The main purpose of this post today is to cut through the maze and lead you directly to the key drives of Search Engine Optimization or SEO, thereby providing you with a toolkit of Low Cost High Impact tactics for your website.

Tapping on Authority Sites

One low cost SEO approach which gets you results is through link exchanges or linking to and from other web sites. Certain links exchange activities cost next to nothing, if you know how to do it correctly. Before you even contact the webmaster of the website you wish to exchange link with, use a few key criteria to evaluate whether the link exchange will benefit both of you mutually.

Check the Alexa Ranking, the Google Page Rank, Links, Search Ranking, Authority Level of the target website. Alexa Ranking tells of traffic, the lower the number the better the traffic, although some would rebut that this benchmark is useful more for the internet marketing fraternity and that page rank is less critical nowadays. Google Page Rank is defines the importance Google places on the web page or site. Search Ranking of the target site should be in first page for the main keywords that both your sites share, hence allowing leverage for your site. Inbound Links of the target site is key to indicating the Authority and traffic, and the greater number of links the better exposure the site has seen. Finally, whether the site is an Authority site depends much on all the above factors combined. Successfully Linking to a high PR and Alexa Authority site is could eventually help you gain improvements to your page ranking and hence, traffic optimizing your site.

Article Marketing For Backlinks, Exposure Over Prolong Periods
Article Writing with keyword rich great content should be a key approach of all webmasters. You may choose to write your own articles or outsource the writing. But key to the concept of article writing is to ensure that you optimize each and every article for maximum SEO leverage. Take additional care to optimize your title, meta, keyword tags, anchor tags, resource box. Take heed never to keyword stuff your articles as this has become taboo in the white hat SEO fraternity.

Article Marketing, the next step after having written your articles helps to generate extend and long term exposure and visibility for your Internet business sites which is also an excellent effective approach to generate back links for your website too. Essentially, Article Marketing is article submission to the major article directories. This is rather manual and you may consider getting someone to assist you in submission, hence freeing up your time to do more critical activities.

Navigate The Reader To Your Destination, Subtly
Key to a good navigation system is ease of use. Navigation must be simple, your website should be clean and easy to read, not cluttered. Never use dark or black background with reverse white as it is very taxing on the eyes. Include a site map in your tabs for the human readers and for the cyber search bots, install a sitemap plug in.

For better control and routing of traffic, there are also tactics which subtly guides the reader through to where you wish to lead them. This is done by intelligent navigation, utilizing routing buttons and prominent anchor texts.

Now that you know, off page optimization such as making slight adjustments to your website or some research on potential authority site linkages and more hard work on great article marketing could all contribute to your enhanced net traffic. It is however, critical to note that SEO tactics are not limited to the above but entails much more.

Low Cost High Impact SEO is in fact not simply for the low budget internet marketer or internet marketing for small business, but also utilized for business or corporate sites as well.

Look hard enough and you will find out that you too can improve the conversion rate of your website, be it selling a service or product. Understand that web marketing is different from physical selling and the aggressive tactics that I will be showing you will help you achieve higher sales conversion in time to come. You may not see the real effects immediately but like all businesses, you need to harness and leverage on what you have and what you can do to the maximum before you see the results.

So let us start right here.

How Search Engine-Compatible Is Your Website?
There are about 10 major search engines online and the top 3 are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Some sites rank well in SEO with Google but not MSN and some better with Yahoo than Google. You need to fully tap the potential of at least all three in order to ensure SEO. Some webmasters tap on the loopholes that MSN has and fully optimize their sites with this trick, but understand that the algorithm that each major search sites differ slightly and you need to be able to strike a balance for all major search sites for optimization. Never risk swaying to one and ignoring the other, this could be detrimental to your SEO strategy.

If you have little or no money to spend and are simply starting out, sign up for Google Analytics. It is free and it tells you tons of information on visitors, referrals, search keywords and much more. Armed with these information, you could run a “diagnostic” on your site and zero in on what needs to be improved. Learn to analyze deep into meaning of the figures.

Do You Have Strong Enough Keywords In Your Website For Search Engine Optimization?
Note the operative “do you have strong enough keywords” and Not “do you have enough keywords”. There is huge difference between strong keywords vs the number of keywords” you have on your website. If your website talks about everything under the sun, and if you populate it with any keyword that you can find, how then do you expect to rank with SEO? Focus is the key. Zero in on what your website theme is all about. Then write articles and posts focusing on a selected appropriate keywords or keyword phrases that describe what your website offers. This will make a vast difference to for searches and search engines picking your site up when people search for related keywords.

To perfect your skills on keywords strategies, there are great tools out there for you to analyze and plan your next steps. Work on how to optimize long tail keywords, not simply broad ones as they would be very competitive to rank for SEO.

Micro Niche Finder 4.0 A Great Keyword Research Tool
One great keyword tool I have been utilizing from the start is Micro Niche Finder, a very unique keyword research tool which reduces my research time by almost 70% with its unique SOC.

The Micro Niche Finder not only helps you research to optimize keywords, it makes it very easy to create Adsense Content pages in a jiff, teaches you how to fully utilize PLR materials for quick profits, helps you set up Squidoo Lenses fast, lets you create eBay feeder pages and much more.

Check out the Micro Niche Finder & Free Videos Here for more information. The 5 Free Videos will run you by step by step how to do all the above.

Know Who Your Competitors Are

How many times do you simply run searches only to find many websites ranked high above yours? Wonder how they do it? Mystery Shopping is one very common activity webmasters do nowadays to find out what their competitors are selling, advertising and keywords they use. Analysis and evaluation of the competition is critical to figure out your shortcomings and it will help you get that advantage over them. Here again, you will find that Micro Niche Finder is the tool to use.

A recap of the last segment, we discussed the process of Finding Demand of Niche Markets via the following steps :

• Collate the Functional list of your niche using Google Adwords Keyword Tools
• Measure the Profitability of your Niche Market via a 2-step process of firstly measuring the volume of your Niche Market via Google Adwords Kywords Tool. Thereafter, evaluating the number of ads in SpyFu for profitability analysis
• Search for Profitable Affiliate Programs related to your Niche Market to sell

Notice a simple natural reaction whenever you need to run a quick research on a topic. You would remind yourself to “Google” the topic. When evaluating supply/competition, we do exactly that. Let’s run through the process.

Evaluating Supply = Competition

• “Google” your selected niche by inputting the keyword or keyword phrase.
• On the top right corner of the bar separating your search bar and search returns, you will find the total number of search returns and this number becomes the Supply or your competition. Do this in “Quotes”.

Note that the total number of search returns ie. the supply/competition will give you an idea of how much information or providers are out there competing to win over the potential niche customers.

However, that is not to say that when Supply runs into the millions the niche is too competitive. We must evaluate the supply against the demand before we derive our conclusion. Go for any number less than 20,000 to 50,000 competing pages.

No one has ever definitively set a benchmark figure for this formula, and neither will I here. The reason being that different niche markets behave and yield different results. There have been instances, albeit rare, when I entered more than usual competitive niches, thinking that the survival rate would be akin to nil, but surprisingly, I managed to pull through with interesting results. And the vice versa is true.

And more importantly, do share the results with all our readers out here. I would really appreciate it.

Next Stop brings us to to investigating Key SEO ideas at 6 Steps to Effective SEO for Online Niche Marketing Domination.

And for a recap of Part 1 of this series, check out Finding Demand of Niche Markets.

We will adopt market accessible free software tools whenever possible but there will be suggestions to explore paid versions should the need arise. But I will share with you a very efficient tool which will cut your keyword research time by 90% at the end of this series.

I am a strong advocator for starting things right at the start. So First Things First, let us go through the following step by step

Define “Niche Market”

Firstly, I would provide you with a simple description of a “Niche Market” as follows:

A niche market defines a small group of people with similar and very focused demand for a certain product or service. This demand is currently met with little or ignored amounts of supply .

This reason I qualify niche market with “demand is currently unmet with little or ignored amounts of supply” is to ensure that as we proceed, you will find that your supply will meet the demand profitably, with little competition.

Find “Demand” – Look for Search Count

We proceed to find the niche segment keywords. You would probably have a niche in mind.

Step 1

Find out the functional list of keywords by going to Google Adwords Keyword Tools , a free software by Google. Note that you should start with a niche with a exact term or phrase and narrow down. If you are comfortable with the amounts of keywords sufficient as writing topics, proceed to the next step.

For building Micro Niche Sites, 1,000 < Search Count < 2,000.

Step 1 Part 2

Purpose of this is to explore the CPC from Google advertisers’ perspective. This is especially important if you are searching for niches words for Google Adsense. The higher the average cpc the better because this would imply that the higher your adsense reward.

Alternatively you could go to Google Adwords Keywords Tool which gives you the average searches of your niche on a monthly basis. Check the drop down list as exact search count. Click to include Est CPC, and Search Trends.

The real objective of part 1 and part 2 is to Derive the Demand via Search Count and hence the potential profitability of your niche from the keywords derived so as to make things worthwhile for you when you finally decide to embark on the chosen niche.

Monetising Your Online Niche Marketing Site with Affiliate Programs and Adsense

As a niche market product or service marketer, the onus is on you to seek out the most effective affiliate program, evaluated from the perspective of a potential user. Hence, exploring the spread of affiliate programs offerings in the market is essential.

The following listing would give you good coverage although not exhaustive – ClickBank, Commission Junction, Associate Programs and popular CPA networks are PepperJam, Affiliate.com, Revenueloop, just to name a few. Note that there are other successful “undercover” affiliate programs not in the mentioned list, yet to be fully leveraged, if only you look hard enough.

A Parting Note… for this Segment

Check out the the next session where we approach the topic of exploring supply, or rather, evaluating your competition for online niche marketing.

For more in depth understanding to identify which online niche marketing approach is most appropriate for you, check out Keyword Driven vs Emotive Online Niche Marketing