I just came across this list of killer domain words over at the Traffic Tactics blog. If you’re thinking of getting another domain for some project or other, I highly recommend having a quick look through the list that they’ve developed.

Many people when they’re trying to find a domain name either pick their company name, or something based on the keywords they’re selling. This isn’t always the best tactic. Sometimes a combination of those strategies, with something from this list might produce better results.

The idea is that certain words elicit a certain psychology in people. Words sell. So use them!

Do you use pay-per-click? Are you into search engine optimization? Either of these marketing disciplines hinge on proper keyword selection. You want to be in front of your customer when they’re in a buying mood, not a browsing mood, right?

I’ve always found that keyword research is one of the hardest things to when creating an ad campaign. How do you find out which keywords make money, and which ones burn money? Anyone can add all the suggestions from a keyword tool into their campaign - but I guarantee they will lose money unless they take that a step further. So how do we find profitable keywords? Here are three steps to help this process.

Step 1

The first thing to do is have a little brainstorm session. For whatever product you’re promoting, try to get inside your customer’s minds:

• What is causing them to be looking for your product?
• What pain (problem) are they feeling or dealing with?
• What questions do they have?
• What solution are they trying to find?

Once you’ve answered these things jot down the different phrases you think they would use to find you.

Step 2

The second step is to use a keyword tool such as the free keyword suggestion tool at wordtracker.com. See if the terms you thought of are showing up on their lists, and find out how many searches are done daily for each keyword. The higher the better, obviously, though the highest keywords might not be the most profitable.

Step 3

Up until now, the information here is probably old hat for most of you. Here’s the golden third step. Head over to MSN’s AdLabs Online Commericial Intention Detector. Click on query, and punch in one of the keywords you think has potential. The web form will then spew out a number between zero and one. Here’s the readout for “affiliate marketing”

Result: NonCommercial (Query)

Probability for Commercial Query:

0.33748

As you can see, MSN thinks this phrase is by and large, non-commercial in intent. Having less than a 0.50 indicates non-commercial; anything over .5 (50%) is commercial in intent. The stronger or higher the co-efficient, the more profitable this keyword is likely to be!

Go to the tool, and compare the output for “personal loan” and “personal loans” - you’d perhaps be surprised to see that the singular is scored at 0.67969, while the plural is scored at 0.89554. So although both look to be quite profitable, “personal loans” is the keyword with the highest commercial intent, of those two.

So now you run your list of keywords from steps one and two through this tool, to make sure that they are all above 50%. If you’ve got keywords that you think would be good, but they’re under 50%, ask yourself why, and see if there isn’t a small variation that can be made to boost the score. If you can improve on it, use the new keyword instead.

Now, I should clarify that although I’ve talked about this as being a way to find profitable keywords, I guess really it is just a method to find the keywords that people are using to buy stuff. This is great, if you are doing SEO. If however you are paying per click, profit takes on a new meaning, as you need to consider what your costs are for each keyword. Chances are strong that the highest rated keywords are also those with strong competition.

However, in all markets, the presence of sharks indicates there is prey in the waters; competition isn’t a bad thing, you just need to find a way to best them, and you’ll be laughing!

Well this blog was initially intended to focus on internet marketing strategies, and it will continue to do so. However, I’m currently in the middle of launching DigitalFrameGuy.com and as such I find my work life turning to the fascinating subject of SEO. Therefore, you’ll likely see a lot more SEO related posts here in the next little while.

So, since we’re talking about SEO, I wanted to let you know about another magnificient little tool I just discovered. My intention isn’t really to flog every product I can find on this blog, but I do want to make mention of tools that I’ve legitimately found useful so others can benefit. I’ve been getting SEO related sales calls quite a bit lately, and mostly they cost a pretty penny. So I opted to do my own SEO. However, I wanted something to help me with the often odious task of link building and search engine submissions.

Anyways, I came across iBusinessPromoter today, which is a cool bit of software that helps you with the complete SEO process, from ground zero all the way through keyword selection, site optimization, search engine submission, link management, and finally a top 10 ranking on the search engine of your choice - guaranteed. Yes, that’s right. Their guarantee is that if you follow their recommendations for your site, and can’t get a top 10 ranking on Google within one year they’ll give you your money back. That’s a pretty good offer where I come from.

So anyways, I downloaded the free version of the software to check it out. I also discovered that companies like eBay, Lexmark, Canon, etc etc have used this product, which gave it a fair bit of credibility off the bat. So after installation, I setup a few of the options and then ran an optimization test on my site. I was expecting something like what I’d seen from other tools online; however this thing took a good 5 minutes crawling all over the internet, finally spitting out a 40 or so page report for my perusal. It also told me that my site ranked at 87%, and then proceeded to tell me why.

The premise here is that if you want to get into the top 10 for say, “internet marketing tips,” then the software will look at the top 10 listings for that keyword on Google. It will analyze each of the 10 pages for something like 130 different factors, then compare your own site to those 10. The idea is that comparing these 10 sites will give you a range of what Google is looking for to get a high ranking, for each parameter. The report then goes into great detail telling you how you match up to the top 10, where you fall short, where you’re too far over the top (ie my keyword density was too high for some variables), and basically where you need to be.

My next step, after making a couple more tweaks on the optimization front, is to do a wholesale site submission to a bunch of search engines and directories. IBP has about 130 search engines that it can submit to automatically, plus a few hundred more that it gives you an assisted submission. In other words, it will fill out pretty much all the fields, then you get to do the CAPTCHA and hit submit. So its like manual submissions on hyperdrive, times 3. IBP apparently has all the updated specs on all the search engines - I checked ou their update log and there have been regular updates every week for a long time.

After the site submissions comes the link building and management. IBP will identify similar sites to mine, based on the keywords provideded and rankings, and work to help me get inbound links coming from those sites. It helps with both reciprocal links as well as one-way links. You can email webmasters from a standard form inside the software, which is cool. Plus you can now see all your inbound links from one tool, with stats on each one. Talk about link management. Prior to this, my link management involved managing the fact that I needed more links, and walking around in the dark trying to get some. This brings it to a whole new level.

Another thing you can do from inside the software is all kinds of keyword research and manipulation. You can generate keyword lists, then modify them for use in PPC as well as on your site. Take the list over to the search engine ranking tool within the program and run it through to get every keyword’s ranking stats: searches, number of results in Google, KEI, and the top link in Google for that word, along with the PR of that link. It’s pretty cool.

I don’t even know what else this software does, but all I can tell you is that as of right now, it looks like it’s going to be my ticket to SEO happiness. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, feel free to checkout the free version of the iBusinessPromoter software.

I’ve been getting a flurry of sales calls lately, mostly offering me costly SEO services (typically $1000-6000). I think this is due to the fact that I’ve just launched DigitalFrameGuy.com and I guess it hit some list somewhere of newly launched e-biz sites.

Problem is, I’m becoming increasingly calloused to sales calls because I’ve been taken in by a few things in the past, and I don’t really have a great desire to throw more money down the golden toilet.

So I’ve learned a few statistics, courtesy of my friendly cold-callers. Here’s one: 92% of all web sales apparently come from search engines, hence the high focus on rankings. These people seemingly completely write off all other forms of marketing, which I think is incredibly narrow-minded. Yes, I will agree that for a web-store, SEO is incredibly important. But to take the line that it is more important that anything else, and that you’re basically wasting your time if you think of doing anything else (hahaha - you newbie moron! - you’re doing PPC?). I know internet marketers who have had amazing success just using lists, and others who are producing amazing results with social media marketing. Personally, I’ve had tremendous success with pay-per-click.

The problem is that these phone marketers don’t know me from Adam, and don’t have a clue that internet marketing is what I’ve chosen to do. I realize I need help along the way, but primarily, I want to learn how to do it myself, not turn my site over to some outfit who will charge a couple grand for an XML sitemap and a few hundred directory submissions.

One outfit guaranteed me page 1 or page 2 on Google, within six months, or my money back. Now that is an offer that is more interesting; however I have this desire to do something for myself. I want to achieve something on my own here! I suppose you could make a business model on having people do everything for you, all the time; however I think it would be a very expensive one. Being naturally techie minded, I’ve learned so much along the way that I can now do in minutes, which other people outsource. Yes, they save a small amount of time, and at some point if life gets busy enough I may do the same. However, I think that until you truly understand what the key elements of your business are you won’t truly have the keys you need to get ahead anyways. Putting 10 outsourcers together is brilliant; and I hope to do it one day, but I MUST know what each one is doing, and why, and how they relate to each other. That knowledge will likely only be gained by doing it yourself, at least the first time.

I’m getting off topic. Back to the sales calls. I am typically polite to callers, and I usually try to hear them out. Sometimes I even learn something. But I really wish they could somehow get a better grasp of who I am before they launch into their one-size-fits-all sales rant. If they actually took the time to find out where I was coming from, I’m sure they would be a lot more effective.

Recently I’ve come across a few cool SEO oriented plugins for Firefox. Honestly, until recently I naively didn’t even know plugins existed for Firefox, so this was a pleasant surprise, and since then I’ve been trending away from IE7 towards Firefox. Anyways, I thought I would share these three SEO plugins with you as I’ve found them useful.

SearchStatus Plugin

* Google PageRank
* Google Category
* Alexa popularity ranking
* Compete.com ranking
* Alexa incoming links
* Alexa related links
* backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN

SEO For FireFox (seobook.com)

This plugin has a big long list of cool things, including PR, Age, Links, .edu links, .gov links, del.ici.us, Technorati, Alexa, DMOZ, Bloglines, WhoIs, and more.

Rank Checker (seobook.com)

Checks your sites for rankings on user-specified keywords on Google, Yahoo and MSN. You can customize this to a certain degree as well. There is a detailed how-to on the page.

In three days I have nearly quadrupled my inbound links (110 to 482 on Yahoo), and it all came from 30 minutes of easy work. More to the point, all of these links are linked to my homepage with the keyword phrase “Affiliate Marketing Tips.” Wanna know how I did it? I used a remarkably fresh new method by Michelle MacPhearson, called “30 Minute Backlinks.”

So now you’re wondering what kind of black-hat stuff I’ve managed to dig myself into right? SEO is grueling, hard work right? Nobody gets quick results with a puny amount of work, right? Well I can tell you the whole thing is completely legitimate. The basic idea is to take advantage of web directories that have high PR, yet are virtually unknown to the majority of webmasters! How can this be you ask? They are software directories!

Software directories… I can hear you laughing already. Like what is a software directory going to do for me? Well what if I told you that Michelle lays out no less than 5 different ways you can create your own customized, branded, software in less than 30 minutes? The beauty of this system is it doesn’t even really matter too much if nobody ever uses your software… though it would be nice of course. The trick here is that you’re getting your software placed in the directories with the keywords you choose as the linking term, coming back directly to your site. These are all one way links coming from good PR sites!

I’ve only used one of the five examples that Michelle discusses - so far I’ve made myself a toolbar for FireFox and Internet Explorer. You can check it out here if you want - it’s got some cool tools on it for affiliate marketers. The best part was, I didn’t need to know a single line of code to produce this toolbar. If you can spell your name and type in your internet address, you can be a programmer!! Well, not quite, but you get the point.

So basically she lays out five different ways to make a cool bit of software, targeted to your niche, which you can then upload to hundreds of sites around the internet - sites that want your listing- even crave your listings! You see these guys want to have the biggest, hugest link directories out there because that is their reason for existence.

The best part is, it is completely free and takes very little time to implement. (The video series itself costs a bit, but it is very reasonable). Anyways, I don’t want to make this too “salesy” - really I’m just kind of stoked that I managed to triple my backlinks with so little effort, and I wanted to share that tip with you. Check it out, and let me know how it works for you!

(UPDATE) As of today (April 9) this domain is up to 631 inbound on Yahoo. I’ve done nothing additional since this posting aside from leaving 3-5 comments on some other blogs.

(UPDATE) April 10 - Yahoo now shows 785 inbound. This is the gift that keeps on giving!

(UPDATE) April 19 - My backlink tool appears to be dead, I now have 0 inbound from each of the big 3! Can anyone recommend a better link checking tool? Argh.

Are you one of those people, like me, that writes a post then changes it 10 times immediately afterwards? Perhaps not. Nevertheless, it is important from an SEO standpoint to choose how you want things to look from the search engine and post with this in mind. Here’s a few tips:

1. Pick a catchy title that will stand out in a crowd of search results. Even if you make it to the first page, if you don’t have a title that elicits interest, nobody will click.

2. Write your title after your post. Perhaps you’re less rabit brained than I tend to be, but many times I’ve sat down to write on a topic and it rabbit-trails into something else. My original title is not really well suited any longer, and needs to be changed. Save yourself the hassle, write the post, then write a title. Students: You don’t write a summary before you write the paper do you? (Don’t answer that).

3. Use a plugin like the All in One SEO pack for Wordpress. It plugs in seamlessly and allows you, right in your post editor, to add meta tags, a meta title, and a 160 character description that will be seen by the search engines. In the description field, try using a portion of one of your more interesting sentences and end with an ellipsis (…) to lead their attention on, into your blog. Having just read the first part of the sentence (if it is interesting), people will naturally want that thought to be completed in their brain, so they’ll click to see what it says.

This is your chance to customize what your search engine entry looks like! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen search results and the “title” is simply a bad list of keywords, and the “description” is basically more of the same. I typically shy away from these results, and go for the ones that look more professional, the ones that are actually coherent! It doesn’t take much effort to stand out sometimes, but it is well worth the few seconds you’ll spend doing it right.

In my ongoing quest to achieve SEO for this blog I’ve started looking at the number of inbound links I have. The more inbound links you have, especially one way links, the better your ranking on the search engines. That’s the theory anyways. Ideally, you want inbound links from sites/pages with high PR as well.

This inbound links tool shows all the inbound links to your site registered by the Big Three: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Punch in your site and try it out. When you click on the button it will bring you to the SEOChat website where your results will be displayed.

Alternatively, you can have a look at the Google Webmaster Tools for your site, or go to alltheweb.com and punch in link:www.yoursitename.com to see the results.

Link Popularity Tool © SEO Chat™ URL Valid URL to check Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

I posted on March 20th that I would start tracking my traffic on this blog, as a means of measuring my success at driving free traffic here. Anyways, here are the stats - either for the month of March or as of today, April 3. Please note that I only got Analytics happening around this time, and I didn’t do any promotion prior to this.

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 6,181,254 (up from 13,952,743!)
Google PR: 0
Technorati Authority: 0
RSS Subscribers: 0

The Golden Rule
March 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 143 (last month I had 1!)

Inbound Links
Another metric I’m going to start tracking is inbound links. I’ll assume that I had 0 at the beginning of March, and as I didn’t measure this at the end of March I’ll assume I had about 30 on March 31. I recently started a new tactic which is going to greatly increase my inbound links (Apr 4 - Yahoo:113, Google:0, MSN:0) which I’ll post about soon. I’m using the link popularity tool at SEOChat.com.

By far the greatest part of my visitors (approx 110) came from one comment I made on Digg one day where I also included the link to my blog. I actually made $1.22 on Adsense that day (from this site). So a few more days like that and I’ll have recovered my costs on the domain anyways. LOL. Good thing I’ve got other things to rely on!

The rest of the visitors mostly came from other sites where I’ve been posting comments, getting involved in the community. This is a slow way of developing traffic, but hopefully it will prove to be higher quality, in terms of finding people that will come and read more than one post, hopefully find something of value here and leave a comment or something.

I’m going to start tracking my progress in ranking for certain terms. This site happens to be #5 on Google for “Jonathan Boettcher” which by most measures is a completely useless term at the moment, so I’ve decided to pick “Affiliate Marketing Tips” as my target phrase for April. I don’t rank at all on any of the engines for this phrase so we’ll see how quickly I can get registered. Initially I thought of “internet marketing” but this is too broad a keyword and there is too much competition for that. Mind you, there will be good competition for this keyword as well, however it is a bit more “niche” so we’ll give that a shot. In addition, I’m planning on putting up some more resources directed towards affiliate marketing in particular.

In other news, last night I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, which went well, and I am excited about some of the new features that are available. Apparently you can get a live traffic chart on your admin panel now. Then all I have to do is get some more traffic!

Until next month…

In my newly found quest to promote this blog and generate traffic, I thought why not submit to a ton of site directories? I found a ridiculously long list of free web directories at lazyurl (they will know if I copy it!! and I submitted my site to a few. I’m curious - has anyone had any quantifiable success with free directory submissions? Anyways, the sheer monotony of doing that for about 20 seconds caused my attention to slip and I started surfing again.

I stumbled upon the following list of filters one can search Google with, and became immediately intrigued. These links search Google for blogs with a specific PageRank (PR), and apparently filter out all blogs that use nofollow links in their comments (better check them yourself though). That started me thinking. Chris Sandberg once told me that a great way to get traffic and rankings was to post on other people’s blogs; basically become involved in the community. In addition, links to your site from pages with a high PR count for more when Google is calculating your own PR.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no SEO Master; in fact I’m just starting out here. But I can put two and two together. So why not find a blog with a high PageRank, and post it to death? Just kidding, make sure your posts are meaningful.

So here’s that list of Google filters. Simply click on the PR you want, and search Google for a topic relevant to your blog, and voila, bang presto - you have a list of sites that have decent PR!

PR 6 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…66:2ziwmhsusja
PR5 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…66:gpfnyqgww54
PR4 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…66:fcvptc3lghk
PR3 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…166:ec1btv16hl
PR 0-2 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…ygwict5bzjo&hl

Now comes the next little problem: hardly any site out there is going to allow you to post a comment on their main page (most likely the highest PR page on the site). So if you posted on a sub page, you might not be getting any value at all, right?

Never fear, there’s a tool for that too!
I found this cool tool at SEOCompany.ca (which has many cool FREE tools) which will check internal site pages for PR. So if you combine the links above with this tool, you should be able to find high PR blog pages that you can post a comment on. Because most blogs use the title of the post in the URL, you can quickly look down the list and even pick a high PR page that is most relevant to your own blog.

Hope you find this useful.