keywords “Make money Online”

Why You Can’t Rank For Keyword Make Money Online

Every time I surf internet, I come across thousands, not even thousands maybe millions of blogs targeting the keyword “make money online”. And why not ? It’s such a profitable keyword, its a gold mine basically. There has got to be every possible reason that you are targeting this gold nugget keyword “make money online”. Be it Adsense, Affiliates, CPAs, ebooks, clickbank products and what not – you just name it and have it !

Sounds easy eh? Well maybe not, do you even have an idea how many blogs and sites are targeting this keyword. Well I guess no otherwise I won’t see every other day a new blog just targeting this keyword. Well its funny isn’t it ? A newbie blogger who hasn’t made a cent online and is completely new to internet marketing and blogging starts out with the niche “make money online”. A man who is yet to make a single dime preaching like a guru and rewriting crappy blog posts dreaming after a month or two I will start earning a decent amount of bucks. Well if you are one of those noobs, then you really need to get a life.

Sorry for being rude but before you jump in something make sure you get your facts right. I am not a guru by any means, infact I am just 4 months old as far as my blogging background is concerned, but I am glad i didn’t start a make money online blog. That’s another thing i managed to avoid this by accident :-P I started with an educational blog by accident as I didn’t know about monetization, niches and stuff at that time. Although the CPC sucks big time courtesy Indian traffic but considering the low competition and number of searches it evens out :-P Anyways I am just sharing my experience which might be useful to some guys who are yet to embark their blogging journey.

Ok enough of my blunt tone. Now let’s get real and analyse why the so called profitablekeyword “make money online” is so damn difficult to rank. Lets see a step by step approach. This also might be helpful to you to know a thing or two about keyword research.

We will proceed how every blogger however successful or new starts:

STEP 1 – How profitable is the keyword “Make Money Online” ?

First of all we head to google adwords/keyword tool to see the cpc of the keyword. CPC only doesn’t mean for adsense. A high CPC word basically means that the advertisers are willing to spend money just because it will give them profits. So a high CPC also means this keyword has good opportunities as far as affliates and CPA offers are concerned.

So what we do after opening the google adwords tool is enter the keyword “make money online” (without quotes). Secondly we ensure that we have All countries option selected. Unless you are targeting a specific area there is no reason you shouldn’t select All countries ;-)

Important – You have got to avoid this blunder mistake. See the screenshot below. By default Broad searches is checked in adwords tool, but if you really want to know the actual potential of the keyword as in number of searches per month, you must check Exact.

STEP 2 – How many search counts does “make money online” get and what is its CPC?

As you can clearly see below “make money online” receives a freaking 135,000 searches per month. The CPC of this keyword is around Rs 105 (above 2$). I believe any keyword which has a CPC of above 1.5 dollars in Google adwords tool with a minimum searches of 3000-4000 is a good word to target given the fact that u can rank :lol:

Ok hold it right there. Most of the people stop after step 2, they just don’t care to see the competition and I don’t blame them. Even when I started blogging I didn’t care about the niche, the Keyword competition but gradually I encountered the harsh truth of blogging. Ok moving on further.

STEP 3 – Real competition for target Keyword:

So in this step what we do is head to the BIG G and type the keyword which we are targetting.

Now when we enter “make money online” in google.com we are presented with about 518 million results :? But no that doesn’t mean you are competing with 518 million sites. We already know how important is having the keyword in title and keyword in url. This forms the basis of on-page SEO which I believe you already know.

So now we check how many sites are having the keyword “make money online” in title. so we enter a search query in google i.e.

intitle:”make money online”

We see that out of 518 million sites, around 17 million sites have the keyword in title.

Now we will check how many sites are having the keyword “make money online” in their URL. So we enter a search query in google i.e.

inurl:”make money online”

We see that out of 518 million sites, around 28 million sites have this keyword in their url structure. Now the important thing to note is that the keyword in root domain has more value. As the hierarchy goes deeper the value of keyword in url diminishes. So value of keyword in www.keyword.com is more than www.yoursite.com/keyword/ .

Now the site which has both the keyword in title as well as url will obviously have better chance of ranking. So we enter a query in google

intitle:”make money online” inurl:”make money online”

We see that your real competition has narrowed down from 518 million to around 8 million sites. Thats your real competition :-)

But lol 8 million site is still too much to compete. There is a very little or no chance that you will be able to outrank these sites as some of them are even 5 year old and 10 year old with millions and zillions of backlinks.

Ok so now since you are competing with 8 million sites but since your aim is to rank top 10 in google so if you manage to outrank these top 10 websites you will automatically beat those remaining 8 million sites. So now we will have a closer look and analyse the top 10 results. How many backlinks they have, whats the site’s age ? What’s its PR ?

STEP 4 — Using Traffic Travis to analyse the top 10 results

Well first of all, let me tell you that Traffic Travis is a tool which makes your life easier as it helps in checking the competition, analysing the seo competition and tons of other features including keyword research. You can also use Market Samurai but since Traffic Travis is free I am using that.

So we open Traffic Travis and click on analyse keyword button

Now enter the keyword in the given column, select country as USA as basically we want to rank on .com and press analyse.

Traffic Travis will take a minute or two and present you with the top 20 results and give you an insight of various ranking parameters of the sites like PR*, age (looks like a bug possibly in the below screenshot since its showing 0 for all), h1 tags, title, description, whether the site is listed in DMOz or not, and most importantly, number of backlinks pointing to that page which appears in the SERPS as well backlinks pointing to the whole domain.

*NOTE – By PR we mean PR of the search result i.e. Page and not the PR of the domain.

A careful observation at the above results present the true story. How many search results you see above have a PR 0 among top 10 ? Hardly do you seeany PR 0 site except 1. Each page listed above is having thousands of backlinks for that page alone forget the whole domain :roll: So by the time you build these many backlinks and wait for the google spider to index them, it will probably take years.

STEP 5 – Using Chrome Extensions (Seoquake) and Firefox Add ons to analyse top 10 Results

Well instead of using Traffic Travis you can also use Seoquake Chrome Extension which will present you with the stats just below the search result in google. (See screenshot)

Alternatively you can also use SEO For Firefox Mozilla add-on by seobook. It will also serve the similar purpose ;-) Additionally it also gives the .edu and .gov links for the search results :-)

CONCLUSION – How to choose a good keyword then

Ok I told you why “make money online” keyword is a bad choice. So what are the characteristic of good keyword ? Here they are –

• a CPC of minimum 1 dollar
• Atleast 4000-5000 “exact” searches monthly consistently (You can use Google Insights and Google Trends to see the search patterns for past few months)
• Around 4-5 results PR 0 results in top 10 (Again I stress PR of result not domain)
• Not more than 2 or 3 sites having more than 200-300 backlinks for that particular page (yahoo inlinks for page not link domain)

I don’t look at the number of sites having title and url because ultimately if I manage to outrank top 10 sites then I can say I have achieved my mission.

I guess that’s enough considering my first guest post :-P. If you find a keyword following above conditions, then i guess more than half your job is done. So go ahead find your keyword, stack up some articles, make backlinks, wait to achieve top 10 ranking and milk money ;-) Happy blogging !