Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Adsense has worked everywhere for me.  Some better than others, but if I experiment with placement and appearance I can improve the yield. If I had a page that really sucked with Adsense then I would be looking for a pay per impression network such as Burst or TribalFusion.

Hello Brian, I'm a Realtor also. Yes, the school of thought is to optimize a page for one keyword phrase. But in our business that is not necessarily the case. Me personally I have about 4 keywords that my site is optimized for. Reason for this is that most people will link to your main page, so the link juice will be for that. I would use this order 1. Dallas Real Estate 2. Dallas Homes for Sale 3. Dallas Condos These tend to be the most competitive phrases in our industry. what you want to do is make sure your title has the phrases based on value. The order above should be the order. meaning your page title should have Dallas Real Estate / Dallas Homes for Sale / Dallas Condos Then natural mix in those phrases into your content but make sure it is visitor friendly content and not just keyword stuffing. Also think about internal linking and your external link profile with these various anchor terms. Note: keep it all natural and legit. The only short cut in SEO is to the Penalty Box.

Alice - thank you very much for this thoughtful & detailed input! I will put it to use.

In addition to Google's Keyword Tool, the recently launched Contextual Targeting Tool in AdWords is great for finding related searches. You will have to have to sign in to AdWords to access it. Well worth it, I've read that it runs on the same engine that fueled Wonder Wheel.

Hey Aaron: First thing to realize is that you've basically decided to get into running and chosen the Olympic Marathon as your first race. The "work from home" category is probably one of the 4 or 5 toughest categories to compete in due to the massive, usually spammy/black hat competition. I'm sorry that sounds like such a downer, but It wouldn't be fair to try to answer this question without first making sure you're aware of the incredibly steep challenge and learning curve ahead of you. Are you certain you want your first foray into SEM to be in such a difficult market vertical? I don't ask that to be discouraging, just to ensure that you've got a realistic view of what's ahead. That said, if you still want to dive in to this specific market... You're clearly wanting to target legit approaches to home-based business. My suggestion would be to initially go after some very specific niches that will help you get away from most of the crap you've already mentioned as your biggest obstacle. The good news is - I think you've already identified a couple. Why not start with specifics like your "how to start a store on Ebay" and "how to start a part-time store on Etsy"? You could focus your keyword research on just these kinds of specific activities, and even get right down to a couple of specific interests (say golf and crafting) that you're already knowledgeable about. They would lend themselves to a lot of really obvious content building, both in text and video. (These wouldn't have to be separate sites, just different categories on the same site)  You could even aim to organize by interest, rather than by business opportunity e.g. home-based business ideas for golfers. This is called "going after the long tail" - specific topics that will have far less volume of interest than the primaries like "home-based business" but with far less competition and a much more defined target audience. Develop and hone your skills with these more accessible targets, then use what you learn to move up the chain of competition. (Or simply spread wider in the long tail with more highly niche targets!) Start with just a couple of these concepts, and as you build them out and start seeing success, find another to add. Don't spread yourself too thin at the beginning. Once you've built up a bunch of these categories of content on your site, you'll naturally be moving toward becoming an authority site on home-based business in general. Because of the spammy nature of the niche, building trust and authority are going to be very challenging but critical to long-term success. You'll most definitely need to build social media networking into your plan also, since done well it can be very effective at building that trust/authority that is much tougher with just a website. Let your passion for helping people come through as much as your specific business expertise. Bottom line, you're going to need to have a clear strategy that's do-able given your current skills and resources, before you start considering how to do the actual keyword research. You're already part way there having figured out that you're up against a very messy category. My recommendation - carve yourself a very, very specific niche and build from there.

Dammit then because I picked a keyword that has 4,400 exact local BUT with a competition of 49-50%. Most of the sites in the top ranking are high authority sites like wiki but don't pertain to my keyword / have only 1 page for it. Lets say my keyword is United States Military. The top sites in the first page don't focus on the exact keyword 'United States Military' but the pages that come up talk about 'US Forces'. Is United States Military and US Forces the same keyword? They are both the SAME thing in definition but I have a different keyword as opposed to the ones listed on google. Another example is "Wireless adapter" when I use the keyword "Wireless USB" and they use "Wireless adapter". They are the same thing in content and definition, but, different keyword. Nothing on the first page has the keyword I mention (even wiki) except for one site that mentions it eight times in the 1 page of content they have focused on it. I also have a .net EMD for my domain as opposed to my 'competition' that dont. Could I take my competition that includes high authority sites with over thousands of backlinks but have only 1 page of content on what they are talking about and I have 5 pages + soon to be thousands of BL?

This is an excellent response Doug. Its gonna help with the call I have coming up right now with the agency

I started out thinking I could learn Google Adwords and save mny company some money, plus increase exposure. After hours of study it seemed the more I learned the more I realised how complex and Involved Adwords became. Almost a science. I then started a trial with WORDSTREAM and finally handed over the whole spend to one of their case managers. I am on my first month and I think the suspense is worse than the study...will keep you informed.

For adwords you don't need to put the geo tag because you are only marketing to a certain radius.  I have seen where the CPC was more expensive when I put in the geo tag. With SEO you def want to put the location unless you are trying to rank nationally.

Another place to look is at the anchor text of the links pointing to your competitor's sites. Open Site Explorer's Anchor Text tag will give you that.

Hi shiftins & donford- thanks so much for your responses here, much appreciated and they certainly make sense! Thanks

I agree with all the thoughts shared so far but would suggest SEMrush as my preferred tool for keyword research. When conducting research, it is important to clarify if you desire to rank in organic search or plan to use PPC advertising. Many of the tools, including SEMrush and the adwords tool Alan shared, define "competition" in terms of ads, not organic search. High competition means there are several bidders for PPC ads who are bidding close to the same amount. This information is completely unrelated to organic search. Even tools which evaluate competitiveness for organic search can be highly inaccurate. For example, many tools will look at the current top 5 or 10 results and strictly grade based on PR / PA. There could be less relevant results from sites like Wikipedia or other heavy hitters which rank strongly for the query therefore showing it as highly competitive. By targeting your keyword usage you may be able to beat other sites on some keywords. To clarify, I am not recommending you try to ever compete head to head with Wikipedia, but there are ways to beat them in some spots.

A recent article on Youmoz blog that has some great general ideas on this topic --> http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012 I know it doesn't go into many specific ways of rectifying the situation but it does have a lot of valuable information.

Yes there is this route... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tracking-organic-ranking-in-google-analytics-with-custom-variables

Well the question was "How can I find more easy keywords? " keywords people place in their meta tags are usually challenging and even if they are not challenging one must do the research to figure out if they are challenging... Another thing I like to do is check for related searches in a google search

This is one of those questions that doesn't have a definite answer. It's an example of where SEO is more of an 'art' than a science, but in a best case scenario, you're only targeting 1 keyword phrase per page. The single most important place on a page to place your keywords are in your title tag. A title tag should only be 65-70 characters in length, so there are only so many keyword phrases that you can fit into that space. Your target keyword phrases may include city names automatically making those target phrases longer. You also want to place your target keywords as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible. So say for example you had 'California Real Estate Agents | California Real Estate Brokers' as your title tag, that page, all other things being equal, would have a better chance of showing up for 'California Real Estate Agents'. So the 2nd keyword phrase that you're targeting in your title tag is going to be less effective than the first one, and if you're targeting a 3rd one, it's going to be even less effective. In theory, you want want to take a look at all of the keywords you want to target, and map each of those keywords to a specific page on your site.

+1 - I used to spend a lot of time getting high off good rankings and low off poor ones. But it's too much of a rollercoaster, and as kchan says, doesn't actually help you build your business. These days I try to stay away from timesinks like this as much as possible and focus on strategy and implementation. (Don't open your email until 11am - my top tip for getting your business moving

No problem at all. Thanks a lot for the tips!