In case you missed it, post one of this series discussed SEO Optimization, including the use of H-Tags and Meta Tags, and how to choose a URL.

Keyword research. We’ve all heard it said, and I’m sure we’ve all given it some thought. But do we really understand what it means? There is more to it than meets the eye. It is not just looking at numbers and statistics, or worse – picking keywords out of thin air. It is the meticulous planning and mapping of your SEO strategy. Remember, the goal of Search Engine Optimization is to move your site up in the rankings to drive targeted, relevant and converting traffic to your website. In order to do this, your entire site planning all begins with keyword research. This is what will make or break your site in the long run, and it’s not something you should take lightly. Are you intimidated now? Don’t be. This post will guide you through all the steps necessary for studying keywords and choosing which of those will work best for you.

Keyword research can be preformed through tools such as Google Adwords, Word Tracker and many other systems, or you can also research it by hand. To be most beneficial, you will probably want to use both.

1. Start off by asking yourself this question: What is my site about? Try and narrow it down to the main topic, with a few subtopics as well. You don’t need to list every category your site will have, only those that are directly relevant to your main subject. For example, you might have a site about cars. Instead of listing everything relating to cars, narrow it down to three or four things, like cars, parts, repairs, and auto listings.
2. Now that you have the direction you want to go with your site, think like the average web user. If you were going to try and look for information in your sites’ subject, what keywords would you use? Write these down as well. They may be similar to the above, or somewhat different. That’s okay for now. We’re still in the beginning stages of keyword research, so any and all thoughts are welcome.
3. Using the list that you’ve created, go to Google Adwords or a similar keyword research tool and look up the statistics of the words you’ve chosen. Here is a good rule of thumb to remember: the smaller the phrase, the bigger the amount of traffic but the tougher the competition.

Pay attention to the perimeters you can set on your research. To give you an example, the word “cars” has over 151,000,000 searches a month. Or does it? 151,000,000 is actually the broad match number, meaning it includes any and all searched phrases that include that word. We want to look at traffic results that are a little more specific, so set the search to only view exact results. Now if we search for “cars” we get 11,100,000.

4. Next, don’t start with the keyword you want to be ranked for. You might say, “This sounds like bypassing SEO. Why would we want to ignore the very thing we want to be ranked for?” Well, like the example above, the keyword you want to be ranked for may have too tough of competition for you to compete with. So where do you start? With long tail key word phrases. Instead of optimizing your site for “cars”, you might try “custom cars for sale”, or another keyword with less traffic and less competition. This way, you have your major keyword in the phrase (cars), while still seeing some return and some movement on your rankings.
5. Checklist: you have your site demographic. You know what keyword you’d like to go after and you’ve picked a few smaller key words to target first. You’re done right? Wrong. One last and very important thing to do is to research your keywords by hand. The research tools may tell you the amount of traffic the word gets, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the sites that are ranked for that. Do a few simple searches for that keyword in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Look at the competition, their page rank, the age of the domain, the number of cashed pages and the number of backlinks the domain has. This can be a huge determining factor for if you should go after that keyword or not.

One major mistake people make when choosing keywords is they optimize for their own brand name. Now, if you have a huge brand, this isn’t a big deal, but chances are you have a little known brand. You want to optimize for what people will search for, so if your brand isn’t known, it’s not going to get searched for. This doesn’t mean that your brand won’t get out there if you didn’t optimize for it. There won’t be any competition for your brand name, so you will get ranked for it with little to no effort. Spend time chipping away at the smaller keywords and work your way up from there.

With other online efforts booming, it’s no secret that link trading is starting to quickly become a thing of the past. It simply doesn’t seem time-efficient compared to the quick-paced world that is viral online marketing, and we can all agree that link building takes some massive time and effort. However, don’t cross it off your list just yet.

The key factor to link trading is not the amount of time you spend doing it (although, time can be a huge factor to those who have none), it’s the way you go about link trading. You have to do your research and prepare a plan before you begin trading with just any site. Your effective site plan always begins with on-site optimization.

You may be starting this whole process without currently having a domain. This is not a bad thing, in fact, this allows you to research different domain URLs and decide which one will best match your niche. There are different types of domains out there from .com, .net, .info and even .gov domains that can usually be purchased for around ten dollars. However, if you are looking for a specific URL, or if you are trying to purchase an older domain that already has link worth pointed to it, be prepared to pay some serious cash. Either way, keep in mind the target audience of your site, and try and pick a URL with the keywords that you would like to go after, which we will go over in another post.

Now that you have a domain, it’s time to discuss the SEO optimization that needs to be done in order to maximize the effectiveness of your link building campaign. One of the most overlooked (and possibly most important) things you can do is add H tags throughout your entire site. These tags are one of the first things that search engine spiders will see upon entering your site, and they also help your user to understand the content that will be on that page.

A good practice is to place your top two key words first on the H tags, and your site name last. This is because you will already be getting “weight” for your site name from the URL so it’s not as important to have that be first. Another good idea is to always add meta descriptions and meta key words to your pages, for the same reasons as the H tags: it’s going to be some of the first info search engines retrieve from your page.

But your hard work isn’t done just yet. It is crucial that you write interesting, key word rich content on your website. All the prior prepping is only to back up your website, not to forefront the SEO itself.

On the next post, we will discuss the value of key word research and how a little more time spent there can greatly affect your income later.

We’ve been scouring the internet for all social sites that we can use in LavaLinx. Does anyone have suggestions or favorite social sites you use most frequently? Please comment and leave suggestions below.

There seems to be a surplus of social networking websites everywhere, some with amazing traffic, others with barely any. I think creating your own social site is all the rage right now. It’s a great way to create revenue through Adsense or banner ads. Another huge benefit of hosting one is the content is user-generated. Most SEO-ers believe “Content is King” so user-generated, possibly daily, is even better. There are a few sites out there with plugins to make your own social site (such as Pligg) or you can create a subdomain through Ning.com. And there’s always Squidoo, where you create your own ‘Lens’ on your topic of choice. Am I missing any? Let me know if you have created your own site and how it’s going so far.

As of yesterday evening, Google’s search results are now automatically customized geographically based on each user’s IP address. Previously, Google did customize search results for users that were logged into their Google accounts, or had cookies enabled (which would be the majority of people). But now, even if you have manually turned off your cookies, Google search results will now be customized geographically whether you like it or not.

Geographical customization does make sense for certain industries. However, for many online industries, it makes no sense at all. If you were searching for something like web hosting services, online education resources, or product reviews, wouldn’t you want to see search results that are actually relevant - not ones where the company headquarters simply happen to be local? I know I would.

Customized search results can make SEO more complicated. What happens if you have SEO clients? They will probably be seeing very different results from the ones you are seeing. Until you are in the top spots where you see major traffic increases, how can you effectively measure your progress? How will search engine ranking tracking services report their results?

When it comes to Google, there are always changes and surprises around every corner. It will be interesting to see how this plays out and how it affects traffic across the board.

Because Lavalinx allows users to exchange bookmarks and bookmark their own pages, we are constantly looking for decent social bookmarking sites. We actually have a list of 900 bookmarking sites, but the list below are the ones we’ve added to Lavalinx so far. We try and track down social bookmarking sites that will give our users the most SEO value and/or social traffic.

We’ve listed all the social sites, that we are currently aware of, that offer hard (dofollow) links. We’ve also included all the social sites that add a nofollow to the link and social sites that just do a redirect on links.

We would like to expand this list, so please send us links to other social sites, particularly sites that provide a hard link.

Hard links DoFollow

http://digg.com (with keywords in title)
http://www.reddit.com (with keywords in title)
http://www.oyax.com (with keywords in title)
http://www.freelink.org (with keywords in title)
http://www.syncone.net (with keywords in title)
http://spotback.com (with keywords in title)
http://www.blipoo.com (with keywords in title)
http://www.tumblr.com (with keywords in title)
http://buddymarks.com (with keywords in title)
http://www.connotea.org (with keywords in title)
http://www.contentpop.com (with keywords in title)
http://www.indianpad.com (with keywords in title)
http://earthfrisk.com (with keywords in title)

http://www.mister-wong.com (with keywords in title, although this site will make all your links “private” if they get the slightest whiff of spam)
http://www.searchles.com (with keywords in title, although this site will make all your links “private” if they get the slightest whiff of spam)
http://www.plime.com (with keywords in title, although this social site is really particular about stories submitted. They must be unusual or weird stories.)

http://multiply.com (hard link on URL only)
http://sphinn.com (hard link on URL only)
http://www.mixx.com (hard link on URL only)
http://www.blogbookmark.com (hard link on URL only)

http://www.quickieclick.com (hard link on images only)

Hard links NoFollow

http://delicious.com (with keywords in title)
http://www.diigo.com (with keywords in title)
http://claimid.com (with keywords in title)
http://faves.com (with keywords in title)
http://www.jumptags.com (with keywords in title)
http://www.clipclip.org (on URL only)
http://www.stumbleupon.com (on images only)

Redirects

http://furl.net (URL text display)
http://www.folkd.com (URL text display)
http://www.propeller.com (URL text display)
http://www.streakr.com (URL text dispay)
http://www.dizzed.com (URL text display)