Hello

       Hello kiddies,

       I can still call you kiddies because, as I write this, you are nine and four years old.

       Today’s lesson is on a very important facet of online marketing, called keywords and Meta tags.

       A whole lot of emphasis is placed on key words for search engines and for Google ad words so it is very important for you to…

Always Know

What Your Keywords Are!

        This letter is about the process of coming up with that list of words.

        My pop used to say that in long copy ads, you sell the lifestyle or about how your life will be so much better, after you use the product. So if you were selling acne cream, you would write that their skin will be silky smooth and quote people saying they felt so relieved to not worry about how their skin face looked.

        It would show not only before and after pictures but the first one would be of a sad lonely girl with acne and in the next she will be getting hit on by several good looking guys.

        With Google adwords and search engines, the customer is putting in words to get information about something they are at the very least curious about.

        So we can't use keywords like yacht and lay around all day in bed, which we may want to show in an ad about making money. Nobody will be typing in "yachts" when they want to learn how to get rich.

        We will specifically speak a lot about meta tags in this lesson because we use them to help develop keyword lists, but this list of keywords is VERY important to Google ad word campaigns and search engine optimization.

        To start coming up with our keyword list I think the first step is to profile our potential customers and try to do a search from their prospective. In our case, I think we are looking for people with money who want to preserve it or know where to invest it in this economy.

        Our prospects are not looking for a job, but they are worried about keeping theirs. They are people who want financial freedom and to be independent. They feel insecure and want security. The ones with a lot of money want to stop the damage.

        These people usually also feel there is some sort of collusion or conspiracy by some small secret club of rich and powerful people. The funny thing is, nobody who actually believes this, wants to stop it. They just want to…

Get In On it!

        I don't deny or affirm this concept of a shadow organization controlling the market, but I sure will use it to entice those that do believe it exists.

        Now I am going to imagine I am a person with one or two of the characteristics I mentioned above and start searching the net using Google to look for ways to invest in this economy.

        I will write down all the words I type in regardless of what comes up from the search. I will note if something too odd does come up.

        Imagine deciding to try your hand at English style cooking and looking up spotted dick (no joke, this is the name of some sort of English food.)

        Since in the end these words cost us money, we will want to avoid any words which will bring the user into a bunch of undesirable websites.

        The examples in this lesson easily get out of control in length, so I am only going to use a couple in each time I need some to make my point.

Here are just a few of my searches.

• Where to invest in this economy.
  
• What companies made money during the depression.
  
• Who does well in a recession.
  
• List of companies that do well in hard economic times.
  
• How to survive a depression or recession.
  
• Industries that do well in a recession
  
• Where to park money.
  
• Investing in 2009
  
• What looks good to invest in for 2009
  
• How to retire early.
  
• Where to get the highest interest rate.
  
• High yield investments.
  
• Best new businesses of 2008

        Okay you can see where I am going here and I will be doing this for some time to come. Your key word list is always a work in progress and when you think of or hear a word that sounds good you may use it.

        People are always switching words for age old products or ideas. Hair gel turned into "product" and lying became "disingenuous", so keep abreast of buzz words in your industry too.

        Now I am going to reduce the searches to just a list of words like so.

        You can go ahead at this point and cross off words that are too common such as "of", "and", "for" etc.

Next, I will put them in order of priority and then use a thesaurus to find other common words that mean the same and other people may use that I didn't think of.

        For example, if you go to www.thesaurus.com and enter in economy you get :

abridgement, austerity, care, carefulness, caution, curtailment, cutback, decrease, deduction, direction, discretion, husbandry, layoff, meanness, miserliness, moratorium, niggardliness, par city, parsimony, providence, prudence, recession, reduction, regulation, restraint, retrenchment, rollback, scrimping, shrinkage, skimping, sparing ness, stinginess, supervision, thrift, thriftiness
This one didn't give us much else to think about. I highlighted the only two words I think may be of use at some point.

        The next word I put into the thesaurus is "recession" and we did much better. Here is what came up.

bad times, bankruptcy, big trouble, bottom-out, bust, collapse, decline, deflation, depression, downturn, hard times, inflation, rainy days, shakeout, slide, slump, stagnation, unemployment

        I dare say we hit pay dirt with that one.

        Now it is time to peak at what the competition uses. What you want to do here is look at all the websites that popped up in your searches, especially the ones that are dealing with services or products similar to yours.

        This can get a bit confusing to simply write about so I have created a video tutorial to help me show you.

Click Here For The Video Tutorial (High Rez 46.2 megs)

        Once you are at their homepage find the word view. Between different browsers and different editions, the word is in a lot of different places depending on which program you are using to surf the Internet.

        Once you locate it, click on the word view. A drop down menu will appear and you want to select view source.

        This is the html and will look like gobbledygook but up near the top you will see the word META and then the list of keywords or a description the search engines like Google use, to find websites they think people are looking for.

        The reason I didn't look at the competition's keyword list first, is I will start to get into their frame of mind once I start reading them. I may have a separate thought pattern that comes up with different words than they do. I don't want to miss the unique words I might come up with, by going right into their frame of mind.

        Do not be surprised if their list of meta tags or keywords makes more sense, is larger or obviously better. They have been at this a lot longer.

        There should be no bruised egos in money making, only lessons to be learned in order to improve.

        I just did a quick couple of searches at Google.

        Here is a list of just a couple of sites that popped up in my searches. You should note how I mark them so I can put more emphasis on one than the other.

        Here are the words in their meta tags I found relevant.

        Some of the sites used only Meta keywords or a website description.

Always do both!

        If these words spark new ideas for other words and phrases, great, if not, it didn't hurt.

        Now it is time to assemble the final list of words in order. Take the ones you think will most likely be punched in the search engine by your ideal prospects and put them first.

        Pay special attention to what the most professional competition puts first. Again, we are not reinventing the wheel; just making sure it is as round as possible and better than the other guy's wheel if his is not perfect.

        Use these words for your website description and meta tags.

        These words will also be important for search engine optimization, site name (if not already chosen) and Google adwords.

        That is it for today kids.

        Lots of love and luck,

        Pop

PS I will publish my final key