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Brandon

About Brandon

I own and manage a professional reputation management services company. We specialize in ranking results. If your negatives are on page 1, what else is really important? Contact us to get rid of your negatives!

How To Find Long Tail Keywords

Finding Long Tail Keywords

The “Long Tail” keywords are phrases that contain up to 5 key words and are highly specific. Since they are so specific, the search volume is very low.

Long tail example:
“Large Sony Plasma 1080p Detroit” – This key phrase is a very specific search phrase. Someone that searches for that knows exactly what they want. They want to buy a large Sony plasma TV in Detroit that has 1080p resolution. If you Google that key phrase you’ll see there are less than 10,000 results, and none of the results are any good.

A regular key phrase would be “Sony Plasma 1080p”. Not only do you have a lot more competition with that key phrase, but you don’t know very much about this visitor. You don’t know if they want a 32″ or a 50″, do they want to spend $500 or $3,000? Do they plan to buy online, or are they doing research and plan to buy locally? Do they really want a Sony, or are they looking for specs. Do they already have a Sony and need a new remote?

When you target the long tail, you will get a much higher conversion ratio because you already know what your visitors are looking for because they’ve been specific with their search. Since you know what they want, you can give it to them above the fold, quickly and easily.

The best way to find long tail keywords and key phrases is through your own data. This is your search engine referrer logs. If you’re site is new, you probably don’t have logs showing what people searched for just yet, but you will. Once this data starts rolling in, start making pages based on what people want.

Until you have that data another good way to find long tail keywords is through a keyword suggestion tool. Google has one, but Keyword Discovery is my favorite. The numbers in the search totals are not very accurate, but it gives you a good idea of what is being searched for.

Using “Sony plasma” as an example we get the following long tail key phrases:

sony multisystem plasma tv
sony plasma dvd connections
comparison chart for sony, toshiba, and panasonic plasma tvs
repair of sony plasma tvs
biggest sony plasma tv
sony plasma dvd digital receiver connection diagram
prices on sony plasma hd tv
sony 37 wega plasma tv specs
sony 950 plasma wall mount
sony bravia hdtv 46 plasma
how to get my sony plasma off standby

As you can see, after a 30 second search, you now can create 11 pages of content that is highly targeted. Some of those searches aren’t going to convert to sales (diagram, specs, off standby), but others could convert very well (wall mount, dvd connections, repair). Even if your page isn’t designed to convert, it could still make you money.

Imagine someone in a forum asks “how to get my sony plasma off standby”. Someone answers by linking to your site. When someone else comes along looking for issues with Sony TV’s, they’ll find your site. Then they might find your comparison chart, or your 1080p vs 720p guide. Since they’re looking for more information, you keep giving them information and your site makes a sale, and gets a link. Win-win for you and the person you helped.

Do you know of other ways to find long tail keywords?

By |July 18th, 2009|SEO/SEM|8 Comments

Add Line Breaks in WordPress Posts

WordPress has a weird “feature” of stripping extra line breaks out of posts. Often times you will want more than just a single space between paragraphs or pictures. If you try to use standard html code like the following, it won’t work.

<br /> – doesn’t work

<p>&nbsp;</p> – doesn’t work

The only method that I have found of adding extra line breaks in your WordPress posts is to use the following code.

<p align=”left”>&nbsp;</p>

Copy and paste that as many times as you want.

 

 

 

 

See?

Another one that seems to work just as good is: <p style=”text-align: left; font-size:1px”>.</p>

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See?

By |July 14th, 2009|General|5 Comments

Site Review: Ezilon.com

Ezilon.com contacted me recently about a site review for their directory. Initially I didn’t want to do it because general web directories are overrated and boring. They sent me a link to their regional web directory and I checked it out. It is unique! Yes, a unique web directory.

Ezilon logo

What makes Ezilon Unique

Since Ezilon is a unique web directory I thought I would start with that. What initially makes Ezilon unique is the design. It isn’t just about template based directory script with a million crappy sites and DMOZ listings. It is a web directory that is designed to be used as a directory. Ezilon is ideal for finding a local business since the first way you’re presented with is a clickable world map that takes you to regional based directory listings. I was able to quickly and easily find backup providers in the US.

Submitting Your Site

Ezilon is a paid web directory. Generally I don’t pay for web directories, but this one made me give it a second thought. The reason is the high authority and high PR inner pages. For example if you sell baseball gear, here is a page with 4 outgoing links that is a PR3 and a steady PR 3….not a spammed quickly fading PR 3.

Baseball gear isn’t the only high deep linked PR page. Here are a couple others I found with only a couple outbound links.

osCommerce

Preschool Programs

Dating

Projector

Those type links are not only hard to find with strong PR and limited outbound links, but this site is loved by Google. I don’t know their stats, but I would imagine they get nearly 100k Google referred visitors per month. I see over 260,000 indexed pages, most of them cached. Did I mention the homepage is a PR6?

Subdomain Crazy!

One of the first things I noticed about Ezilon.com was their prolific use of subdomains. I counted about 20 subdomains ranging from country listings to an answer service like Yahoo Answers. Unless you’re site is really large, you shouldn’t need 20 subdomains, one situation in which you could use subdomains is for different languages like Ezilon.com does. Google often treats subdomains as different websites so a subdomain that is for a different language is truly a different website targeting different people.

Ideas and Suggestions

After spending considerable time browsing all aspects of Ezilon.com (and the various subdomains), I noticed a considerable lack of advertising. While this is definitely not a bad thing, it isn’t the best business practice, unless you’re running a pro-bono site. The advertising that I did see was mainly Adsense ads. When you have good page rank and good page views, you should have no trouble selling advertising.

I would suggest targeting specific markets and selling advertising on those pages of the site. Ezilon could sell Miami Beach real estate listings and web directory listings to that market. They could create a process and duplicate their process across the US and the entire world. With Ezilon there are a million different possibilities for upselling and cross selling including homepage advertising and featured category listings.

In addition to the different types of direct selling, they could promote their paid web directory and give out coupons to specific target markets they want to break into. When you give out a coupon to “Company A”, and they sign up, it’s easier to sell the product or service to “Company B”. The sales call would be easy, “I wanted to let you know that Company A is advertising on our website. If you’re interested in advertising as well, I can list you as a featured site and you’re website will display above theirs!” Fear and competition can sell advertising. Company B thinks that if Company A has paid for advertising, I should to. I can be featured above them? Great!

Ezilon has so many PR 6 and PR 5 links, they could easily be selling $2-5,000 worth of text links per month. On this Help Desk page alone (PR6), they could sell a link to any number of help desk companies looking to increase their rankings.

I would suggest starting with an inventory of assets. These assets are mainly high trafficked pages and high PR pages. Once the list is created, start selling!

In addition to the high value assets, there are a lot of other medium quality assets that can be monetized including the Article Submission section. Article Submission services are a great source of passive income.

Another medium value section is the Job Board. It’s a PR 3 with only one untargeted banner advertisement. Even just an affiliate program from Monster or Snag A Job would be better than no monetization.

Now You See…

Ezilon isn’t just another basic web directory with a bunch of junk listings. Their site provides value in a variety of ways and has huge untapped potential! Check out Ezilon Regional Web Directory today!

By |April 30th, 2009|Reviews|1 Comment

If you’re going to spam…

If you’re going to spam, make sure you fill out the boxes… #lame

Spam Email

On a side note, is it weird that I think about #tagging things in real life? The dinner my wife made last night was great! #awesomedinner

By |April 29th, 2009|General|0 Comments