SEO Book FREE - By Internet Top Income Earner By: Ryan Nelson

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Meet Ryan Nelson! 4

A Matter of Dollars and Sense! 7

ReWire Your Thinking! 11

3-Step Approach! 15

Dissecting the Monster! 21

Indexing for Fun and Profit! 27

X Marks the Spot! 33

Marketing Mayhem! 43

The Keys to the Kingdom! 51

The Nuts and Bolts of SEO! 58

Get Out The Links ! 65

Content Is King! 72

Keyword Targeting! 80

The Hat Police ! 86

Acknowledgments ! 92


Meet Ryan Nelson

Anyone and everyone who markets and sells any product or service online should listen up: If Ryan Nelson is talking… you should be taking notes.

The reason is simple.

He will help you to make more money, in less time. It’s his mission in life, and he happens to be very good at it.

Ryan Nelson is one of the top SEO consultants working today. He has created profitable SEO strategies for hundreds of websites and for some of the internet’s most successful marketers. His specialty is helping MLM entrepreneurs to build their business online.

He began his career in his early-teens, hacking his way to the realization that you could make a lot of money online, as long as you knew how. And today, when it comes to profiting from the internet, Ryan clearly knows how.

Despite his ranking as one of the 5 best SEO consultants in the world, Ryan’s road to internet stardom was not typical, by anyone’s standards. He enlisted in the Army and spent 4 years helping Uncle Sam to prosecute the war on the evil doers that seek to disrupt civilized society. After the Army, he went to Oklahoma State University and got a bachelor’s degree—in theater.

With hopes of becoming a professional actor, Ryan planned to apply his self-taught SEO skills and mastery of online marketing to the challenge of building a name for himself by leveraging the internet to land acting gigs.

It was, by all measures, a matter of fate when, after college, Ryan’s first epiphany occurred. He realized that he could make a lot more money just


AUTHOR: RYAN NELSON

doing what he loved—beating Google at its own game, than he probably could as an actor.

So it was back to the internet where he found wealth and acclaim by starting more successful businesses by the age of 30 than most people have the good fortune to start in a lifetime.

The simple fact was that Ryan’s breathtaking ability to dominate Google using his homegrown SEO techniques—all legal and therefore sanctioned by the very beast he was taming—made him a very marketable commodity.

As he made a name for himself, he caught the attention of some very successful direct marketing entrepreneurs who clamored to hire him for their own online enterprises.

The money of course was great and Ryan enjoyed being able to work from home, enjoying the company of his wife, Jessica, and a big pack of small dogs who roam freely around the house.

But Ryan, just beginning his third decade of life, realized that there was more to business than just making money hand over fist. It was fun, of course, but he wanted to take it all to the next level.

Pondering this for awhile, he had his second epiphany when he realized that his true calling was to become an evangelist for internet marketing success by documenting his own, self-developed SEO weapons, and then publishing them for the masses.


Reasoning that everyone could benefit from his knowledge and expertise, he decided to create an affordable—and devastatingly effective—SEO manual and tool kit.

So he did just that. The result is his two book series, The SEO Battlefield and 127 Weapons To Defeat The Search Engines. He now offers these two books, along with his explosive, high velocity internet marketing platform, simply named the (IMC) Internet Marketing Central.

For the record, Ryan isn’t a para-military wannabe who thinks of everything in terms of armed conflict. In fact, Ryan hasn’t heard the sound of gunfire in years, and probably won’t for the foreseeable future.

But he does understand what combat is all about, and when viewed through the filter of his Army experience—not to mention a little carry over drama from his acting days and training—he realized that marketing online is very much a war.

Which brings us to the present. Today, Ryan’s mission in life is simple: provide the best possible SEO weapons imaginable to the legions of online combatants, in order to help as many of them as he can to survive—and succeed. In other words, Ryan wants to help you make more money.

For that reason, if you happen to be an internet marketer, waging your own online war for market share and massive profits, be sure to equip yourself with his state-of-the-art SEO weapons systems. Ryan Nelson is a good ally to have on your side.


Chapter 1

A Matter of Dollars and Sense

This book is not simply about marketing on the internet. It is about marketing more effectively on the internet. In other words, it’s about making money, specifically how to make more money online. And the tools and strategies contained here will help anyone to do just that.

My sole focus is on providing high value SEO information to non-technical internet marketers, in an easy-to-understand, informal format. Using my methods, you will make more money from your online business enterprise, without spending any more than you’re spending now.

Who should read this book? It was really intended for any business owner or manager who conducts business online and who wants to improve the efficiency of their e-marketing efforts. My SEO techniques will work for anyone, no matter what you are marketing and selling online. It was for this audience that I first set out to write this book.

But my techniques will also work for SEO consultants or computer experts who want to become SEO consultants. It’s also for techies who want to improve their SEO skills, or to learn new ones. Before you guys dig in however, be advised that this book (and the next one, mentioned below), aren’t written in techno-geek speak. These books are written in plain English so that everybody can understand them and implement my tools.

(With that said and for anyone who cares, i.e., tech pros, I will be writing a much more technical version of this material in the not too distant future.)

Because there is so much to say, I’ve written two books: this one, and its companion, 127 Weapons to Defeat the Search Engines.


The book you’re reading now introduces me and gives you an overview of the principles of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

The companion book, 127 Weapons to Defeat the Search Engines details each and every one of my tools and techniques for successful SEO (yes, all 127 of them). If you really want to succeed at SEO, be sure to read 127 Weapons to Defeat the Search Engines as soon as you finish this one.

Who should read this and why?

Anyone who uses the internet for business should read this book. Today, that includes just about everybody—from a single entrepreneur to a mom and pop store to a global corporation—who is in business. Whether you think your self as an online entrepreneur, internet marketer or as a business person, my books are for you.

By the way, regardless of what business you are in, regardless of what products or services you sell, and regardless of who ultimately buys them, you need to be marketing online, if you’re not already. It truly is a matter of dollars and sense. In other words, if you want to make more dollars, it makes sense to market online.

The internet is the most dynamic, the most lucrative, and the most expansive marketplace ever created by mankind. It has probably created more millionaires in the past 10 years than in the entire previously recorded history of mankind.

The problem is that the internet has become a battlefield where tens of millions of big corporations, small businesses, micro enterprises, and individual entrepreneurs compete for the eyes and wallets of prospective customers all over the globe. This daily struggle for market share—and revenue—is turning mankind’s most dynamic marketplace into mankind’s biggest battlefield.


He or she with the most weapons wins.

Like any war that our species wages, the SEO wars are ultimately about money—as in making more of it. And like with shooting wars, the army with the most weapons wins. You’ll notice I didn’t say the most expensive weapons—I said the best. And I really believe that mine are just that.

Marketing online has become increasingly competitive—heck, almost combative sometimes, speaking from experience—and it will continue to do so. The fact is that it’s getting crowded out there. In order to market effectively, an online business must be able to stand out from that crowd. You need to get your message in front of the right people—just as you would in offline advertising—in order to make sales.

To win in this epic struggle, you need the right weapons. So please read on.

Of course, I am not the first one to write a book about SEO, nor will I be the last. But I think this book is different than most of the others out there. And that’s because it’s written specifically for the non-technical reader. It’s written for someone who doesn’t know or isn’t comfortable with all of the jargon that is so common in any technical environment in general, and with internet marketing and SEO in particular.

I also haven’t held anything back—I’m all about full disclosure. A lot of so-called internet gurus tell you almost everything, while holding just enough back to give them a competitive edge should you ever square off online against one another. By keeping certain aspects of their personal formula secret, then ensure that they can dominate when and if they need to.

I haven’t done that for the simple reason that I would rather help a million people to be successful by using my information, as opposed to helping 100 people to be successful in person. As I write this, I


spend most of my time working with some of the worlds most successful—and richest—internet marketers to generate millions of dollars online. It’s time for a change, and wanting to help others was a major factor in my decision to write these books in the first place.


Chapter 2

ReWire Your Thinking

I’ll share a little bit more about my background later on in this book, but for now let it suffice to say that the internet has been a big part of my life since my early teen years, when I became a successful—and somewhat notorious—hacker.

I joined the army and graduated college, but my true calling was figuring out how to help my dad run his business online. As I said, more about that later, but my point is simple. Even though I’m self taught, spending all those years online was like getting an MBA in internet marketing. I learned a lot—and now it’s time for me to share what I learned.

One more thing about me before I explain the basics of what the whole SEO thing is all about. I don’t take myself too seriously. I’ve made it my mission to enjoy my life. I want every day to be a blast. And I’ve found out that if you focus on having fun instead of making money, two things will happen.

First, of course you’ll have fun. But second, and interestingly enough, you’ll also make money. In fact, you’ll probably wind up making more money than if you spent all day every day worrying about it. So the takeaway here is to start making sure you’re having fun every day, and then to start making more money while you’re at it.

Another reason I wrote this book is because I wanted to level the playing field that the internet supposedly leveled in the first place. The thinking behind this particular concept is that because any business, regardless of size, can launch a website and begin doing business online, it’s theoretically possible for a tiny micro business to compete against global behemoths.


The reality is that this is true only up to a point. While any business or entrepreneur can—and indeed most do—launch a website and start competing with everyone else online, very few of them can actually compete effectively.

With my weapons, you can engage in asymmetric online warfare.

Success online does not necessarily depend on how much you are willing to spend. It’s a matter of how you leverage what’s at your disposal. So you may not be able to compete head to head with all of your competitors, but with my weapons in your arsenal, you can still fight the SEO WAR—and win your share of the battles. (The military calls this asymmetric warfare, and it’s what the SEALs, Green Berets and any other special forces practice.)

This is because big corporations and the so called “industry top earners” pay big bucks to guys like me in order to move them to the head of the class in the organic Google search rankings. (The big boys, by the way, don’t just pay SEO experts. They hire the best and brightest web designers, programmers, copy writers and marketing experts to help them as well. So don’t kid yourself—when you sally forth to do business on the battlefields of the internet, some of your opponents are coming to the table with a bristling arsenal of marketing weapons.)

Most people are aware of the high failure rate of small business startups. The bad news is that it’s no different online, and for similar reasons.

The high mortality rate for brick and mortar businesses is more often than not the result of insufficient capital, a lack of expertise, or both. Same goes for the internet marketing universe.

DIY-OJT—NOT!


Many beginning internet marketers are often mislead into believing that marketing (and selling) online is easy. So they start out on a shoe-string budget, and plan on kind of a do it yourself on the job training program (DIY-OJT). It rarely if ever works.

This is because even though people are told that marketing online is easy, it’s really not. The concepts might in fact be pretty straightforward, but it’s ultimately all about the execution and that can get downright difficult.

So these beginning online entrepreneurs set out to learn everything there is to learn offline, by themselves. This however is another common misconception: learning how to market and sell online—the key to mastering flawless execution—is also easy. Again, not necessarily true. Students of online marketing are often faced with contradictory advice, that doesn’t make sense anyway because it is so technical and complex in nature.

Now, it’s not to say that teaching yourself how to be successful online is impossible. (In fact, I’m going to show you how to get a good head start, using an entirely new approach that I’ll explain here in just a bit.) But being a successful self-taught student can be an arduous, tedious and time-consuming process.

This is why people or organizations with deep pockets generally hire outside pros to do all of this. If you have the money to do this, it’s a logical approach. It’s also a very expensive one—for example, I charge my clients $10,000 a month for my services, and typically spend only a few hours each week on their individual projects.

The sweet smell of success.

Quite frankly, most people give up long before they even get a good whiff of success, because they have neither the time nor the money to continue—in some cases to even really get started. After spending countless of hours trying to learn the principles of internet marketing, and after spending thousands of dollars in the process, they realize


that they are spending way more than they are making. (This is called a hobby.)

But since most of these people gave up a full time day job to start working from home online (or who lost their full time day job for whatever reason) their options now are limited. Some continue to work at McDonald’s or the Waffle House while they are waiting for their new, online business to “kick in.” Most of them though—at least in my experience—just go back to their day jobs though, usually paying a lot less than they were making in the first place.


Chapter 3

3-Step Approach

I am going to change this for you though, by doing three things differently. First, I am going to assume that you know very little if anything about internet marketing.

Second, I am going to focus in on an area that produces quick—in fact almost immediate—results. I am not going to teach you how to build a website. I am not going to tell you what products or services to sell. I am not going to show you how to create killer content (but I will introduce you to someone who can). I am not going to show you how to create a brand (the same guy who does my content can show you that too.)

All I’m going to do in these two books is show you how to not only master SEO, but how to successfully implement my tools and techniques by yourself. In a moment I’ll explain why this approach makes the most sense. You’ll understand why methods can help you to short circuit the learning curve and to jump start your online business.

And if you follow my instructions, you will see measurable results. Quickly.

Third, I’m not going to go into crazy detail trying to explain why my stuff works. You don’t have the time for that. (My forthcoming book for techno-geeks will delve a little more deeply into the magic rocks that make my tools actually work.). For now though I’m just going to give you step by step instructions on what to do, and then what to do next, and so on.

The reason I am taking this approach is pretty obvious—at least to me. It’s because that effective SEO is the shortest path to financial success online. Let me explain why.


Internet Marketing 101

A little bit ago I mentioned the 5 basic elements of an online business, or of an internet marketing effort—same thing, either way. Here they are in a little more detail.

1. Product or ServiceAs obvious as this might sound, you first need something to sell. I know it sounds crazy, but a lot of clients come to me without a clear-cut idea of what they are selling.

They talk about internet marketing but don’t really know what that means. If someone tells me they are an “internet marketer” my first question is “What do you sell?” If they can’t answer that, we start there.

2. BrandEvery business has a brand, whether they like it or not. I’ve heard it described as the customers’ expectation of quality, service and value from a particular business. Basically, it’s your reputation.

If you have a good, solid reputation, it can and should be shaped into a killer brand. If your reputation sucks, you might want to think about fixing that first, before you go too far with your online business.

Good SEO can get your brand noticed. But if you don’t deliver super high quality, service and value, you’ll crash and burn along with the thousands of other failed internet entrepreneurs who tried to sell scams instead of legitimate products and services. This is an important step. If you don’t know how to build out your brand online, get someone to help you.


3. Marketing PlanOnce you have a product to sell, you need to figure out how to sell it. There are a lot of questions that need to be answered in order to determine this.

For example, what kind of web platform do you need?

What happens when somebody lands there (in other words, what is your sales process)?

How do people shop for and buy your products and services when they’re on your site?

How will you drive traffic to it?

How will you capture e-mail addresses from visitors?

And most importantly, how will you convert those visitors into paying customers?

Some people figure this stuff out by themselves. Some buy into a turnkey system to make it happen. But it’s pretty clear that this all needs to be worked out before you can start doing business online (and before you can start implementing any SEO tactics).

4. Web PlatformYour web platform (mentioned above) is your online place of business. It can be a website, a blog, a landing page, or any combination of the above. Internet marketers have a lot of latitude here.


You can construct a massive, complex, fully featured site with all of the bells and whistles. Alternatively (and sometimes even more effective) is a simple microsite that is little more than a sales letter landing page. It’s really a matter of budget, personal preference and your timetable.

Since either kind of site can be SEO’d effectively, it’s entirely up to you. Your web platform has a front end (graphic appearance, look and feel) and a back end (system programming). You can probably launch a simple site by yourself.

For more complex web platforms you’ll probably need someone who is good at graphic design and adept at programming as well. It used to be that web developers did both pretty well. Today, to stay ahead of the curve, you might find yourself using two different experts to build out a complex platform.

5. ContentRegardless of what type of site you decide to run with, what you say on that site is of utmost importance. First of all, you need to populate your site—large or small—with compelling, high value content. If you can’t write it yourself, hire someone who can. The content must be impeccable.

A good copy writer is trained and experienced at selling in print. If you can do that well, great; if not, like I said before, hire someone who can.

Ok, so that’s internet marketing in a nutshell. Now for the final frontier: Search Engine Optimization. And also, the reason why I think that my SEO weapons are the quickest path to massive success online.


The Magic of Link Juice

Google has spent a lot of time and money creating an algorithm that determines, among other things, the relevance of a website—in other words, Google wants to figure out which one is the best. The term link juice is used by SEO gurus to describe the relative value of site as calculated by the Google algorithm.

You could say that link juice is the lifeblood not only of the Google monster, but of your internet marketing business as well. The more link juice

you have, the more relevance you have in the eyes—and massive processors—of Google, and the higher you will be ranked.

So search engine optimization is all about link juice. It flows through all of the elements of an online business, enabling search engines to find your web platform, recognize it, assign it a value, and move it up in the organic search engine rankings. We will cover how this works in a little more detail later on, but for now, it’s important to understand the concept of link juice, and how it will make you more money online.

Let’s face it—the internet is a huge place. If a search for your name or product or even your keywords returns several hundred thousand hits, the reality is that unless you’re in the top 10—even the top 20 is a stretch—your web presence will likely go unnoticed.

However, if your site has been properly optimized so that the search engines can find it and rank it, people will find out about you, quickly. And provided that you are providing substantial value in one form or another, they will buy from you as well.

Link juice (an SEO term by the way, but one that I didn’t make up myself) ties everything together as far as your web platform is concerned. By researching and defining appropriate key words that are associated with


your products and services as well as your brand, the internet marketer can begin the process of waging successful war on the search engine battlefields.

With clearly defined key words in mind, the behind-the-scenes code for your website, landing page, or blog can be adjusted to attract the attention of the search engines. I’m going to show you how to do that, very clearly, step by step. The concept of link juice will enable us to quantify and visualize how the search engines see us. The better optimized we are, the more link juice we’ll have (and the more money we’ll make). By improving the flow of link juice, we will improve our organic search engine rankings.

The concept of link juice also applies to all of the content you put out into the internet marketing place such as articles, press releases and blog entries. I will show you how to optimize the flow of link juice throughout all of your internet marketing efforts in this two-book series.

This is why I believe that SEO is a tool any online marketer will benefit from fairly quickly and with relative ease. As long as you have the five basic elements—the ones we just talked about—in place, using my SEO weapons you can tie them all together and dramatically improve your overall internet marketing success.

All you need to do is to follow my step by step instructions, and then start closely monitoring your rapidly growing bank account.

Let’s get started.


Chapter 4Dissecting the Monster

Before we can have a meaningful discussion about Search Engine Optimization, we have to first understand what a search engine is and how it works.

I promised you in the beginning that I would make sure that this information doesn’t get too technical, so it won’t. But you need to understand the basics if you want to use my 127 weapons, so bear with me.

If you’re reading this book, you already know what a search engine does. It’s basically an index of just about every document that is

available online, that helps you find, out of literally billions of possibilities, the information that you are looking for.

Simply by typing a topic that you’re interested in into the search bar and hitting enter, you are presented with list—usually a very long list—of relevant websites. The key is in knowing what words to search for, and then determining what resulting websites meet your specific needs.

From your perspective as a user, it’s important to make sure that the search terms you are using accurately reflect the information you are seeking. Simply changing a couple of letters in your search term will often yield radically different results. (For example, switch out two letters in ‘bear skin’ and you might type ‘bare skin,’ which would undoubtedly point you in an entirely different direction.)

Remember this point because as an internet marketer, the same concept applies, only in reverse. You’ll see why it’s important for you to get inside the head of your potential customers to figure out not only what they are searching for, but how they are spelling it.


All Monsters Aren’t Created Equal

Before we get too far into this discussion, I want to touch on the various search engines that are out there. There are a bunch of them, but from my perspective, there are only three that really matter—Google, Yahoo & Bing.

From a business standpoint, it’s always great when your product or service comes to define your industry. My Dad never used to say he had to copy something—he had to “Xerox” it. To “FedEx” something means to ship it overnight, even if you plan on using UPS or even the Post Office. A friend of mine used to always say he got a new pair of “Nikes” even thought the running shoes he just picked up were actually Adidas.

And of course we don’t search for something online—we “Google” it, whether we are in fact using Google, or one of the other major search engines, Bing or Yahoo. Of the 3, Google is by far the largest with industry experts projecting that the company processes about 78% of all online search queries.

This is why my efforts are targeted specifically at Google. I understand how Google works and what it is looking for when it analyzes content. I can tell you also that although there are some


differences, there are a lot of similarities between the 3 major search engines. With this in mind, my suggestion is to focus on improving your Google results, and know that these efforts will likely improve your results on the other engines as well.

A Vast Spider’s Web

The internet has been part of our lives for years now—almost as long as some us can remember—and we’ve grown not only accustomed to it, but we now pretty much take it for granted. But what is the internet, really, and why is it so important to our business?

I’m not going to spend too much time on this except to say that the internet is a

massive global network that links millions of other, localized smaller networks. Each one of those is made up of computers—some huge and some tiny—that for the most part can share information. That’s the online universe.

Back in the day, some people used to refer to the internet as the World Wide Web. Today, when somebody calls it that it almost sounds quaint. But the reality is that the World Wide Web is a function of the internet. The Web collectively refers to the billions of documents that are linked using hypertext, and that can be accessed via the internet.

In order to understand how search engines works, I think it’s useful to use some graphic imagery to portray it. I think the best mental picture of the Web is to think of it just like that—as a massive spider’s web. (They call it



the World Wide Web for a reason.)If you’re the spider, you can get to any place on your web simply by crawling along the strands because everything is interconnected. Then (and I don’t know if they really do this or not, but I’m trying to make a point) you might decide to link your web some other webs near you.

Spider webs are made up of concentric rings, connected by supporting spokes. So if you are a thoughtful spider, you could map any location on your web by counting naming the spokes (A,B,C, and so on) and counting the rings. That way, when a bug lands on your web, you know where it is (let’s forget that you can also see it).

The point I’m making is that spot on your web has its own unique location code, for example Spoke C, Ring 5, or Spoke A, Ring 1, and so on. Now if you’re a social spider, you might connect your web to those of your neighbors. Provided that you all use the same method of naming the locations, you can find out where anything is on anyone’s web simply by adding their name to the front of the web location.

Bad example, I know, but it does describe the principles behind the World Wide Web. Every piece of content online (intended for public access) has a unique web address, known as its Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

This naming convention is what enables the Web to exist, and forms the basis of what the search engines do.

Creepy Crawlers

Now that we understand what the World Wide Web is (it’s a Web that extends World Wide, right?) we next need to understand how the search engines work with it.

Back to our example of the spider’s neighborhood network. If you’re a spider and want to know what your neighbor several webs down has for lunch, the only way to find out is to crawl across the network of webs until you get to the particular one you’re looking for. Along the way, it might make sense to make a note of what bugs are stuck in other webs as well.


If you have a really organized mind, you can remember what bugs were where as you crawled past, and then follow up to see if they were still there on your way back. But because other bugs keep landing on the webs, and other spiders keep eating those bugs, your index of bugs keeps changing. For that reason, if you really want an up to the minute understanding of where all of the bugs are, you have to keep crawling the webs.

Search engines work the same way. They send out automated programs, interestingly enough usually called crawlers, or even spiders—imagine that!—designed to analyze content all across the Web. By analyzing the codes present in that content, they start the process of helping you to find what you’re looking for.

It’s important here, particularly from the perspective of an internet marketer, to have some level of understanding as to the scope of this undertaking.

There are billions of documents online, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, added every day. The amount of data is staggering. It becomes pretty obvious that the crawlers never really finish their tasks. Minutes after they leave a site, the webmaster might post entirely new content.

For that reason, it’s a good idea to think of the search engine crawlers as hungry little critters that constantly need to be fed. And just like living and breathing little critters, the web crawlers will remember where their good and frequent meals come from (don’t forget, they eat content).

So posting fresh content (and relevant, which we’ll talk about in a bit) is the best way possible to keep the web crawler’s coming back, and a vital step in the process of improving your search engine rankings.


Chapter 5

Indexing for Fun and Profit

After the spiders or crawlers have consumed their content, they need to remember where it came from, and when. So the next step for the search engines is to create a comprehensive index of all of that information.

The digestive systems of the spiders for the 3 main search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing—there are more, but these are the only ones that matter, really) are different, but they work the same way.

The spiders or crawlers look at the content of each or page piece of content—on the whole web, one at a time— and decide what it is about, and ultimately, how important it is. More on that in a minute.

Of course, there are many different crawlers working at the same time, but nevertheless, when you start thinking about what’s going on here it’s pretty amazing.

Also, if you have a vested interest in what the spiders consume on your site—which you obviously do if you’r trying to sell something online—it’s important to understand how all of this information is actually processed.

Some people mistakenly think that web content is indexed by somebody sitting in an office somewhere at Google. Not true, of course. The spider or crawler programs simply scan through all of the content, and then use sophisticated algorithms to figure out what it all means. They don’t actually


read it like a person would, and generally don’t understand nuances of language and even context.

For example, if you are selling hot pepper sauce, and it comes in bottles, and if the word ‘bottles’ appears multiple times throughout your site, it’s possible that the crawlers might think your site is primarily about bottles and not hot pepper sauce. We’ll see how to correct that problem later on, but for now, understand that it’s those kind of issues that can cause tremendous problems when it comes to preparing your site for the search engines.

After a site has been crawled and all of the content indexed, the crawling spiders need some place to put it. The indexed information has to be processed somehow and then made available for when people search for it.

All of this is done in massive data centers that house thousands of exceptionally powerful computers, all dedicated to doing one thing—analyze the content of the web and serve it up to you when you need it.

What we have now is a huge index of content that the spiders and crawlers collected from their journeys across the vast World Wide Web. They’ve indexed many different types of documents and data, and returned it to the massive data storage centers of the search engines that they work for.

And that was the easy part.

Nothing But The Facts, Please

Having all of this information would be useless unless it meant something. And mean something it does.

We’ve all become so accustomed to how easy it is finding information online that we don’t really think about what makes it possible. And to the majority of search engine users who use the internet for research, shopping, e-mails, and other forms entertainment, it probably doesn’t


matter that much. It’s not something they need to concern themselves with.

But if you are using the internet for commerce of any kind, it is absolutely essential that you know.

The guy that got this ball rolling is Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. He created the Google PageRank algorithm—great name for a program that ranks pages and was created by a guy named Page—to analyze the relative value of each webpage it analyzes.

Like I promised, I’m not going to go into the arcane detail that would be necessary to understand how the Google algorithm—and those of the other search engines—actually operates. Let it suffice to say that it takes a number of different variables from every page it looks at, and uses them to assign a value to each page.

This value determines two things that enable the search engine to give you exactly what you—or your customer—was looking for. These two things are relevance and importance.

In other words, the search engine uses its algorithm to parse through billions of documents to find out which ones are most relevant to what the user is looking for. Then it goes through and ranks those documents in order of importance.

The final result is (should be at least) a listing of the sites most relevant to the search, in the order of importance.

If it sounds impressive, it should, because it is. And it is way more complicated that I’ve made it sound here. All of the major search engines,


Google Algorithm = AHH!

but Google in particular, have spent millions of dollars creating their system, and continue to spend millions revising and improving them.

From a perspective of understanding how they work, unless you are an engineer working at Google, you’ll never really understand the entire process. This is what I do, and I still don’t know everything about how it works (I will say that I know a lot though…more than most people do, and probably more than Google would like me to know).

After all of this, the point that I’m trying to make is pretty simple. With a basic understanding of how the search engines work, you should only be concerned with one thing—how to give those crawlers and spiders the content they need so that when you get ranked, you show up in the top ten.

And that is precisely what I’m here to do.

Instant Gratification(getting the results quickly)

It should be clear by now that if you can impact the way the search engines find you and your products or services, how they rank you and then how they present your information, you stand to make a lot of money.

Right there is the problem. Because there is so much at stake—in terms of dollars and sense—trying to manipulate the search engines is a hot and lucrative way to make money. It’s also super competitive.

As in any endeavor where the is a lot of cash at stake, there are just as many illegal ways to do this as legal, if not more. In the SEO universe, those underhanded techniques are called “Black Hat” methods.

Yes, I know not only about them, but how to use them as well. And no, I won’t be sharing any Black Hat stuff with you. Google doesn’t just frown on it—they’ll shut you down in a heartbeat if they catch you using it.


Our focus here is purely on the legal White Hat methods of improving your standings with the search engines, particularly with Google.

The bottom line is that Google wants to process your site effectively. At the end of the day, they make money by selling ads (lots of other ways too, but advertising is a major revenue component for them). In order to sell advertising, all of the search engines need people to use them. And the best way to get people to use them is to provide a superior product, namely highly accurate search results delivered as close to the speed of light as possible.

That’s what the search engines are all about.

And if you can help them do that more quickly and efficiently, they will gladly welcome and support those efforts.

This is where my 127 weapons come in. Over the course of my career to date, I’ve either been selling stuff online myself, or helping others to do it. I recognized early on that the search engines, especially Google, had a major impact on how my business was doing.

I also realized that if I didn’t show up in the top 10 of the search engine ranking results, it was just about the same as not showing up at all. That fact is basically what started my quest.

I wanted to know why sites that I was competing with were always at the front of Google, and why my sites were so far back it didn’t matter (I wasn’t selling squat, when I first started).

I began by analyzing the code on my competitors’ sites and then comparing it to my code.

The result of this research—which, for all intents and purposes, is still underway—was the identification of 127 different things that I could do to improve my search engine rankings.


I also realized that I didn’t need to do all of them, although I usually do. But I learned, very specifically, what the search engine spiders were looking for, and than I learned how to give them what they wanted.

By implementing my 127 weapons, you’ll be able to do the same thing.

So when somebody wants to find what you’re selling, and wants instant gratification when they’re looking for it, you’ll be right there in the top ten, ready and able to do business.


Chapter 6

X Marks the Spot

Before we get to my SEO weapons I think it’s important to set the stage, if you will—why I’m even qualified to write this. You want to know who you’re working with.

I was a B/C student in school. I consider myself bright, smart even, but I never set any records for academic achievement. In fact, my senior year in high school, my guidance counselor recommended that I attend a trade school after I graduated.

Let’s just say that I’m intellectually curious—about certain things—but if something doesn’t really interest me, I don’t have a lot of motivation to study it.

The trade school idea was ridiculous so off I went to college. For a semester. Like I said, not much of a student.

The fact was however that I’ve always been way ahead of the curve when it comes to computers. That stuff always held my interest.

I was playing video games when I was a pre-schooler. I’ve always been thrilled by technology.

I was selling video games online, modeled after a popular gaming platform (X marks the spot), before I could drive. Unbeknownst to me, there were more than a few laws that covered such an enterprise, and which in turn caused me some problems.


Let’s just say, like it does for everything else, timing played a huge role in my evolution into internet marketing expert.

That’s where this book comes in. Because I’ve been marketing online since I was 15. At very young age I recognized how easy it was to make money online. That understanding influenced my decision to leave college (the first time around) and to forge my fortunes online.

But I also realized that it could be very hard to make money online as well. I watched my dad struggle with marketing online, and I set out to help him figure out how to do it.

My Dad is the consummate entrepreneur—and a visionary as well. A natural born salesman, he realized long before e-Bay came into common acceptance, that the internet was a powerful marketplace. He tried to sell everything and anything online.

He was always like that. Build it in the backyard, and then go sell it out front. He wasn’t into MLM or anything, but his product line ranged from vitamins to shirts.

The problem was that nothing ever worked. For him at least. He’d post an item online, but there were never any buyers. He tried using directories to list his website, and even e-mail. Nada.

Seeing my dad struggle with this troubled me to no end. It also fascinated.

I remember, sitting there, 15 or 16 years old, staring at the familiar green screen, trying to figure out what’s what.

I suggested to Dad that we conduct some research to find out what’s going one. And then I jumped in, and did just that.


The first problem of course was that there was nothing out there to really use for selling online. Like I said, e-Bay like the internet was, for all intents and purposes, still in its infancy.

E-bay was officially started in 1995, but in 1996, was just getting started. (In 1997, the site held 2 million auctions—just one more testiment to the power of the internet and the speed with which it empowers a business.)

So in 1996 and 1997, there I sat, trying to figure out why Dad’s stuff wasn’t selling. Don’t forget, I was a teenaged kid, trying to make sense out of this. There was really no such thing as SEO, mainly because there was no such thing as Google, which wasn’t even funded until 1998.

It became an obsession.

I started looking at pages of other sites, sites that were selling things like my Dad’s, so see what they were doing. If for example two sites were selling the same shoe, I’d find out which one was selling more, and then try to figure out why.

I knew nothing about code, but I just kept looking at it, and sure enough, some things started to emerge.

I’d build two almost identical sites, and incorporating the subtle differences that I was seeing, I began to figure out what worked—and what didn’t.

By the time Google started emerging as THE search engine of choice for just about everybody, I already knew—at least to some extent—what it was looking for.

In fact, Google made the whole process easier, because now I could simply see, in the Google rankings, how various changes to a website’s code would impact the results returned by Google. Not only was this amazing to me, but it was very, very cool.


I studied web pages specifically to find out how they were built. I compared successful websites—at least the ones I thought were successful—with my Dad’s. But what I really became obsessed with was how the search engines ranked them.

To me, that was the magic of the whole internet. I wanted to understand how Google looked at websites and then ranked them. It really irritated me that my dad’s site, even though it was—in my opinion, anyway—really good and very relevant, didn’t show up at all in the rankings.

Now, I’m inquisitive by nature and relentless to a fault. So deciphering the search engines became not only a passion of mine, but an obsession. (It still is—both—to this day.) I wanted to know what made them tick.

After literally years of slaving over this, I was able to start putting together a toolkit of things that I knew worked online. These tools—that I now call my weapons—would have a dramatic impact on the Google results of just about any website.

Also, my weapons—all 127 of them—are now intended to do this for you. My goal with this book is to shorten your learning curve. Anyone can learn this if they spend enough time and effort. I am completely self-taught—you can be, too.

I taught myself HTML programming. Today, I’m also an expert at PHP. But you don’t need to be. Just read my books.

What’s crazy is that I’ve never really planned on doing this for a living. After my first one-semester attempt at college, I had lost some focus and direction in my life—sound familiar?—so I joined the Army. I served for 6 years, and learned a lot about a lot. Some of the things I did, were, shall we say, quite interesting. And that’s about all I’m allowed to say about it.


Besides some unique experiences, the service helped me to find my way. I got out and enrolled at Oklahoma State. By this point in my life, since I knew computers as well as just about anybody, I decided I wanted to study something fun.

So I chose to study theater. I loved in high school, and I decided that I’d ultimately wind up on stage in New York or Chicago. During my time at Oklahoma State I actually went to London to study stage sword fighting. Talk about an arcane skill.

The teacher who taught me these skills, Lloyd Caldwell, was not only a magnificent theater teacher, but he also infused me with the work ethic that I display today. He is one of those rare people who plays such an important role in shaping your life.

Returning from London, I graduated from school and got my degree. My plan now was simple, somewhat expected, but I also had a secret weapon at my disposal.

Like most kids fresh out of school after formal training as a thespian, the bright lights of the big city beckoned. That’s the expected part.

But the secret weapon was that I was doing SEO before it was really even called SEO, and way before it was a practicable skill-set.

So my plan was to go to New York, and then to literally SEO my way onstage.

For example, let’s say that I wanted to play the lead in A Streetcar Named Desire. I would write summaries and reviews about myself, and SEO the heck out of them. These writings would make it abundantly clear that I was the next Marlon Brando, ready to take the world by fire.

Any producer thinking about doing that play and looking for talent, would see these (bogus) reviews and call me. (Remember—a basic


tenet of mine is that if they read it on the internet, they think it must be true. For the most part, anyway.)

Just to set the record straight, I wasn’t living in some kind of dreamworld. By this time, I knew that I had skills that few other people even knew existed. It was like waking up one morning, and realizing that you have superpowers.


Woody Must Be One Of The Top 10 Film Directors In Chicago.

#5 Google

#4 Google

While I was formulating my SEO battle plan to own the New York Theatre scene, my first SEO client came along in the form of my friend, Woody Lindsey. Woody, who is a brother to me, is a film producer, and was trying to gain a foothold in Chicago.

In the days before YouTube, this was almost impossible. Now it’s just really, really, hard.

I started by optimizing Woody’s videos and blog. Almost immediately he had between 6,000 and 7,000 views.

By the way, on the Internet, history really does mean something. The longer something’s been there—and noticed—the more valuable it is. So today, all of those page views from years and years ago become more valuable every day. (That’s an important lesson to remember. The longer you maintain a presence with your brand online, in the eyes of Google, the more valuable it is.)

To put him at the top of the heap, I optimized Woody for Chicago Film Director. (Go ahead, Google it.) Still Top 10. I’m telling you, my techniques work. That can, and will, be you.

Once again, to reiterate my basic assumptions about how people search, remember the following:

1. If it’s on the internet, it must be true.

2. If it shows up in the Google top 10—not to mention #1—it must be the best.

By the way, Woody now has a cult following and is constantly included in film festivals. His career is beginning to skyrocket. Also, if you need the best filmmaker anywhere, call Woody.


The beginnings of a career was starting to take shape, but I still wasn’t really even aware of it.

Don’t forget, I originally started teaching myself SEO so that I could sell stuff online, like my Dad tried to do. I thought I’d be able to make a fortune selling CDs online. We’ll, I’m in the process of making a fortune, but it has nothing to do with CDs.

Looking back, I’m still a little surprised how I consistently overlooked the profit potential of what I was doing. I thought I’d make big bucks as an actor, and the computer thing would simply help me to get started. SEO, how I optimized a page, was something I learned to help me and my Dad, not to launch a career.

No, my master plan was still to be an actor. And it would have worked, had it not been for my lifelong friend, Matt Whitney, who came along towards the end of my last semester in college to talk about a business he was starting.

Matt had been my next door neighbor growing up. He was setting up a coupon card company, and wanted some help taking it online.

With my dreams of becoming an actor temporarily on hold, I went to Houston to join Matt, and to see what I could do. I was your basic support techie, nothing spectacular there.

Like I said, our business was going to be coupon card. But it wasn’t long before the new company, WhamMobile, was moving towards becoming a full fledged digital marketing company. We started using text messaging and SMS coupons. I worked at getting recognized by Google.

Well, Google recognized us. It also wasn’t long before I recognized the true value of my skills.


When I started, the company had no online presence and was generating a measly $100 per month. In less than a year, we were at the top of Google, and generating $8,000 a month.

Here is another important lesson—once you’re in the Google top 10, it’s almost impossible for someone else to unseat you. All you need to do is commit to a little bit of maintenance time every month, and that’s it. (To make this point, I’ll reveal that WhamMobile is not generating about 5 times what it was after I finished my initial SEO efforts.

That pretty much did it as far as my acting career went. Once I realized that I had a skill—one that I had developed and learned by myself—the die was cast. I found the prospects of helping companies to thrive and prosper online using my customized weapons to defeat Google to be not only challenging, exciting and profitable—but fun as well. I was hooked and committed.

Everything grew organically from there. I never had to market or promote myself. The growth of my consulting practice happened strictly by word of mouth. That, by the way, was a huge lesson learned.

The key to success in any business is value, plain and simple. The more value you provide to your clients and customers—in fact, to society in general—the more money you will make.

As you read my books, and put my weapons to use, remember that. The best way to build your brand—in addition of course to my weapons—is by referral. Let other people do the talking for you, after they’ve experienced the value you provide and the problems that you’ve solved.

It wasn’t long before I was doing work for Sony, Clear Channel Communications, Prudential Reality, Houston Dynamo, and enough NFL players to form my own team. (Someday, maybe.) Everything I was doing was interactive media based services.


I landed a client who was selling a form of Multi-Level Marketing product online, and he hired me to get him into the Google top 10. I did, and my client base of dedicated internet marketers expanded exponentially. I found their market and their business to be both challenging and rewarding. The competition in their arena was—and still is—fierce.

But my clients invariably make it to the top—as long as I’m working with them. At that level, some have found that it might not be as easy to go it alone as it may seem.

Don’t get me wrong—anyone can do this. If you put my weapons to work, you will learn to optimize your own search engine results. You’ll also learn how to monetize that.

Top internet marketers consistently make 7-figure incomes. When you get to that level, maybe you won’t want to do this yourself—in fact, at that point, you might just want to hire me. BUT DON’T I really believe with the IMC platform you can do it for a fraction of what you would pay me.


Chapter 7

Marketing Mayhem

Before we get too far into understanding what SEO can really do, I think it’s important to make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to marketing in general.

I’ve heard many people refer to internet marketing like it’s some kind of business, in and of itself. I ask them what they do and they say “Internet marketing,” or “I’m an internet marketer.”

That’s kind of like answering the question of what you do with “I drive to work,” or “I wear a business suit all day.”

Yeah, you might do those things—I don’t do either, thankfully—but it’s not really what you do for a living.

Same thing with internet marketing. It’s a means to an end—not a business in and of itself.


One of my business partners has a concept that he calls Sales Engineering, and he defines marketing as “the process of bringing customers (and prospects) to your point of sale.

He further defines the point of sale as “the place where a buying decision is made.”

And then he defines a sale as “the process of creating an equal exchange of value.”

So let’s think about all of that for a minute, because it’s perfectly suited for establishing a foundation for internet marketing in general and my SEO weapons in particular.

This is really important within the context of SEO because I can get you to the top of Google all day long, but if you don’t have something awesome to sell—whether it’s a product or a service—it won’t mean squat.

Internet marketing ultimately needs to lead to internet selling. If it doesn’t, whatever you’re doing online is a hobby.

We’ll start by defining your point of sale, which is pretty easy if you do business over the internet—it’s your website, or more correctly, your shopping cart. That’s where people make a buying decision to purchase whatever you’re selling.

It stands to reason then that if you don’t yet have a website with a shopping cart, there are some things you need to do before you can SEO anything.

While we’re at it, let’s talk about selling too. We said that selling is essentially the process of creating an equal exchange of value. I tell my two books cost $99. Before you buy them, you must decide whether reading my books will return you at least $99 in value. (If you deploy my weapons and follow my guidance, you’ll see a much bigger return than that.)


It’s that way with anything that you or anyone else buys. An item—product or service—is offered for a given price. The prospective buyer makes some sort of internal calculation as to whether that price is fair.

In some cases, a negotiation ensues, often when buying big ticket items like a car, a house, a boat, and so on. Sometimes no negotiation happens at all, like when you’re buying something online. There, at that point of sale, you consider the price, make your decision and buy—or don’t buy.

How you create that equal value exchange, or the perception of it—in other words, how you sell—is a topic for an entirely different discussion. Online, we sell in print, by having outstanding copy that closes a sale for us by convincing the prospect to pull out the credit card and use it.

Let it suffice to say that if your site isn’t set up to sell efficiently, all of the SEO weapons in the world won’t help you. I can help you get people to come to your website. But you have to close them and convert them into paying customers.

Imagine a fruit stand that spent tons of money trying to get people to come to it. The run ads, radio spots, hand out flyers—a whole range of tactics. The buyers come, in droves, only to find that all of the fruit is rotten. It’s smelly and disgusting.

Two things happen—the buyers don’t buy, and then they leave, never to come back.

That’s an important lesson. If you implement my weapons, get ranked near the top in Google, and then drive traffic to your site, if you don’t give the people what they want, you’ll lose them, and they’ll never come back. Ever.


My advice therefore is to make sure that you are set up to do business and to convey massive amounts of value before you start doing any marketing, and certainly before you mount any SEO campaigns.

Now that we understand the concept of the point of sale, and understand what selling really is, let’s talk about marketing—the process of bringing customers to that point of sale.

We’re also going to talk about how my 127 SEO weapons fit in to your overall marketing efforts.

The internet is an amazing marketplace. You can literally sell anything online as long as you A.) have it to sell, and B.) know how to sell it. In fact there are more than a few people making money online today who just have B.) mastered. They scam people out of millions of dollars (maybe even billions) selling things that don’t really exist.

With our prior discussion in mind, I will now assume that you have something amazing to sell, and a place online to sell it.

The question now becomes, “How do we get people to our site?” (In the parlance of online marketing professionals, that question becomes “How do we drive traffic?”)

I’m going to start with a laundry list of internet marketing tactics that you can use, and then parse that list into the ones my 127 Weapons can help you with. Remember: the purpose of these tactics is to bring customers to your point of sale. In other words, we need to drive traffic to your site.


Here’s the list:

• Banner advertising—I can’t help you there, except maybe with relevant key words that support your brand.

• Offline ads on TV or in print—I can’t help you there, but know someone who can.

• Snail mail— IMC • Social Networking and Bookmarking—IMC• Blogging and Forum Participation— You need my 127

weapons. • Video Marketing—You need my 127 weapons.• Article Marketing—You need my 127 weapons.• Press Releases—You need my 127 weapons.• Pay Per Click ads—Of course I can help.• Anything to do with Linking—Bingo.• General Internet Topical Search—Bingo again.

Since this book is about SEO and not internet marketing in general, I am not going to cover each one of these tactics in detail. (Not in this book, anyway—perhaps that’s a good topic for another book down the road.)

But what I do want to point out is that with the exception of the last two items—linking and general topical search—the tactics that I can help you with are what we call Off Page tactics. This simply means that the SEO work that we do on them happens off of your webpage(s).

I do have weapons for off page SEO, and we’ll talk about them later. Our first focus is going to be the other form of SEO, which is called On Page (naturally). I will tell you that the techniques for Off Page SEO are constantly changing and evolving.

Not so much with On Page. That’s why we’re going to start there.


But before we really start talking about that topic, though let’s first think about how people use the internet.

I’ll try not to make this too basic, so bear with me.

Today, when somebody wants to solve a problem, they more often than not start on the internet. There are many kinds of problems, of course, but in my opinion, a problem of some sort is what goads a person into action.

With their problem in mind, they start looking for a solution, and that’s when they go online.

Here are some examples. You might not consider these to be problems, at least not serious ones, but they are nevertheless problems.

The problem is that you need to make dinner, so you look for recipes.

The problem is that you want to go shopping, so you look online for things to buy, and for deals.

The problem is that you heard about a person who can help you (lose weight, make money, find a date, the list goes on) and you need to get more information about him, so you look online.

The problem is that you need to lose weight, make money, find a date, again, the list goes, on, so you go online to find a solution.

The point that I’m making is that every internet search starts with a need of some sort. I like to consider those needs problems, because it perfectly sets up what I’m about to tell you next.


If you’re in business, you must be able to solve these problems. Remember the concept of an equal exchange of value? A problem is what starts the whole transaction sequence in the first place.

If your solution will potentially solve a prospects’ problem, if the cost of the solution equals the pain the problem is causing, then a sale will probably take place.

There are a lot of other factors, of course, but that’s the basic concept.

And therein lies the most powerful aspect of internet marketing, and the reason why my SEO weapons can make you so much money.

If you can get your name or your business or your product or your service to come up in the top 10 of the organic Google search listings, your chance of making a sale has increased exponentially. Literally.

If there are a couple hundred thousand hits, or a million, and you are in the top 10, guess what? You must be really, really, good.

Remember, if it’s on the internet, it must be true. And those Google rankings aren’t paid ads. So when you show up there, it is a testament to the quality of your solutions and the value that you provide.

This applies to any business, in any industry, regardless of what you are selling and who you are selling it to.

It works equally well for global Fortune 100 companies selling to international markets as it does for little mom-and-pop shops selling pizzas on the corner.

All of the other tactics that I listed are valuable tactics that can and do produce results—if you use them correctly. But in terms of


marketing value and Return On Investment (ROI), they pale in comparison to a top ranking on Google. That ROI by the way includes not only dollars, but your time as well.

I say this unequivocally—properly executed SEO is the fastest, most cost effective method of marketing online than any other tactic, bar none. It is powerful, efficient and in terms of capturing market share—lethal.

What is the key to mastering this powerful set of weapons? The answer is in the question—keywords.

In the next chapter we’ll talk about what they are, how to find them, and how to use them.


Chapter 8

The Keys to the Kingdom

We left off at the end of last chapter talking about how people use search engines to find the information they’re looking for. I also want you to remember how we thought about that—people use the Internet to solve problems.

(The corollary to that is that you use the Internet to solve those problems for people. Which is, of course, how you make money, and lots of it.)

Here’s how it works. You realize that have a problem—minor, major, doesn’t really matter—and you need to get information about solving it. You call up Google (or maybe Yahoo or Bing) and type in a query.

Stop right there.

What words, exactly did you type?

The words that you used to find the information you’re looking for—to solve your problem—are collective called a search string. And somewhere in that search string is what we’re interested in.

Those are the specific words that indicate to the search engine what it is, exactly, that you’re looking for. (Hopefully, anyway.)

Those words are called keywords, and they form the basis of any SEO effort. For that reason, understanding how your customers and prospective customers search for information—what keywords they actually use—is critical to optimizing your business for the search engines.


To be accurate, we have keywords, and we also have key phrases, which are made up of keywords. You also might hear people refer to long-tail keywords. That’s a different beast entirely, because it refers to the “long tail” of a search. This long tail encompasses millions of unique searches on a topic that

are only conducted once or twice a day, as opposed to the “popular” search terms which can be searched thousands of times a day.

Targeting long-tail key words is a more advanced strategy that I’ll cover in more detail in the 127 Weapons book.

The challenge of course is that sometimes people aren’t very accurate or specific when choosing their keywords. And the search engines, on the other hand, don’t understand context at all.

A search engine takes the search string, parses it, identifies what it recognizes as keywords, adds some other mystery elements to the mix, and voila—returns results in a matter of seconds. (The mystery elements vary by search engine, but might include your search history, sites you’ve recently visited, your geographical location, and so on.)

But the effectiveness of the search engine—and of your search itself—is entirely dependent on the use of accurate keywords.

You can see then, why, as an Internet marketer, it’s critical for you to understand how people search for your products or services. If you understand the words they are using and how they are searching, you can optimize your site and all of your content. If you don’t understand how they are searching for you, you can’t optimize. (Well you can try, but it won’t have any effect.)


I like to say that THE most important aspect of SEO is doing solid keyword research. (I’m going to give you some tools for that in a minute.) But in order to even begin doing keyword research, you must be able to get inside the head of your prospects.

The only way I can tell you how to do this is to think creatively and logically about what people are searching for and how they search for it. But that’s not where you start.

Instead, begin thinking about your products and services, like we discussed before. Sure features, benefits and advantages are all important. But the real meat here is what problems do you solve. Next question is who has those problems.

Now we can begin thinking about how they go about searching for solutions.

Again, remember we need to be both creative and logical. We should also be exhaustive—come up with as many keywords as possible.

Here’s why.

Imagine for a moment that you are a plumber in Washington, DC. The problem you solve is that you fix leaks—leaky faucets, leaky toilets, and leaky pipes are all problems that you can solve.

Now let’s imagine that President Obama is upset because every time he says something to his staff, it winds up in the newspapers the next day. In other words, he has a leak—an information leak.

He’s frustrated—yes, he has a problem—so he goes online and Googles “stop a leak.”


That his search string, and the combination of stop + leak is his key phrase.

If you have used my 127 weapons and optimized your website, you will probably show up in the President’s top 10 Google results. But I can assure you that he won’t be calling.

Now suppose the President was a little more accurate with his search. Let’s say he typed “stop a leak in Washington, DC.”

But you were very thorough in your key word planning, and used my techniques for Geo-Targeting. Using this approach, you can

dominate search listings for specifically targeted geographic areas. I show you how to do this effectively in the second book.

Well, guess what? As long as you’ve employed my weapons and geo-targeted your site, you’ll come up again. And he still won’t call.

In both instances, President Obama wasn’t getting what he was really looking for because he wasn’t “granular” enough in his search. He needs to add a little more detail to his search—one additional keyword would do it.

So now if he types “stop an information leak,” his results will be much more in line with what he was looking for. And you won’t come up because it is unlikely that you would have targeted information as one of your key words. (Unless you also sell some plumbing information products and are using that in a long-tail phrase. But I’m not going to go there—for now at least.)

This was a really bad example, but I wanted to try to demonstrate what users do when they search for something online, and how you need to be able to mentally insert yourself into that process.


A surprisingly large number of people don’t really pay too much attention to this, on both sides. Internet users more often than not just sit down and start typing a search query. If a quick scan of the results doesn’t offer up what they were looking for, they just do another search with different terms, again without much thought.

On the other side of the fence, many Internet marketers define their keywords by thinking only about what they would type to search for their own products and services. That can become a problem though, since many business people are too close to their business—for obvious reasons.

Be when doing your keyword research, be careful not to fall into this trap. Try to envision not only how you would search for yourself, but how other people would do it as well. It’s not so much thinking outside the box as it is thinking outside your own head.

I can’t stress the importance of your keyword strategy to your overall success marketing online. Spend the time necessary to do this right, and you will reap the benefits for years to come.

As you begin to define the keywords that describe your offering—and that prospects will use to search for it—there are two factors that you need to consider.

The first is competition. By typing your keyword into Google you can easily get count of the number of competitive sites. The more sites that are competing for that term, the more valuable it is—and the harder it will be to dominate, if you can even dominate it all.


The second is search frequency. This is simply the number of times that a keyword is searched during a given time period (typically in a given month, or the past 30 days). Search frequency is important because it validates the keyword—if nobody is searching for that keyword, obviously nobody cares about it. In other words, keep doing your research.

There are numerous tools available online to determine keyword usage (I’ll cover several in 127 Weapons), but the most common one is probably Google’s Adword Tool. (Since adwords are basically what Google is all about, anyone who is seriously engaged in selling online should become familiar with the entire Google online toolbox.)

My suggestion is to make a list of all of the keywords that you feel are relevant to your site and to your offering. When it comes to iterations of the same root word, or even misspellings of it, the search engines are pretty flexible. They look at “leaks” generally the same as “leak,” for example. They cue in on the root word.

However, if you are looking for a very specific and targeted keyword, spell it exactly.

Which brings us back to the concept of long-tail keywords, that we briefly mentioned earlier. As I explained, long tail keywords form the long tail of smaller scope searches that are conducted for any given topic. If you envision a graph of a topical search, the most common keywords would form a steep, high spike in the graph, and then the related but less popular search terms would “tail off,” forming the long tail.

The trade off here is that there are not as many searches conducted for these long-tail keywords, but they are much less competitive and typically enjoy much higher conversion rates.

Before we move on to the next chapter, it’s critical to understand how important keywords are to your entire SEO process. They are used both on your page and off. Properly selected keywords can


result in tens of thousands of revenue dollars, every month or even every day.

Conversely, bad keywords can prevent your site from making hardly any money at all.

Learn how to research and select good keywords. It’s where your online success will start.


Chapter 9

The Nuts and Bolts of SEO

Although I covered it early on in this book, I think I need to point out, once again who should be reading this.

My assumption, my target audience here, is someone who is—or who wants to—market and sell products or services on the Internet. Whether it’s for a business you are running out of your spare bedroom, or whether you work for a company and have taken on the task of optimizing your website, you are first and foremost a business person.

In my world, that is almost the opposite of what I will respectfully refer to as a techie.

For the purposes of this book, a techie understands the inner workings of websites and of the Internet, and already knows how to do basic SEO. If this describes you, I’d suggest skipping the rest of this book and going straight to 127 Weapons. That’s where I reveal my secrets and give you the step by step instructions on how to use them.

On the other hand, if you don’t qualify as a techie, then, first of all, this book is for you. Second of all, I am going to assume that you


don’t have much working knowledge about the technical aspects of SEO

For that reason, I am going to start at a very basic level. If you already know it, no problem, skip ahead until you get to new material.

This is why I’ve written both of these books, by the way. I want to give everyone the technical details of functional SEO, but I also want to make sure that everyone who sells online can use this information.

This was the best approach I could come up with.

One more thing, before we jump in here. Hopefully by now you’re realizing that my books in particular and my information in general is about a whole lot more than SEO.

Quite frankly, there are already a number of books on the market that delve into the deepest, darkest corners of SEO, and give you all of the gory details. It can get quite complex, and very, very confusing.

I’m trying to spare you that. My assumption here is that you want to learn how to use SEO to make more money by selling more products and services online. I can definitely help you do that.

If you want to learn all of the background, continue your education by reading as many books as you can and diving into the process of self education. But if you’re in this for the money—and I say that with all due respect, because if you’re in business, you should be in it for the money—then my information is really all you’ll need to be successful.

Start Here, But Don’t Get Hyper

Here’s some bad news, and then some good news.


The bad news is this: before you can really understand how to SEO your website—or any off page content you have as well—you need to have at least a rudimentary understanding of Hyper Text Markup Language, otherwise known as HTML.

Yes, it’s a programming language. It was developed in 1990 to allow scientists to share research information across what was then called “The Internet.” The very same one we’re using today, except a whole lot more popular.

And now for the good news: HTML is easy to learn, at least to the extent that you’ll need to learn it. (In fact, it’s pretty easy to master on your own if you feel like doing that. I did, and I can tell you all it takes is a little bit of time and personal curiosity.)

Besides being a programming language, HTML is also the universal language of web browsers. A page of HTML code—which at first might look a little intimidating—is really just a set of instructions that tells the browser what to display and what to do when certain other things happen.

Because HTML is what browsers understand, it stands to reason that HTML is also what the search engines look at.

The way it works then is every website is essentially made up of individual files that are blocks of HTML code. Each filename is a separate URL (which, as I explained before, stands for Uniform Resource Header). Think of the URL as the address on the Internet where that page of code lives.

When you tell your browser where to go on the Internet, either by typing a URL into the address bar or clicking on a hyper link, your browser calls up the file associated with that address, and follows the instructions contained in the HTML.


Those instructions tell the browser what to display and what to do (fonts, colors, words, calls to other programs and so on), and that is what you, the user actually sees.

However, if you want to get a behind the scenes look at what your browser—or the search engines are actually seeing—simply click on the “View Source” option that every browser has. You’ll see the HTML code pop up in a little window, and yes, it’s a little like watching sausage being made.

But don’t worry—unless you plan to actually create your own web pages by writing lines of HTML code, there are only certain aspects of those pages that you will be concerned with.

By the way—bear with me here. I’m not trying to turn you into a techie, and I’m not trying to make this anymore complicated than it needs to be. The bottom line though is that if you want to optimize your site and your content for the search engines, you can’t get around acquiring at least a basic understanding of this stuff.

The Header

Effective on-page SEO starts in the HTML header. I will give you specific tools to do this in 127 Weapons, but for now, there are certain critical elements that you should be aware of.

First is the URL itself. I strongly recommend that it contains your primary keyword. Your domain name should also include it. (Now you’ll begin to understand why the keyword research was so important.) You also want to make sure that you stay away from cryptic codes when creating additional pages on your site. Every URL should help the search engines to figure out what’s there, before they even start digesting content.


The title tag of the header itself is important because it has a direct impact on three separate—and very important—aspects of both the user experience and SEO.

First, be aware that the search engines will only display the first 70 characters of the title tag. Plan accordingly. However, just because only 70 characters are displayed doesn’t mean the search engine ignores the rest—the entire title tag is processed.

So if you are targeting multiple long-tail keywords that exceed 70 characters, it still probably makes sense to include them. The excess just won’t show up in search listings.The title tag is also what appears in the browser’s address bar. So having your keywords near the front not only helps the search engine, but it also allows the user to see what the page they’re on is about. This is useful for brand identity and recognition.

Finally, when the engines display the results, they bold any keywords from the title tag. This shows relevance to the user, and can influence click thru rates from search engine results.

Meta tags in the header are also very powerful SEO tools that can have a significant impact on how the search engines process a site. At this point, however, it’s important to understand that the meta tags are used to provide specific instructions to a search engine.

For example, if you’ve written a really good article that was published online, you might want to include it on your site as content, but don’t want to be penalized for duplicate content. In this case, you can set the meta tag so that the search engine ignores the content.

The meta description is ignored by the search engines in terms of keywords, but the copy is displayed in the search results as a description of the site. The key here is to write a user-friendly description so that users can fully understand what your site is about when they see the results.


The Body

There are two important things I want to discuss here about optimizing the body of your site.

The first is header tags. A header tag is simply the importance given to headings and sub-headings within the content of your page. HTML looks at these headings differently from the text, and assigns a priority to them—H1, H2, H3 and so on.

The search engines zero in on these headers—up to a point—to understand what the site is about and what its relevance is.


For that reason, you should make sure that you include a selected keyword or phrase within each H1 and H2 headings. It’s important though not to overdo it, because too many H tags will start to devalue the impact of the keywords.

I generally recommend using one H1 tag and one or two H2 tags. Like I said, don’t overdo it.

The body of your site is where the bulk of your content will appear, and it’s also the area where people tend to make a lot of mistakes.

We’ll talk about content more a little later on, but the old adage that “content is king” rings very true here. The problem of course is that many people have a problem creating content.

To save time and effort, it’s common to write a block of copy about a particular topic—a bio or a company description, for example—and then to use it several times throughout the site.

It’s easy from the writer’s perspective, but the search engines don’t know how to differentiate that content, so they wind up devaluing all of it. This results in lower rankings.

The important lesson to remember here is that every piece of unique content should also have a unique URL. I should also point out that the more such URLs your site has, the more relevant it will appear to the search engines.

The main lesson here though is simple—avoid duplicate content for any page that you want the search engines to look at.


Chapter 10

Get Out The Links

Earlier in the book I introduced the term “link juice” as a way to describe how search engines assign values to various sites. Although it doesn’t sound very scientific, it is a real thing and critically important to showing up in the organic top ten rankings.

The term link juice was first coined by an SEO consultant to describe the way Google assigns a value to a website, based on the number of links (also called backlinks, inbound links or referral links) that a site receives.

Even though the algorithms that search engines use to rank sites are proprietary and closely guarded secrets, SEO consultants over the years have identified certain key characteristics of the process.

And of those key characteristics, linking is one of the most important.

A link is simply a hypertext reference to your site that shows up on another website, or blog. That part is easy enough to understand.

The search engines, as they crawl the web, look at all of these links, and follow them wherever they lead, and then assign a value to them. To simplify the concept a little, a link to a site that targets precisely the same key words as yours is worth more than a site that targets entirely different key words.


Early on in the evolution of SEO, the links were actually looked at as votes. It essentially boiled down to the more links your site had, the more votes you were credited with. Same basic principle today, but the concept is constantly getting refined and improved.

Today, in addition to the links you have, the search engines also evaluate the content of the linking site to your content. They analyze the similarity of keyword focus on the two sites, and apply a value to (their perception of) relevance.

The thinking here is pretty straightforward. A site that has fundamentally the same keyword focus (and therefore content) as yours, and that links back to you, is demonstrating that there must be something of value on your site. Accordingly, the more such links you have, the more value your site must deliver.

And the more valuable—and relevant—your site appears to the search engines, the higher it will be ranked.

This forms one of the basic tactical principles that SEO consultants use to boost search engine rankings.

By creating backlinks to a website, the site’s value—as perceived by the search engines—increases, and the organic search engine ranking improves as well.

So that’s exactly what they do—go out and hook up a bunch of links and wait for it all to take effect. The reality, though, is that sometimes it works—and sometimes it doesn’t.

I am not a fan of blindly finding links for a site and hoping that the ranking improves. I use a different approach, which I’ll share with you in a moment.

Before I do that, let’s look at some ways that SEO guys—which you can of course use too—to get links. As with anything else, obtaining links requires the commitment of resources. It’s going to either cost


you some time, some money, or more likely, both, in order to get links.

With that said, it’s also important to understand that as far as SEO is concerned, once you have solid keywords in place (in other words, once you’ve done your homework, done the research and found those solid keywords) the most important aspect of your SEO activities will be to find valuable links. It’s absolutely essential to Internet marketing success.

Let’s first look at the challenge. Here you are with a brand new website, just launched, and ready to do business. (Make sure the search engines know you’re open for business—see 127 Weapons for the details.) And now it’s time to get some links. You need to somehow get other websites to post a link somewhere on their site (often it’s done in the footer) that takes visitors back to your site.

This sounds easy enough except that the possibility exists for someone to follow that link from the linking site to yours and then not to return to the linking site. They just lost a visitor, thanks to you. For this reason, there needs to be some incentive for one site to link to another.

Ok, where should we begin?

For starters, because this is essentially a supply and demand issue (you have a demand for links and someone has a supply of them), people have turned the process of finding links into a business. There are tools and link building programs you can buy that automatically find links and brokers who will sell you links. You can also buy advertising with links included.

It’s an easy way to generate a lot of links quickly. It’s also an approach that I don’t recommend.

You can write really high quality articles, blog entries and even press releases that attract attention and that other webmasters want to


feature on their sites. This content though must be so compelling, so cutting edge, so value laden and so interesting that people read every word. If it’s just more Internet noise, nobody will read it and nobody will link to it.

By the way, content that is used to develop links like this is called, appropriately enough, link bait.

This is a great way to build links, but it’s also very difficult. Unless you are a very good writer who can not only wordsmith impeccable content but who can also frame unique, cutting edge “Big Ideas,” writing linkbait content may not be the best way to spend your time. There are writers who are expert at cranking out linkbait and who do it every day, and even then, not all of their stuff works.

If you can do it effectively, excellent—go for it. But you will still probably need more links in order to break into the Google top 10.

Another alternative is to hire an SEO “expert” who has probably got some tools in his or her toolkit that will enable them to give you a couple of thousand links in relatively little time. Great, but will it positively affect your rankings?

Probably not.

I say that because there is more to effective SEO than having a massive number of links pointing to your site. The search engines rank not only popularity, but relevancy as well.


So if you own a dog walking site, and you have links from sites that sell cars, online poker games or Viagra, guess what? Those links count a little, but not all that much.

Now suppose your dog walking site has some links from sites that sell leases, collars, dog food or maybe even walking shoes. The search engines will figure out that there is some relevance there, and will give those links a little more value—you’ll earn a little more link juice.

Ok, so guess what happens when another dog walking site links to you. Bingo, that one really counts, because the keyword focus of both sites is the same. The search engine sees that as complete consistency, and awards a much higher relevancy score for it.

And here’s one last thing to consider. Which do you think would be more valuable: a link from a site with the same keywords that is ranked #100,000 in a field of 1,000,o00, or a link from the site that is ranked #1?

The answer of course is that the higher rank a site holds, the more value a link from that site is worth. And that value increase isn’t incremental—it’s exponential.

My strategy on this topic is simple and straight forward. I don’t mess around, gathering up hundreds or even thousands of links with dubious value.

I go for greatness, right out of the box.

My approach is to get three or four links to my site from sites in the Google top 10 organic search results. More often than not, that’s all it will take to get my site into that coveted space as well.

How do I go about making this happen? Simple—I call the site owners, or at least e-mail them directly.


Let me step out of this discussion for a moment to talk about that a little. Too many Internet marketers forget that at the end of the day, marketing is about selling, and selling about transacting a deal between two human beings.

I know a lot of Internet entrepreneurs who, when they go online, lose sight of the fact that there are real people who are out there looking for things to buy and deals to make. Hiding behind their anonymous screens and keyboards, they focus on the technology, and not on the human psychology.

The reality is that the Internet is entirely about people, and nothing more. And unless you are prepared to interact with some of them personally, you will never be able to sell effectively online.

To find my links, then, I start by doing a Google search of my targeted keywords. I go to each site in the top 10, starting with number 1, and I get their contact information.

Then I contact them. (I prefer a phone call.)

I proceed to offer them one of three things.

The first offer is that I will right an article—or a blog post—for free about their topic and using their keyword, in return for a backlink to my site. I am essentially offering them direct linkbait.

Many webmasters will gladly agree to this—particularly if your content is outstanding—and your total cost of a super high value link is the time required to make a phone call and to write a simple article.

Some webmasters though won’t want to share keywords with you, and won’t agree to it. My second offer, when this happens, is to suggest promoting alternative keywords.


In other words, I’ll feature a link on my site for a keyword that they want to target, and they’ll do the same for me. Once again, a simple discussion such as this easily and more often than not will result in a high value link from a highly rated site.

Finally, and when all else fails, I’ll offer cash for that link. Don’t forget what’s at stake here.

Being in Google’s top 10 (or Yahoo’s or Bing’s) can easily be worth thousands of dollars in sales every day. And I can’t stress enough how valuable a link to one of the top 10 sites can be.

So I will gladly invest $500 or so for a link to one of those sites, knowing full well that my return on investment will, over time, undoubtedly be exponential.

The takeaway lesson is this: when it comes to linking, quality is far more important than quantity.

Three links to sites in the top 10 is unquestionably better than 1,000 links to sites that are topically unrelated.

Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and barter for links. I think you’ll find that not only is it easy to do—it works like a charm.


Chapter 11

Content Is King

Everyone has heard the term “Content is King” and when you think about it, of course it’s true.

After all, what is the Internet? It’s content. Billions of pages of content, about everything under the sun, linked together as we’ve seen, and searched by some of the world’s most powerful computer systems.

But what, really, is content, why is it important to your online business, and most importantly, how can you make your content stand out? Read on.

In today’s information driven society, content is the fuel that keeps us going. We consume it in many different ways. There are the old school media, both print and electronic, that are facing some steep challenges in how to deal with the Internet.


Newspapers, magazines, broadcast and cable television, radio, and even the recording industry are all grappling with how best to monetize their content online, without giving it away.

This is a problem, because there is so much free content available online, charging for content today is tricky. In fact, if you choose to charge for your content, you had best make sure the value of what you’re putting out there far exceeds the cost—otherwise, you’ll go out of business very quickly.

(I’m comfortable charging $99 for my stuff because if you use it the way I’ve told you to, you’ll earn back many times again what you’ve paid for it. I think that’s excellent value, and I’m comfortable with the exchange. You need to think about that when deciding what to charge for your content.)

Back to our discussion.

One of the reasons there is so much free content online is that it’s so damn easy to put there. Back in the day, when print and broadcast media ruled the news and entertainment outlets, and when book publishing was reserved for the very fortunate few, creating content wasn’t all that easy.

Before you could publish or produce virtually anything, you had to convince someone—an editor, a publisher or a producer—that what you had was worth something. Since the competition for just getting an audience to pitch something, or for just getting the decision maker to read something was so fierce, professional content creation was difficult to break into.

And amateur content creation, for the most part anyway, didn’t even exist.

All that of course has changed now.


Anyone can bang out content now—blog, article, special report, e-book, song, video, the list goes on—and self publish it on the Internet instantly. And once it’s out there, it’s out there.

The search engines go through it, and do their thing. And there it sits waiting for someone to consume it. The problem is that a good portion of this free content quite frankly sucks—pardon my French, but it is what it is—and most people have zero interest in reading, listening, or consuming it in any way.

Interestingly enough, if that crappy content is somehow targeted to your identified and selected keywords, you are in effect competing against it, at least from the perspective of the search engines.

By the way, some Internet marketers create content never intending for it to see the light of day. It’s out there for the search engines and search engines only. Of course, if someone reads that stuff the person to whom it’s attributed will sound foolish, but the thinking is that no one ever will.

To continue that thought, there are software programs and human providers who will take written articles and “spin” them so that they sound different. From a keyword/search engine perspective, this is a valid tactic. From a personal branding perspective, it’s the kiss of death.

You might ask why anyone would bother to spin an article, or worse, turn to a machine to write something for them. After all, doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of writing in the first place? Isn’t writing about communicating?

Well, online, yes and no. Because so many people have become marginally aware of SEO tactics, they believe that simply flooding the Internet with junk is a workable strategy. Indeed, there was a time when it probably was. But as the search engines become more sophisticated, and users right along with them, this whole approach is rapidly losing ground.


You see, creating content—really good content—can be difficult. It certainly isn’t easy. And most people are inherently lazy. They want instant results, and they want them now. Don’t we all?

So instead of really thinking a topic through, instead of crafting an entry or an article so that it flows, is easy to read and, most importantly, provides value, they “just throw something together.” Wham, bam, upload it and it’s done.

Quick and easy. Forget the fact that it sucks.

Even worse, with the boom in video and YouTube, you are finding an increasing number of people mumbling aimlessly into their video camera, with no concern whatsoever for lighting, setting, or even scripting. It’s 3, 5 or 10 minutes of gobbledygook that is a pathetic waste of time.

Is there value from these low rent videos in terms of search engines. Is there value from those same videos in terms of brand perception—yes, a lot of negative value. Most prospects see those things and immediately decide NOT to buy.

The way I see it, solid content serves three main purposes. Here they are:

1. Keyword Targeting

As an SEO guy, this one—to me—is pretty obvious. Writing articles, blog entries, or press releases that are targeted to specific keywords is one of the best ways to advance in the search engine rankings, especially if you are writing good content that gets picked up and linked to.

One or two powerful articles can have a major impact on your organic search engine rankings. A steady stream of them will put you in the top 10—or even at the top—and keep you there.


After we finish this list, I’ll give you some tips on writing these kinds of articles. But for now, let it suffice to say that creating content for the purpose of keyword targeting is a very powerful SEO tactic that should be employed by every business serious about marketing and selling online.

2. Branding

Even though just about everyone doing business online today talks about branding, very few really understand what branding really it. That’s a shame because niche branding is an excellent way to get noticed online, and one that we’ll talk about more in the next chapter.

Your brand describes you. It is your reputation—it’s how people think about you.

If you run a business, the business has a brand. What customers have come to expect from you in terms of value, quality and service defines your brand. The content that your business puts out on the Internet should constantly be focusing on your brand’s compelling value propositions.

If you are competing in a crowded market space, differentiating your brand—and then writing about it—can help you get noticed. Also, doing SEO for a niche branded keyword is a lot more effective than doing it for a globally popular one.

For example, back to our dog walking example. A Google search of ‘dog walking’ yields 2,550,000 results. But let’s say that you decided to target ‘urban dog walking,’ and then wrote articles strictly about that topic. There are 330,000 results for ‘urban dog walking.’ Still a robust market, but a lot easier to dominate.

Use your content to help build your brand.


3. Thought Leadership

Thought leaders are people who are known for their expertise in a particular topic. They are the ones sought out by the media to comment on current events, or happenings in their particular area of expertise.

They are known and respected for their knowledge and opinions. People seek them out to find out more about a topic.

And anyone who is interested in a thought leaders area of expertise will generally buy a book or information product that the thought leader has published, or they will attend a seminar that the thought leader is presenting.

It extends everywhere. Want to consult a thought leader about dog walking? Check out Cesar Milan, whose brand is the Dog Whisperer. The man is amazing. And he is the perfect example of what thought leadership—in fact what pack leadership—is all about.

Think about your role as a thought leader in every piece of content you create. And then go out an monetize it, using your newly developed Internet marketing skills.

Before we wrap up here, I want to say a few words about keyword density. A few years ago it was a hot topic. Everyone was shooting for a magical number—your keyword density must be 6.5%, or some other mystical figure. There were formulas that told you what your results were, and there were tools to use to get there.


In the early days of SEO, a lot of writers stuffed keywords. Here’s an example of that misfortunate approach, in the form of the first paragraph of an article.

Dog Walking For Fun And Profit8 Times In One Paragraph (I HATE THIS)

Dog walking is fun. But dog walking can also make you a lot of money. Think of dog walking this way. You are a dog. Walking is how you get exercise. For a dog, walking with the master is the best part of the day. And for the master who has a dog walking business, dog walking is not just fun and relaxing, but dog walking is a way to make money.

If you guessed that the keyword was dog walking, you are correct. (Not to mention perceptive.)

My advice for writing SEO friendly articles is to write naturally. I’ll say it again—write naturally. Use the keywords where appropriate. You can use off page optimization of the final article (a topic covered in depth in 127 Weapons) to make sure the search engines understand the content.

Here’s a more acceptable, rewritten version of the previous example.

Dog Walking For Fun And Profit

Dog walking is fun. But it’s also a great way to make money. Doctors agree that for a human being, walking—anywhere and


Had To Include My Best Friend In The Book...Peyton Your The Best!

anytime—is great exercise. It also clears your mind. Pet experts also agree that dogs enjoy walking with their masters too. They not only get exercise, but they get to bond with their own personal human. And that bonding, between you and your dog is more important—and more fun—than the exercise itself. In fact, if you are a dog, walking with your master is probably the highlight of your day.

The second version will have just as much value to the search engines as the first one (more actually) and will also have value to the author’s brand and thought leadership. It doesn’t sound like it was written by an algorithm, or by someone who was told to use the term ‘dog walking‘ 8 times.

But there are three things I want you to notice about the second version.

First the keyword is used in the title, and at the beginning of the first sentence. You should always do that.

Second, the keyword ‘dog walking’ doesn’t have to appear intact in every instance. Dog, dogs and walking all count.

Third, the search engines ignore punctuation. So if a sentence ends with the word ‘dog’ and the next one begins with the word ‘walking’ that counts as an intact keyword. That little trick can help you add keywords without sounding like keywords.

Good luck creating your content. And remember: content is—and always will be—king.


Chapter 12

Keyword Targeting

• Brand niche = SEO (127 Weapons)• Personal targeting = Ryan Nelson• Geo targeting = el jarcato in katy

An important part of any meaningful SEO discussion is keyword targeting. This is an essential piece of successfully marketing online and a concept that every online entrepreneur needs to master.

We’ve already talked about doing keyword research to select the keywords that most effectively represent your business. This of course is essential for enabling the search engines to find you and rank you.

We’ve also talked about content in terms of what it’s used for and how to create it.

What I want to do now is to share my thinking on how to focus those keywords and that content into targeted projectiles that blast your site right to the top of the search engine rankings.

I will also use my own online presence to demonstrate my points and to show you how all of this fits together.

Over the years, I have experimented with a number of different approaches, and have refined my system into an approach that will work for just about anyone.

I always use two different targeting techniques when I’m launching a new SEO campaign, and depending on the type of the business, sometimes three. These techniques are particularly well suited for starting a new business, or for launching a new product. The three techniques are as follows.


1. Brand Niche Targeting2. Brand Name Targeting3. Geo Targeting

Before I explain them, lets first talk about why we need them.

In the last chapter we talked briefly about creating a brand niche. The example I used was 2 million + hits for the keyword “dog walking” and a much more manageable 330,000 hits for “urban dog walking.”

Let me show you how I might go about creating that niche brand. At first glance it probably sounds self evident, but what I want you to do is to extend this thinking to your own business so that you can create your own brand niche.

In this example, I walk dogs for clients that are at work all day and can’t get home to let their pets out. I happen to live in Austin—or in Philadelphia, New York, LA, or any big city—and have grown accustomed to the challenges of walking a dog in a large urban setting.

Sidewalks are crowded and the streets are dangerous. For most of my clients, the dogs need to take an elevator ride down for their walk and back up to get home. Open spaces for the dogs to walk are few and far between.

But because I’ve been doing this for several years (with my own dogs before I started the business) I know the ropes. I know how to control skittish dogs on busy sidewalks. I know how to cross streets safely. I know how to find the best dog parks, or other spaces that work just as well. And I know all about handling the toxic waste that occurs at some point during the walk.

Well, guess what? That knowledge is valuable. It also differentiates me from other dog walking services.


So I start writing articles and blogs about urban dog walking. I use this information to become recognized as a thought leader in the field of walking dogs in a big city. By the way, there is a by-product to all of this.

Not only have I create a niche for my brand, but I’ve also begun to create the basis for some potentially valuable information products about my niche. If I write an e-book or some special reports, I can sell those products at the same time I’m attracting new clients to my business.

Brand Niche Targeting

Brand niche targeting is simply the process of identifying an aspect of your business that makes you unique, and then building your brand around it. Once you’ve done this, you create a long-tail keyword that describes the brand, and begin an SEO campaign focused on that keyword.

In the example, it’s pretty straightforward. I would begin targeting the keyword “urban dog walking” in all of my articles, blogs, press releases and even with my on-page optimization weapons.

The my goal is then to “own” the search results, i.e., show up in the number one spot, for this keyword.

Oh, and by the way. You don’t need to limit yourself to one brand niche and one long tail keyword. Use as many as you can, provided that they accurately describe your business and your brand.

Here’s a real-world example, using my own website and SEO consulting business.

I operate an SEO consulting business. But so do tens of thousands of other people, maybe more. So for me to try and own SEO consulting, the time and effort required makes it cost ineffective.


(Nevertheless, if I really wanted that spot, I could get it. The reality is that I don’t need it.)

Using my principle of Brand Niche Targeting, one long-tail keyword I selected was “seo business plan.” If you Google that, you’ll see that I’m already in the top ten and my rank continues to get even better.

Brand Name Targeting

Brand name targeting is simply the practice of targeting the name of your business as a keyword. If you are—or want to become—a thought leader in your industry, you can and should also target your personal name as well.

The reason to target—in fact to own the domain for—your business brand should be self-evident. It’s your business, after all. Most businesses who market online do this naturally.

In my case, I’ve used the name for my overall branded SEO concept, 127 Weapons, as the targeted brand name for my business. Google that name, and, as you’d probably expect, I am in the number 1 spot.

Concerning your personal name, at first glance, this might seem like wasted effort. After all, who is going to Google your name? How would they even know about you?

That’s precisely the point.

To market and sell effectively online, you need to be a tireless self-promoter. You want to—you need to—get your name out there. That’s where those articles and blog entries come into play. When you catch someone’s attention or interest with some content you’ve published, the next thing they are going to want to do is to find out more about you.


The next step of course is for them to Google your name. If you’ve optimized for it and you show up in the number one spot, instant credibility.

One of the things I always recommend doing is to own the URL that is your name. (Check out www.ryannelson.com). Even if you don’t actually put any content there, you can simply point the domain back to your primary business site.

In my case, I’ve chosen to use ryannelson.com as the place where everything happens. That’s because, in my business, I am essentially my own brand. When people buy my products or services, they are in effect buying me. For those reasons, using ryannelson.com as my main site makes sense.

For many people, owning their own name is a fairly straight forward process. If you have a relatively common name, or if you share your name with a relatively high profile person, it becomes a little more challenging.

The key is content. The more content you have out there, the easier it will be to own your own name. Obviously for someone who doesn’t market online, this is wasted effort.

But if you in any way use the Internet to generate an income, owning your name online is essential.

Geo Targeting

Geo targeting is the process of optimizing a keyword for a specific geographic area.

Many online businesses are not concerned about geo targeting, because they serve the entire Internet, regardless of geographical location. My business is an example of this.


http://www.ryannelson.com

http://www.ryannelson.com

However, if you operate a brick and mortar business that serves a local clientele, geo targeting is an essential weapon for your arsenal.

It’s also relatively easy to accomplish. Add your geographical location to your primary keyword.

For example, if you Google “waffles” you’ll see a Wikipedia listing along with a bunch of recipes. However, if you Google Waffles Katy TX (my home town), the first listing is the Katy Waffle House, one of my favorite breakfast haunts.

Every business that serves a local market, even if the Internet is not a major source of revenue, should implement a geo targeting campaign. The reality is that today, just about everybody and anybody who is looking to find a local business of any kind looks first on the Internet—or on their mobile device. Geo targeting will put your local business at the top of their list.

As with most aspects of Internet marketing a little bit of thought, planning, and analytical thinking goes a long way. I can also tell you that many people trying to market and sell online don’t do it. Thoughtfully implement my strategies for keyword targeting, and the results will speak for themselves.

Finally, in 127 Weapons, I’ll cover these tools in much more detail, with specific instructions for optimizing the keywords you’ve selected.


Chapter 13The Hat Police

This chapter is about the three different types of SEO, what they mean, and how they (potentially) affect you.

The three kinds of SEO I’m referring to are White Hat, Black Hat, and Grey Hat. They could just as easily be called the good, the bad and ugly, because, for all intents and purposes, that’s what they are.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Search engines are tools that enable an Internet user to quickly locate information that they are looking for. If you are a business, it is in your best interest to be as close to the front of the listings that the search engines return to an interested user.

If you are in fact there, you stand to make a lot of money.

If you’re not, you probably won’t make anything.

Ok, so there’s a lot of money at stake here. Even for a small business, it could be millions of dollars. Across the entire Internet, it’s billions. Easily.

When there is that kind of cash in play, you can bet that people will try everything and anything to claim a bigger and bigger piece of it.


The search engines, however, are businesses too. They make their money by selling advertising to businesses. But advertising without eyeballs isn’t worth anything.

In order for the search engines to make money, users have to actually use them. The quicker that a search engine can deliver accurate results to its users, the more eyeballs will be directed to that search engine on any given day. Once again, the more eyeballs they can attract, the more advertising they can sell.

Based on all of this, the mission of the search engines is clear. They want to match high value content with the needs of their users. Larry Page, one of the founders of Google and the creator of the PageRank Algorithm (named after him, interestingly enough) said, “The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing.”

In other words, the search engines want you to be able to get your valuable content in front of the people who are looking for it as quickly as possible. They will even provide you with some tools and expertise to do that.

The unwritten rule though is that everybody must play fair. Somewhat surprisingly, this expectation has never really been codified into a uniform code of conduct online. The search engines essentially reserve the right to decide what’s fair and what’s not based on their own internal value structure.

These decisions are made every day, sometimes with horrific consequences for businesses who are marketing online. If you are simply offering good content, and telling the search engines what you’re offering, everything will be fine. On the other hand, if you are trying to exploit their system, or are caught trying to game their operations, they tend to react swiftly.


Consequences can range from penalizing your organic ranking all the way to removing you completely from their databases, in which case your site becomes impossible to find through a search.

The relationship is like your bank. They want to be known as a convenient financial institution so they make it easy to get to your money. The put ATMs all over the place, and stay open late, in some cases even on weekends. It’s all about customer service.

Like I said, they want you to be able to get to your money. But suppose that you figure out a way to get to other people’s money, to the bank’s money, by somehow manipulating their system.

Sounds like a plan, until you get busted, in which case you will probably go to jail.

The search engines won’t send you to jail, but they certainly can have you busted in terms of your online business. And if that’s your primary source of income, that’s probably bad enough.

Like I said earlier, over the last several years, SEO techniques have come to be classified in one of three ways, Black Hat, White Hat and Grey Hat.

Before I go on, I should point out that I know all three pretty well. I will also tell you that—perhaps I should plead the fifth here—I stay away from Black Hat techniques, except in the case of an extreme emergency.

The reality is that Black Hat SEO is rarely useful over the long term. With that said, it can be quite useful in the short term, particularly when someone has done something nefarious to you, your site or your online reputation.

It’s only common sense that you don’t—or at least shouldn’t—mess with SEO guys. There are too many weapons at our disposal.


Nevertheless, it happens all the time, and when anyone tries it with me—as they occasionally have—I tend to react very negatively.

There are however online marketers—typically the unscrupulous among us—that use nothing but black hat techniques. Now like I said, the search engines don’t like to be manipulated, and that’s exactly what Black Hat SEO is all about—improperly manipulating the search engines.

When they find you doing it, as they always will, they will shut you down. The Black Hat guys know this. But if they can put up a site and manipulate the search engines to make a couple grand in an hour or so, once that site gets taken down, they just put up a new one.

It’s not exactly a sustainable business model, particularly if you are looking at running an online business for a number of years, but it is a way of making a fair amount of money in a relatively short time.

It’s not my style, and hopefully it’s not yours, but it happens every day. And some people have become very rich using nothing but Black Hat techniques.

White Hat techniques are exactly the opposite of the Black Hat ones. In fact, pure White Hat SEO is nothing more than providing high quality content, and then using some very basic HTML provisions to make sure the search engines know about it.

The search engines not only want you to use White Hat techniques, but they actually expect you to. The reality is that it makes their job a whole lot easier if you do.

So that brings us to the Grey Hat method of SEO. The term Grey Hat isn’t derived from the fact that grey is the middle ground between black and white, even though it is.


It’s called Grey Hat because Grey Hat techniques are basically in a grey area in terms of how the search engines feel about them. They aren’t blatantly dishonest because they don’t mislead users. There are no bait and switch manipulations going on, and no misuse of technology to mislead the search engines—and users.

But Grey Hat techniques do in fact leverage the search engines for the benefit of site optimization.

Some of the leverage is in the form of publicly available but little known characteristics of the search engines. On the other hand, some of the leverage that Grey Hat techniques employ come from secrets about the search engines that only a few people are aware of.

Quite frankly, when the search engines find some of these loopholes in their systems, they close them. That’s why SEO is constantly evolving. (It’s also why my hacker background has proved so useful.)

SEO consultants are constantly seeking a competitive edge. (Don’t forget, there’s a lot of money at stake here.) The search engines are constantly seeking to eliminate those individual advantages and once again level the playing field. It’s an endless game, and one that will likely continue forever.

The key is to not get greedy. I am going to show you how to use Grey Hat and White Hat techniques that will enable you and your business to market and sell online more effectively.

As long as you are providing value—not only in the products and services you sell, but in your online content as well—the search engines will leave you alone.

Be aware, though, that the SEO battlefield is constantly changing. Technology is becoming ever more powerful. The Internet is becoming ever more crowded. Competition is becoming ever more


fierce. And the search engines are becoming ever more sophisticated.

Implementing good SEO for your online business doesn’t have to become a full time job. After you’re set up, a few minutes every day will be all it takes. But I encourage you to become a student not only of SEO, but of Internet marketing in general.

To stay ahead of the pack, you need to stay ahead of the curve.

Follow my instructions, deploy my weapons and you will reap the rewards of a successful Internet business.

Onward to victory—the SEO battlefield awaits.

Thank YouIf you made it this far I congratulate you! You have went against the status-quo.

If you want to take the next step into the internet marketing arena you must join our community of Internet Entrepreneurs at (IMC).

Learn more about IMC - http://WorkingAtHome.co

If you are ready for the 127 Weapons - http://127Weapons.com

Please Read My Acknowledgments... Most People Ignore This Section Of A Book... But I Need To Thank Some Special People For My Success!


http://WorkingAtHome.co

http://WorkingAtHome.co

http://127Weapons.com

http://127Weapons.com

Acknowledgments

I’ve lived a good life.

Amazingly enough, it gets better everyday. If you would’ve asked me, 5, 10, or 15 years ago what I would be doing for a career, I probably couldn’t have told you.

For me at least, important things like that reveal themselves when it’s time. I think I know why that is, and I’ll thank Him last.

I’ve been fortunate enough to live a blessed life, and I am truly thankful for it, in every sense. But the people who have played the biggest role in my development—and my success—are my Mom and Dad. There’s really nothing I can say here and now, or ever, that expresses how much I appreciate everything they have done for me.

My Mom and Dad were the role models that I have based my life on. Personally and professionally, they set the example and established the high standards that I live my life by today. And when it’s time for Jessica and I to become parents, I will again follow the role model of the two best parents anyone could ever have.

Speaking of my cherished wife Jessica, I knew, from the moment that I laid eyes on her that we would spend our lives together. With that said, I’m not an easy person to live with. I am passionate about SEO and my business. I typically work until the wee hours in the morning. Jessica has made numerous sacrifices in the name of our business, and will undoubtedly make many more. I love her dearly. And I thank her endlessly.

On my list of priorities, right behind family comes friends. And neither my business nor my book would have been possible without a few of them.

Woody Lindsey is not my best friend—he is my brother, if not by blood, by every other measure of the term. He has helped me in more ways than I could ever begin to express, and we share a common bond that grows stronger, if that’s possible, every day. Woody and I have grown up


together, and with our businesses intertwined, will continue to grow forever.

Kip Herriage and Karl Bessey deserve special recognition as well. As cofounders of one of the world’s most successful financial education and direct marketing companies, they have been instrumental in helping me to move from the bedroom to the boardroom. My business is skyrocketing because of their tutelage and support, and I am eternally grateful.

I also want to extend a special thanks to Kerry Lohrman and his partner, Melissa Mazzeo. They have believed in me since Day 1, and together, we lit spark that exploded into my 127 Weapons concept. From breakfast in the Katy Waffle House to moonlit dinners in Key West with me and Jessica, Kerry and Melissa helped to make my dream become reality. They’ve helped me with my book and my business, and both Jessica and I are looking forward to a long and mutually beneficial working relationship. (And also to our next extended visit in Key West.)

I firmly believe that one of the best ways to become successful is to find a mentor, and then to listen to them. I’ve had the extreme privilege of working with two.

Gil Guptill infected me with the acting bug and a love of the theater that wound up shaping almost all of my future career decisions. When everyone laughed and said I would fail, Gil offered me the lead role in my senior class production of Grease. His belief in me fostered an intense belief in myself that endures to this day. Gil’s confidence transformed me from someone who doubted his ability to do anything at all to someone who now knows he can accomplish everything in life he chooses to.

I honestly believe that it was Gil who is responsible for my drive and success with SEO and Internet marketing today.

Lloyd Caldwell is another mentor, also from the world of theater, who taught me that, without question or doubt, you can accomplish any task in life with hard work and self confidence. Lloyd spent countless hours


schooling me in the art of the theatrical sword fight, which I can still do, almost as well as I do SEO.

Most of all, however, I thank the Lord our God. The Lord can giveth and the Lord can taketh away—it’s not an exact quote from the Bible, but the meaning, to me, is both crystal clear and very important. Appreciate what you have, while you have it. And make it a point to give back freely to the people who need it. It’s also important to remember and give thanks to the people who made you what you are.

Everybody has their own belief in the Creator and what He means. I believe in God and I thank Him everyday for the blessings I’ve already received, and the blessings I know I am about to receive. Regardless of your spiritual beliefs, I encourage you to give thanks every day, as well.

Good luck, much success, and may God bless,


Documents

SEO Book FREE - By Internet Top Income Earner By: Ryan Nelson