Here is another good place to advertise your home based business.

Its called Google Base

Just another excellent method of getting the word out about your service or product.

Internet marketing and search engine optimization in your home based business hinge on knowing what keyword or keywords web search surfers are searching for on the web. By doing extensive keyword analysis you can zero in on the best keyword terms to use when setting up pay per click advertising, writing keyword articles, and optimizing web pages.

Not only is it necessary to know what keywords are searched for the most but also how many times particular keywords have been searched. There are a number of effective tools available for keyword analysis and keyword suggestion.

Yahoo Search Marketing
Yahoo has an excellent tool for helping webmasters and home based business marketers determine what keywords people are searching for on a monthly basis. This tool, located at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php is powered by Yahoo Search Marketing that was previously known as Overture.

Wordtracker
One of the more popular tools for doing keyword research is Wordtracker.
WordTracker can be found at http://www.wordtracker.com/. Keyword results provided by Wordtracker are compiled from Dogpile and Metacrawler. Wordtracker is not free but with the ability to do targeted keyword research the results can quickly pay for the software.

Once you have done some preliminary research you will need to decide which keywords or keyword phrases to target for your home based business. It is best to choose keywords that have a good amount of traffic without too much competition for placement.

For example, let’s say you are marketing a variety of photography books and you search on photography only to find that it had more than 1,000,000 searches last month. The competition for placement with this keyword is probably going to be pretty tough. Try researching on more targeted phrases such as nature photography, landscape photography, photography books, etc.

You will likely find that these terms have less monthly searches and much less competition. There will be a lower search to competition ratio. Generally, a keyword with 30,000 to 50,000 monthly searches is going to be one that you can compete for in terms of placement and being found on the search engines. Instead of spinning your wheels marketing for those who are searching for photography instead create multiple campaigns that market to more targeted keyword phrases.

You can evaluate the search to competition ratio by taking the number of searchs of a particular keyword and dividing by the number of web site which return for that keyword when searched. The higher the number the better. For example, if you have a keyword that is searched for 100 times in a month and when you search on that keyword you return 1000 results then the ratio is 100/1000 or 0.10. If you have a keyword that is searched for 100 times but there are 10,000 search return results then the ratio goes down to 0.01. The larger the ratio the better in terms of your ability to be competitive.

Finding the best keywords to use in your home based business is vital to effectively driving targeted traffic to your web site. Take the time to find out what people are searching for and your efforts will pay off in terms of traffic and sales conversion.

One of the keys to success in your home based business is advertising. On the internet, well placed text links have always been an effective means of increasing page rank and traffic.

Over the last few months I tried a number of text linking schemes. This one has worked best for me. I have seen an increase in backlinks and in traffic as a result of putting this free tool in place.

Its called Link-Vault. All you do is place a bit of code on your site which displays a few links from fellow members. Then in turn your links are shown on other members sites.

Very simple. I found it easy to get up and running.

Here is the link – check it out Link-Vault

My home based business is better for it and I’m sure yours will be too.

Enjoy !

This week has seen a few changes on the home based business site.

Firstly the new page ranks are out. The website was given a PR3 rating. A good start. I really want to progress to the point where its rated a 5 or 6.

To this end I’ll keep writing articles and adding links.

Latest addition to the link program is Link-Vault. This free program places your links on member sites in proportion to the number of links displayed. Means that your link will appear on a selection of targetted sites, some of which will be high value. I’m expecting some good traffic from this.

Also added a couple of pages:

* One on web site hosting to provide information on good web hosts.

* The other on keywords as they are important in so many aspects of the internet.

Have made minor changes to the index page by adding a few more links and changing the Adwords layout a little.

Sometimes, link building is more than just searching out sites to request links from. Sometimes you have to get creative in how you build links.

In this article, we look at another way of building links that doesn’t really require you to go out and search for relevant sites to request links from.

The web is growing at a phenomenal rate.

Technorati, a popular blog search and syndication site estimates that the blogosphere alone doubles in size every 5 months. As of the end of July 2005, Technorati was tracking over 14.2 million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links.

Who knows how much the rest of the web grows? I would bet that while it doesn’t double every 5 months its rate of growth is pretty impressive.

It is because of this growth in the web that other forms of link building become somewhat easier. I am talking about building links through content creation and publishing.

Chances are you are reading this article on the Text Link Brokers blog, or one of a number of syndication partners who agree to republish the article with links intact.
Through such syndication, you could come across this article through a variety of high profile websites on the web. In addition, these high profile sites are industry specific.

This means that any links I embed into this article (which is then syndicated) will ultimately point back to this site on important key phrases.

Think about this, for the time it takes me to write this article, I could have built as many as 2 dozen high quality, keyword rich links back to both the main site as well as the blog site.

Normally, for me to build 2 dozen high quality links for one of my clients I’d have to start with a list of about 500 somewhat related sites, filtering out those that are lower quality and submitting to 50 to 100 sites in hopes of achieving those 20 or so links.

And it has been my experience that I would be lucky to achieve 5 to 10 links from that initial list of 500 sites.
All this would have taken me about 5 or 6 hours – even longer if I hadn’t used a few tools to help gather those links.
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