Making Money Online by Combining SEO and Article Marketing

Making money online is difficult for many people, but if you combine the power of article marketing with SEO, or search engine optimization, then you have an almost unbeatable combination. Forget the so-called 'black hat' secrets - I learned a long time ago that they are neither secrets nor 'black hat' whatever that means.

The term is intended to convey that somehow these guys are doing something mysterious and illegal online that the search engines such as Google cannot detect, but if you believe that then you are nuts! Google hire only the best, and these guys will spot these antics from many miles away. I once tried one black hat technique, exactly as suggested in an eBook that cost me over $100, and instantly lost my AdSense account for life. Google experts are not idiots, and I lost a good source of income that was earning me around $1500 monthly in an instant by believing these guys.

So forget it! Don't make my mistake. I have now made up for that error which I could have avoided if I had read Google's TOS - not 'black hat', just 'stupid'! Stupid or not, I got over that by following a perfectly legal technique that I read about online known as the 'silo structure' of websites. Using that I can get almost any website I develop into the top pages of Google's search engine results. That makes making money online a little bit easier!

Maybe not always Page #1, but certainly Page #2 and 3. From there it takes a few tweaks to get to the top page, and then you can work up from there. Many of these so-called 'tweaks' involve advertising and link-gathering, and I use SEO and article marketing for that. Being a professional article ghostwriter, this was not a big deal for me, but the point is that it works.

Here is how it works and what you must do.

First, you have to choose different keywords for each of your web pages, including your home page, and use these as your page titles - by that I mean both visibly, at the top of each page, and also invisibly except to search engine spiders: these are contained within Title tags in the HTML in the Head section of your page. As far as I know, this only works for HTML or CSS pages - I don't go much for Flash websites, and I am not sure how that pans out with respect to search engines and SEO. Sorry for my ignorance, but I won't try to kid you if I don't know.

In fact I am getting ahead of myself. First you should have drawn up a plan for your website - a silo structure involves a home page pointing to each of several sub pages. Each sub page has its own title and links, and links to one article page that itself then links to another and so on. Every page links to the Home Page, but to no other page but the next in sequence. I don't have time here to describe the website structure in full, but I know that it works and wouldn't try to fool you if it didn't: you would find out for yourself soon enough!

Another thing that seems to work for me is to arrange your HTML so that the spiders see your text first before any navigation. There are ways to do that, and experts have told me it is 'rubbish', but I get higher listings than these experts. When I point that out, I am told that I am using easy keywords, but what's easy about being at positions 1, 2 and 3 on Page #1 of Google for a keyword with 620 million results? Another totally different website with 131 million competing web pages?

That's not an advert - just some justification that this works. So try that and see if it works for you. SEO is more than just web design and meta tags. It's a state of mind, and article marketing also plays a significant part.

The next part of the strategy is to advertise your website using article marketing. You can either write your own articles or pay for a ghostwriter to do it for you. You will likely have to start off doing it yourself until you are making enough money to outsource. That's another buzz word at the moment: 'outsourcing'. It is simply another word for paying other people to do the work - if you can afford it, and many can't.

Sometimes I wonder if these so-called 'gurus' have their heads screwed on the right way! They charge us a fortune to tell us to get other people to do all the work for us - no doubt they will also be offering their services! Forget it.

Learn how to write articles, learn how to write some simple HTML, and the learn the very basic principles of SEO, and you can make money online using SEO and article marketing to get your web page (you only need one from each website) listed on Page #1 of Google (forget Yahoo and the rest) and you will get loads of traffic to that web page.

Just make sure it is worth visiting, and that you can offer your visitor exactly what he or she was looking for when they used the keyword for which your website is optimized.

RULE #1: if you optimize a web page for one keyword, then make sure that the page offers loads of good and useful information on the topic of that keyword.

Be honest, seem reliable and prove that you know your stuff and you should get the respect of your readers, and then deliver when they click to your web page. That is how to make money online by combining SEO and article marketing. Agreed?

If you want to find out how I do it, visit Article Czar for a free gift and details of how I use article marketing and SEOcious to get top Google listings.