This week, we have talked alot about keywords and SEO and I wanted to share an e-mail that I received from Miriam Parkinson from Market Samurai’s Technical Support where she discusses the power of the Rank Tracker module.

Published: May 28th, 2010

Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker module provides you with the tools you need to monitor your website rankings – in all 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing).

Because of this huge wealth of information, it’s one of Market Samurai’s most popular features.

In support I receive a lot of questions about how to use it effectively. So today, I want to answer the most common questions people have around using Rank Tracker – including “how do you use all of the tools inside Rank Tracker to your best advantage?”

I also want to share with you some advanced analysis strategies for using Rank Tracker. And give you some time-saving insider tips for pinpointing some of the valuable insights Rank Tracker is sharing about your website.

Why Should I Track My Rankings?

There are 4 reasons why you should check your rankings regularly:

1. It tells you whether your SEO techniques are working. This helps you to fine-tune your SEO strategy. When you are able to see tangible feedback on whether your SEO efforts are having an impact on your site’s rankings it allows you to determine what works for your particular niche. This allows you to spend more time on the things that work, and less time on the things that don’t.

2. It alerts you if you have made changes to your site that are negatively impacting your search engine positions. Sometimes you’ll make a small change to your website structure, or modify your site’s meta-tags and it will negatively impact your search engine rankings. If you are not monitoring your rankings then you won’t know what’s happened until you start investigating why your traffic has dropped. By monitoring your rankings you are able to see this change early, and correct the problem before it has a significant impact on your traffic and income.

3. Watching your sites move up the rankings keeps you motivated. When you first start working on a site it can be a lot of hard work without any tangible rewards. Watching your sites improve in ranking is fun, and allows you to see your hard work paying off. This helps to keep you motivated in those early days and keeps you working towards your goals.

4. It helps you to prioritize your SEO efforts. Few of us have the luxury to dedicate as much time as we’d like towards building our online businesses. In the end you will need to decide which areas you are going to focus your limited time on. By looking at an overview of where your sites are ranking for your keywords you can prioritize your work and focus on the areas that are going to bring the most value to your business.

How Should I Select Keywords To Track?

There are a number of ways that you could decide which keywords to track. A common approach is to select a large number of keywords in your niche or keywords that you think it would be nice to rank for. This gives you a large list of rank data with many keywords showing no rank or ranking on page 30 where you have no hope of getting any traffic from it. This means that it’s harder to spot the truely valuable keywords and as a result it doesn’t give a good snapshot of how your SEO campaign is going and what you need to work on.

A better approach is to track only the keywords that you are actively optimizing your site for. This includes lower traffic long-tail keywords that you might target with a single blog post or article. In addition, you may like to track the keywords that are currently bringing traffic to your site.

How Often Should I Check my Rankings? Google is constantly tweaking and updating its search data, over a network of thousands of computers.

This means results can fluctuate greatly throughout the day, particularly when a site has only recently been indexed. So it isn’t necessarily helpful to know your exact position at any one time.

What is more important is the trend in how your site is moving through the SERPs for your keywords.

As a general rule of thumb checking your rankings weekly is plenty to give you the information you need to know about how your site is performing.

(If your cache age tells you that Google is indexing your site more often then you can increase the number of times per week you check your rankings. This knowledgebase article explains cache age further.)

The most powerful interface in Rank Tracker is the historical data. You can access this by clicking the graph button to the right of each row. This allows you to view a graph of how your positions have changed over time giving you powerful information that can help you to adjust your SEO strategy.

Historical search engine position data

The brilliance of this is that it filters out the noise caused by small fluctuations in ranking and allows you to easily see the overall trend of how your site is performing in the search engines.

This means that you are not distracted by the small adjustments that Google makes throughout the day so you are able to see exactly where your site is heading and whether the SEO efforts that you are applying are working or you have hit a dead end.
What do I do with My Ranking Data?

So you have all of this historical, and current data on your sites and your rankings, what do you do with it?

Your ranking data is likely to tell you one of three things:

1. If your position for a keyword is improving then you know that whatever SEO techniques that you have been applying are working so you should continue as you’ve been going.

2. If your position for a keyword has stopped improving then look at your site and see what you could be doing to improve your optimization. Try something different and see if that helps.

3. If your position for a keyword is falling – don’t panic! Think about the recent changes you have made to your site. Could any of those have damaged your SEO? Have you been updating your site less frequently? Have you stopped building backlinks? Are your competitors fighting back? Try to determine what has caused the fall in ranking and correct the problem.

By keeping track of how your SEO efforts have impacted your position in the search engines over the long term you can develop your own understanding of what helps, what doesn’t help and what might harm the SEO of your site, allowing you to build your own expertise and give yourself the best chance of success.

Miriam Parkinson
Noble Samurai Support

We left off at discussing the importance generating a massive amount of keywords from your broad seed keyword and grouping them. You then want to structure and categorize your site based on your keyword grouping to leverage SEO optimization.

I promised to share a detailed example on how to group your keywords that are generated from your seed keyword. Let’s say that your keyword was Weight Loss Tips. If we type that on a Google search box and go over to the left and select the Wonder Wheel, you will see all of the related keywords that Google handing you. The results are pictured below.

You should then make each of these keywords, diet tips, weight watchers, weight loss calculator, weight loss foods, quick weight loss tips, lose weight fast, ideal weight and work out tips, first level keywords that you generate a Wonder Wheel for each.

For this example, first level keyword, weight loss foods was selected and the following second level keywords were generated, healthy foods, negative calorie foods, green tea weight loss, weight loss snacks, weight loss recipes and low calorie foods. The results are pictured below.

In this example, you want to optimize your site on your seed, first level and second level keywords. So categories your blog or website on all of your first level keywords and write articles, videos and make forum posts on all of your first and second level keywords.

It is that easy to create an SEO optimized site that Google is going to love because they gave you the relevant keywords that people are searching for.

In this example, I used the Wonder Wheel to illustrate how to create an SEO optimized site based on your seed, level one and two keywords. You can also use, Google Suggests, Google’s Keyword Tool, Market Samurai, Keyword Elite and many other tools that are extremely effective in generating massive relevant keywords.

Also, do not feel that you must stop at second level keywords. Some niches are very deep and you could go to a third or fourth level. Rinse and repeat and I will see you at the top.

We left off at the importance of knowing when and where to pick your battles with your competition. When you see that a specific keyword on the first page of Google is dominated by an Authority Site, you want to go to your list of keywords and pick another one. There are less competitive keywords for your to invest your time on dominating and ranking for on the first page of Google. To review, Authority Sites have a high Page Rank, typically 4, 5 or 6, a ton of indexed pages, the domain has been around for 3 to 10 years and a massive amount of back links.

So how can you determine what is an Authority Site as you are browsing? Before I even answer that question, let’s take a step back and discuss the importance of using the Firefox Browser if you are a Network or Internet Marketer. There are countless plug-ins that are all compatible with the Firefox browser. You guessed it, the answer to identifying Authority Sites is a very powerful plug-in called, SEO Quake.

To get SEO Quake, type SEO Quake inside a Google Search box and the first entry will take you to the their site for you to download the plug-in. A word of caution, if you perform too many searches in a short period of time your IP address will be blocked or frozen. You may want to consider downloading an IP address proxy. There are many out there in internet land. Some are free and some are paid services. I could write an entire post just on that topic alone, so for the sake of brevity, I will recommend a free one that I use to get you started.

I use Hotspot Shield and as of this writing the latest version is 1.341. To get it simply do a search for Hotspot Shield in Google and type hotspot shield download and click on the first entry for Hotspot Shield by Anchor. The tool is free and you will have to put up with a little advertising. You will also be asked to donate, which is a good thing in order to keep the product updated.

The last item that we will cover is the importance of grouping your keywords. Once you have created a massive list of long tail keywords, you want to separate them by their natural categories. I will present a detailed example on the next post. You want to break the list of keywords into short term profit keywords, quick hit keywords such as the name of the product that you are marketing and you want to focus on low competition buyer phrases.

You also want to separate out the long term profit keywords that have moderate to high competition and conduct a well planned out campaign to take them out over time. Apply, apply, apply and we will see you at the top.

So last week I shared with you folks the Google Wonder Wheel and the Google Suggests Tool. I am sure that you would agree, that those are two very powerful tools to have in your arsenal.

So today I want to go over the mindset regarding selecting keywords and review some of the fundamentals. Let’s begin with the mindset. Begin building your massive list with a broad seed keyword. Next, put yourself in the shoes and mind of your customer.

Make a list of all of the problems that he or she may be encountering and generate keywords aimed at solving each one at a time. Generate as many long tail keywords as possible. A long term keyword for Personal Trainer would be Personal Trainer in New York City or Personal Trainer for Women in New York City.

Next, analyze the competition for the keywords that you have decided to go after. Many people think that competition is a bad thing and believe that they are going to find that next big hidden niche. The reality is that the probability of you finding the next big hidden niche albeit possible, remain highly unlikely and hence, get comfortable with competition and learn to thrive on it.

What you are looking for is manageable competition. Let’s breakdown what manageable means. When you type in your keyword onto a Google Search, ideally, you want 300,000 or less competing pages. At times you may allow for up to 500,000, if the next two numbers that we will discuss are within our desired range.

In order to determine the “true competing” pages, you want to surround your keyword with quotes. You want that number to be less than 300,000 in order for you to work hard on your Search Engine Optimization strategies and have a good chance on getting on the first page of Google for your desired keyword.

Next, I will share with you the absolute best and most accurate way to determine your true competition for your desired keyword and that is the “AllInTitle:” search. The AllInTitle: search yields all of the competing pages that contain your keyword in the title. Ideally you want this number to be 10,000 or less.

In the range of 500 – 2000 you have an outstanding chance to rank quickly on the first page of Google for your desired keyword. Up to 5000 you continue to have a good chance and from 5,000 to 10,000 you continue to have a good chance provided that you work hard on successful SEO strategies.

There are going to be keywords that you literally have no chance on competing for a first page rank and it is best that you move onto to a different longer tail keyword. The best way to determine whether or not you can compete is by being aware and on the look out for Authority Sites. Authority Sites have a high Page Rank, typically 4, 5 or 6, a ton of indexed pages, the domain has been around for 3 to 10 years and a massive amount of back links. When you find yourself competing in that league, your best solution is to go find another page to compete against.

I will continue building on this topic on the next post and will create an FAQ video on a future post.

So, by now you know that Google Suggests is an excellent tool for determining the exact words that your customers are looking for.

Let’s talk about how can you get it and start implementing it into your business. The first step is to open up a browser window and go to a Google Search page. Next, type, google suggestor in the search box and the first result should be, Google Suggestor 1.0. Look for the link that begins with, com-uk.us/.

Click on the hyper-link and scroll down two thirds of the page until you see a MediaFire link. Please note that the Google Suggestor application requires .net version 3.5 to run and only runs on a Windows Operating System or Windows Emulator in an Apple environment.

Next, click on the MediaFire link which will bring you to a blue hyperlink, with Mediafire in the title. You will see a Click here to start download hyperlink, which you will select and the application will begin to saving on your computer.

To decompress the application, you will need to download the WinRaR Extractor.

Once you download the GoogleSuggestor application, install it, launch it and enter your desired seed keyword and hit return. The tool will go out and scrape Google Suggests and return all relevant keywords.

For example, if our seed keyword was, networking marketing, you would type it in and the tool would yield the results pictured below.

Enjoy and implement these FREE tools and take your business to the top.

Google Suggests is an excellent tool for determining the exact words that your customers are looking for. Most Network Marketers fail because they are implementing either Article or Video Marketing with little to no clue on what keywords are relevant.

In other words, their customers want and are searching for keywords x,y & z and the original content and marketing that they are creating is based on their best guess as to what they believe their customers want, a, b & c.

If I had to give you 6 steps to guarantee that you generate leads on your blog or your website, they would be as follows:

1 Build your offer. Regardless of the product or service that you are offering whether it is your own, which I highly recommend or whether it is an affiliate product, you always begin with the end in mind. In other words, as Eben Pagan ingeniously articulates, what makes a solution is that people are looking for it, desperately demand for a solution and you have the priceless answer to their problem.

2. Identify the relevant keywords. Focus on relevant longer tail keywords with less competition than the broader keywords. The other benefit of longer keywords is that they are more targeted.

3. Create relevant keyword content. One of the best ways to implement this point if you are doing article or video marketing is to create articles and videos for each long tail keyword that you identify.

4. Optimize your relevant content. Again, one of the best ways to optimize your content is to create a page on your blog or website with articles and videos on every long tail keyword.

5. Syndicate your content. Here it is simple. You want your content to be everywhere all the time.

6. Tracking your content. Tracking is another area where Network Marketers fall on their faces. If you are not tracking your business you are driving with blindfolds on.

As you read and digest each bullet, keywords are a fundamental and foundational key to making everything work. You have got to have a reliable way of building your campaigns on relevant keywords that address a problem. The opposite of that would be analogies to building your campaign on sand.

So how do we insure that we get relevant keywords and get Google to help us? One answer is the Google Wonder Wheel. The other answer is Google Suggest. Google Suggest is the autofill output that appears as you are typing a search on Google. The keywords that appear as you type provide you realtime keywords that are being searched.

The Google Suggest Tool yields all relevant keywords that are being searched in relationship to your seed keyword. I will provide screen shots and where you can download the tool on our next post.

Recently, Google released a very cool keyword tool called the Wonder Wheel. The Wonder Wheel is a tool that helps you find related keywords. So how does it work? Bring up a browser page, type in a broad keyword on any topic or niche that is of interest to you that you have searched millions of times before.

On the left hand side of the results page, you will notice that there is a “show search tools”. Click on the little down arrow and you will see the following headings: Any Time, All Results, All Results, Standard View and Standard Results. Under Standard View, click on the Wonder wheel. Instantly, you will see all of the top related keywords to the broad search term that you entered in the search.

These are not just any keywords. They are keywords that Google believes are closely related to your seed keyword. What is really powerful is that they are based on what people are currently searching for and what pages they link to. In other words, pages that are optimized for a given keyword tend to linked to other pages that are optimized for a different keyword and hence, must be related.

If you then decide to click on the related keyword “A”, Google generates a new wonder wheel that displays keywords that are related to keyword “A”. You have the ability to continue to drill down and generate an unlimited number of longer tail keywords that are relevant and that people are searching for.

Armed with the Wonder Wheel tool, you have the ability to apply your seed keyword to your main page for example and build subsequent pages around the different related keywords that are generated from the wheel.

Imagine building websites that consist of multiple pages based on related keywords that are optimized based on Google’s results. I know what you are thinking. That is truly powerful, very powerful.

I recommend you take the time to experience the Wonder Wheel for yourself and then apply it to all of your sites and allow Google to provide you that road map for optimizing your business.

Last week, Mike Klingler revealed Marketing Funnel Mastery where he covered the importance of making  money  on the front  and  back end of your sales funnel.  Another very  critical  must have sales and marketing skill is the ability to create a  repeatable  continuity  into  your  business.

By definition, Continuity is the state of being continuous.  You see most people think that the purpose of a sale is to make money.  Yes, that is part of the reason why we make sales, however, the primary and most important reason to make a sale is to get a customer.

A customer is a person who purchases goods or services from another; buyer; patron.  The Master Skill for MLM Success is to continuously create products and services that position you as the trusted adviser, create tremendous value, solve their problems and yield customer loyalty.  That is the recipe for long term wealth and success regardless of what business you are in.

What are the advantages of implementing a system of doing repeatable business that generates revenue to you and your business.

1.  It reduces the selling activities. Number.  Repeatable business takes some of the pressure off of having to continue to make sales.

2  It reduces advertisement costs and expenses.  You rely less on needing more new customers to achieve your revenue goals.

3. It increases customer loyalty.  Your customers are loyal to your product and service and they depend on it.

4. It increases customer value.

5  It increases referrals.  Your customers are value you and your business and are raving fans that eagerly will refer your products and services.

6. It benefits the customer as you products and services continue to solve their problems without interruption of service.

Some examples of continuity programs include: The Book or CD or the month, group coaching or fixed number coaching that insures everyone participates and gets their questions answered, etc.

It doesn’t matter what type of business you are running, with creativity, there is a businesses continuity program that can be applied to it. Yes, even businesses that or not so obvious like a funeral parlor.  Yes even that business.

Other ideas include loyalty rewards, discount coupons for VIPs, Bonus Certificates with Bronze, Silver and Gold levels.

The best way to determine if what you are attempting to implement is going to work or not is to see if folks around you are beginning to criticize and let you know that your idea has not shot of working.  That is the sure fire way to know that you are truly onto something and need to go full force ahead with your idea.

There are two major methods for generating traffic to your Blogs, Websites and Squeeze Pages (Landing, Thank you and Sales Pages). The first is your Content Funnel which is fed by your Article, Video and Social Media Marketing and the second is your Pay Per Click, PPC, Funnel that generate traffic via paid campaigns.

Either method requires money, lots and lots of money. Some may argue that the Article, Video and Social Media Marketing, AVS Marketing, is “FREE”. I would disagree as once you calculate that value of your time, multiplied by the time you invest in your AVS Marketing, in many cases it is actually turns out to be a much greater investment of money.

Hence, time is truly the most precious asset that we have and the reality is that we do not control time. All we have control of is how efficiently we manage our activities in the 24 Hours per day or 168 Hours per week or the 5040 Hours per month that we are fortunate to have.

So how do you make the best use of your time. Well if you are doing AVS Marketing or any thing else that involves writing, creating videos and creating podcasts, below you will find a tip and system that Russell Brunson shared with me.

What could it be you may be thinking? Some of you may have heard of and others might not have. Either way, implementing the system will make a big difference in efficiently managing the tasks that support your AVS Marketing efforts.

The tool is Google Voice. Google Voice is in Beta release right now and hence, you must be invited in order to have access to it. I have seen invitation offers to Google Voice on e-Bay for $5.

So what is the big deal? For starters, you get your own phone number which you can choose from any area code and set up to ring other phone numbers simultaneously. In other words, you can reduce all of your current numbers down to one. The other awesome feature is that all of your voice-mails are transcribed up to 3 minutes at a time. There are many other features and I will focus on voice-mail transcription.

This feature is powerful and can be leveraged to streamline your AVS Marketing by implementing the system outlined in 6 steps.

Once you have been invited, picked a phone number and setup up the Google Voice, GV account you are ready to go.

1. Dial your GV number and leave a message covering a topic that you were planning on writing an article on. Remember that you are limited to just under 3 minutes. Go to your GV account and clean up your transcription.

2. Post the Article and Audio transcriptions on to your Blog.

3. Post the Article to the Article Directories.

4. Post the Audio to the Podcast Directories.

5. Take the Article Audio and using a service like Animoto, turn it into a Video

6. Submit the Video to the Video Directories.

How cool is that system? Implement it and take your efficient use of time to new heights.

Marketing Funnel Mastery 2010 is the 12 part course series hosted by Legendary Internet Marketer, Mike Klingler. The first webinar was by far the most powerful online event that I have participated in, in recent memory.

Absorbing and applying the information that was covered in this webinar can shave three to five years from your learning curve. The key principles of this webinar is structuring your marketing for Cash Flow. Mike believes that when we are done with the course, you will have created a highly organized and structured outline of exactly what to offer to make money in your business.

It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do or what business you are in. If you’re not focused on optimizing a structure with the intent on cash flowing, you will work ten times harder for significantly less money.  The number one goal is to create “Sweet Spots” in your funnel and remember that your funnel is your business. All of these principles are applied with congruency throughout.

Marketing Funnel Mastery will teach you how to develop a Unique Selling Position. USP is how you want to optimize your efforts to achieve maximum results in your business.  You want to sell on the Front End and on the Back End of your funnel using your self branded products.  Selling your products immediately once a prospect enters your funnel and sell them on the back end.

Folks through attraction marketing you want to sell products immediately once people enter the funnel and you want to sell products on the back end of the sales funnel.

So what is the biggest reason people fail?

1. Not selling their own products at the opt in.
2. Not capturing leads first, with the self branded system.
3. Capturing leads first, with an affiliate system.
4. Not developing front in an back and sweet spot of whether you’re doing.

Using a Content funnel – Article, Video and Social Media Marketing or Pay Per Click, PPC funnel strategy that immediately sells someone else’s affiliate product is a sure way to fail. You have an established YOU as a credible, go to resource. Whether you drive traffic to your blog, websit or lead capture page using PPC to capture your leads, the key is to sell them your own branded products immediately.

Whether it’s free offers that are yours. It’s all you and your products on the inside pages of your system. The delivered free value offer pre sells the Intermediate product offer. Beginer’s may opt to add a service that is relevant and up sell and down sell as you proceed through the sales funnel.

The real world retail entity that embodies, implements and leverages these concepts and principles on a daily basis is IKEA. IKEA directs its customers where to go, shows and demonstrates all of their products and is constantly upselling you every step of the way until you exit the store. Brilliant!

I have provided a very small sampling of the tremendous value, eye opening and game changing webinar that was the first of 12. I highly recommend that you do everything in your power to be part of this life changing program.