1. Make sure you have keywords in your title tag.

Always put keywords in your title tag, but don’t stuff. Remember, the title is what people click in the SERPs, so it should be enticing. Two phrases of 2-4 words is plenty.

2. Use keywords in your domain name.

Having golfswingtips.com if you want to rank for “golf swing tips” helps. It’s not the holy grail of ranking, but it does make a big difference.

3. Only use .com, .net, and .org domains.

The .info domain, the .biz domain, and other extensions are used extensively by spammers. These domains CAN rank well, but it’s harder than the big three extensions.

4. Don’t use more than two dashes in your domain name.

Spammers tend to stuff keywords into domains by putting a lot of dashes. If at all possible, don’t use any dashes in your domain, but never use more than two.

5. Get backlinks to your site from high quality sites in your niche.

Getting backlinks is essential, but take care to get most of your links from quality sites that are related to your site’s niche. If your site is about golf, get mostly backlinks from sites about golf or at least sports. Backlinks from cooking sites wouldn’t work as well.

6. Don’t get hundreds of backlinks per day. This looks unnatural.

Anything unnatural can cause your site to fall under suspicion. While you might not get banned, you might see a big drop in rankings for a while.

7. Write quality content, and don’t worry about achieving a specific keyword density.

Keyword density is a thing of the past except for proving you’re a “spammer” if your density is too high. Just write naturally.

The trouble is, most websites don’t link to their competitors. It doesn’t make sense for them to link to another site that competes against them, unless of course they have a reason to that benefits them directly.

That’s what you have to do. You have to provide sites with a reason to link to your site. This is actually a lot easier than you might think.

There are several ways you can provide value in order to get links:

• Write exceptional content. The higher quality your content, the more links you will get.
• Go easy on the ads. Sites with fewer ads will get more attention, because they don’t look like spam sites.
• Offer something in return. For example, offer to write a great article for someone else’s site in exchange for a link.
• Exchange links. While reciprocal links do tend to carry less weight, they are still very valuable.
• Pay for links. Do NOT pay for “backlinks”, as Google frowns on this. But you can buy “advertising” on sites.

Always be working on getting more backlinks to your site. If you don’t, you will probably find yourself slipping in the rankings while your competitors climb. Backlinks are an ongoing thing. You have to continually be getting more of them to stay ahead of the competition. It’s not a difficult job, but it is time consuming, so consider outsourcing the job to a knowledgeable and reputable backlink provider. Just remember to check their references. If you hire someone who is inexperience, they could end up getting you a bunch of worthless links that could hurt your site more than they help.

The title tag of an HTML document is found in the head, between the <title> and </title> tags. It should contain keywords, but you shouldn’t stuff the title full of dozens of meaningless keywords. Ideally, your title should have just two or three phrases, up to around 160 characters or so.

What I like to do with my title tags is to insert one main keyword phrase, then another similar phrase that uses some of the same words, but not all. Let’s look at an example title.

Improve Your Golf Swing | Golf Swing Tips

I’ve included my main keyword phrase first (Improve Your Golf Swing), and then I’ve included a secondary keyword phrase (Golf Swing Tips) that includes two of the four words from the first phrase. You’ll also notice that the two phrases are separated by the | or pipe symbol. This could also be a dash, an asterisk, or one of several symbols. I just prefer to use the pipe symbol and it works for me.

Some people like to put the name of their site in the title of every page. While you CAN do this, I don’t recommend it unless the name of your site is related to the topic of every single page. For example, if you have a site called GolfSwingTips.com, and every single article on the site was about improving a player’s golf swing, then you could probably safely put “Golf Swing Tips” in your title. If your site was called GolfMania.com, you might not want to put “Golf Mania” in every title tag.

Whatever you do, do NOT leave the title tag blank. If you do, it will show up as “Untitled Document” in the search engines. Not only are you not likely to rank this way, but you aren’t likely to get many clicks through to your site, either.

Speaking of groups, they are a great way to get in some valuable marketing on Facebook. You can start a group on practically any legal niche you want, and then you can pretty much market to that group’s users to your heart’s content. The best thing about this is the fact that the users will be very targeted. If a user joins a group about knitting, chances are extremely good that they are actually interested in knitting!

You can also get in more valuable marketing by making Facebook apps. These are fun little addons that people can use to play around on Facebook. For example, you could make an app that sends a virtual skein of yarn to knitters, and users who use that app could use it to send a cute picture of some yarn to their other knitting friends. Apps aren’t particularly difficult to make if you have a programming background, but you can outsource their creation relatively cheaply if you don’t. Simple apps are pretty quick to make.

Facebook profiles aren’t as customizable as MySpace profiles, but don’t forget to personalize it. Add a photo (or multiple photos), add a complete bio, and jazz up your page as much as you can. The more you personalize your profile, the more personal it will feel. This will make it a lot easier to get friends on the site, and it will make it a lot easier to market to those friends.

When Twitter first hit the scene, a lot of people just didn’t understand its power. With it, you can keep in constant contact with people. Instead of having to post long blog posts with lots of content, you can simply take a few seconds to post a sentence or two. It’s also very conducive to getting to know your followers on a one-on-one basis. Using direct messages (or DM), you can communicate directly with other users.

How to Get More Twitter Followers:

1. Follow approximately 300 users per day that are related to the niche you are interested in.

2. Use Twitter Karma to find out which of your followers are following you.

3. Unfollow anyone who doesn’t follow you back within a couple of days, because you can only follow a maximum of 2,000 people unless you have more than 2,000 followers.

4. You will also receive followers who find you through the pages of people who follow you and who you are following!

Twitionary:

Follower: Someone who has subscribed to follow your updates.

RT: Retweet. When you post someone else’s message again for your own followers. Example: RT @username Little girl needs help for eye surgery. http://url.com

DM: Direct Message. A message sent directly to another user.

Tweet: (n) A message you post on Twitter. (v) To post a message on Twitter.

Tweeple: Twitter users.

Twitter Traffic Tips:

• Don’t post a constant barrage of ads. Post one ad for every 5-10 regular messages.
• Give your followers free gifts now and then to keep them happy and loyal.
• Post insights into your personal life. People love feeling like they know you personally.
• Post a few times a day, but not more than once every hour or two. You don’t want to spam your followers.

For example, if you want to rank well for the phrase “Amish quilts”, you should ideally buy amishquilts.com. If that domain isn’t available, you could either try for a less popular version, like buyamishquilts.com, or you could buy amishquilts.net or amish-quilts.com. I would stick with .com domains if at all possible. If necessary, you could buy a .net or a .org, but I never bother with other extensions. In my experience, .com domains rank better and faster than comparably optimized domains with other extensions.

One main reason why the domain is so important is presumably because the Google algorithm is programmed in favor of companies. For example, someone searching for “Taco Bell” would probably prefer to be presented with the company’s official website first. If someone searches for “Taco Bell recipes”, they probably aren’t looking for the Taco Bell website, but might like a site called tacobellrecipes.com!

Should You Use Dashes?

A lot of people want to know if they should use dashes in their domain name if a domain isn’t available without dashes. In the past, dashes were very useful and sites using them ranked very well. These days, domains without dashes seem to have an edge over domains with dashes. Although this isn’t always true, it does seem to make a difference.

In my experience, domains with dashes are fine, but NOT more than two dashes per domain name. Anything more and the domain may look spammy to the search engines, as well as to any potential visitors!

How Many Keywords?

Ideally you want to buy a domain that uses the phrase has the highest traffic in your niche. Most of the time, the highest traffic phrases (those with two words usually) will be taken. Three and four words is fine, too. In general, phrases with five or more words have a lot less traffic and don’t work as well for getting traffic. If possible, I would buy a two word domain first. Not only will they usually get more traffic, but they will be more valuable if you decide to sell the site later.

For example, you could take 3 short articles and make a Squidoo lens. Then you could rewrite those 3 articles and make a HubPages hub. Then you could rewrite them again and make a Blogger blog. You could make a site on Weebly, a page on Wet Paint, submit to Ezine Articles and other article directories… the list goes on. By submitting to many different sites, you could rank on the first page with several of them. In this case, you would have more chances to get your links in front of visitors instead of a competitor.

For example, let’s say you’re selling Amish quilts as an affiliate. You could make 20 or 30 different pages about Amish quilts on various sites. If just 5 of them ranked on the front page of Google, you would own 50% of the front page! That would be so much more powerful than owning only one spot. Personally, I’d rather own 50% of ranks 2-10 than to own only the very top rank. Remember, not everyone clicks that first link. People often scan the entire first page looking for the best match. If you have 5 different listings on page one, you will have a much greater chance of having one of your pages visited than if you only have one.

Using this technique, you can often grab 3, 5, occasionally even the entire first page of listings for long tail keywords. That is true domination, and in profitable niches it could make you a great deal of money.

Bum marketing is great for beginners, because you don’t need a website. If you have your own domain name, you can marketing it with bum marketing methods. But if you don’t have the money available for hosting and domain names, you can use bum marketing to sell affiliate products for commission.

There are several important sites for bum marketing. Article directories are the most popular, and a lot of people confuse bum marketing with article marketing. But the fact is, bum marketing actually includes other sites, too. In fact, any site that allows you to make a free web page and promote affiliate links can be used for bum marketing.

Common Sites for Bum Marketing:

• Ezine Articles
• Buzzle
• GoArticles
• Squidoo
• HubPages
• Weebly

Some people find a site they like, and they will just concentrate on using that one site. That can work, but it’s actually a better idea to use as many sites as possible. Why?

Well, if you use only one site, you will probably get only one first page result for each keyword phrase. If you use multiple sites, you could end up dominating the first page or two, perhaps owning several listings on the first two pages. This would make it so much more likely that one of YOUR pages would be clicked rather than someone else’s!

Using bum marketing, you can potentially make a good deal of money without investing anything other than time. This is what makes it so powerful and so compelling for beginners.