Laws of Keyword Usage - all keywords are not created equal

This error below made me realize I hadn't compiled the rules/laws/principles of proper and effective keyword usage for SEO:

1. One main keyword (phrase) per page. Now, sufficiently long, you'll get other combinations of keywords which link to this page, but you are going for one particular long-tail niche (forget one-word keywords, these have been sewn up long ago and are maintained by huge sites with massive link-love coming their way.

Reason? Your page is known (reputation) by its in-bound links. Whatever they say is on the page is really more important that what is on that page - but you want all inbound links to say the same keyword as you optimize the page for. If you work on getting prime search engine real estate (top 5 positions - above the fold), then figure for a keyword "scatterbrained nitwit", all or most of your inbound links should have the words "scatterbrained nitwit" in their text link. While you can get "scatterbrainednitwit.com" to help out, it's not essential. (But note: having "scatterbrained-nitwit.com" can get you penalized, as spammers wasted that approach years ago.)

Two or more keyword phrases will confuse search engines and give you lower rankings. Your pages should be like you talk - one subject at a time. Don't talk or write in non-sequiturs. If you do have to bring up another topic, it's perfectly OK to link to a separate page on this new topic. Gives you another keyword phrase you can "dominate".

2. Use your meta-tags for theme words, not keywords. Most of the biggest search engines don't rely on meta-tags (thank spammers for that one, too...), but Google uses them to check the "theme" of the page, ie. does your content match what you are talking about?

If you put your keyword phrases in your meta-tags, unscrupulous spammers will scan these to find what you are talking about or trying to get search engine real-estate with and work to beat you to the punch. Just what you need - more competition.

The old tools which harvest meta tag information are good now for finding theme words - what that page should be talking about. The reason Google looks for theme words is also to help them figure where to list your page. Most words have several distinct meanings. Searching for "Apple" the computer company shouldn't give you results on "apple" the fruit. Help them out - use meta tags for repeating theme words on your page.

3. General current use of Keywords:
a. Page title
b. H1 heading
c. Once in opening paragraph - which should be emphasized with bold (or possibly italic - but only in san-serif fonts, so it remains legible).
d. Generally, no where else on the page, or at max - no greater than 5% of that text copy - again, thank the spammers for this rule.
e. The rest of the page is composed of theme words and articles (an, a, the, those, that, etc.) and somewhat meaningless words which hold the sentence together (conjunctions and stuff like and, or, with, as well as of, in, by, etc.) But these common words aren't theme words and so shouldn't show up on your meta-tags.

This above is the result of several studies into page optimization, namely through Michael Campbell, Dr. Andy Williams, SEO2020, and some others.

While the rest of this below post seems fairly accurate, the below is not. (P.S. I blog this to give you all possible data, but also because their site has no particularly apparent way to add a comment.)

Website Magazine : Keyword Research - A Foundation for Local SEO:
"Focus on one or two keywords or phrases per page – and use them in the title, subheads, meta tags, and copy of the page. Also use keyword variations in the text to enhance the keyword’s relevance.

As an example, let’s say your business is called Las Vegas Floral Boutique. You could use your business’s name as one keyword phrase and ‘Las Vegas flowers’ as another. Since most people will be using ‘Las Vegas flowers’ rather than your business name in their searches, mention Las Vegas Floral Boutique occasionally but focus more on the more generic term and use variations like ‘Las Vegas flower shop’, ‘flower shop Las Vegas’, ‘affordable Vegas flowers”, etc."

Branding you/your product - the life of Brad Pitt (insert your brand here)

Below (from Seth Godin) is what I'd earlier run into under the name "Product Life Cycle" - essentially a bell curve showing:
1. unknown product
2. rising demand - most profitable as least supply
3. peak - lots of supply and versions of the original - least profitable
4. dropping demand - also profitable as you're selling accessories and spare parts
5. near unknown - niche market residual

Now, applied to a fad (not a trend), the "Brad Pitt" cycle below applies. Unknown to unknown. Such is the case in celebrities and one-shot wonders. They leave a legacy of trivial pursuit and aging fan clubs.

Successful celebrities go from peak to peak, constantly coming out with new projects, and reinventing themselves as they age and mature.

That's the point of any brand/product lifecycle - they can go through this process many, many times. You just have to reinvent them. Businesses do this with re-packaging. Laundry detergent is into concentrating their product and then selling them in smaller packages - with the advertising to push this off on consumers.
Breck recently did this with their product (though I have no sales statistics - only following the ads on TV).

Disney re-packages their products continually and causes short booms in sales.

Right now, the movie-house experience seems to be the ramp-up for the DVD sales, which is where many movies peak.

Brand extension? Repackaging in order to create another life cycle.

A study in recurring product lifecycles is the "Law of Attraction". It's been known by other names since before we've had a written history. It got the name "Law of Attraction" in the early 1920's when it was in its hey-day as part of "New Thought". Recently, an Australian TV producer discovered basic books about it and created "The Secret" - which made a new lifecycle for it. Writing a book on the subject continued the peak. With a lack of subsequent products, that peak is dropping. But it has helped other people with their peaks, bringing new "Brad Pitts" to view and to a broader audience.

There isn't death after product life - just more repackaging and brand extension...

Seth's Blog: The five step brand lifecycle:

"The five step brand lifecycle

Who is Brad Pitt? [insert your brand/name here]

Get me Brad Pitt!

Get me someone like Brad PItt, but cheaper!

Get me a newer version of Brad Pitt!

Who is Brad Pitt?

[original source unknown]."

Common elements between successful entrepreneurs and self help

Continuing with my eBay training with BrightBuilders.com:

Essentially, they use the same principles that Napoleon Hill laid out in Think and Grow Rich, as well as indirectly covered in "The Secret" DVD, as well as found in every long-term successful self help, pop psychology, or metaphysical texts. And every successful entrepreneur uses these same data, same techniques - and they are the ways to accelerate your personal success.

The key points are:

1. Create your vision statement - what you seek to achieve (Hill's "Burning Desire") Review this daily, 3 times or so daily. Every single day.
2. Write a commission statement and sign it.
   
3. Work out your plan, rework it as necessary, and keep at it.
4. Do daily "To Do's" of what will accomplish your current planning and that vision. Execute these exactly - base them on weekly analysis of your progress.

You will find that you continue to research new technology and find new networking terminals to add to your "Master Mind" (as Hill calls it). You don't have to know everything, but you will have to be able to employ (or trust) people around you that do know what you need to know.

There is a wealth of data, a continuing line of published techniques which come through the ages, much as Earl Nightingale discovered in his "Strangest Secret".

This works on 30-day cycles, where - if you apply those four steps above - you wind up changing considerable mental habits and arriving at a "higher plane" of operation. By continuing to refine your goals as you achieve them, you keep evolving as an individual - which is the reason we are all here, anyway.

Summary is that I need to get these books I've been publishing for so long up on eBay and out to the general public - using the natural keywords which are in common use.

There are fascinating techniques to get valuable data out to the general public quickly and profitably (which allows you to help more people).

As I can distill these, I'll post them for you.

New blogging course to evaluate - Simpleology

Here's a trial.

I've recently read about an online course, Mark Joyner’s Simpleoligy system, which purports to be a 20-lesson course in making blogs profitable.

Now, I'm up for trying anything new. As Michael Campbell and other online marketing guru's recommend - "monerize everything."

So, here's the blurb I'm required to post in order to earn this free course:

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

How's that for a good deal, huh?

Just some credit to where I first heard about it - Tali Shapiro, of The Marketer Review.

New approaches to blogging and social media

Just a couple of quick notes, since it's late:

You can get both traffic and pagerank if you post comments to blogs which don't use "no-follow" links. Just be sure you use your own keywords in your comment post - not blatant, but if you use a program like Neil Shearing's Real Link Finder (sorry, no hot-link here, but it's a free download) you can find blogs who have that keyword (phrase) in their text and so your comment would be right in line with theirs.

I've been taking a flying leap at the eBay community - which is more hard-nosed about making money than some of the other marketing I've been seeing. But they are right in the marketplace, with people who have come with their wallets to buy and haggle with you over the price, pinch your produce, and talk with you about how the weather affected the crops this year. So it's both a contrast and comparison to what I've collected with an Online Millionaire Plan. I'll let you know what I find. (Mostly, the basics are the same, just ramped up enormously - consider that you don't have to work that hard to find leads... Might be an interesting approach to getting stuff sold and has mailing lists as a routine.)

Community conversations seem to be the trail here. And Visitor Experience in a community translates to Quality of Life Issues in the real world. So all our work in marketing, especially social media, has incredible impact over in sociological fields - as well as sprituality. (But that's my metaphysical side talking...)

How to Get New Business Ideas - self help book promotion through social media

When you have the secret genius recipe for Getting New Business Ideas, you want to get the word out.

And that's what I've been doing this week. Took a lot longer than I thought. But the result has been worth it.

Slideshare has some user hurdles I'm just now jumping - and these are the preliminary findings:

• Slidecasts (contain audio) do better than simple Powerpoint. More exposure faster.
  
• Can't be overly long. Ideal is probably around 3 minutes, like a pop song.
• Lots of high-quality visuals, not a great deal of text on each slide.
• Like articles, you need to give valuable data quickly, concisely.
  

Technical details:

• Very active community, so only post your best and final version.
• Means you have to have your audio ready for sync-ing right after you post your slideshare (in order to make a slidecast).
• Links are active, not no-follow - means you get link love from Slideshare when you comment on someone else's creation (or your own). Search engines follow those links.
  
• Google loves Slideshare currently and posts your stuff at the top of their rankings within minutes.

My point with posting this was to get the word out about my new book - but also to help people with what I'd found. (And in the process, tell people that I was available for hire as a genius idea-finder.)

Earlier work was just on YouTube and didn't go anywhere. Here's the video:





As you can see, it's not bad, but isn't the same quality as my later slidecast:

| View | Upload your own

Comparing the two - I've gotten just over 500 views through YouTube on the first video in the month since I posted it. Slideshare has given me over 230 views in 12 hours, with three or four people favoriting it.

Just for grins and giggles - here's the same data (pix and audio) converted to a YouTube video:



Technical How-To's:

In this case, I tried something new, as well as keeping to the established ways of doing things.

New - created this in Corel Draw as it doesn't have to have a template like OpenOffice Impress (or MS Word's PowerPoint). It's an excellent graphic layout tool, though it remains a niche product. CorelDraw outputs direct to PDF, and so can import into Slideshare easily.

Old - learned from my earlier mistakes and held off posting the slideshare until I had the audio online.

Here's that audio from Archive.org:



You'll note that I've got two soundtracks here. This falls under new-based-on-old. I put a short and a longer soundtrack up for the same slides. You see, I sit on a wealth of data on self help, as well as how to create/unleash genius abilities. So the first short version (the popular one) was just to create the overview. The longer one gives the down and dirty of how and why I say what I do.

Now, with those sound tracks posted, I then finished up posting the slideshare and quickly converted it to a slidecast.

Why this sequence? So the initial impression is with sound. Higher value for the visitor experience.

Creating the slideshow was first, but posting it was fourth. Audio posting was third. First was creating a one-page landing page. Second was working out a press release and getting this into my article submitter program.

The web page is the end-point I want people going to. The press release drives people to the slidecast and my websites. But I didn't wait to get all my press release sites contacted before I got the slidecast up and running.

Following all this promotion is this blog post, which I'll social post.

Different from earlier work is the absence of an article to put on the article directories. I'd already posted the "Genius Recipe" so I didn't figure I could revamp it again. (And, spending a week on this slidecast, plus other distractions, has put me behind on other work...)

- - - -

So this about wraps up the scene. Oh yes, a word from our sponsor:

Genius - How to be one, How to live with it.

Print: $37.00

Download: $17.00

HOW TO MAKE A GENIUS is as little understood as geniuses themselves.

Genius, as the ancients knew, is completely spiritual in origin. And taking a metaphysical approach to this is where we start making progress in understanding this extreme state of ability (or talents). Basic premise to a book like this is to assemble all the known data on genius (genii) and to publish this as a collection of works.

Want to become a genius?

Know someone who could cope better with their incredible ability?

Note: contains controversial statements which contradict the best modern authorities.