You have a website. You are selling the best gadget around. But in order to succeed you should get visitors to your website. You need traffic. Nobody knows about your product or website. You depend on web searches, or more precisely, on web search engines. They should have your website indexed and display it among search results. But not just any search results. Your page should be displayed when somebody searches for keywords that are relevant to your website.

The key to online success are right keywords. You should target keywords that people use to find things. Of course, your product should be something people need and are looking to buy. Otherwise even the best keywords will not help you. But how do you know what are people looking for? The answer is called keyword research. The best approach is to do keyword research before you start with an online project. But even if you already have a website you can optimize it with content about popular keywords. How can you find them?

You can do it manually. But analyzing each keyword, counting backlinks and estimating competition is a very time consuming task. The best approach is to use a dedicated tool like Market Samurai. Market Samurai has (almost) everything you need for internet marketing. It is a great keyword research and search engine competition analysis software. With it you can easily find right keywords you should target. How do you use it?

Using Market Samurai is very simple. You create a project around a root keyword. This is the keyword that describes your market, for example “used cars”. Market samurai will help you to find keywords (search phrases) that are related to your market, in this case to used cars. Your goal should be to select keywords for which you could rank on the first page of Google search results. You need to look for keywords that have some number of daily searches, have little or weak competition and there should be some advertisers advertising for this keyword.

The number of searches is pretty obvious. If nobody searches for some keyword then it makes no sense to target this keyword. The more search volume, the more traffic could come to your website. As a rule of thumb you should look for keywords that have at least 100 daily searches. The strength of the competition is not so obvious parameter. In order to reach top position on the search results page there should be very few other pages competing for the same keyword. Because if there is a strong competition you will never reach high ranking which consequently means lower traffic to your website. To evaluate the competition for particular keyword, Market Samurai provides an excellent matrix of key properties for top 10 websites ranking for particular keyword. You should have a little knowledge about SEO to decide if this is a “go” or “no go” case, but even for beginners it is easy to check the number of backlinks and PageRank.

The third criteria is the market for this keyword. If there are no advertisers then it is very likely that this keyword is not interesting. Once you find a keyword that passes all tests you should use it to create a web page around it. Don’t forget to publish only original quality content. A few backlinks and you are done! If your judgment was right then you will shortly rank for this keyword.

The author is a big fan of Google and and internet marketing. His latest project is the http://hydronicfloorheating.org/ website which explains advantages of hydronic floor heating, a type of radiant heating.

Do you publish a blog for your business? If you do…..I’d like to talk about some humiliating mistakes you should actively avoid, especially if you are trying to position yourself as an expert. As someone who helps maintain, publish and promote the business’s of others, I’ve learned the HARD way that it’s often MUCH easier to embarrass yourself (or your clients) if you aren’t careful.

(And I’m NOT talking about the pictures of myself drinking a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 out of a beer funnel from 1995 that were circulating around my Facebook friends list last year). I’m talking PROFESSIONAL embarrassment. And the kind of things, that if you’re maintaining and publishing blogs for traffic, publicity and profit, you MUST avoid to keep your sites ranking well, and raking in the cash.

- Check Your Blog Settings Before You Publish Your Very First Post: Depending on what platform you are using (I exclusively use WordPress and recommend you do, too) and what version you are running, you MUST check to make sure you’re blog is set to be “public”. Want an example of why? I was working on a campaign for a client a few months back and we had created all sorts of killer content to promote their newest offer. Articles, press releases, social strategies, link building techniques, you name it, we did it.

Yet, a few weeks later, the client emailed me to tell me that their site STILL wasn’t indexed in the search engines. And when I checked, he was right….all of the STATIC HTML pages were up and ranking, but all of the work MY team did, wasn’t showing up at all. Anywhere. Guess what? I totally forgot to change the initial setting that even ALLOWED the engines to “crawl” the blog. I had it set on “make this blog private”. Not good, right? Thank god I’ve got caller id, because I was able to avoid getting screamed at for a few days until we got the whole thing straightened out…:-) Don’t make this mistake if you are a professional blog consultant – it IS embarrassing!

- Respond to Your Comments! I think this is embarrassing. Maybe you don’t…but I was sort of taught at a young age that when people ask you questions, or say nice things about you, or compliment your work, it’s polite to respond! It amazes me how many people don’t….or how many “gurus” will tell you that they don’t even read their blog comments. (after asking people to leave them for the latest “launch” nonsense) I’ll tell you what: Last night?

I listened to an hour long interview with Seth Godin, the marketing genius behind the “Purple Cow” and “IdeaVirus” theology – and he said he gets 5-600 emails a day. And responds to each personally. That’s what being “remarkable” is all about…and while we all may not get there, taking the time to interact with people who care enough to comment is a GREAT way of saving face, making friends…and BUILDING a business blog that people truly love.