The keywords of your website are the foundation for every penny you will earn from day one. Get them right, and you will be amazed at the revenue they will produce. Get them wrong, and you will be working for nothing, on a site that cannot attract people that want to click ads or purchase products. The main thing to remember here is that it is not always your main keyword that will attract visitors, but also your LSI keywords.

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, and Google now puts a lot of faith in the fact that relevant content on a website should contain a good mix of LSI keywords, as well as main keywords. If the spiders see that you include keywords that are associated with your subject, and your main keyword for the page, then your page becomes higher ranked than a page that only optimizes for just one keyword – or the surrounding content is not as closely related. For example, if your blog is about knitting, and you have an article about nail guns, then the likelihood of the nail gun article outranking that of a nail gun blog is very slim – to none. The blog content surrounding the article will not be relevant, and who knows what the Adsense ads would look like.

There are various ways to ensure your LSI is right on the money, and Google itself can help here. When you search for a term, you can check the related terms at the bottom of the results, and you can also use Google’s Wonder Wheel to throw up valid suggestions that can be used around your article and page.

There is not yet a hard and fast rule for LSI, but everyone is sure that Google looks for it, and has said as much in press conferences. The rule of thumb now is to ensure you have it – and have it in spades.

After an Adwords campaign that has been fairly successful, you may be looking for other ways you can get lots of eyes on your ads, and drag them through to your websites. If Adwords hurt your wallet, then is it because you didn’t have a high enough quality landing page? Is it because your competitors were outbidding you? Or is it because Adwords is now one of the most guru dominant marketplaces in niche marketing?

It would have to be said that the latter is certainly true, whilst the former are just possibilities. You may not have heard, but Google now run TV ads. Not just videos appearing on websites, but live TV advertisements that run on national cable access channels in America. This is a step too far for some website owners, and they see it as a gimmicky way for Google to continue world domination.

If you can imagine Pay Per View marketing, but with extremely good demographic targeting, you would still be quite far from where Google TV Ads are. They enable you to pinpoint the exact type of viewer you want, and allow you to track them and improve your ads over time. Just like Adwords, you can set a budget, and then tailor your campaign. Amazingly, you can start on a budget of a few hundred dollars (though Google say you can start with $20). You just need a good video. And if you do not want to pay thousands of dollars for this, you can pay someone in the marketplace that Google have set up. This video for example cost around $500. You will agree that it is indeed a nice video, and would get some visitors to a website. If you add in the cost of impressions on your ad, you could get this up for about $1000. Considering the amount of people you could get to a niche site, that is monetized well, you may end up earning much more for your dollars than Adwords could ever provide. And remember – each ad is seriously targeted…

If content is King, then images are the Queen. If you have media on your website, then it is probably in the form of images in your posts, and videos appearing where needed. This is ideal, of course, because of the weight Google lends to media rich websites, and the fact that you can even channel ore traffic to your site with media. For example, by tweeting on Twitter that there is a very funny video on your site about a horse kicking a door open, you will get visitors from social news sites like Reddit or Digg for example. You could even submit to StumbleUpon, which has been known for crashing servers with its traffic. Once the traffic gets there, they are not going to care that the video is actually from Youtube, only that it is funny, and what they were looking for. Once they are on your page, however, then it is up to your design work and content to keep them there.

Many visitors will hit your pages looking at images first, and then text. So it is always, ALWAYS important to deliver high quality images, not only in your post, but also as relevant content in its own right. For example, if you look at Flickr you will see millions of images for you to use, and most have copyright details (what you can and cannot use it for) built in to their page on there. It is important of course to abide by these rules.

WP Decoratr allows you to have Flickr images displayed based on the context of your page. This is great for keyword rich sites

Flickr Gallery This works on the shortcodes you will see in many plugins. By entering a small amount of text in your post, you will be displaying great relevant images.

Flickr Tag Plugin You can use this plugin to download all the images you like from Flickr, and store them on your site. These images are then usable on your own gallery!

If you want to keep visitors interested in your content, you have to get them involved. You don’t necessarily have to get them involved by commenting on your posts, or your content, you can of course get them talking about what interests them. You can use Chat plugins for your blog, or forums – you can even separate all these things and have a multi-function blog. However, one seriously good method of keeping visitors coming back, is by allowing them to rate certain topics or conversation points in your posts. There are various tools set up now whereby you can add rating systems into your post (contextually), and further add functionality to your posts.

When you are writing about Google and a cool SEO method, you could simply add in these little tooltip features, where they encourage the visitor to comment on Google, or on SEO.. or anything else in the post. A website called Blippr is getting a lot of attention from the big blogs like Mashable etc. and they are growing rapidly. They will insert small smileys in the content of your post, next to the words you specify. People can then leave their opinion about the topic. When you allow visitors to do something like this, they feel part of the blog, and part of its upkeep. This means they will more thank likely return, and continue adding to the blog’s content in true Web 2.0 style.

You could of course simply allow visitors to rate your posts. Rating System allows you to add a five star review feature at the footer of each post, and this can be beneficial to both you and your visitors. They will see a highly rated topic on your site and want to read it, and furthermore get involved. This will pay dividends in future residual traffic.

One of the first places on your list of ways to market your website should be Ezine articles. Providing you with high quality do follow links for Google worth, Pagerank, and natural traffic, Ezine sits and markets you website 24 hours a day for free. Possibly the most respected among the directories, Ezine has been around for years, and will continue to grow in terms of size and quality, because it is the ultimate collaborative source of information, with articles that have often been written by professional marketers and writers.

You can easily tap into Ezine articles as a marketing tool by using little known methods of ranking your article. Ezine has a most viewed section for its articles, and this can be found at the bottom of every article page. The top articles are found here, and link to from thousands of other articles throughout the site, in each category. If you want to get to the top, simply find out how many views the top article has had, and then knock them off the top spot. To do this, there are many options, and this is one of them:-

All Ezine wants to see is a unique IP visiting that article to count as a unique view. All you need to do is get a few hundred people to view it to ensure you get the top spot. Depending on your niche, all you need to do is find a related forum by searching Google. Go to the forum, and sign up. Make a few good posts to build up your post count so you can actually have a signature, and also post links. Every forum has different rules for this.

You next step is to find a related thread on the forum, and then reply to the poster, with a very relevant and helpful link. You must not look any way spammy, and having an Ezine link will also add to the trust value (as opposed to posting your URL for your own site). If the article you wrote is about Forex, and discusses a particular topic in the niche, then you should post something like “I’ve found Ezine articles to be pretty helpful on that, like this article: link to your site. If you navigate through Ezine’s categories, you will see they have a Forex section and the articles are pretty good.”. This doesn’t sound spammy, and will be allowed by moderators. On a fast growing thread, you will get a few hundred views for free.

There are a few ways you can get your website noticed online, and one of the best ways is to get your site linked to from other blogs. This is the most powerful way of getting backlinks and traffic, because these are recommendations made by other blog owners, to their loyal readers. Therefore the readers are much more inclined to click the links. When you see names in comment boxes, you are not as likely to click, and likewise, forum signatures that will never be used in actual posts will never be clicked. They are just SEO fodder, and of course – Google can smell this a mile off if you overdo it. A good way to get your site about in actual communities, is to use the new toolbars that are popping up all over the net. These toolbars have “gadgets” and links on them, such as checking the weather, playing games and more. Another thing you can do, is promote your website on these toolbars, which have millions of users, and appear on thousands of websites. The basic theory is this. You create you blog, and then you go to a company like Conduit who allow you to create your own gadget, which will appear on these toolbars all over the internet, on webmasters’ websites. As long as you are related to their blog or website, they will have your gadget on that toolbar. And as long as you have great content – you will get webmasters using your site as a gadget. If you are getting related traffic to your site, from possibly higher ranking websites, then this can only mean you will retain these visitors over a long period. You will also never have to pay for this traffic, and of course the traffic is viral. Other webmasters will see your link, and possibly add to their toolbar. As new webmasters sign up for the Conduit platform, your site will appear on more and more sites – this is due to your gadget having a user count. The more popular you get, the more people want you on their toolbar.

There’s a popular misconception that blogs (all blogs) do not allow comments, and they are so heavily moderated that you would never see one of your comments go live with a backlink intact. This is untrue, and you will find that it is the biggest blogs on the web that will give you the most link juice, and who actually encourage posting on their sites. This is all part and parcel of the internet revolution that is Web 2.0, where sites strive to become more collaborative with their readership.

When you are looking for blogs to post on, you will most probably be doing it wrong. You will be looking for blogs in your niche, which are relevant to your site. This way, a comment that you post on the blog will be relevant, and of course moderated accordingly. This is, to some extent, exactly what you should be doing. You post a comment, and your name becomes an anchor text. That anchor can point at your niche site. However, the way to REALLY do this properly, is to look for blogs that have Top Commentators. Well the main reason is that your anchor text will appear on every page of the blog –as well as the front page. You will get the link juice of whatever Pagerank the site is, and also even get traffic from people clicking your name/link – because you are a top commentator.

The way to find these sites is also very simple indeed. Simply go to Google, and search for the following:

allintext: “Top Commentators” “Powered by WordPress “

And that is all. Now all you need to do is check the Pagerank of each site you visit, and only comment on sites that you are knowledgeable about. You often only need around 5 – 10 comments to hit the top spot. This may run for days or weeks. Your backlinks will remain there for as long as you comment. As you build up more and more of these sites in your armoury, simply outsoruce the whole job to keep those backlinks intact.

It can be very difficult to get your SEO indexed fast, so it is beneficial to have access to websites that will publish your articles etc. and get them indexed fast. This in turn gets the site you are linking to indexed quickly too. One of the best methods, if not the best method, of backlinking and indexing is document storage and document storage.

Google has always seen sites like Scribd for example as being very authoritive, and ranks them as high as possible in a very short time. You can usually hit page one in a matter of minutes, and certainly get ranked in the top 5 pages easily. One way people use this technique is for breaking news items, as they rank extremely high very fast. If you are covering a hot topic in your niche, then the document will rank high up for the keyword, and then you can channel that traffic right at your site. This is also true of reviews on products, and other niche marketing methods.

By using sites like Scribd, DocStoc and many others, you can upload articles that are written in Word documents, Open Office documents and slideshows, and have them uploaded and indexed in a matter of minutes. The great thing about these documents, is that there is no limit to the amount of words you can use in the articles, and no limited to the amount of images & anchor texts. This means you can seriously optimise a block of content, either in slideshow or regular document format, and really get your keywords packed in there.

Once you get the hand of creating many different documents from one initial article, you can then get to the more advanced stages, such as adding meta tags to the document properties, to further enhance your SEO.

Before YouTube, can you remember how you used to search for videos online? Not many people can. They see YouTube as being the first and most popular video serving website, and it would naturally be the first place you would look, if you were looking for a video of something online. Google genuinely had to acknowledge that YouTube was becoming a superpower on the internet, and in 2006 acquired YouTube to the tune of $1.65billion. With all that said, and with the traction YouTube has now built up, you can safely say that Google, along with the other search engines, gives a lot of credence to video online.

Google is particularly interested in your website if you display multimedia, and even more interested if you have the media rich content that they own. Never more has it been more apparent that including video, images and other media on your website can actually curry favour with the search engines.

Embedding videos is a very simple task, and YouTube encourages it by giving you the opportunity to embed using different sizes and colours on every video they serve. Whatever your niche, you can simply find a video that fits the best, and then embed it on your blog. By adding some notes to the page, that accompany the video, Google sees this as highly relevant, and will strive to send visitors if the rest of your site is just as good. The trick is, do not overdo it. Far too many websites have YouTube videos being blasted to their pages using autoblogging software, and Google knows this.  If you fall into the same trap, then Google will discount this content as being very non-unique, and possibly rank you much lower. Use video as and when you need to, and observe the colour schemes that you have already to integrate the video better. With this in mind, you cannot go wrong.

Blogging can be a pain in the butt if you do not want to spend time ensuring the site is up to standrads that search engines now demand.  They require more and more from a webmaster now, than ever before. Usually, it’s content. Content can make or break a site, and the only real longevity a site ever gets is from unique regular content being added, and Google seeing this happen over a length of time.

You can argue the point that most of the autoblogs out there are spinning content to 30% unique, and they are getting away with page one rankings with Google – but for how long? You really need to add enough content to ensure Google thinks you are an authority on your niche subject, and starts pumping traffic your way, based on this trust. That word has now become a beacon for most webmasters, because Trustrank is well and truly here. Google is now ranking sites NOT just based on their inbound links, but also on their outbound links (amongst other things under the Trustrank banner). If your site has no selfless outbound links – which can link to any site – then your site has less chance of ranking higher. The best place to observe this is on website flipping sites like Flippa.com. You can check the micro-niche blogs that advertise Amazon products. These guys rank up high in the SERPs, and all include Trustrank methods. You will see few that do not have outbound links in their sidebars…

Another big deal over at Google HQ has always been backlinks. You may have seen recently that Angela and PJ’s backlinks have been penalized by Google, and their sites have received a drop in Pagerank. This is testament to the fact that all your backlinking activities should be natural and relevant. Always be wary of purchasing backlinks – it may harm your site if you do!