Here are the best and the top traffic generating keywords tracked for the last month on DailySEOblog.

Many of them are long tail keywords while some are good volume searches and is constantly generating traffic.

All of them are picked form my referral stats. I normally believe in SEOing your site to live searches on Google rather than working towards a fancy keyword like “SEO India” which is easily mistaken for traffic. With these keywords, I get a good amount of traffic each day (see the competition number for each keyword), and I’m happy with it.

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TNX.net is a one stop place for both Advertisers and Publishers who’d like to make some quick bucks online. Well, the idea is pretty clear. If you have a blog, you can advertise it on other publishers network at cheap rates and if you are a publisher you can earn money by displaying others ads. Simple as that.

The TNX, website itself has a very user friendly layout and design, where everything is explained at every step. You won’t find it difficult to use it at all. And they have made the registration process too very simple. You just need to give in the minimum details and you’re done!

At the moment, TNX has 41075 users with 31844835 links in the whole system. Pretty impressive!

So how the whole system works on is based on points. You get 2000 points right when you sign up itself. Then for each ad displayed on your site/blog, you get points at TNX and you can redeem it later as money from them.

TNX also has an affiliate program that is easy to step up. Earning money will be an automatic process, once you have the referrals coming in. The pay out percentage is 13.3% for direct referrals which is impressive.

Setting up a TNX publisher account is easy too. Just sign up, install the TNX code on your website, then wait for ther approval which normally happens in less than 2 days, then display ads on your site (max 4), ge the points and redeem them as money form TNX. Pretty simple isn’t it? You can sell the TNX points to the TNX system or other TNX users also.

There is a cool application called income calculator, which on giving in your PR, number of pages and the total number of ads that you are going to display, will give you the amount of money you are likely to make. This is a nice tool just to get you an idea of how powerful TNX is.

For Advertisers, creating an account and finding millions of pages to feature their ads is easy.

The sidebar gives quick access to starting an Ad Campaign. Thanks to TNX’s well-organized Ad Campaign wizard, creating and ad campaign is easy as breeze. You can set the parameters for the sites where your ads should appear on: website categories, geo-location, number of Yahoo Backlinks (YB) and Google Page Rank.TNX even provides a calculator of how many links you will get on based on the parameters you chose and your spending plan (in TNX points)

On the whole, TNX is a nice place to find and sell ads, and make some money or get some great ad deals for cheap rates. Using it is very easy as they’ve take good care in ensuring that the whole process is kept simple and user friendly.

This is an interesting case study for everyone.I hope my readers from outside India give me their sincere opinion on this and not dodge the question. Here goes.

Recently, at a conference I remember the CEO of a popular Indian SEO company proclaim that their company ranks high on Google for the term “SEO India”. And this should show others how good they are and what great deal of business they do.

Honestly, this seemed like a baseless statement to me because, for any SEO company, ranking high for a particular term cannot (underline) bring them real business. I’m talking about real good, genuine, healthy business. From my experience, I’ve learned that good business always come from referrals. And for referrals, there needs to be an incredible amount of credibility towards the company. By just ranking high for the term SEO India, can give you probably one time clients, but if you lack in quality, that’s the end of it. For it’s a service not a product we sell.

And I’ve enough reasons to think that company’s that boasts of ranking high for the term SEO India are bogus themselves! First off, the term SEO India, as suggested by the CEO gentleman itself is not a popular word among clients (US and UK predominantly). Because of the poor quality of services offered by many SEO companies in India, there is a widespread belief that all SEO’s in India are weak, which is not true.Yes, there are weak ones, but not all are.

Out of all my clients that I deal with today, almost everyone (this is shameful) has had a bad experience with an Indian SEO. The common issues raised are that, the so called “professional SEO’s” does not reveal to the clients what they do with their site. They don’t tell them where they are sourcing the incoming links from, they don’t tell them why they are using a particular keyword on the meta tags, they don’t even tell them what they should do with their duplicate content on the site.

I’ve heard this issue with many clients and I think they have all good reasons to complain that Indian SEOs are poor quality. Now, if we further investigate into this problem, we can find some interesting equations.

Normally when a client wants to outsource their SEO work to India, they’d normally go googling. And they are likely to go ahead with the first few companies that they find on Google ranks. The problem arises here. Out of the top rankers for the term SEO India, on Google, many so called “professional” companies use keyword stuffing and hidden text to make it to the top.

Why that frown on your face? Check it out yourself. I don’t want to take names but it is disappointing to see that even in the top results, many of them use the words SEO India, SEM India, SEO company India and many similar keywords either extensively on the top header, in the ALT tags, in the title, more like spam often repeated and in lines with black hat methods.

One simple question here -

If these companies will do such kind of unethical SEO practices to get better ranks themselves, would not they do similar unethical strategies to the clients?

Indeed they will. Now, that explains it all. Doesn’t it ?

Okay, coming back to my readers outside India, I’m just curious to know, what keywords will you use to search for an outsourced SEO firm?

Google Trends shows that nobody outside India uses the search term “SEO India” on Google. Absolutely none. My opinion is that it is the SEO firms in India that are competing among themselves to rank for this term (See the number of ad results on Google), and not any genuine potential client. He might be searching for other keywords but definitely not SEO India. In order to test this out, I’ve changed my title tags and metas to feature the keyword SEO India, I’m just curious to see how much traffic this change is going to bring?

We all spent a lot of time “promoting” our blogs isn’t it?

You comment on other blogs, you pass on links, you join forums, answer questions there, go for link exchanges and what not?

It all makes sense when someone whom you actually targeted really visits your blog and grabs your feed/click an ad. That is the ultimate goal.

Well, sometimes it leads to fatigue, when the ratio gets fat.

That is when the ratio of “Time you spent for promoting” gets larger than “Number of people actually visiting your blog”.

Normally, it should be large, but the boring part is when it gets too large. You touch failure and feels that whatever you’ve done was a waste of time.

Now, out of experience, let me give you one sure shot tip for making someone visit your blog.

This could be anyone - anyone that you wish. You select the target, and I’ll tell you how to prey on him.

This is how it goes.

1. Write a pretty good article. As always, I insist that you write good quality articles and any let down here will spoil the whole show.
2. Now, trim and tie the article beautifully, make it really impressive.
3. Now find appropriate lines in the article, which you think can be used to link to your target blogger.
4. Let this not be his name or his blog name.(see reason below)
5. Let it be some relevant text. For example - “I totally disagree with MY TARGET when he says that”.You can use your creativity to make the text look really interesting. I leave it to you.
6. Use the entire line to link to the target’s blog.
7. After you’ve published the article, make sure that you visit the target’s blog clicking on the link.

That should be it. Now, the trap is something like this.

- You click the link and follow the targets blog.

- Target who is watching his referral stats like a hawk, notices your link.

- He thinks that its an interesting link because of the anchor text(the whole text line) in it, while others used his name to link.

- Decides to check your site.

- Since you have a great article, he probably grabs your feed/comment on the blog.

Why should you not use the blog name or the author name?

Everyone does it, in order to stand out in the referral stats, you need to add the whole text. It’s up to you to make it as distinct and attractive as possible.

How can you be so sure that the target will visit your blog?

Think about it. If you were in his place, would you not?

The last two people I met on the internet, asked me this very same question, which got me thinking.

They were curious and one asked me,

Mani,how did you manage to write up all these content?

Other guy told me that he was curious to know if I copied the content from any other site.

Both very interesting questions. I believe I have a duty to clear these doubts to my readers.

Well, to be honest, very honest - I haven’t copied content from any source (website,newspaper,magazine,) at all. In fact, had it been that way, you would’ve seen at least a few hundred more pages on the site. :) 

All the articles you read here are all written by me and are original in thoughts. Well, on the blogosphere, everybody has their own platform and their own voice. So it’s just about how well you raise it. I have been inspired by many, and I think I’ve expressed my gratitude to all of them in the respective posts.

To be frank, writing articles daily isn’t easy at all. But there are a few things that I learned from my experience that help me make it, even today. I’d like to share it with you.

1 - Consistency
Every blogger who is serious about impressing others should be consistent. Consistency should be maintained in the frequency of posts and the quality of articles. You can take deviations once in a while, like writing a steroid article, like a 101 websites list, that is likely to make it to to Digg pages, but that is just garnishing. The basic course is your articles (whatever your niche is) and the quality of them.

To me, SEO writing SEO articles was more like maintaining a journal entry. I was lucky that I never ran out of topic to write an article. In the old times, while I was an SEO learner, I use to experiment with stuff and whatever the result was, I used to write it all down on the blog. That was a neat trick right? You study and you let others show your work at the same time.

2- Personal style
Even though this is something that I am still confused about, many of my readers tell me that they like the articles because they like the style and the way things are rolled out. So I guess, that forms my personal style.
I always assume that I’m talking to a normal person, who is not keen to  listen to the technical jargons, and write the articles catering to him. This works both for me and the reader. I talk to clients daily and this “jargon less” style is much appreciated by many of them. I adopt the same policy here on the blog.

3- Knowing your audience
Well, honestly, if there is anything that I’ve deliberately done to help me make a better blog, then this is it. There are numerous ways to get this done. You can assume things, try out a trial and error method, ask questions to your readers, and most importantly study from your stats. Use any method, but knowing who your real audience is really important as it lets you know what you should deliver. I get many clues from my organic referrals as to what are the contents that are missing in the blog. So I make it a point to write them up if it’s possible.

3- Communicating with readers
First off, let me say that this isn’t something that’s easy, but I love doing it. I’m not keen to talk to each and every reader at the same time, but may be one at a time. It’s not possible to make all of them happy as well. But what’s important is that you communicate to them. Many people ask me questions on email, and this itself gives me clues on what to write on the blog. People are reading your blog to learn something, so deliver it at the shortest time, in the right manner. It’s a simple concept I follow. To help this, talk to the readers.

5- I’m not a preacher I’m a learner like you
I don’t think that if you believe you are a guru or whatever, (giving advice to everybody), is a good idea. I cannot set myself in that frame of mind, it simply doesn’t work out. I prefer to be working along with my clients or the reader, and sit with them to find a solution, rather than sit on the other side spitting out “gyan”.

This is very much effective, as it helps you and the person you are helping. If it was otherwise, only the person I’m helping would benefit. Which is good, but if you have a better way why not try it?

So everyday, when I face roadblocks and bottlenecks during my work, I research on the topic myself, and record all what I’ve learned. Many of the posts that I’ve featured here are my research topics.

6- Forget who’s listening to you, talk to yourself
Now, this is a worst case scenario, I must admit that when I started off blogging there weren’t too many readers at the blog. Just like any other blogger,  I too struggled to get an audience. But at one point of time, I found that instead of wasting time in looking for readers, it’s better to focus my time in writing good articles. So that if at all someone visited your blog, there was enough content for him to browse. So whenever there was no reader at the blog, I’d talk to myself and write up a post. Adding a little bit of decoration to it, the very same post becomes enjoyable to a reader as well.

So those were some crude tips on how you can write articles on your blog too,and pile them up! Keep in mind, it’s all about quality not quantity, which is why I don’t agree with anyone who’ll say that there are lot of articles on this site and I did a good job in that. It’s a process and it’s going on, it’s  just about making sure that the process is enjoyable, not the final product.

Hope it helped you.

Traffic statistics is one thing all of us check every now and then. There are many tools available online free already like Sitemeter and Google Analytics. But every time it requires you to go a site, log in and wait for the statistics. Honestly many a times, what is shown in the statistics is not what i actually need. There are a few stats that I’d love to track all the time. it’s not the page load time, or the browser platforms people use. But the incoming links, referrers, google search keywords, etc.
No, here is a plugin which simply does that. And it sits right in your dashboard!

It give you statistics that you often look at and pretty quickly too. So no more waiting for boring data loads.
It uses your API key - so after installing the plugin, just enter the API code and wait for 20 minutes and you’re done.
Download the plugin here.

Hey, Thanks for visiting this blog through Stumbleupon.
I’d appreciate if you’d click the “I like it”(Thumbs up image) button on the toolbar.

How did i guess that you visited this blog through stumble upon?

Simple - 90% and more of my visitors these days(from the last stumble on June 1) are from Stumble upon. So i assumed you are a referral !

So, I’m sacrificing my rest 10% readers (feed readers and direct)with this post?

No.

It is more likely that out of the 10 visitors on this site, 8-9 are through Stumble upon - Just like you!!!

And the best way to convert a stumble upon visitor to your loyal visitor is to get his attention on the first visit - just i like i did with this post!

Meanwhile, this is a search engine optimization, blogging related blog written by Mani Karthik, an SEO from India.
Curious?

See my SEO related posts here.

Once again Thanks very much for visiting - don’t forget to click the green thumbs up button on the tools bar!!

(Sshh..Meanwhile, you can write a similar post on your blog too to attract stumble upon visitors. What say?)

Gracias!
Mani

Here’s part 1 if you missed. It is normal to have a blogger’s block.Finding topics to blog can be quite confusing. As said in the earlier post we have tools that will give us suggestions on what the world is searching for and so search engine optimizers recommend you to select one of them and start blogging. Fair enough! But as (link) Michael Gray said, there are two schools of thought here - one is to blog for money and other is to blog for passion. As Michael rightly puts it - you need to strike a balance between both. The methods discussed in the earlier post(part 1) were mainly finding topics to blog for money. Those are the methods that will help you find keywords people are searching for, you may not have a liking to them though.

Today, let’s see if there are any interesting places to find things to blog about. Well, what came to my mind first is the statistics page. All of us like to check our statistics page. I do it when i have nothing to do online. Do you see a gold mine right there?

Yes, the referrals page is a gold mine. If you watch carefully there are those Google referrals links that bought new visitors to your page.(Can be seen in the referrals section). It may look something like -

http://www.google.com/search?q=podcasting%20blogger&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.google:en-US:official&client=firefox

Now, this tells us that somebody was searching for -”podcasting blogger”- and your blog showed up in the results page (not necessarily at the top).This may be because of two reasons.
1- Your blog contained the exact information what the visitor was looking for.
2 - Your blog contained parts of information what he was looking for but it showed up on the SERPs page.

Let’s look at scenario two. If the information the visitor was looking for is available partly on your site, it is more likely that the information he is looking for (now available to you from the url) is related to your blog.

Pick up these informations from the referral url. If he was looking for “Free mp3’s” don’t go ahead and dive in write a post on Free mp3s. Goto the tools mentioned in post 1 (where and how to find topics to blog) and research along the lines of this keyword. Find a match and write an article with the proper keyword density.Ensure that you make good titles that will be easily picked up by the search engines.

This way we can ensure that
- we deliver the articles people are searching for right now.
- we find topics that are related to your blog/articles.
- decrease the bounce rate of visitors.

For more SEO related articles, click here

Blogging is a phenomena today. No doubt about that. User generated quality content, networking and folksonomy has become the essence of blogging. And this is what makes it a phenomena. There are no juniors and seniors in the game as many believe. According to me, everyone who manages to generate quality content is a star - irrespective of whether he started his blog one month back or 3 years.

It’s disappointing when there are categories and lists in blogging. There are bloggers who are categorized as A-List and “Pro - bloggers”, while others are “Z-List” and newbies. According to me this is rubbish, because somebody categorized them on the basis of
- who’s making more money
- who’s got the biggest network
- and who started the first.

None of them is a genuine scale to measure the quality of a blogger.

If it’s making money, then only the ones who managed to initiate an affiliate network, or only the one who managed to make 1000 MFA articles(by employing 5 copy writers), will manage to be the top bloggers. Or if it’s about “starting it first” then those who started blogging in the last 2-3 years are losers.Right?

These days every second blog you come across is a “How to make money online” blog or a technology blog. It’s anyone’s guess that if everybody blogger get’s a 5 digit check from Google, then there’s definitely something wrong in the system. Either there are fraudulent clicks or even if they were genuine, the advertisers should be suffering in their ROI figures(more clicks-no buys).

Okay, let’s ignore the money part - it’s a boring game. I saw this interesting comment on bloggingtips, in my article. It was from a gentleman called Dollar Bear who was frustrated that every other blog he came across was a “Tips to money making one” and clearly he was not interested. He says - I’m not in that group. I must appreciate his statement. It is the voice of a thousand plus bloggers who are sick of the money making blogging thing.

They want to blog because they need to tell the world a different story about something we all have turned a blind eye to, or they want to think differently about an axiom - or they simply have a new business idea. Shouldn’t such kind of talen be recognised and appreciated? What if he too jumped into the bandwagon and wasted his time trying to monetise his site, thinking about the ad-sizes, referrals, links and stuff? That would corrupt his mind - would it not?

The blogging community is a network - the “blogosphere” as it’s called. There are many think-tanks out there who want to make a point.
Any sort of classification and labelling, be it based on the money, or the popularity only corrupts the idea, and should not be entertained. I’d be happy to listen to your thoughts on this..