How to Make Money Blogging

Unless you plan on getting paid to blog for others, the key concept to understand when trying to make money blogging is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is a crazy science of wizardry. It involves millions of factors that are so hard to understand and comprehend that I think we should leave it to the experts. And lets [...]

Unless you plan on getting paid to blog for others, the key concept to understand when trying to make money blogging is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

SEO is a crazy science of wizardry. It involves millions of factors that are so hard to understand and comprehend that I think we should leave it to the experts. And lets allow them to charge premium dollar for their efforts too. Really? … Well not so much. SEO isn’t really all that difficult. In fact I would go as far as to say that a lot of it is mostly grunt work, applied intelligently. So why do people think it is so difficult to understand how to rank in Google? Well the truth is that it isn’t that difficult to understand, and it certainty isn’t rocket science.Wouldn’t you like to know what the key factors are that determine what pages rank well in Google? Well the information is out there freely available, and you don’t have to buy some dick head’s Ebook to find out, lets take a look.

Key Factors for Ranking in 2011

• Keyword use in title tag
• Keyword use in domain name
• Substantive, unique content on page
• Keyword focused anchor text in links
• Quantity/quality of links
• Diversity of link sources
• Page specific trust rank
• Relevance of link sources
• Keyword specific anchor text from internal links

Source: Search Engine Ranking Factors

Keyword use in title tag

This one is straight forward and the most widely used SEO technique. If you simply include a keyword in the title of your page, you tell Google what the page is about. This will help that page rank for that keyword.

Keyword use in domain name

Domain names that have keywords in them will rank much more easily for a keyword than ones that don’t. It doesn’t mean your domain won’t rank well for any chosen keyword. But it may mean you need to build more backlinks to be on a level playing field. Believe it or not this site ranks on the front page of Google.co.nz for the keyword phrase “Make Money Online”. This doesn’t bring a huge amount of traffic because nz is small in a global search market. But it is still well worth the effort.

Substantive, unique content on page

Google loves unique content. And pages with lots of it, targeted to a keyword will rank better than those pages that may be similar in every other way, but lighter on unique content.

Keyword focused anchor text in links

For me I rate this the most important factor, but also the most hard work. To rank well for competitive keywords you are going to have to build links to your site that have your keyword as the anchor text of those links. I obviously want links aiming at this site with the phrase Make Money Online as that anchor of those links.

Quantity/quality of links

A lot of links aiming at your page or site is going to help you rank better. And a fewer amount of quality links will have the same effect.

Diversity of link sources

Having a site wide link on another site may help you rank a little, but to improve your site ranking you are going to need to build links from a variety of different sources.

Page specific trust rank

Does Google trust your site? Is it new? Or have you been around for a while. Google likes to sandbox new sites to avoid spam sites. This will stop them from ranking for a period of time. The longer your site has been around to more trust Google applies to that domain. As a result very old sites rank easily for competitive keywords.

Relevance of link sources

Relevance of links is important. If you are trying to rank for a term about Internet Marketing, You are going to want to gets links from other sites about Internet Marketing.

Keyword specific anchor text from internal links

This is something you can easily control, and it certainly does help. Think of it this way. Google doesn’t know what your site is about unless you tell them. You can tell them by including the relevant keywords to links around your site. The link at the top of this site has my main keywords in it. The links to different articles have keywords in them as I try to use keywords in titles.

Ok so that’s it. It doesn’t sound that hard. And the above list was agreed upon by 72 of the industries most influential SEO’s. So these factors are very close to fact rather than opinion. Obviously understanding SEO is one thing. Having the skills and character to be able to pull it off is another.