Since the last 2 of my posts were entirely about Internet Marketers and what I don’t like about some of them, I feel I owe my readers some SEO advice. Because this is an important aspect of seoreef.com, to give good SEO advice to people who need it.

On today’s special, I am going to talk about how to get a top 10 ranking in 48 or even 24 hours using Digg. Don’t get me wrong, I am not talking about difficult keywords. But that doesn’t mean that some of the long tailed keywords can’t bring you traffic. As a matter of fact, if you have a lot of long tailed keywords into top 10, you will have a steady source of traffic each day. It is advisable that you apply this strategy each day or it least once every other day, especially for your important websites.

STEP 1: CHOOSE THE KEYWORD(S) YOU ARE GOING TO TARGET
No matter what your niche is, you are bound to find some keywords that are easy to dominate and will provide you with some traffic. For the sake of argument, I am going to give an example in the Dish Network niche. The keyword we are looking for is ideally 3, 4 or 5 words long – yes, this does work for some of the non-competitive 3 words long keywords.

We go to Keyword Discovery, which is my favorite keyword research tool, and type in “Dish Network”. If you are not a Keyword Discovery subscriber, you can use the free version here, although it doesn’t have as many features. Just for this strategy, you can use the free version, because this will not be a very extensive keyword research. If you are planning on building a website, it is better if you have the full version though.

Ok, let’s move on. Ideally, you want to target a keyword with less than 1,000 allintitle competition. You will soon understand what I mean by that. Now let’s take a look at the first four keywords and their search volume.

dish network 190530
dish network receiver 4472
dish network satellite 3800
dish network internet 3711

Of course, we can’t dream of touching the “dish network” keyword, this must be done with a preferably aged domain with a lot of authority. Let’s look at the following keywords though and establish the competition. In Google, type “allintitle:dish network receiver” in the query box. We get 11,500 results. Way too much. Let’s go on. Allintitle for “dish network satellite” is 261,000. Haha, no way. Let’s try “dish network internet”. We get 2,310 results. We may be on to something, so let’s dig deeper into this keyword. After typing this keyword into Keyword Discovery, we get as the most important results the following:

dish network internet 3711
dish network high speed internet 878
dish network satellite internet 870
dish network internet service 776
dish network satellite internet pole installation 488
dish network satellite internet service 219

Now let’s check the allintitle competition for “dish network high speed internet”. It is just 311! We have just found our golden nugget. Reasonably high searched for term, little competition. What is even better is that we can probably rank in top 10 for some of the other keywords also.

Results 1 - 10 of about 497 for allintitle:dish network satellite internet – very good;
Results 1 - 10 of about 302 for allintitle:dish network internet service – very good;
Your search - allintitle:dish network satellite internet pole installation - did not match any documents – not that good and I’ll tell you why in a second;
Results 1 - 10 of about 46 for allintitle:dish network satellite internet service – very good.

Now, keyword research is not over. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, it is better if you don’t rely on a single keyword research tool. The probability that a keyword is indeed searched for is way higher if the respective keyword can be found in more than a keyword research tool’s database. So we go to Wordtracker. The story with the paid version vs. the free version is the same as with Keyword Discovery’s, so I will not insist on that.

Let’s type “dish network internet” into Wordtracker. We get the following as the most important results:

200 dish network internet
23 dish network satellite internet
22 dish network high speed internet
15 dish network internet service
7 dish network internet access
7 satellite internet dish network

It seems that the results from the 2 keyword research tools are reciprocal – well, almost – and that’s very good. We have 3 certain winners here:

dish network high speed internet
dish network satellite internet
dish network internet service

However, we can rule out “dish network satellite internet pole installation”. Since Wordtracker doesn’t record it, it must have been just a temporary search trend. It could have been a webmaster searching for his rankings or a number of other different things. The fact that the keyword is not really important is also shown by the fact that we got 0 competition for the allintitle query. This concludes keyword research, so let’s move on to step 2.

STEP 2: CREATE THE ARTICLE AND UPLOAD IT ON YOUR WEBSITE
You are now going to create the article, which must have the following characteristics:
- it should be high quality, because you want your visitors to like and to digg it;
- it should incorporate the keyword(s) you are looking for in the body.

However, there’s one more very important thing to do before submitting the article. You should come up with a proper title tag, because the title tag together with the high authority backlink from Digg is what is going to make your page rank high. Ideally, the title tag for this page should be something like:

“Find out everything about the Dish Network satellite high speed Internet service”.

With this title tag, you incorporate all the 3 keywords we decided to rank for.

STEP 3: SUBMIT YOUR ARTICLE TO DIGG
All that is left for you to do is to submit your article to Digg. However, there is one final catch. Your Digg profile must be a relatively strong one. You need to have 100-150 friends, or somewhere along those lines. Of course, it might work even if you have fewer or more friends than that, but bottom line is that you need to get involved. Digg other people’s stuff, and they will digg yours in return. Be a part of the community and don’t spam. You want to get at least 10 diggs, because this way your backlink will have more authority. So, take the time to create a powerful Digg profile.

Once you submit your article, you should be able to see results in 48 hours or even less. You will notice that the Digg submission itself will rank maybe even higher than your website at first, but that’s only going to last for a few days. After that, your ranking will stick, while the Digg submission will probably disappear way lower.

I hope you enjoyed this little secret of mine, now get to work!

You probably know that the question in the title is more of a rhetorical one than anything else. And the answer is different for each individual. For some of you, the answer may be 0. For other persons, it may be thousands of dollars or even more. Let’s get something straight: we are talking about money spend, not time or anything else, and yes, I know that time costs money.

So why do I insist on only taking money into this equation? Well, to be frank, because this is how Internet Marketers who supposedly sell recipes of success put it. And you might argue that I have something against them, which is simply not true. I couldn’t care less for the majority of them.

But why do they insist, in their sales letters, to say things like:
“This product will bring you tens of thousands of dollars each month, what is this worth to you?”

If you have seen some of the sales letters, I know you will recognize the speech. The overwhelming majority of their hyped up sales pitches have this line in order to justify their often absurd prices. In order for you to understand how stupid this type of line is, let’s think about an example that could easily be – and probably has been for many people – a real life example.

John buys a van, and starts transporting people between two different towns. He starts a small business, and due to the fact that he had a somewhat lower price compared to other companies and started developing a good reputation, business was good to him. He bought another van and so on and so forth. John now has an incredibly developed business, with many coaches and lots of routes, between many towns. Let’s say that the first van he bought cost $15,000. His current business has an annual money flow of 3 million dollars. So, was the first van he bought worth $3,000,000?

Of course it wasn’t. The time, dedication and commitment he put into development of his business is worth that much. However, many ebook and other digital products gurus try to lead you into believing their products are worth the metaphorical $3,000,000. But their products are not. It’s your own commitment and work that is worth the output you manage to get out of your business. You shouldn’t judge a product based on how much money it can theoretically bring to a person, because in theory you can make millions starting with a pencil. Now I wouldn’t mind the gurus saying: “Hey, this kind of advice is scarce and there are not too many experts on the matter, so that’s why it’s priced at $197”. In other words, to base their prices on the supply and demand balance of the market. But wait, now I remembered: they’re not real Marketers, they’re just salesmen.

Of course, in the end, this is just another one of their strategies that try to play with one’s mind and induce them the buying attitude. For me, it is just not fair. It doesn’t seem fair that an ebook from a quasi expert who barely knows how to write costs $97, while a real Marketing book, from a real expert, Philip Kotler, can be found on Amazon for as low as $68.

“Forgive me but the day I start trusting him is the day I would have sold my soul”. This quote is from Sayid, a very cool character from an even better show called “Lost”. A show which is definitely my all time favorite. What does that have to do with Internet Marketing? Well, the quote tells exactly how I feel about the majority of gurus - I will not call them Marketers, because I don’t consider them to be.

Being a “guru” is very fashionable in today’s online environment. They project an image of success and everyone who tries his/her luck online wants to be exactly like the gurus and fit into the guru mentality. I am telling you to think again. Let’s talk about some of the reasons why you should not listen or follow these self-proclaimed gurus.

1. THE GURUS FEED FROM YOUR LACK OF SUCCESS
It sounds pretty cruel, but it’s still the blatant truth. As I was saying before, many people who get disappointed by the lack of their online success tend to buy more and more of the gurus’ ebooks. When they don’t really find the answer in a product that sounded too good to be true, they move on and buy another. The conclusion is simple: the gurus only sell their products because you don’t achieve online success. Because if you would, you would not be needing their products, would you?

2. MOST OF THE PRODUCTS ARE OF POOR QUALITY
Not ALL of the products are of poor quality, but most of them are. For one thing, they never tell you the whole story. They tell you some basic things, without touching the essence. And they don’t really want you to succeed online. If you are successful online, it means that:
- they have more competition to worry about;
- they lose one of their potential buyers (you).

Then, not every person can be a writer. Many of these ebooks have basic Grammar errors that would make a 12-year old feel embarrassed. Amateurish and sloppy writing is the best way to define these products. In order to overcome this and capture the reader’s attention, they resort to extreme measures like offensive language, constant bragging, etc.

3. YOU DON’T NEED THE GURUS
That’s exactly right, you don’t need them; it is exactly the other way around. They need you and other people like you who dream of online success in order to sell their products. I am not saying that you shouldn’t buy any of their products at all. As I stated before, there are some good products. But you certainly don’t need to buy each and every new product that comes out. As a matter of fact, you can believe me when I tell you that it only takes the best product from each field and you’ve read them all.

4. SOME OF THEIR PRODUCTS ARE RIDICULOUSLY OVERPRICED
$800/month for a membership site?! $1000 - $1500 for a single product?! Some of these gurus’ greed is indeed endless. However, you must remember that not the people who demand such outrageous sums of money are being foolish; it is the people that give the money. Never pay such large amounts on Internet Marketing products; you would be disappointed of what you get in return.

5. LACK OF REAL QUALITY CONTROL
However, there’s one area in which these gurus excel indeed: vanity. OK, that too. But I’m referring to something else: copywriting. Yes, they are indeed very good at writing hyped up sales letters that touch a sensitive string in people. The fact that they don’t deliver is not that important (to them, anyway). Some of these sales copies are so good though, they should be made illegal.

Usually, the longer a sales page is for a product, the worse the product is. There’s no wonder that there’s a rumor that says that Google is going to filter these pages out of the search results. However, the lack of REAL quality control is an issue. For instance, what would you say if you saw a driving school’s advertisement that said: “Come to our school, and you will be able to compete in Formula 1”. Unfortunately, this is not a far fetched comparison, not by a longshot. While you would know that the driving school’s advertisement is fake, you would not really be able to tell that you can’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight by reading a certain ebook. This is exactly why I said that the gurus feed on people’s hopes and dreams, and take advantage of them.

Now, as a final note, you might argue that one has to sell his/her products. I am not against that. What I am against is throwing out poor products with no sense of ethics whatsoever. In one of my future posts I will make a comparison between your average guru and his / her inherent way of thinking and real Internet Marketers who know what they are talking about and actually bring something useful to the community.

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few years, you probably know the great popularity that the blog platform enjoys nowadays. The term “blog” actually comes from the term web log, and the conceptual backbone is similar to that of a diary, except for the fact that it’s exposed for everyone to see and it is online.

People share their expertise and experiences through blogs and it didn’t take too long for people to realize blogs are a great way to make money online also. So what are the most important advantages of a blog? Quick installation and the ability to receive instant feedback and to communicate with the visitors are some of the most important ones, but there are many more. However, this is not the subject of this post.

What I am going to talk about is the title tags of your blog posts. The great majority of people owning blogs use the WordPress platform, with its 5 minutes quick installation and its versatility. However, what the WordPress CMS fails to provide is good title tags for the blog posts. However, there is a solution and it’s called the SEO Title Tag plugin and you can find it here.

With this handy little plugin, you have the possibility to create a custom title tag for each of your blog posts. As you might have noticed, Wordpress title tag usually defaults to the headline of your post, which is not a very good thing. I’ve had a few websites filtered out of the search results for doing this mistake back in the times when I was a rookie.

The installation is simple. You simply upload the plugin onto your server, in the wp-content folder, and in the sub folder called plugins. After that, you log into your administrator area of your blog, go to plugins main menu and plugins sub-menu. You will get a list of your available plugins, where you will see the one called Seo Title Tag. Hit activate. Now, before you actually start customizing your title tags, there is one more thing you need to do. You need to replace the title tag php command line in your header file. If you don’t know absolutely anything about programming, don’t fret. This is far easier than it sounds. You just need to delete a line and copy-paste another one. Here is how you do it.

In your blog admin area, you go to Presentation main menu and Theme Editor sub-menu. At the right of the page, you will have a list of editable files. Click on the one called “Header”. Look for your title tag, it is to the top of the page. It is the statement between the beginning title tag (<title>) and the ending title tag (</title>). All you need to do is replace that line with:

<title><?php if (function_exists(’seo_title_tag’)) { seo_title_tag(); } else { bloginfo(’name’); wp_title();} ?></title>

Hit update file, and start customizing your blog posts’ title tags. This is a must do, so make sure you don’t skip this. Have fun.

No, this post is not about how gurus make their often enough immense amounts of money by selling false dreams to naïve people. Nope, this is about something else entirely. This post is about me and my performance.

And boy, do I have a lot of things to feel frustrated about. First of all, I feel very uncomfortable for setting up this blog and utterly and completely forgetting about it. If you have any experience whatsoever in the field of Internet Marketing, you will know how I feel and what I am talking about.

It is very easy to get carried away, make big and bold plans, and then not carrying on with them. Especially in Internet Marketing. The mirage of hitting it big time is often a curse also. We can say that not every person is prepared to embrace success. Internet Marketing is like flirting with a beautiful woman. You can either become the happiest man in the world or heart broken.

But before throwing other metaphors at you, I will also tell you exactly what I mean. It is easy to get carried away at the allure of a free life, with you being your own boss. It is very easy to think about waking up each morning, taking a shower and going at the corner café for a delicious breakfast taken while checking your overnight income. What most people often forget – your truly, guilty as charged sometimes - is the fact that you need to work really hard if you want those dreams to become reality. As much as working on a normal full time job? Nope, not as much, way more!

So as of today I am going to make a promise to myself. Although I can’t say that I’m a lazy person, I can safely say that I can do more. This blog is a proof of that. So what would you like to mend in your Internet Marketing method of working?

If there ever was a doubt about it, social networks are the next revolution of the Internet. And this affects all aspects of Internet Marketing and SEO consequently.
October 23, 2007. Stumbleupon launches a toolbar which will most likely have an important impact in the way people perceive search. Although many people just don’t realize this yet. However, if you are one of the almost 4 million “stumblers” and you downloaded the toolbar, you can also see Stumbleupon results next to some of the sites that appear in your searches. They work on all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Msn, as well as in Youtube, Flickr, Wikipedia.

To me, this is a clear sign that we are heading towards “social dominance”. After all, how much time is it going to pass before the major search engines start giving these social sites more “attention” and weight in the search results? My bet is that it will not take too long. After all, social networks have a few undeniable advantages:

• They are the closest thing to a real life society on the Internet. And although nothing is perfect, they mimic a real life society pretty well;
• They establish natural relationship patterns between users;
• As a consequence, users build natural linking patterns among themselves, either by connecting with each other or by “casting votes”.

Now, if you noticed – and I’m sure you did – I used the phrase “natural linking patterns”. When you hear that, first thing you think about is “backlinks”, of course. Backlinks are the backbone of the Google search engine, it is what made it different. Its algorithms put a great emphasis on the number of inbound links a website has, and they try to identify natural linking patterns.

It was designed like that in order to profit from the democratic nature of the Internet. However, the system is far from perfect since it can be easily manipulated by savvy webmasters. Google’s emphasis on backlinks is what gave birth to the bulk of link spamming and even content duplication.

Of course, social networks can be spammed too, but they are much more controllable. Also, if you just have a software that is going to automatically make you 100 accounts on a site, that is not going to be enough, far from it. With social networks, you will have to get INVOLVED, actually make friends, exchange ideas, cast votes, etc. (this will be the subject of a whole new post). If you don’t do all those things, you are not likely to achieve much success. You are not going to be able to build up an audience, and you will not be able to sell consequently.

So, if you look at the big picture, social networks are far more natural in their approach than backlink building. I am not saying that backlink building is or will be dead in the near future, that is not possible yet – and it will probably never be as long as search engines exist. What I am saying however is the fact that search engines are irreversibly heading towards this social revolution, the moment in which social networks will play a major role in the search results. That alone is worth the trouble, so start digging, stumbling and bookmarking.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, here are some examples of social networking sites (a few of the most important):

Myspace.com
Digg.com
Del.icio.us
Stumbleupon.com
Flickr.com
Sphinn.com

So it’s official now, the Google Page Rank has been updated. However, the controversies are far from settled over issues like:

• Is Page Rank important in any way?
• Has Page Rank algorithm been modified?

SO, IS PAGE RANK IMPORTANT IN ANY WAY?

This debate has been going on for years now, and neither side is willing to budge. There is the first group that says Page Rank is useless and it doesn’t prove anything. Then there’s another group that says Page Rank is a major ranking algorithm. As usual, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

The Page Rank you see in the Google toolbar is like a picture of the real Page Rank taken once every 3 months (approximately, it is not a fixed date). The Real Page Rank is updated constantly by Google and it is like a measurement of your site’s importance. It is actually a link analysis of your website, and that’s what, in my opinion, makes it pretty important.

So for instance if you have a webpage, its PR will depend on the Page Rank that its inbound links will bring. Each inbound link will bring you a PR equal to the PR of the page that links to you divided by the number of outbound links that particular page has. I hope it isn’t very confusing, but let’s assume you get a backlink from a page that has a PR of 1. If that particular page has 9 more other outbound links, this means that you will get approximately 0.1 amount of Page Rank. Besides all this, there is also the damping factor, which is set at 0.85. So the PR of a page has the formula:

PR = 0.15 + 0.85*n

Where “n” is the sum of all the Page Rank amounts brought by inbound links as explained above. So, each new page starts with a PR of 0.15.

SO WHAT’S DIFFERENT NOW?

Well, to be perfectly honest, this is unclear yet. However, what we can rely upon are facts and those are:

• Yahoo got from a PR of 10 to a PR of 9;
• Youtube got from a PR of 8 to a PR of 3 !
• Even different regional Google homepages got from a PR of 8 to a PR of 7 like google.se (Sweden) or google.ro (Romania).

However, the conspiracy theories regarding the demise of copyblogger.com didn’t come true in the end, as the PR of 4 was just an intermediary phase prior to the update, and Copyblogger now has a PR of 7 (after having a PR of 6). This is also what happened to reputable sites like ezinearticles.com which had NO PR yesterday.

THE ALL FAMOUS CLICHÉ: PR DOESN’T MATTER, TRAFFIC DOES

This phrase, taken in absolute value, is true. However, it’s like owning a street shop and saying: “I don’t care how my front windows look like, all I care about is customers walking into the store.” – when it’s obvious that how your front windows look affects how many potential customers walk into your store. Same with PR, since it’s still obvious that Page Rank is still a solid ranking algorithm. After all, Page Rank is the most important link relationship algorithm and this is what set Google apart from all the other search engines. This is an important factor in its success. Why would years of research and lots of money spent in the process be simply thrown down the drain?

Keyword research is a pretty hot topic for beginning or advanced Internet Marketers alike. After all, if you want search engine traffic, you need to rank well for the specific terms of your industry. However, far too many people rely heavily on keyword research tools. And by heavily I mean exclusively. It’s not that it’s bad to consult the different keyword research services. It’s just that they can sometimes be misleading.

And this is where keyword research common sense comes into play. What this basically means is the fact that if you want to start a new website, the best thing to do before consulting the keyword services is make up your own list of keywords. Of course, this implies that you have at least some intermediate notions about your niche, but that’s the best way to succeed online, right?

Ok, let’s think about a niche, for example soccer – I picked this one because I know something about it, and unless you want to build a thin MFA website, you should know something about your topic also. It is a big niche, and I would advise to start a site on a more specific one, but this is just for the sake of example. Now we can go to the drawing board, and we will do that before consulting the keyword services in any way!

Now think about the work “soccer”, and start writing every keyword that you think YOU would type in the search engines related to the topic. Big chances are that many of the other soccer passionates are looking for approximately the same keywords. I will tell you why that’s important in a second, but not before I present you with another approach.

Write down the word soccer, and also think about the first three verbs and nouns that come into your mind. Also, write down commercial keywords, like “buy”, “cheap”, “free”. If I think about it for a few seconds, the first three soccer related verbs that come into my mind are: play, watch, learn. As for nouns, they are: match, equipment, teams. So we have: “play soccer”, “watch soccer”, “learn soccer”, “soccer match”, “soccer equipment”, “soccer teams”. Now, all you need to do is extrapolate from that. For instance, you have “soccer equipment”. Where do you go from there? “Soccer shoes”, “Soccer balls”, etc. Of course, if you have any other root words that pop up into your mind while doing so, write them down. Like “soccer field” or anything else. If you think about them in relation to your niche, chances are that other people think about them too.

Keep doing this until you have a pretty consistent keyword list. Don’t forget to include the plurals, where the case requires. Then, you can go to your favorite keyword service. You will notice that many of the keywords you thought about in your list are there. However, some of them will not be there but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are not searched for. This is where the keyword research common sense comes in. If you take it into consideration, you might attract traffic from the most unusual sources.

From my experience, this is an important factor. I’ve optimized sites for keywords that supposedly got thousands of hits each month. For instance, I got a 4500 hits/month keyword (according to a keyword research service) to number one on Google. All I got from it were a few hits in a few months (not in one month, in a few months). Then, working on the same site, I came up with another keyword. I checked it on the same service, but it didn’t have records of the respective keyword. But it only seemed like common sense to me, so I got it to top 10. Imagine my surprise when the respective keyword got an average of 10 hits/day, and it wasn’t even on the top spot on Google, it was just top 10. So even though working with Overture, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery is important, don’t forget about the common sense keywords. You might just be surprised!

If you’ve read some SEO books, been on some forums, or just chatted with some friends, you have all heard of the term “keyword research”. It is the foundation of your new site, from where you will start building it brick by brick, article by article. However, if you’ve noticed in the same books, forums or in the minds of your friends, there’s one big dilemma: which of the 4 services mentioned in the title of this post should you use? Almost no one will definitely tell you “Hey, you should go with this one, or with that one”. Nope. As anything else in Internet Marketing, it is not really that simple.

Ok, then. We’ll take them one at a time. We will start with the all time favorite, Overture. Even though, realistically thinking, it is not the best of them. I still am amazed of how many people use Overture figures as a reference. It’s not that it’s good for nothing, but it has the most problems.

• it can’t differentiate plural from singular. So if you are trying to see how many hits the keyword “iphones” gets, you will be amazed to find out that you can’t. Instead, the hits from this keyword are added to the hits of its singular brother;

• the numbers you get back from Overture are dramatically skewed. In fact, whenever I see the Overture numbers, I am actually thinking that a real number would be something in the range of 10-25% of what Overture shows. This is because Overture takes into consideration the hits made by bots or computer software that checks for rankings. Now imagine how much of this activity is being conducted!

• The Overture database is not updated very often. At the time of this writing, it is October 21^st 2007. The figures you get from the Overture database date back from January 1^st 2007. So, if you wanted to apply some Boom Marketing techniques, you can say goodbye to the Overture database. For instance, if you could have foreseen the Halo 3 rush and you wanted to build a website that would be top 10 for related queries by the time of its launch (September 25^th), Overture would not have been the best choice for your keyword research. In fact, it would have been the worst;

• Overture will most likely show results biased by Yahoo’s PPC interests.

Having said that, there are also 2 good points I see in Overture, and they are:

• They show pretty good relative relationships between keywords (because the actual figures are, as I said, dramatically altered);

• They base their results on a major search engine, which is Yahoo.

Let’s go to Wordtracker now. This is a paid tool, but you can use their free version if you want to save some money. It’s just that you will have to do more work yourself – but that always happens when you want to cut down the budget, right? When compared to Overture, Wordtracker is simply better. It gathers its data from 2 search engines, Dogpile and Metacrawler. Combined, they have a 0.65 – 0.70% share of the search engine market. That doesn’t sound like much, but that does not necessarily mean that Wordtracker’s results are in any way worse than the other services. The benefits of using Wordtracker include:

• you get a clear differentiation between the singular and plural versions of a keyword;
• the results are not in any way geared towards the PPC market;
• you get more realistic figures than Overture’s.

The only major disadvantage of using Wordtracker is the fact that it only gathers data from the above mentioned search engines. However, it also tries to repair this by approximating the number of searches taking into account the market share of the respective 2 engines. Of course, that would imply that the behavioral patterns of people looking for information on the search engines are the same, which is of course a utopia. Still, there is no perfect keyword research tool. Not by a longshot.

So we got to Keyword Discovery. This is also a paid service, and it gathers its data from 180 different search engines. From my perspective, what Keyword Discovery does differently – and maybe in a better fashion overall – is mine out the long tailed keywords. As opposed to Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery does not estimate the total number of searches a keyword would get, it shows it as the keyword was recorded in their database.

As for Google’s keyword research tool, I think it is more similar to Overture, if you simply think about the fact that it has a strong PPC influence. This is best used if you plan a Google Adwords campaign, and this is also the reason behind its existence. Another useful feature is for people who look for Adsense revenue. They can easily see which keywords are more expensive and what should they optimize their page for – in order to target more expensive keywords and a bigger CPC implicitly. However, you must remember one thing: no keyword tool is perfect, far from it. If I had to choose between the four on a new website and I could only pick one, that would be Wordtracker for me. However, keyword list building is very time consuming. You also need to think about keyword research common sense, which will be covered in my next post.

I recently came across a pretty good free report, called “Teaching Sells”, which you can find here. It was written by Brian Clark, but I found the report via Aaron Wall’s SeoBook site. You can download the report and read it, it is pretty good. But that’s not the point.

The most important messages of the report (from my perspective), are the following:

• the fact that you shouldn’t rely on Google for traffic;
• the fact that you should SELL your content, and not give it for free;
• the fact that you should always have the big picture and mind and think about the future.

While I don’t necessarily completely disagree with neither one of those key points (as a matter of fact I strongly support the 3rd one), I want to raise another issue here: when having the average Online Marketer in mind, whom is he/she supposed to listen to? Now I’ve tried and tested several systems, I know some of them work and some don’t. However, this is because of years of trial and error. But then again, the average Joe hears from a big shot SEO expert that he could and should try building some Adsense websites. Some of them say “Hey, Google is your best friend. Catch some long tails, and success will surely come”. Then, there are people like in the above-mentioned case, who state that Google is a dictator – which I don’t necessarily disapprove of, I was just giving an example.

I think this is a pretty big problem. People who look for online success are usually very susceptible to believing almost everything they hear. That’s because being successful online is still perceived as a dream, and the Internet is the land of dreams consequently. But when they buy an ebook and they learn something, only to buy the next one and learn something else, that’s a problem. Because even though some people do make money from Adsense and rely on Google for traffic and some people make do money through selling content, they all suggest theirs is the only way. However, from all the ebooks I’ve read and all the pieces of software I’ve used, there’s only one that had a big impact on me at the time of its reading. That’s the only high quality Internet Marketing product that could ever compete with standard Marketing books written by classics the likes of Philip Kotler - you know, the ones that get printed :). But more on that sometime in the future.