farewell and adios till the next time we meet.

In life, it’s said, you can only hate the person you really love, so I must truly love blogging...

To know more about promoting you new blog, read Get your New Blog Noticed (Part 1) and (Part 2).

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Why search engines love blogs? And so should you!

Ask this question of any SEO expert and they will tell you “fresh content” and “backlinks”, other than Google took over Blogger. The last one is my favorite as no one can argue with that.

Search engines like fresh content as its valuable for their users, and links show that other sites or blogs (and not just your own website) think that the information on your website is useful to their readers.

A blog can be an individual’s viewpoint, a life journal, a school girl’s diary, a poet’s space, an artist’s expression, or just about sharing your moments with family and friends. One can share information, pictures and even videos with no previous knowledge of designing and programming.

Companies use blogs to promote their latest products, introduce new services, announce upcoming events, share event pictures and videos, announce special offers/discounts, run opinion polls, introduce new team members, special announcements, build loyalty, and invite their customers to leave comments and give testimonials.

Home businesses and young entrepreneurs use blogs to increase awareness and attract traffic to their online business, new ventures, and daring expeditions into the unknown.

Professionals use blogs to brand themselves, create awareness and credibility, make money (yes that’s possible), and share their knowledge and experiences.

Housewives use blogs to share cooking tips and recipes, their children’s growing moments, travel log of the last trip, and shopping expeditions.

We SEO experts use blogs for achieving higher rankings for specific keywords. Unbelievable, and yet in many instances my blog link appears higher on search engines results page than pages that I optimize personally for the same keyword.

Getting started with blogging is relatively easy. You can sign up with www.blogger.com or other such blogging platforms.

If you don’t own a domain name for your blog, no worries, you can start with a free subdomain with Blogger. Eg. www.thisbemyjourney.blogspot.com or map it to your company’s domain name Eg. www.seo-optimization-experts.com/seoblog.html.

Statistics on Blogging

The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay!

comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
• Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
• Facebook: 41.0 million MySpace 75.1 million
• Total internet audience 188.9 million

eMarketer (May 2008)
• 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
• 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)

Universal McCann (March 2008)
• 184 million WW have started a blog 26.4 US
• 346 million WW read blogs 60.3 US
• 77% of active Internet users read blogs

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report is now available. For a detailed report go to http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

The report states that Brands make up a major part of bloggers' online conversations. More than four in five bloggers post product or brand reviews, and blog about brands they love or hate. Even day-to-day experiences with customer care or in a retail store are fodder for blog posts. Companies are already reaching out to bloggers: one-third of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates.

Bloggers believe that blogs are being taken more seriously as information sources. One in five bloggers don't think that newspapers will survive the next ten years. Half believe that blogs will be a primary source for news and entertainment in the next five years.

Bloggers are most open to receiving marketing messages from other blogs. Even non-blog web content is more influential among this group than traditional media sources for brand information. (ref Technorati 2008 Report)

But wait, that’s not all. The report also states that Blogs are an increasingly attractive platform for advertisers. The majority of bloggers we surveyed have advertising on their blogs. Marketers realize that bloggers are creating high quality content and attracting growing, loyal audiences. So there is potential for profit from blogging. (ref Technorati 2008 Report)

Well you are convinced, and you start writing periodically, uploading photographs and videos and have shared your blog link with many friends, but a few months down a nagging worry start to hit you (this is for those who don’t track their readers using tracking software’s like Google Analytics) that you are writing for “you” alone and your mum who thinks “my son is the best”.

While there is nothing wrong with writing, just for the pleasure of writing, I am sure you all want to reach out and touch someone else with all your hard work. The real challenge is to get your target audience to read your blog whether its family, friends, colleagues, or readers around the world who would be interested in what you are writing about.

Trust me even friends will betray you if what you write does not make them want to come back, so pay close attention to the questions below and answer them as honestly as you can.

What would make your blog special to your audience?

Why would they want to bookmark your blog?

Why would they want to link to it and tell others?

What is my ultimate goal for this blog?

While the first 3 questions require you to dig down deep inside your minds and hearts, the last question is most critical. What do you ultimately want out all the hard work, late nights and coffee cups invested into your blog?

Well, whether your blog is for the purpose of sharing knowledge, gaining credibility, increasing visibility and rankings, building customer loyalty, sharing information, making money, or assisting our fellow men in the journey of life, the bottom line remains - search engines love blogs, and so should you!

To know more about promoting you new blog, read my blog postGet your New Blog Noticed (Part 1) and (Part 2).

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Mumbai SEO Expert Series - Success with Keywords (Part 5)

For those who have not read Success with Keywords Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4, I suggest you do that now before you read any further.

Welcome to the last installment of the Mumbai SEO Expert Series - Success with Keywords. I hope you have had a great journey so far, and as I had promised we will continue our keyword discovery process and try and find additional keywords that could drive business to my website.

In this article we are going to explore some of the tools and resources available that will assist you in your journey to finding winning keywords.

Each keyword you target becomes a funnel of traffic to your website, each keyword will have competition, and each keyword targeted is potential business.

So the KEY to SUCCESS is in the KEYWORDS you select!

Till so far we have managed to create a list of around 50 great keywords that are focused around my business, my products/services, my target audiences, and my competition.

A quick recap of keywords identified so far…

Seo expert, seo expert mumbai, mumbai seo expert, seo experts in mumbai, seo expert in mumbai, seo expert india, seo experts in india, seo expert in india, seo company mumbai, seo firm mumbai, seo company india,

seo services mumbai, seo services in mumbai, seo services india, seo services in india, seo content services mumbai, seo content services india, seo link building mumbai, seo link building india, seo directory services mumbai, seo directory services india, seo consulting mumbai, seo consulting india,

seo marketing mumbai, seo marketing india, internet marketing mumbai, internet marketing india, seo jobs mumbai, seo training mumbai, seo training india, seo outsource india, outsource seo india, sem mumbai, sem india, sem services mumbai, sem services india,

Seo specialist mumbai, seo specialist india, seo firm mumbai, seo firm india, seo mumbai, seo india, web marketing mumbai, web marketing india, mumbai seo, seo in mumbai.

In the end of Part 4, I had left you with some food for thought …

From the keywords list I have created so far:

1.How many users are actually searching for my keywords?

2.What is the search trend and search volume for my keyword over the past 4 years across top search engines?

3.What competition am I up against for my keywords?

How important do you think it is to know the above metrics? How will the above data assist in planning a seo strategy for my website? How will the above data affect my rankings?

If you are still reading further, you have obviously understood the importance on knowing the metrics of success. So here goes…

The key to successful search engine optimization begins with a simple keyword phrase. Everything depends on that keyword phrase. You'll be including those keyword phrases in your META tags, your title and other important tags, as well as in the body content of the page itself.

I have listed a few tools and links below that I have found very useful in my research:

(This list is dedicated to my partner in the SEO Company, Rajesh, who will smile when he reads this ------> Enjoy)

Google Insights:

Google’s recently launched Google Insights offers search marketers and online businessman a chance to look at the vast amount of user search volumes in Google universe over the past 4 years. With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames for a keyword, and even compare it against other keywords.

Search by Categories: Narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and sports.

Examples: Entertainment category in India (last 30 days) Seo in India in 2008, 2007... The top vehicle brands in France (last 30 days)

Search by Seasonality: Anticipate demand for your business so you can budget and plan accordingly.

Examples: soccer in 2006 vs. 2007 basketball in 2008, 2007,... hotel in 2008, 2007,...

Search by Geographic distribution: Know where to find your customers. See how search volume is distributed across regions and cities.

Examples: pizza in Italy vs. the USA ski in Australia vs. Switzerland soccer in Brazil, Italy, Germany, UK

Wordtracker:

Wordtracker is a Web-based service is a great tool for anyone who is serious about identifying the right keywords. Be sure to check out WordTracker's KEI, Keyword Effectiveness Index, which is an index factor built into WordTracker that compares the 24-hour results (the *potential* for traffic) with the number of competing Web pages to help identify which keywords are most effective. The higher the KEI factor, the more effective the phrase will be, based on the phrase being both popular but having low competition.

Thesaurus.com:

Use a thesaurus to discover keywords and phrases you've never considered.

http://thesaurus.reference.com/
http://www.plumbdesign.com/thesaurus

Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture):

Offers a Search Term Suggestion Tool, which is available through the advertisers' area. Simply enter your keyword phrase, and you'll learn how many people actually searched for that term during the previous month. This tool won’t tell you how many people are searching for your keyword phrase at other engines, but give you an idea of how popular the keyword phrase is.

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There are many more tools out there; all you have to do is “ask for it”. The above tools will help you get started.

In the beginning, there was a word, and that word was KEYWORD.

For those who have taken the time to journey with me over the last one week, thank you and hope to you again soon.

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Mumbai SEO Expert Series - Success with Keywords (Part 4)

For those who have not read Success with Keywords Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, I absolutely insist you do that now before you read any further.

As I had promised we will continue our keyword discovery journey and try and find additional keywords that could drive business to my website. The next question we ask is very important in today’s competitive world – What is my competition doing?

While I firmly advocate analyzing the competition for the purpose of finding new keywords that could drive traffic to my website, I feel competition in life is rather unnecessary and a futile attempt “one” makes to feel better that the “other”.

You need someone to lose, to feel you have won! Have you ever considered why? Somewhere within there is someone who feels rather small, and to feel bigger, it needs to become better at something, and to become better at something, someone needs to be smaller than you. So we compete in the workplace, in our homes, with friends, in love and in life. If that seems lame, it is, look within and you find that someone small inside you, trying to make itself feel bigger, by making someone else look smaller.

A quick recap… As you can see my keywords list had gone up quite a bit, Seo expert, seo expert mumbai, mumbai seo expert, seo experts in mumbai, seo expert in mumbai, seo expert india, seo experts in india, seo expert in india, seo company mumbai, seo firm mumbai, seo company india, seo services mumbai, seo services in mumbai, seo services india, seo services in india, seo content services mumbai, seo content services india, seo link building mumbai, seo link building india, seo directory services mumbai, seo directory services india, seo consulting mumbai, seo consulting india, seo marketing mumbai, seo marketing india, internet marketing mumbai, internet marketing india, seo jobs mumbai, seo training mumbai, seo training india, seo outsource india, outsource seo india, sem mumbai, sem india, sem services mumbai, sem services india.

So we are up to 36 keywords that revolve around my business, products, services, location, the target audience, and the Industry.

Now let’s see what the competition is up to:

1. Study the keywords your competition has used and are ranking well, and why?

2. Check to see if you have those keywords in your list of winning keywords. If the competition has used a keywords and you have not, analyze why you did not come up with the keyword. Is your competition using services of a seo expert, keyword analysis tools and insights that you are unaware off?

3. Study the top 5 to 10 sites for each of your keywords (what seo strategies have they used, is the keyword placed in the meta tags and body content, is their title and description inviting you to click the link)

4. Check your optimized pages, are they missing something – then ask why is the competition ranking higher than you? Have they done something different? What page optimization strategies have they used? Have they used link building strategies?

There will always be keywords you would have missed out, so why not steal a few from the competition. It’s the easiest thing to do. Right click to view the source for the page and check for the keyword tag on that page.

A few keywords that I had missed out (potential traffic churners):

Seo specialist mumbai, seo specialist india, seo firm mumbai, seo firm india, seo mumbai, seo india, web marketing mumbai, web marketing india, mumbai seo.

Till so far we have managed to create a list of around 50 great keywords that are focused around my business, my products/services, my target audiences, and my competition. Good job, but the story has not ended, in fact it’s just the beginning.
Some food for thought for you till the next time we meet…

From the keywords list I have created so far:

1. How many users are actually searching for my keywords?

2. What is the search trend and search volume for my keywords over the past 4 years across top search engines?

3. What competition am I up against for my keywords?

That should be enough to keep your brain racking… now I will try and get myself to switch off my notebook and catch some sleep...

In my next post in this series I will show you tools that can assist you further in finding the right keywords and keyword combinations to drive traffic to your website…. (Continued in Part 5)

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Mumbai SEO Expert Series - Success with Keywords (Part 3)

For those who have not read Success with Keywords Part 1, and Part 2, I suggest you do that now. No sense in joining us in the middle of a great story, with no clue how it began.

It all started with a promise of an adventure, a journey to keyword discovery to find additional keywords that could drive business to my website.

A quick recap… As you can see my new keywords list is focused around my business, expertise and the services that I can offer.

These include Seo expert, seo expert mumbai, mumbai seo expert, seo experts in mumbai, seo expert in mumbai, seo expert india, seo experts in india, seo expert in india, seo company mumbai, seo firm mumbai, seo company india, seo services mumbai, seo services in mumbai, seo services india, seo services in india, seo content services mumbai, seo content services india, seo link building mumbai, seo link building india, seo directory services mumbai, seo directory services india, seo consulting services mumbai, seo consulting india.

The next step is to create new keywords focused around the users I expect to visit my site and use the services I offer. I always ask my questions like why will the target segment come to my site, what do they expect when they reach the website, and do I have the content/ tools required to satisfy their needs and questions.

Each target segment may belong to different age groups, different vocations, different mindsets, and have different requirements and needs to feel satisfied. This will be better understood with the list below.

Let me list out some of the TG I hope to attract:

1. Marketing professionals
2. Website developers
3. Seo students
4. SEM professionals
5. Outsourcing seo (from other countries)

A marketing professional wants to increase his business, and wants a good ROI. He (or she) wants to understand the process and how it will impact the brand, brand loyalty, and the bottom line.

A website developer is looking for a partner for help in optimizing the pages, link building, directory submissions, and article submissions for his clients. He (or she) wants to know about time, cost and quality of the work.

A Seo student is looking to learn, find tips and tricks, new tools, search for a job, and keep up-to-date with the seo industry.

A company looking to outsource their seo needs to a seo company or seo expert, to countries where the costs are still reasonable, with services with a promise of quality and speed.

This above is by no means a comprehensive analysis of the target audience, or a complete list of the target audience I expect to visit my website, but just an indication on the importance of knowing your customers, and the keywords that can follow.

A new list of keywords based on the TG, seo marketing mumbai, seo marketing india, internet marketing mumbai, internet marketing india, seo jobs mumbai, seo training mumbai, seo training india, seo outsource india, outsource seo india, sem mumbai, sem india, sem services mumbai, sem services india.

Eventually, you may want to create separate pages targeting each of those different audiences, because each of those audiences represents a window or entry into your site.

In my next post in this series I will analyze the competition and see what kind of keywords and keyword combinations come up…. (Continued in Part 4)

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Mumbai SEO Expert Series - Success with Keywords (Part 2)

For those who have not read Success with Keywords – Part 1, I suggest you do that now, and then this article will make a whole lot of more sense to you.

As I had promised we will continue our keyword discovery journey and try and find additional keywords that could drive business to my website www.seo-optimization-experts.com.

A quick recap… My keywords list now includes Seo expert, seo expert mumbai, seo experts in mumbai, seo expert in mumbai, seo expert india, seo experts in india, seo expert in india, seo company mumbai, seo firm mumbai, seo company india.

Now let me list out the seo services I offer:

1. Keyword research
2. Optimization services
3. Content creation
4. Link building
5. Directory listing
6. Consultancy services

Now how would someone search for seo related content services? You got it, by searching for seo content services mumbai. I have added the location in the keyword, as explained in Part 1, so I won’t get into detail. In this way I can list out all the services I offer and create compelling keywords that the user would type to reach my website. The above list could have been created based on products I offered as well.

As you can see, by adding the services in my keywords, I have created focused keywords based on services that I can actually offer. There is no point in targeting keywords just for the additional traffic and then having no value to the user on the link. The search engines dislike that, and many websites that capture keywords but have no content are soon being banned from the listings.

My new list of keywords can now include: seo services mumbai, seo services in mumbai, seo services india, seo services in india, seo content services mumbai, seo content services india, seo link building mumbai, seo link building india, seo directory services mumbai, seo directory services india, seo consulting mumbai, seo consultants india.

And the more competitive keywords would be seo content services, seo link building services, seo directory services, seo services. Generic keywords have lots of competition, and as in everything else with life, good things come only with time, commitment and patience. So while your local keywords start the ball rolling, always keep targeting the bigger pies of traffic.

I have seen companies generally tend to start slagging in their seo strategy once they start getting good rankings for a few of the non-competitive keywords.

There is no better way to say this…so I will say it straight out…forget about seo and your online business, if you plan to stay committed for just 3 months, 6 months, or even a year. Search engine marketing is a marriage and once you commit there is no turning back.

It only takes a few weeks to undo all the good online business you have been doing for the past year, so make seo part of your integral business strategy.

Don't think that you have to focus ONLY on your products or services. What are your USP’s, something you offer and no one else can? What are your customers looking for when they come online? Give them the information they're looking for, and you'll be pulling in targeted traffic from keyword areas that you may never have considered before.

And, most times, those keyword areas are much less competitive than trying to target your individual goods and services. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't target your products -- only that you need to look at other avenues from which to pull traffic as well.

The journey has just begun, and the path ahead is full of surprises and mysteries to harness the true power of your online business.

In my next post in the Mumbai SEO Expert series I will explore the target audience I hope to attract and see what kind of keywords and keyword combinations come up…. (To be continued in Part 3)

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Mumbai SEO Expert Series – Success with Keywords (Part 1)

In the beginning, there was a word, and that word was KEYWORD.

As a SEO Expert in Mumbai, I am often asked why I have “seo expert mumbai” appearing in some form or another in most of my blog posts, articles and my website www.seo-optimization-experts.com.

In the two lines above lies the answer to that question. As a Seo Expert, I obviously want to excite any user or a company who is seeking the services of a seo expert or seo company on a search engine like Google to find me easily.

And I, like any smart businessman want anyone typing seo expert in mumbai to land to my website or my blog post. The reason I have added Mumbai (location) is common sense. Since I am based in Mumbai, it’s highly probable I will more easily attract the users who want to find a seo expert or seo company in close vicinity.

So seo expert mumbai is primarily a KEYWORD.

It’s the KEYWORD that will drive potential customers to your website or blog that will translate into traffic, and eventually sales.

Now I have clients in Middle East and in US as well, but having location in my keyword ensures targeted traffic from my city of business. Also, as any smart SEO expert would know, that targeting a common term like “seo expert” would be more difficult to achieve, as I will have to compete with thousands of other SEO experts worldwide for that keyword (of course that does not mean that I intend to give up).

In fact it is one of my personal goals to rank No #1 for seo expert, but in the meanwhile why let good business get away.

To demonstrate the power of putting location in your keyword when it comes to search engine rankings, type in seo experts in mumbai in Google, and my website appears on Rank #1, but only if you are searching from Mumbai, but would appear Rank #11 if you were searching from, say New Delhi or London.

If you notice the individual keywords “seo” and “experts” also forms part of my domain name www.seo-optimization-experts.com. This is a key factor in achieving high rankings for a particular keyword phrase, i.e. get your keyword or individual keywords, into your domain name.

For those who are cringing about now, thinking they already have a domain and it does not include the keyword, don’t worry, there are ways of getting around, one of them being, you can setup sub domains.

E.g. www.abcd.com is in the business of property development in Dubai. Now the primary keyword company ABCD wants to target is “Property developers in Dubai”. A sub domain can be set up like http://property-developers-dubai.abcd.com which would be great to get higher ranking for the keyword “property developers in dubai” in search engines.

Simply put search engines rank sites higher which contain the keyword the user is searching for in their domain name. There are various other factors like optimizing each page around a keyword, building quality links and fresh content that will influence search engine rankings, but that’s another story.

Another sub domain e.g. http://mumbai.seo-optimization-experts.com will target keyword “mumbai” which is a part of the keyword I am targeting seo expert mumbai, but not currently part of my domain name.

Since Mumbai is located in India, it also makes sense for me to target users who are searching for seo experts in India, so we have seo expert in India as another important keyword.

If I had an office in say London (feels good to say it), I would also have created a sub domain http://london.seo-optimization-experts.com. In this way I would have “seo”, “experts” and “london” in my domain…and a user typing in seo expert in London would find my website in search engine results (if I have done my page optimization around that keyword properly that is).

So you can see how I started with one keyword seo expert mumbai, and additional keywords phrases got created in the process of writing this article.

So as you can see, my keywords list has gone up a bit, Seo expert, seo expert mumbai, seo experts in mumbai, seo expert in mumbai, seo expert india, seo experts in india, seo expert in india, seo company mumbai, seo firm mumbai, seo company india.

Notice that though the keywords above look similar, the search ranking for each of those keywords is different. You can never be sure what the user will type in to reach you, so identify longer versions of your keywords as well. A user searching for seo expert in mumbai, and if I am optimized for that exact keyword as well, rather than only seo expert mumbai, my page would be found higher in the search listing.

I have also targeted mis-spelt words like seo exprt mumbai which means that even when a users mis-spells by mistake you ensure your website comes up. This is becoming soon out of date with Google suggest, and their new browser Chrome that suggests possible keywords based on each letter you type.

This is just the beginning into a wonderful journey of finding the right powerful keywords that will generate business for you, where you start with one keyword, and eventually create hundreds of powerful keywords that become traffic funnels to your website.

Having hundreds of focused keywords around my business would mean… you do the maths. Like I always say, I am not a SEO expert, I am just a smart businessman.

In my next post in this series I will explore the services I offer and see what kind of keywords and keyword combinations come up…. (Continued in Part 2)

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