“Welcome to China”s Parallel Cyber Universe” is an article written by Pei Shing Huei, a reporter from a Singapore ‘s newspaper – “The Straight Times”. He wrote that it was true for Chinese people prefer those “Made in China” popular search engines/portals. “Baidu” is a synonym of ‘Google” in China. Baidu issues its stock at NASDAQ( BIDU). Its today’s price is US$208.33. It is the number 1 search engine in China, accounting for 60% of the market share while only 25% of the Chinese users sometimes use “Google”.

Several years ago, eBay took up 90% of China market. Several years later in 2006, they were forced to close one of their major web site in China. Now it is under-rank their Chinese competitor – “Taobao”
Facebook is ranked as the 55 in China for click rates and their cloned Chinese brother ” Kaixin” is the 15th on the list. Baidu is reported an annual profit about 450 million USD in 2008.
Why they failed in China? There are numerous reasons contributed. According the article, one of the critical reasons is that they were defeated in ” word-of mouth contest”. It is reported that 9 out of every 10 new users of search engine always recommend “Baidu” to their friends.

“Most of my friends in China are using Kaixin, so I have to register an account in Kaixin, too.” said Mr Wu from Beijing, who is working in Singapore. ” I told them about Facebook, they had no response. They barely heard of it.”

Another reason is the local language – Chinese. Most of Chinese web sites use Chinese Pinyin Spelling System(a new spelling system based the Roman Alphabets). It makes looking for sites easy and fast. On the other hand, most Chinese internet users are not really good at English so they don’t bother to remember how to spell ‘Facebook” and “Youtube”

Hands down, Baidu is more popular in China then Google; but to define how this benefits marketers, we need to look at who is searching for what in each search engine; as we’re not looking for popularity and non-relevant clicks and inquires; rather we’re really looking for where our likely target audience will gather.

Google vs. Baidu: Which one’s more popular?

The vast majority of Chinese prefer using Baidu to Google (52.1% vs. 32.8%). But before you begin planning your marketing campaign based on that factoid, consider this:

In 2003 a CNNIC survey found that 49.1% users searched the web, while 55.8% of users searched for MP3s. For Google, 61.7% of users searched the web, while only 11.9% searched for MP3s. That means over half of all Baidu searches are for illegally downloading MP3 music files.

So one reason that Baidu is so loved by the Chinese is that it is not held to the strict legal standards of its western competitors; for a typical marketing campaign, the popularity of Baidu vs. Google may largely be irrelevant.

Search results page scanning.

When looking at scanning heat maps, one can see that for Google, the majority of the scanning happens at the top left corner of the results; this means Google is doing a good job at displaying relevant results.

When viewing Baidu, we see the scan appearing throughout the page, while Google users will seldom venture past the 3rd highest result, Chinese users are more likely to click lower results or even go to the 2nd and 3rd page looking for results.

Why?

Part of the reason is that Baidu hides its sponsored listings within its top organic results. The Chinese searchers know this and generally do not trust the first few results, leading them to scan further down the page.

Another reason is that Chinese characters take a long time to type when using a western keyboard. Therefore it’s sometimes easier to type in part of the entry, search, and then click relevant suggestions featured at the bottom of the page – this is actually faster than typing in the entire search query.

This then leads to a general scanning of the entire page, but doesn’t necessarily lead to additional interaction with the lower ranked organic listings.

Phonetic search: Is it easier to find Chinese terms in Baidu?

Some arguments state that Baidu has a better way of displaying Chinese search terms. Chinese characters are basically a series of pictures, each single character able to have many different meanings based on characters surrounding it. Therefore, it gets pretty tricky for a search engine to display the appropriate search results when it needs to compare the words surrounding the search term to adequately supply the correct listings.

I guess this is valid, but then why does Google satisfy better on pure satisfaction and relevancy? When we measure pure information related searches (and take out the MP3 searches) we find that Google provides better results in Chinese.

Baidu’s competitive advantage.

Baidu’s top spot among Chinese can likely be attributed to 3 factors:

1. The MP3 Effect; as discussed above;

2. Stability Issues; Google.com isn’t as stable in China as it is in the West, and the Chinese government has been known to redirect traffic from Google.com to Baidu.com;

3. Chinese nationalism; Baidu is from China, the word “bai du” refers to a poem written in the Song Dynasty about searching for beauty among chaos, and its CEO is the personification of young success and revitalization of the economy. Basically if you’re Chinese, it just feels better to use Baidu, regardless of the search results.

How is this relevant for marketers?

Well as I stated above, it’s best to use a mix of both search engines when planning a campaign; but general rule here is that if you’re targeting businesses and students (target group require relevant results) then it’s better to go with Google, and if you’re targeting the vast majority of Chinese, then it’s better to go with Baidu.

However when compensating for the MP3 factor, most of the numbers tend to even out; they are close enough to make the differences negligible.

The best long-term strategies tend to remain remarkably similar; use SEO and have value-added information on your website (not just a sales conversion funnel) so it’s more likely users will visit your site hunting for information.

Short term strategies including PPC and other forms of online advertising, however, require a lot more understanding of the subtle differences between the engines.

It is a good thing that we watched this happen; for this is the Year that We, a new generation across the world assumes the mantle of leadership and responsibility for each other, for our societies and for our world. As an older generation looses their standing in world affairs, and their power, they are leaving as loosing armies always do; they destroy everything behind them; their economies; their environments; their world.

Our generation understands these simple truths; that We are Responsible for our actions; that We are Responsible to pass our world on to our Children in better shape than we received it in; that We are the generation who must Change Humanity if We are to save our world.

So I ask all, to look forward into 2009 with a confident vision, because change is in our hands, dare to light the fires of hope, because we ourselves are the hope and begin to dream again, because we can now share our dreams across cities and towns, across prairies and mountains and across borders and oceans, our dreams can now be heard by everyone across the world.

]]> http://www.clarencewang.com/blog/internet-marketing/happy-new-year-everyone/feed/ 0 http://www.clarencewang.com/blog/life/xmas-in-the-park/ http://www.clarencewang.com/blog/life/xmas-in-the-park/#comments Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:44:17 +0000 Clarence http://www.clarencewang.com/blog/?p=208 Xmas in the park

Some random shots at this year’s Xmas in the park, not a huge fan of this, but since I am staying just 10 mins from Auckland Domain, therefore managed to squeeze an hour to produce this.

Merry Xmas everyone!!!

Tips for Building a Blog Part-Time:

Have Realistic Expectations, but be Aggressive

During the time that I’ve been blogging, I’ve come across a huge number of bloggers who start out with so much enthusiasm and passion for building their blog and earning a substantial income. Unfortunately, most of them no longer have the same dedication to their blog or expectations for the future, because the reality was disappointing to them.

If you start out by expecting to earn six figures by working part-time hours, you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed, even if others would consider your results successful. Those who have realistic expectations of what they’ll get out of their blog and what they’ll have to put in will usually be able to stick around long enough to see the fruits of their labor.

Although I think it’s important to realize how much work and time is involved in building a blog, I also think it’s important to be aggressive and to go after success. Those bloggers who I know personally that have done very well did not just put in some effort to see what would happen. Aggressively go after success and it is very achievable.

Approach it for the Long-Term

As I said earlier, building a blog takes time. If you go in with the approach that you’re building an asset that will help you more in the long-term than it will in the short-term, you’ll have an outlook that prepares you for success. Very few bloggers are able to build a strong blog overnight, and if you’re willing to put in a lot of hours early on without a whole lot of reward, you’ll be paid off in the long run. If you’re looking for a short-term answer to making money online, there are better methods than blogging.

Find Your Motivation

Building a blog part-time will require you to make sacrifices in order to dedicate time to your blog. Maybe you’ll lose some time with family and friends, or maybe you’ll have to temporarily give up something that you enjoy. During these times you’ll need to have something that motivates you to keep going. By knowing specifically why you want to build a successful blog, you can always keep that motivation in mind when you’re questioning why you are making sacrifices.

Focus on Building it First, Making Money will Come Later

When it comes to monetizing a blog, I’ve tried both approaches – monetizing from the start and waiting several months before attempting to monetize. After trying both approaches, I think my next blog launch (whenever that may be) will have no ads for a while. Making money from ads with a new site is possible, but the space used for ads may be better off being used to promote something on the site and helping to encourage growth.

Whether you sell ads at first or not, the main focus should be on building a strong blog, not on making as much money as possible. A blog that’s full of valuable, well-targeted content will have plenty of opportunities to make money, but if your focus is on the money rather than the content, the results are likely to suffer.

Set Your Weekly Schedule

Some bloggers encourage a very structured posting schedule and others prefer more flexibility. Personally, I think it all depends on the blog and the style of the blogger. However, even if you’re not scheduling your posts, it’s helpful to have a rough schedule of when you’ll be working on your blog each week. Building a blog takes time and effort, and it’s easy to let other things take priority if the time isn’t scheduled.
Get the Support of Your Family

Depending on your current family situation, your blogging efforts may impact others in a big way. You may be willing to make some sacrifices, but others will also have to be willing. It’s important that those in your family are made aware of your intentions and why you’re doing it. I know I wouldn’t be able to dedicate the time that I do if my wife wasn’t behind me 100%. We both make sacrifices right now, with hopes that it will pay off in the long run.

Set Monthly Goals

As a part-time blogger you’ll need something to keep you going from time-to-time, and you’ll also need some direction in order to keep yourself on the right path. By setting measurable monthly goals you’ll always have something to be working towards, and it will be easy to see how you are progressing.

One of the keys to setting goals is to set the right goals. If you’re main priority is making money, then income should be one of your most significant goals. Other things like pageviews, subscriber growth, inbound links, etc. can ultimately help to make you more money, but don’t lose focus of what’s most important to you, whatever that may be.

Get Involved in the Community

One of the biggest factors in building my primary blog was the help and support of others in the blogging community. Whatever niche you are in there are certainly other bloggers that would be valuable members of your network. Take some time to comment on other blogs, use Twitter, write guest posts, even visit some forums.

You’ll find that blogging is extremely interactive, and it’s pretty hard to build a successful blog without surrounding yourself with other bloggers. People help those that they like and they also tend to follow the blogs of other that they’ve gotten to know on a deeper level.

Find Your Style

One of the biggest mistakes bloggers can make is trying to be like the leading blogs in their niche. There’s nothing wrong with learning from others and observing what works, but make a strong effort to find your own identity and go out of your way to be unique. Do whatever it is that you do best and give others the opportunity to take notice. This is especially important in crowded niches where readers have plenty of other blogs that they could be reading.

Focus on Quality Over Quantity

When it comes to quantity of posts, there is a huge variety. Some bloggers post a few times per month, and others crank out several per day. There is no right or wrong, but make sure you’re allowing yourself enough time to create the highest quality content possible. One really strong post per week is better than 3 or 4 mediocre posts.

Limit the Number of Projects at One Time

As a part-time blogger you’ll be stretched for time as it is. Most likely you’ll have plenty ideas of other projects that you could be starting, but resist the temptation to take on too much, at least until your blog is established. Often, building the blog’s audience in the early days will take more time that it will to maintain the blog in the future, so your schedule may open up a bit if you can be patient.

This is something that I struggle with personally. I currently have 2 blogs and although I post to each one a few times per week, I know that they’re not as strong as they would be if I had fewer responsibilities. In my case, I’m able to manage the two, but it’s not an optimal situation for a one-man operation.

Know What You Want

In terms of income, there is a huge variety of goals from one blogger to the next. One person may want to make $300 a month and another may want to be John Chow and make $30,000 a month. It’s important to know what you want so you can always keep that in mind when you’re working on building the blog. Don’t let others tell you what you should be making or what you should be after, it’s a decision you’ll have to make for yourself.

Celebrate Minor Victories

Because building a blog part-time can take a great deal of discipline and persistence, it’s a good practice to be able to appreciate and enjoy even your minor accomplishments. What you do to celebrate or acknowledge your achievements is up to you, but it’s important that it gives you a sense of satisfaction, yet still motivates you to do even better.

Pay Attention to How You Use Your Time

Efficiency is critical for part-time bloggers. There’s very little time to waste, so pay attention to how you are spending your time and what is producing results. Use a to-do list and daily goals to keep yourself on track and you’ll find that you get more done and you waste less time.

Find Multiple Sources of Income

Selling ad space isn’t the only monetization option for bloggers. I highly advocate mixing in some other sources of income, such as some type of relevant service. Doing freelance writing for other blogs can also help hold you over until your own blogs are producing more income.

Learn from the Best

Take some time to really examine the leading blogs in your niche, or even in other niches. Take notice to what they’re doing to create success and see how you can apply it to your own blog. Make an effort to get to know some of the leading bloggers in your niche, you never know what you’ll be able to pick up from them. Personally, doing freelance work for blogs like Smashing Magazine and Freelance Switch has helped me to get to know some successful and influential bloggers and I’ve learned some things about what it takes to create an A-list blog.

What’s Your Advice for Others?

If you have some advice of your own for part-time bloggers, please leave a comment.

Here’s 20 such sites that I have been using (PR in brackets):

Note: Please keep the submissions of new sites coming and I will check them out but note that I will only include sites on this list that do not have voting.

1. Mister-Wong (8)
2. Backflip (6)
3. Spurl (6)
4. Feedmarker (6)
5. LinkaGoGo (5)
6. MyLinkVault (5)
7. Connectedy (5)
8. SpotBack (5)
9. A1 Webmarks (4)
10. OYAX (4)
11. TeDigo (3)
12. MyPIP (3)
13. SyncOne (3)
14. Space-Ed (3)
15. Yattle (3)
16. To Tag It (1)
17. Buzz Tagz (1)
18. Wiggley Tagz (0)
19. i89 (0)
20. Chipmark (0)

Why Use Social Bookmarking?

Every time you add a bookmark to one of your pages in one of these sites you create a backlink. If you bookmark every piece of content you create in all of these sites you can build a lot backlinks over time.

For the purposes of backlinks, you want to make sure that the bookmarking sites provide a real, do-follow link. This rules out the biggest of the bunch – Delicious as it is no-follow. I found lots of big no-follow sites and I also found several that don’t provide real backlinks – they use their own form of dynamic link which does not count as a backlink.

One other thing to be aware of is that even though these are your personal bookmarks, you need to ensure that they are public – that way other people (Google really) can find them. But be careful, some bookmarking sites such as Connotea have a specific niche and probably wont appreciate your toenail clipping bookmarks.

Some Notable Additions

There are some bookmarking sites that are either nofollow or they use a dynamic link structure. However, even a nofollow link can be valuable to some extent because Google is not the only search engine and there is also the issue of human readers. In the case of particularly big sites such as Delicious, those bookmarks often get copied to many other places so one nofollow link in delicious could actually result in about a dozen links elsewhere though this tends to happen only with popular links.

In the next section of this post I point you towards several services that allow you to bookmark at many sites all in one go. Under these circumstances adding your links to a few extra sites can take just a few seconds more so for that reason I have also listed below a few extra bookmarking sites that don’t offer real dofollow backlinks but are very high profile and worth using under those circumstances:

1. Delicious (8)
2. Furl (8)
3. Blinklist (7)
4. Folkd (7)
5. NetVous (6)
6. Simpy (6)

Speeding Up the Bookmarking Process

It can take time to visit all of these sites individually, and type in the details multiple times so there are various tools to help you:

Social Marker

SocialMarker is a pretty useful web application that allows you to type in the details (name, url, tags, description) etc just ones and then it brings up the submission pages for each site you have selected and you just click through them very quickly.

Most of the sites I mention in the list are supported by Social Marker and it is regularly updated. It’s not without it’s flaws however – sometimes it misses out information and you’ll find a submission page without tags for example so do have a good over what you are submitting for each site.

There are some other similar services too such as Social Poster, and the boys at the Thirty Day Challenge are also working on one.

Firefox Tabs

For the other sites that aren’t supported by Social Marker, I have them all bookmarked in a folder in Firefox and I simply right click on that folder and select ‘Open in Tabs’. This closes any existing tabs (use the Session Manager plugin if you want to save them) and opens one tab for each site. Then it’s pretty quick to plow through each one using the keyboard shortcut as described above to populate the information.

Using these methods I can bookmark a page on all the sites in under 10 minutes.

How to Bookmark For SEO

The purpose of this exercise is to generate backlinks to our content pages that help them rank better in Google. I’ll assume that each piece of content is optimised for some keyword. There are usually three places where you can add information:

• The title
• Tags
• Description

Make sure your keyword is in all three of them. Note that the title especially usually becomes the anchor text that is used in the resulting link so the title is arguably the most important element to get right.

These are real searches and they are already generating traffic so any one of them could be written out into a SEO’d proper blog post to drive even more traffic. If I had the time and the inclination then I’d do it myself but I have neither so here they are, enjoy! I expect to see you guys outranking me for these terms soon!

1. how can i make a living on line
2. how can i make a pretty table to import into wordpress?
3. how can i make a video blog using wordpress
4. how can social bookmarking help my website?
5. how can you make your tumblr show up on your twitter?
6. how can you possibly leave a comment to all your friends on myspace
7. how can you use the knowledge to sell the product
8. how do comments on other blogs help you
9. how do i build a money making web page from scratch
10. how do i embed a youtube clip in my website
11. how do i insert a chart into wordpress
12. how do i insert an excel file into a wordpress blog?
13. how do i install my favicon?
14. how do i know if blog is do follow?
15. how do i leave a comment on twitter
16. how do i post in other blogs
17. how do i send out a marketing e-mail campaign
18. how do i stop my tweets from updateing facebook
19. how do niche websites make money
20. how do social websites work
21. how do we build effective networking techniques with people far away
22. how do you get adsense to parse your page again?
23. how good are my blog stats?
24. how good is wordpress.org for money making blogs
25. how hard do you work
26. how i can change my face on my webcam image on real time?
27. how many blogs do you have
28. how many ebooks are sold on clickbank
29. how many internet marketing blogs are there
30. how many keywords in domain
31. how many niche sites should i promote
32. how many pages should my clickbank book be
33. how many people use stumbleupon
34. how many reports can i generate on my silver membership at butterfly reports
35. how many subscribers do you need to make a living
36. how many visitors should a niche site get
37. how much do you have to make a month to be rich
38. how much do you need to make a living online
39. how much harder is it to rank for a keyword if it is not in your domain name
40. how much have people earned using adsense
41. how much money can you make off writing ebooks
42. how much money do i need to be rich
43. how much money does a blog generate
44. how much to spend a day for ppc on your ebook
45. how to add value through blog comments
46. how to add youtube clips without sounds
47. how to be the first to leave a comment on a blog
48. how to bookmark using stumbleupon
49. how to boost ctr on adsense
50. how to bring traffic to my blog
51. how to build a cash flow system
52. how to build a site in wordpress
53. how to build a twitter mashup
54. how to build a twitter timeline application
55. how to build a wordpress web site
56. how to build assets and wealth
57. how to build money making sites
58. how to build niche knowledge in my job
59. how to come up with a good keyword?
60. how to come up with a product that really sells
61. how to configure word press to build your news web site
62. how to connect with people on social networks
63. how to connect with people online
64. how to crack stumbleupon and drive traffic
65. how to create a download in a blog
66. how to create a niche blog
67. how to create afilliate site using wordpress
68. how to determine whether niche willl be profitable
69. how to direct traffic to your website using web 2.0
70. how to display excel tables in wordpress
71. how to do seo with social bookmarking sites
72. how to download a backlink url of a particular website using php
73. how to earn money by mail order
74. how to earn money from wordpress
75. how to earn money in wordpress
76. how to embed camtasia into wordpress
77. how to embed rss feed into wordpress
78. how to embed smaller you tube videos?
79. how to embed youtube and make it look good
80. how to embed youtube in windows live writer
81. how to find a product niche
82. how to find good keywords for your niche
83. how to find good long tail keywords
84. how to find high bid keywords
85. how to find high cpc keywords
86. how to find high paying keywords
87. how to find high paying niches
88. how to find influential bloggers in your niche
89. how to find low competition high paying keywords
90. how to find niches for adsense
91. how to find people on stumbleupon
92. how to find rss feeds to auto update my blog
93. how to find site with the do follow tag
94. how to find stumblers similar to you
95. how to gain more followers on twitter
96. how to get a twitter audience
97. how to get more followers on twitter
98. how to get people to sign up for twitter
99. how to get twitter messages when clicking on images
100. how to insert a html table into wordpress
101. how to insert a table into blogger

Internet Marketing Blog Ideas

Where Are Keywords Used?

Most people don’t really stop to think about where they will use their keywords. They simply identify keywords that they want to rank for and then pimp out their site SEO-wise to try and target that keyword as effectively as possible. But stopping to think about where you use your keywords will reveal the kinds of content you need to create, and where you don’t need content at all.

Your Website Content

This is the most obvious place where you will use your keywords – on your site itself. You’ll create a blog post, article page or something similar that is targeted towards your chosen keyword. You’ll do as much on-page SEO as you can to make your posts & pages rank as well as possible for your chosen keywords. In order for your website to rank for a particular keyword, you need to create content that targets it.

Actually, that last statement is not quite true. Go to Google and type in “twitter tactics”. Depending on where in the world you are, the site http://www.twittertactics.com/ ranks very highly for this keyword and yet it is a completely empty WordPress default blog that was created and then abandoned. The only place where the keyword has been used is in the URL and the title of the site. There isn’t even a post that targets it. However, this keyword is probably not a competitive one so this doesn’t often happen!

Article (Marketing) Content

The next new posts in this project will discuss the backlink strategies that I am using for my niche sites and article marketing is one of them. Now there are two ways in which you can benefit from an article:

* The backlink you place in the article or resource box
* Traffic that comes from the article itself

To utilise the first strategy, you just need to write pretty much any old article that is related to your site and then insert a link back to your site in the resource box. There is nothing to say that you have to target any particular keywords in the article itself because the important part is the backlink for which you will use appropriate anchor text (see below).

However this is only one way to benefit from articles and is really a bit of a wasted potential if that is all you do. Josh Spaulding in his Article Marketing Domination book advocates writing an article that is going to draw in traffic to the article itself and a portion of those people will click through to your link so this way not only do you benefit from the backlink, but from the traffic itself.

There are two ways in which you can approach the process of writing a highly-trafficked article. One way is to once again abandon all keywords and simply write the most compelling article headline you can think of and hope that its listing in the directory will be enough. However if you are in a competitive niche it can be tricky to really stand out from the crowd amongst hundreds of other articles. The other strategy is to utilise the ranking power of the directory and target low competition phrases in the article itself.

When doing your competition research I am sure that you will have seen on many occasions an article from EZine Articles ranking in the top 10 in the serps. Google loves EA, probably a lot more than your site and if you wrote that same article for your website, your EA article would probably out-rank your site article. By utilising the power of popular directories you can target keywords that the directory can rank for and then drive traffic that way.

Web 2.0 Hosted Content

Similarly to the above, there are now a whole bunch of web 2.0 sites where you can host content – but much richer content than is usually allowed in article directories. I’m talking about sites like Squidoo, Hubpages and Weebly to name three of them. Once again, you have two strategies open to you – Just put up a page that is related to your niche and throw in your chosen link or try to create a page that is going to rank for keywords and drive traffic through your link.

For these strategies the keywords that you target for these third party sites does not necessarily have to be the same ones you are trying to rank for on your main site.

Anchor Text

Any time you place a link anywhere, the text that is underlined is called the anchor text. Now in many places you can directly control and create your links specifically. For example in your own blog posts, article submissions, hosted pages on web 2.0 sites and so on. If you leave comments on blogs as a backlink method the name that you leave the comment under counts as the anchor text. Note – I don’t like this method and people who use keywords in the name on my blog have to work that much harder to ensure their comment doesn’t get deleted

There are some links where you don’t specifically control the anchor text. For example, a great way to build lots of links every time you create content is to socially bookmark your posts but each bookmarking site will use its only link creation method. Often the anchor text will be the title that you submit so you have some degree of control but not as much as you do on your own content.

Backlinks are more important than on-page SEO and some people say that the anchor text is one of the most important factors in ranking. It’s much better to rank for a keyword than for your own name for instance. Once again, the anchor text that you choose does not have to be used in the url that you are linking to. Obviously if the anchor text is deemed relevant to the content of the url being linked to then it will be worth more in the eyes of Google but you do not have to target just one keyword for example. You can (and should) vary your anchor text.

Tags

Tags, tags, tags! Tags are everywhere. You can tag your blog posts, tag your boomarks, tag your web 2.0 pages, tag your bum, tag your photos… Wait, one of those might not be quite right but you get the idea! Not much is known about the strength of tagging as far as ranking goes but it certainly doesn’t hurt and like with anchor text, no content is needed for a tag – you just type in whatever tag you feel like.

Now depending on where the tag is, broad tags or more specific tags may work better. For example if you are tagging content in StumbleUpon, broad tags work better as they are used to determine what your page is about and broad tags drive more traffic than specific ones because people tend to search for broad topics.

However if you are tagging something like a Squidoo page, those tags help users find similarly tagged pages and using specific keywords is encouraged.

Keyword Content & Generic Content

Recently I discussed the subject of writing for difficult keywords. What do you do if you want to target a keyword such as “mobile phone buy”? Well you can use the punctuation trick that I mentioned in the article but what you can also do is to use that keyword in places where content is not needed – such as anchor text and tags. Tags work specially well here. You can write a generic article about buying mobile phones and tag it with those specific awkward keywords that are difficult to write for.

When I talked about content research I suggested that you should try to write as uniquely as possible on your site so that you can pick up as much long tail traffic as possible. That is true if you are writing content for your own website but what about that external content that you create for article directories and web 2.0 sites? Those sites are great places to put your generic content that doesn’t really target keywords very well.

For example, in one of the niches that I have looked at, there is a lot of information out there, lots of EZine Articles, lots of PLR packs available but most of the content is very generic in terms of keywords. The content itself is good, gives solid advice to the reader but simply doesn’t target any profitable keywords. Is this content useless? For your site maybe but not for external sites. Write those generic articles for directories and web 2.0 sites and then use carefully crafted links with your chosen anchor text and tag the content with the keywords that you want to target.

Keywords With Low Traffic

When deciding upon niches, we’re looking for keywords that have good levels of traffic and low enough competition that we can rank for it. But if you have spent any length of time with a keyword research tool I’m sure you’ll find a whole bunch of keywords that have very low traffic levels. What should you do with these? Well because the traffic potential is so low it probably is not worth going to the effort of writing lots of specific content for those keywords, and you certainly wouldn’t want to build a whole site around them like with the keyword sniping strategy!

However bear in mind that the vast majority of traffic is from single-searched terms, having all of those weird and wonderful long tail terms on your site can help you pick up significant amounts of traffic over time. Use those keywords in places where you don’t have to go to much effort – use them in anchor text, in tags, in category headings etc.

Conclusion

All keywords have a use but just because you want to target a keyword does not necessarily mean that you have to write content for it. Use the power of third party sites like Ezine Articles to help you rank for terms that your site might not be able to rank for. Use tags wherever you can and use them to target all those long tail phrases with low traffic. Carefully control your anchor text where applicable, and when writing content on third party sites in particular, think carefully about the purpose of the article – for a backlink? To get headline traffic? To rank in the serps? All of those?

Keywords That Don’t Make Sense

When people go to a search engine and starting typing in words, often they will start with a broad search and when that brings back too many irrelevant results they narrow it down by adding extra keywords. What this often results in, are keyword phrases that don’t read well – they can’t be used naturally in a sentence. For example, somebody looking to buy a mobile phone might start off by typing mobile phone and then, add the word buy to the end of it, resulting in mobile phone buy. This keyword probably has a ton of traffic but its much more difficult to write for than the more intuitive, buy mobile phone.

When doing my keyword research if I have a long list of keywords then I’ll tend to skip these ones but if the numbers are very tempting or there are not many competitive keywords in that niche, then creatively writing for these tricky keywords might be the only way into a competitive market.

The solution is the creative use of punctuation. In Google, punctuation characters such as periods and commas do not count, so the phrases mobile phone buy and mobile phone. Buy are the same in the eyes of Google. For example, if I was writing a title for this keyword I might try something like:

Everyone Needs a Mobile Phone! Buy the Best You Can

Of course, this is not ideal as the keyword is in the middle and not at the beginning, but it’s better than not being able to target the keyword at all.

Keywords That Are A Single Topic

In my earlier post on content research I was advocating the creation of multiple unique articles rather than writing a single article and then re-writing it multiple times. My reasoning for this is that when you write completely unique articles you use different words which means that you get the chance to grab more long tail traffic. If you take one article and re-write it a bunch of times, the actual words used within the article are likely to be highly similar so the keyword net that you can cast won’t be quite as broad.

So, what do you do in those odd cases where the keyword itself simply doesn’t lend itself to multiple topics; when it is a topic in itself? For example, a phrase I’ve seen used before is “how to build a deck”. Now I don’t know much about deck building but I’m assuming that there is pretty much only one way to build a deck so it would probably be difficult to write a dozen different articles on it.

What I would do in this situation, is create a very large article and break it into as many parts as were needed, and title each one similarly, eg “How to Build a Deck, Part #1″ and so on.

Keywords With Little Content

In my previous article  I showed you several ideas of where to look for content so hopefully you have plenty of topics to write about in order to target your keyword. The ideal situation would be that you can write something unique for each article so that you can grab extra long tail traffic for each one but if you’re really struggling to come up with enough unique ideas then you may have to resort to rehashing similar content in creative ways.

1. What is [keyword]
2. Why is [keyword ] important
3. Where to find [keyword] on the Internet
4. Looking for [keyword]
5. The best to find [keyword]
6. Top 5 things to remember when looking for [keyword]
7. Top 3 [keyword] tips
8. [keyword]
9. Information about [keyword]
10. What is [keyword] so useful

Obviously they won’t all be appropriate for every keyword. You can’t write a “what is” article if your keyword begins with a question for example but hopefully this list will give you a little starting point.

Other Ideas?

I’ve only put three examples here and offered my own solutions to them, but I’d be delighted to hear your ideas on this topic. Have you had trouble writing for certain types of keywords? If so, what did you do about it? Do you have any alternatives for the suggestions I have made here?

keyword writing

Google is basically a database of web pages and when somebody performs a search on Google it checks its database to bring back pages that are relevant to the search term. If your site is not in the database it cannot appear in the search results. Being in the Google database is known as being indexed and all it means is that Google knows of the existence of the url.

In the bad old days you would have to go to Google’s submission form to tell them about your new site or page but because of the speed and frequency at which Google spiders the web looking for content this is no longer necessary. A quick way to get into the Google index is to get a link back from another page that is already in the index and is updated regularly. A great way to do this is to bookmark your new site / page at one of the top social bookmarking sites or a big web 2.0 site such as Squidoo.

To check if your site is indexed, perform the following search in Google:

site:domain

eg, typing in site:http://www.clarencewang.com will bring back all the pages from my domain that Google has in its index.

Being RANKED in Google

People often confused being indexed with being ranked. Being indexed merely means that your site is in the database, it does not mean that it will come up when somebody types in a related search term. For example, type in site:http://www.johnchow.com and this will show that Google has many pages from johnchow.com in its index. However now type in simply john chow and note that johnchow.com does NOT come near the top of the results!

I’ll explain why that is later in the article but be aware of the difference.

A ranking in Google is a relationship between a particular search term and a page. So for example, my Twitter Guide ranks number #1 in Google for the term twitter guide. However that page does not rank number #1 for the term random search term. A page can rank for many different terms but often it is difficult to rank in the top position for multiple phrases on the same page. We usually optimise a page for one particular search term.

The Google SANDBOX

The Google Sandbox is a mythical beast! That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist; simply that it is not official but there is much evidence of it. The general theory is that Google does not trust brand new domains so it tends to put them in the ’sandbox’ for a period of a few months while some kind of authority is established. When a site is in the sandbox it is still indexed, but it tends not to rank as well as it could do for competitive keywords. Quite often, a sandboxed site can still rank number #1 for low competition keywords.

The period of time that a site spends in the sandbox varies, but is typically 3-6 months. It tends not to be ‘released’ until some time has passed and Google is satisfied that the site has some authority so it will need to have some good, relevant keywords and some backlinks. Also note that not all sites go into the sandbox.

What quite often happens is that when a site is first indexed it ranks quite highly for its target keywords but then it appears to drop out of the index altogether only to appear a few days later but ranking much lower. This is perfectly normal behaviour for Google and nothing to be worried about.

Google PageRank

PageRank is an indicator that Google put in place many years ago and has caused an enormous amount of discussion and debate in the SEO community. Although it is called Pagerank, it does not really indicate where a page will rank in the search engine results pages (serps). It is an indicator of the number and quality of backlinks that a particular page has.

Many people put a lot of emphasis on building PageRank but the thing to remember is that it is just an indicator, nothing more. PageRank is only one is a great many factors that determine your ranking in the serps and it does not do anything to directly drive traffic. Your most important stat as far as SEO goes is your actual traffic which you can see from your own analytics software.

However, it does have a use – it gives other people an indicator of the ranking of your page and this can come in useful if you want to trade links with people, sell advertising space, sell the domain and so on.

Alexa Ranking

Alexa is an independent company that has nothing whatsoever to do with Google. It publishes a toolbar that tracks usage statistics from its users and from those statistics Alexa publishes ‘traffic’ rankings of websites that its users visit using the toolbar. The trouble with Alexa is that it only tracks traffic from people using the Alexa toolbar which is not everybody so it is not an accurate traffic indicator.

It is about as useful as PageRank – you are better off looking at your own analytics to see your own traffic stats but your alexa ranking can be useful as an indicator for other people if you want to sell ad space etc. Just remember that Alexa is not Google.

Google SLAP

This is another term that has evolved over the years which has much supporting evidence but no official word from Google. It simply means that for some reason, a particular domain has suffered some kind of ranking penalty and is not ranking as highly as it should. The domain johnchow.com has been Google-slapped for quite some time now which is why it is not ranking well for the term john chow, which it certainly should.

These slaps happen periodically and are not random. Another example was Squidoo which was slapped some time in 2007 I think when it got severely hit by spammers. However the guys at Squidoo worked hard to clean up the spam and pages from its domain are now ranking much better. The slap appears to have been lifted, or at least lessened.

In a similar way, there are some domains that seem to be extremely well liked by Google and tend to rank extremely highly. Wikipedia and YouTube are two such examples. You’ll have a hard time outranking a page from those domains! What this means is that Google is able to apply some kind of additional factor to specific domains as it feels like it which affects the rankings. Play nice with Google and this shouldn’t be a problem for you.