So, you’ve figured out your niche market and have a website, and now you’ve arguably reached the toughest part – how do I get traffic to my site? Paying for traffic via banners and PPC does not always make sense and may not be feasible for your business. Or maybe you just want to supplement your current traffic sources. After all, SEO traffic is typically the best you can get – targeted, high-converting, and best of all, free (nothings actually free, but we often have more time than resources).

A general rules to follow is to make things descriptive and useful to your users. And just be natural! Over-optimizing wastes time and energy and can often hurt more than help.

Doing a little search engine optimization is usually a no-brainer, as you can often do 80% of the work with little time and effort. Here’s my list of 10 quick seo tips and advice to help get you started and improve your rankings.

1. Determine a couple keyword phrases for each page on your site. Don’t just guess what users will be search for – use Google’s and Wordtracker’s keyword tools to make the final descision. You can spend all your time optimizing for “green foosball tables”, but if only 10 people search that in a month, it’s obviously a complete waste of time. Before deciding on a keyword phrase, check how competitive it is. Search for your phrase and take note of the top 10 results in Google. Could you see your site ahead of some of the current results? Do you think you offer something more relevant? Last thing you want to do is to start an endless uphill battle with little chance of success.
2. Optimize all of your page titles. Your title has the most ranking weight for keywords, so you should at least make sure every page has a title containing the keyword phrase(s) it’s targeting. Make sure your title is 70 characters or less (here’s a great tool for optimizing site titles and descriptions. Unless your brand name is extremely important and will be searched by users, put your keywords first and and your brand name last (e.g. Regulation Foosball Tables | Foosball City).
3. Make use of the heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc). Make sure each page has an <h1> tag containing the main keyword phrase for the page. You can line up your h1 tag with your page title if you want, although I would consider changing it up a bit to be a little more natural (e.g. “Regulation Foosball Tables for Sale”). Use <h2> tags for secondary keyword phrases, if any.
4. Make sure your images have descriptive alt tags containing your keywords. Make it natural, and don’t make everything word-for-word the same (e.g. “professional foosball table”).
5. Make use of META descriptions, and write a unique one for each page. If you do not have time to add a unique one per page, then don’t bother adding one (identical descriptions may signal duplicate content to Google and the other search engines). Keep in mind that your page description will not provide any actual ranking power, so don’t bother keyword stuffing them – make them helpful to users to improve click-thru rates.
6. Link out to high quality, related sites. Some people speculate you can improve ranking by linking out to relevant sites. Even if that’s not the case, it still provides valuable resouces to your users, and may encourage sites to link back to you. If you’re linking to a spammy, shady, or otherwise non-trusted site (maybe from user-generated content) make sure you include the rel=”nofollow” attribute.
7. Make sure every page has unique content. It shouldn’t be too hard to have at least 200 words per page. Your content should of course contain your keywords, but don’t worry how often it shows up – use slightly different phrases in different contexts, keeping with the “be natural” theme (e.g. “foosball tables”, “regulation foosball table”, etc.).
8. Link to your own pages from within your content. This is especially important for blogs, as older posts get shoved into the archives or moved to page 3+ of your category pages. Look for terms that relate to other pages on your site and make them links. Ideally every page on your site will be within 2 clicks from your home page. You can also accomplish this by creating a sitemap page, linked to from your home page, that links to every page on your site (with appropriate anchor text for each page).
9. Sign up with Google Webmaster Tools. It’s completely free, and is a great resource for SEO. You can find out which of your pages are having issues, what pages are missing, what search terms your site is ranking for, and many other great things. You can also manually submit an xml sitemap, which can help Google index your pages faster and find new content. If you run a WordPress blog, there are several great plugins for automatically generating the sitemap.
10. Build backlinks, but make sure they look natural. If possible, have links to your site contain your keywords, although make sure to change them up a little bit. And have links pointing to pages other than your home page. You can do a few reciprocal links between sites, but try not to go overboard. Don’t waste too much time with link directories besides Yahoo! and DMOZ. If you really are a quality resource, you should be able to get at least a few relevant sites to link to you. And experiment with social networking sites like Digg and Stumbleupon to promote your site.

If you’re still hungry for more SEO tips and discussion, be sure to check out SEOmoz! Great resource, even if you just read the blog.

Using Google Insights:

The first thing to do is to visit http://www.google.com/insights/search/ and sign in to your google account at the top right.

The home page will look something like this:

Google also provides data for categories, seasonal, and geographic keyword data. Make sure you take the time to look over each section.

Finding a niche market:

To find a niche market all you have to do is type a keyword you want to research. Google insights will then dig through it’s data providing you with a goldmine of top searched keywords and keyword phrases.

So for this example I will research rifle scopes. I’ll type rifle scopes in the search bar, choose U.S.A., and gather the data all the way back from 2007 for the top keywords and phrases.

Google will then generate a graph like this:

Click to enlarge

Don’t mind the data on the graph it’s self. You just want to pay attention to the relative volume to see if the term is rising. You can even compare this term with a second one. Just hit the plus sign to add a phrase and google will generate a chart to compare the data.

Click on the add search term

Now I’m able to compare two different keyword terms to see which is better. For this example I’ll use the term spotting scopes.

spotting scopes

This is the data google provided. You can compare the relative volume of both.

Click to enlarge

Google Insights also provides related terms on the rise in google. This enables you to dig deeper to reveal potential niche markets and sub-niche markets. After I scroll down I clicked on the “leupold rifle scopes” term to dig a little deeper.

I clicked leupold rifle scopes to dig deeper

Then google provided me with the common search terms and keyword terms on the rise.

Now I know the search volume and keywords on the rise to profit from. Google Insights will help you dig through all the junk and help you find those true niche markets, making all you niche marketing efforts worth wild.

Go and check out his tool and let me know what you think. Was it easy to use and find your niche market?

Do you want to make money on the internet, and as soon as possible? Setting up an internet store is a proven way to monetize web traffic. However, becoming a web merchant can be a long process and requires a large investment in money and space for resale goods. So how do web merchants bring in the big bucks without breaking the bank? They set up an eBay niche store.

There are two major eBay niche store programs out there: Phpbay Pro and BANS, which stands for ‘Build a Niche Store’. They have several key elements in common. Both allow you to build a store on your website using eBay products that are sold by other vendors. This offers quick and easy money, sometimes taking just minutes. Both use the keywords and phrases on your website to determine what products will sell best to your audience. Both stores can enhance your search engine rankings by adding relevant and valuable key words to your website. However, there are a few key differences.

Phpbay Pro is unique because it is also a wordpress plug-in. WordPress is a very Google friendly format, so this can mean being higher up on a search engine results page. Also,  Phpbay Pro masks the links, so they come up on Google as fresh content, which again can increase a search engine ranking. Users report that the customer support at Phpbay Pro is nothing short of amazing, which can be a huge bonus if you are new to the niche store concept.

BANS has an excellent range of templates, which allow users to customize the look of their niche store. Another benefit is that they are easy to install.  However, BANS does not have the same wordpress options as Phpbay Pro, and therefore will not reap the same harvest of web traffic for your website. BANS also is generally considered buggy, with quite a few annoying and malproductive quirks. Although BANS offers an attractive addition to your website, they will bring a few headaches along for the ride.

If you’re afraid putting this kind of money-maker on your site will compromise your site’s integrity, think again. Phpbay Pro and BANS both allow users to choose their vendors and categories, which can prevent inappropriate items from getting onto a website. They also both use keyword driven listings that are guaranteed to be a good fit with your website. Whichever you choose, there is no reason to let your website go another day without adding this easy and lucrative money making feature.

Google G1 Android Phone

Google G1 Android Phone

The G1 is the very first phone launched by Google. The technology behind the phone is an open source Android operating system that anyone can use to continuously improve and modify the available software. The phone is available at any T-Mobile outlet. It comes in black or white color scheme and offers a user-friendly interface. The entire casing consists of a large 3.2 inch screen and four buttons at the bottom, which slides open to reveal a sleek keyboard.

Functions

Under the watchful eyes of Google experts, G1 powerful operating system ensures a smooth web browsing experience. It uses high resolution screen, touch screen technology and offers quick navigation to web applications. The phone is also embedded with a zoom technology that lets users to magnify a specific portion with just a click on a button. Anyone can effortlessly scroll through the entire webpage by simply sliding their finger on the screen. The phone provides one touch access to many of the Google’s popular applications and is geared towards a mobile internet user.

Unfortunately, this phone is not for video buffs as it can’t use flash. Not yet, at least. On a good note, it does have a 3 mega pixel camera to snatch quality pictures. You can also expect video recordings in the later versions. Also, it does not provide functionality to use the high powered headsets. Users will have to stick with their earphones, for now.

Software

Anyone can access the online music anytime through the Amazon MP3 store. The real advantage lies in its open source software that will provide users with automatic updates to its operating system and access to new applications. There are a wide variety of applications in the Android marketplace. Shop savvy is one of its applications that allow users to scan the bar codes of any item to run a price comparison with other shops. If that’s not enough, the in built GPS will help locate the nearest store with a better pricing.

The phone competes directly with Apple’s iPhone G3. It must be confessed that the looks of iPhone are better than the Google G1 Android phone. The G1 phone might also lack some critical features but professionals believe that its open source coding technology will definitely prevail over its rivals, in the long run.
[video]1FJHYqE0RDg[/video]

Pricing & Availability

The retail price of the phone in US market is $179 which may vary from vendor to vendor and on available promotions.  It supports the existing 3G and Wifi networks.  It is initially launched in 21 cities across the United States. By the end of the year, the reach will extend to multiple cities and European market. The data plans for the phone starts from $25 a month that makes it cheaper than the iPhone. It seems that the phone is customized for individual users as it doesn’t have the capability to connect to corporate email servers.

Samsung and LG are already talking about designing something on the footsteps of the Google G1 mobile phone. The future of the phone relies heavily on the creativity of programmers who will use the android platform to offer new and powerful functions. The phone is future proof says Andy Rubin, senior director of mobile platform at Google. If it is really so, we will have to wait and see…

With all that said here are some numbers;

KEYWORDS;

“android phone”

• Approx ave. 9,900 searches per month

“android phones”

• Approx ave. 1,900 searches per month

I’m sure the best place to buy Google’s android phone(s) will be on ebay. I will be placing some auctions on the android phone here, so check back on the release date.