If you don’t take a peek first to see who’s already ranking in a particular keyword, you’re taking a major risk. Why? Because there could be a big, mean, 800 lb Gorilla camping out in there, meaning there isn’t any room for you (or much hope for success).

What are you looking for in a keyword/niche?

Taking an in-depth look at a keyword could reveal more positive information like: “wow, this keyword is getting tons of searches, but there is no real player in the keyword yet.”  That keyword is what I call ‘low hanging fruit’ and it has room for you. That’s the kind of keyword/niche you want to JUMP on.

What does low  hanging fruit look like?

Google ranks sites using a few different factors, namely # of quality links & keyword relevancy. Don’t freak out on me, there are definitely a lot more factors to consider, but these are typically the most important.  So, to get a top ranking spot on Google, you need a lot of inbound links and good keyword relevancy in your URL name and your content.

You want to find a keyword/niche where the top ranking sites don’t have more links that you’re capable of overcoming. The #1 site may have 20k links but maybe the #3 site only has 215.  While you won’t easily be able to gain 20k links, you could easily get 300 and jump into the #3 spot.

Combine those links with good keyword relevancy in your URL name and content, and this is very attainable.

At the end of the day, what you want is a keyword/niche that you can rank high in Google searches.  High-ranking organic search results in Google are getting an extremely large majority of clicks these days. If you can’t get in the top 10, then chances are you won’t get much traction.

How do you find the low hanging fruit?  Comment Below if you have some tactics you’re willing to tell about!

Learn More:

I spend $10,000 to develop a software that makes finding the low hanging fruit a breeze. If you want to get it for FREE, click here now and download my ‘cherrypicker’ and find a niche that you can dominate. You can also get my entire Perpetual Traffic Formula right HERE.

It all boils down to 3 core variables that you can control.

1- Content (keywords, domain name, tags, etc.)

2- Links (inbound, outbound, authority, etc.)

3- Activity (traffic, RSS subscriptions, comments, updates, etc.)

Some might think I’m not giving Google enough credit, but it’s really this simple.

Getting ranked is really only about doing three things:

#1- Getting quality, original content

#2- Generating a handful of quality links

#3- Generating some human activity so Google knows that what you’re doing is real and not just SPAM.

I’m sure all of you are doing at least one of these 3 things to help your site’s ranking, but the KEY is to be doing ALL 3 of them. Leave out one, and you’ll lose with Google.

Are you getting all 3 parts of Google’s Algorithm correct?  What part are you missing?  Comment Below!

Learn More:

To get the full story about the Google Ranking Triad and my personally tested method of getting free, perpetual traffic from Google, hop on over and check out my FREE ‘Perpetual Traffic Report’.

After having to shut down for 12 hours on Monday due to a database error, Twitter is tired of all the technical issues too, so they’re opening their own Data Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.  (sigh of relief)

Until now Twitter used NTT America’s data center where they did not have full control over their network and system configurations to meet their very specific needs.

Here’s what we should be able to expect from Twitter having their own data center.

1- Twitter is tacking on new users at an ever increasing pace, one of the reasons Twitter can’t seem to stay up and running.  A new, dedicated data center will allow Twitter to configure their data center to handle the growth. (the extra power will help as well)

2- With events like the World Cup, people Tweet A LOT more and Twitter has been pretty shaky trying to handle the massive amount traffic.  The increase power of the new database will enable Twitter to facilitate way more Tweets with out interruption.

3- Twitter has had to shut down a lot of applications to conserve space and power to keep up with everything.  The new data center will give them room to expand their applications and push their new Ads layout.

The data center’s potential positive effects are all great, but even Twitter engineer, Cozzatti, stated that “We frequently compare the tasks of scaling, maintaining, and tweaking Twitter to building a rocket in mid-flight,” meaning that this could all take a bit to fix and straighten out.

Do you think Twitter is yet to reach it’s full potential as they still struggle to find a way to accommodate all their new features and users?  Comment Below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I think it’s safe to say that most of us have our SEO targets set on Google (and PPC for that matter). And it’s pretty appropriate seeing that Google owns such a vast majority of the search engine market. But if we want to be truly savvy Internet marketers, we can’t ignore the fact that the Microsoft/Yahoo merger has finally come.

Is there anything we can be doing to SEO for both Google and Yahoo?

A recent report done by SEO Chat revealed quite clearly how the two search engines differ in ranking.  They compared 2 domains and how they indexed in each search engine.  Domain A ranked #1 in Yahoo, but it didn’t make the top 200 in Google. Domain B ranked #1 in Google, but was #135 in Yahoo.

Based on these results, it’s obvious that Google and Yahoo are doing something different.

The report was pretty lengthy, but I’ll sum up the important stuff for you.

1-    Both sites had similar domain ages and similar keyword use in their title tags, homepage, and internal links.  So both search engines worked pretty similar on that front.

2-    Domain B had many more root domain links and a much higher link quality profile, which is highly favored by Google, thus it ranked #1 in Google.

3-    Domain A had a much higher total count of links, most of which were only counted by Yahoo, thus it ranked #1 in Yahoo.

But WHY?

The site that Yahoo ranked #1 had a much higher total count of links because Yahoo counts the overall links pointing to the website and not just the unique count of root domains as Google does.

In fact, many of the links that Yahoo was counting came from 7 other mirrored domains owned by the same person.  So the reason they aren’t ranking in Google is because Google bans that kind of activity in creating redundant content.

Our Repsonse?

Well, you could easily mirror a few domains and build a very large amount of interconnected links to impress Yahoo and get a top ranking, but doing this would most likely get you banned by Google.  That’s not a very good idea considering Google is the leader in search engines.

At this point, it’s still in our best interest to cater to Google’s need by focusing on link quality, content quality and root domains (and much more). And I’m sure in some cases, doing these things will get some good rankings in Yahoo as well.

Do you have any tactics that help you rank well in both search engines? OR Do you think ranking #1 in yahoo with ease is worth getting banned in Google? Comment Below!

Or more simply, they buy a lot of fledgling companies that are packed with web geniuses that can help Google tromp forward across their vast online kingdom.

This time, I’m actually pretty intrigued by their newest purchase of Metaweb, a hyper ambitious group of people putting together a database of the web’s info called Freebase.

I’ll skip the boring details of how they acquired Metaweb and who works there, and give you a quick explanation of what Metaweb does and how they can help Google be a better place for you and me.

Metaweb is tackling the problem created by semantics, where one word can mean many different things. This is something that standard search engines can’t fully overcome.

So Metaweb is building a search database built off of entities (a singular person, place or thing).  The easiest way to put this is to say you wanted to search for Female Novelists in New York City.  Instead of searching for pages that have those three defining keywords, Metaweb will relate entities to one another until it narrows it down.

In the end it gets boiled down to a few different relevant entities (novelists, new yorkers, females, etc) and how they relate. If everything goes correctly, exact results will index and not just pages that have all or most of  your broad keywords.

Another way you can use Metaweb would be to select an entity like a popular band, then ask Metaweb for what’s under the hood of the particular entity. There you could access their songs, biographies, pics, vids, etc.  Pretty sweet ineed.

At some point Google will start using Metaweb to help them out with the difficult searches that they currently struggle with.  At the end of the day this is Google getting smarter.

Getting smarter could be good and bad for us Internet marketers.  Agreed?  Smarter could mean more accurate indexing of our content but it could also mean we have more hurdles to leap through to get solid rankings. What do you think?  Comment Below!

And this is why every successful campaign (organic or PPC) needs a good SERM (search engine reputation management) campaign behind it. If you’re not keeping an eye out for yourself, a single piece of negative press about you or your product can pop up and taint your search results.

Take United Airlines for an example. Word spread quickly that they had a pilot Arrested in an international airport for trying to fly DRUNK. If you were to Google ‘United Airlines’ at that time, some of the top Google results included youtube videos and articles spreading the negative press about the fiasco. Not exactly what you want searches seeing when they Google you, right?

When you take into consideration instances like these, you can see how NOT protecting your online reputation has the potential to put a serious halt to your traffic system when negative press shows up just below your blog or sales letter on Google. As far as I’m concerned SERM is part of any search engine campaign (orgainc or PPC), you can’t maintain success with the the latter without practicing the former.

In the end, they both share the goal of keeping you and your products at the top the search engine totem pole (instead of negative press).

One of my top SERM tactics is to set up Google Alerts for keywords like: My name, my products, my colleagues and basically anything that someone might attack that would negatively affect my SEO campaign and search rankings.

What are you guys doing to protect your search rankings? Comment Below.

There has been some debate as to whether or not Twitter is an effective or appropriate platform for customer support. Personally, I’ve made my mind up about it. While I’d never use it as my primary customer support desk, I still field concerns from my Twitter followers.

There has been a few times where my customers have utilized Twitter to get a quick response from me when they really needed one, allowing me to delegate a customer representative to take swift care of the person in need.

Even in my case, 140 characters can be extremely limiting when trying to give the appropriate response to a customer in need.  And for those of you who use Twitter primarily for customer support, this is even truer.

Here is how Zendesk is going to help you out.

If you’re not familiar with Zendesk, It’s worth taking a look at if you’re shopping for a good web based customer support desk.  I’ve used it now for a few years, and love it.

Zendesk released an app that allows you to integrate your Zendesk with your Twitter Account. Essentially this will enable a customer to turn a Tweet in to a Twicket (Zendesk Ticket).

I really like this for a few reasons: 1- If you need more than 140 characters, you can easily get it by transforming the Tweet to a Twicket. 2- If you want to pass it to a customer service rep, then you can turn into a Twicket and get it assigned immediately?

What are you using for customer support? Do you see a need for a tool like this?  Comment Below!

The latest quarterly report from Efficient Frontier shows great news for Bing.  Bing’s most recent quarter reveals that ad impressions are up 56% from the following year. What makes it even better is that Google ad impressions are virtually in the same position they were last year, giving Bing the chance to gain some ground.

And when it comes to ad clicks, Bing is up about 34% where as Google is DOWN 8%.

Sure this is good news for Bing, but I think it’s better news for us!

While Google still holds 75% market share of searches, Bing is showing signs of life. Tack this success on to the fact that the Yahoo-Bing merger is finally about to happen, this could mean we have a true search market contender on our hands.  The competition we’ve all been hoping for may finally be on it’s way.

Do you trust that these numbers actually mean Bing has a chance?  Comment Below!

I found this handy little tool the other day and wanted to pass it along.

A little background first: If you want success in blogging, you NEED inbound links. ( it’s just part of the puzzle)

What’s an inbound link? Ex. You post a comment on someone’s blog and leave a link to your site along with it. Thus, you’ve created a link outside of your blog that has an inbound direction to your blog!

Why do you need them? The more inbound links you have out there, the more pathways to your blog for people to find! (a.k.a link juice)  Google really likes them too

But Google doesn’t really like them all, because Google will only reward blog comments that are done on ‘Do Follow’ Blogs. A ‘Do Follow’ blog is one that allows Google to find the outbound links on it’s site.

Whether or not a blog is ‘Do Follow’ is totally up to the Webmaster of the site.

So, in the end, you WANT to leave comments and inbound links on ‘Do Follow’ blogs to help your blog get more link juice and more looks from Google.

How do you find ‘Do Follow’ blogs?

I found this tool @ http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/

Simply type in your keyword and it will populate a list of blogs for that keyword that are ‘Do Follow’. A handy tool indeed .

Have you guys used this one or one that’s better? Comment and let me know!

I’m not one to bash PPC or to say SEO is the only way to go (you need both!), BUT I think this infographic says a lot about where we should be focusing our time & efforts in regards to getting the highest ROI from search engines.

Take a look below to see the behavior of online searchers.

I think the most important thing to gather from this is that there are multiple pieces in the ’search engine’ pie.  If you want it all, then you need to diversify between SEO and PPC.  And based on the results listed in the infographic, SEO needs to be the bigger piece in your search engine pie!

What does your ’search engine’ pie look like?  Do you have it sliced up right?  Comment Below and Let me know!