If you are looking for a great visual explanation as to exactly how Matt Cutts Link Wheels work, then head over to Alex’s latest post: The Link Wheel Exposed. Much as I have trusted Alex’s guidance over these last few weeks, it is always good to have a visual explanation to go along with the emails! And Alex has put together a good demo about how Page Rank figures in the Link Wheel.

However, today I want to take a little detour away from the actual mechanics of the Link Wheel and remind you of the importance of researching your keywords and making sure they appear naturally in your headings and content and don’t forget to add them to your tags!

I want to start by asking you a question.

Are you blogging:

1. To make money?
2. Because you just want to write?
3. To do both of the above?

If your answer is 1. or 3. then not only do you need to set up Link Wheels and ensure you have great content, you MUST research your keywords. Sometimes it’s hard. You have an idea for a great blog post and off you go.

But if you want an audience, you are going to need a bit more help than just relying on some Tweets, some posts on Facebook and your mates on here to pay you some visits.

In the Squidoo Step by Step Guidebook we explain how to undertake keyword research, so I wont go into it now. But I want to give you some examples of how keywords can get you featuring high in the Searches.

When we set up the Year of the Tiger Tattoos Blog, we already knew that “Year of the Tiger Tattoos” was searched for regularly on Google and that there were not many pages that contained that specific phrase. The research I did also turned up a lot of related keywords. Not only would they need to be used on a regular basis in my blog posts, it is those keywords that will keep me focussed on what topics I should write about.

Thanks to this research, time and again searches for my keywords and phrases are turning my Year of the Tiger Tattoos blog up on the first one or two pages of Google.

I have a confession to make……

When I first set up this blog, I did not do any research *GASP* But in my defense, that’s OK because I did not intend it to become a micro-niche blog. I just saw this blog as being a general repository for anything that came up that I wanted to blog about, to do with me, blogging and Squidoo Tips. I also saw it as a place to establish quality backlinks for my lenses.

However, the blog has recently become “niche focussed” thanks to this Blogging for Profit series. And as I posted yesterday in Part 14, one of the posts on here currently ranks on the second page of Google for the Phrase Blogging for Profit!

Today, I got another reminder about how keyphrases can get you ranked highly

I Googled “Matt Cutts Link Wheel” and had yet another “Oh boy!” moment! Take a look at the screenshot.

Google search for "Matt Cutts Link Wheel"

Yes, an article I wrote on Squidlog yesterday was there at #6 on Google. However, it did not make it there because of the Title, (which was Teaching about Squidoo and Blogging has its responsibilities) it made it there because I had added the tag “Matt Cutts Link Wheel” and because I added a description and title in the summary of the blog that was relevant to outside Squidoo.

Let’s revise the question I asked earlier

Are you blogging:

1. To make money?
2. Because you just want to write for you?
3. Because you want to write for your friends (friends include people here on The Beach and Squidoo)?
4. Because you want to write for a wider audience (people you don’t know)?
5. To do all of the above?

If your answer is 1., 4. or 5. then think again about what keyphrases you need to use. Think about the summary you add in the All In One SEO pack – you are using the All In One SEO Wordpress plugin aren’t you?

If you are not, here are the links to Alex’s tutorial videos:

Simple blog set up

All in One SEO pack for Wordpress

Take a look at the title of this Post: Matt Cutts Link Wheel and Keywords Part 15: Blogging for Profit. Can you see the thought process behind my selection? Do you understand why the phrase Blogging for Profit appears in every title in this series? It is also a category on this Blog – which reminds me, I really MUST sort out the other Categories on here. Categories should be keywords too!

Think about who you are trying to reach with your blogging and any online writing you do. And if it is in the hope you will reach a wider audience, then you need the phrases that will apply to them, not necessarily just your audience on Crabby’s Beach or on Squidoo.

I am out of trouble with Hubpages!

The Hub Emii has a Tiger Tattoo is out of jail and the Cluster is complete. Phew!

Finally, did you notice whose blog is BELOW mine in the screenshot – heh heh

Yesterday I blogged about establishing Clusters in the Link Wheel for Year of the Tiger Tattoos. Today, I am in trouble for failing to properly interpret the Hubpages Terms of Service (TOS).

Let me be clear that I am not complaining. It’s my fault, although those of you who know me are aware that I do try to stick to the rules of whatever website I am posting on!

So what did I do?

I failed to properly interpet the rule about only having two links per DOMAIN. Silly me was thinking it was more than two links to the same URL – there’s a difference. I know the difference!

But, despite knowing the difference, I added three links to Squidoo on my hub about Emii’s tattoos. The Hub published OK but a few hours later I received an email from Hubpages. It included:

Overly Promotional – Solely or excessively promotes another site(s), especially when Hub links all point to one site.

Oh crikey! Moi? Overly promotional?

I headed over to the Hub. Looked through it carefully and at first could not see the blindingly obvious. I had used the links module and in there was the evidence:

• http://www.squidoo.com/year-of-the-tiger
• http://www.squidoo.com/year-of-the-tiger-tattoos
• http://www.squidoo.com/Emii_Tattoos

All different pages, but all part of the same domain. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

I deleted the link to the Year of the Tiger lens, resubmitted the Hub and am now waiting to hear if it is OK. I am a bit worried by the phrase in the email that said:

Please note that repeated violations will result in the banning of your account.

Fair enough but I am a tad nervous in case there is anything else I have not spotted. I’ll let you know what happens.

Blogging for Profit is certainly getting some traffic

On a more positive note, I have been so engrossed by the Stats on the Year of the Tiger Tattoos blog, that I have not been checking the Stats for this one. Boy, was I surprised! In the four weeks since I started the Blogging for Profit series, I have been averaging 116 visits per week, with last week peaking at 156!

Oh and if you just happen “Google” Blogging for Profit, it returns 1,730,000 pages. And OMG (that’s Oh My Gosh), guess who is at #11? Only this: Link Wheels things to remember Blogging for Profit: Part 9

Thank you everyone who has been visiting and commenting. This is what I just lurve about the Word Press Multi User Platform. It gives you the opportunity to set up and be part of a community. You can join in when you want to, you can watch when you want to and if you want some solitary time, you can have that as well!

In Part 6 of Blogging for Profit I posted a diagram of the complete Link Wheel – you may like to just go and take a peek to remind yourself how it was constructed.

You will note in the bottom right of the Link Wheel that there is a lens: Year of the Tiger Tattoos and it was this section of the “Rim” that I decided to look at with a view to establishing its own “mini Link Wheel” or “Cluster”.

This morning I listed some sites that I thought could be part of the Cluster. Then I sketched out a really rough diagram of how I thought this cluster should be linked and after some scribbles and crossings out, I had something I thought would work.

The difficulty is not choosing the sites, it is how they can link together to establish the one way flow of backlinks.

Establishing a Cluster in a Link Wheel

The sites I chose were my Blog at Blogger, Tumblr, another lens and a Hubpage. The main problem was fitting in the Lens and the Hub in a logical way and of course every site in the Cluster had to point to the centre. The diagram, left, shows how it ended up.

The links in the rim are as follows:

Hub – Emii has a Tiger Tattoo
Lens – Emii’s Tattoos
Blogger – Year of the Tiger Tattoos and Link Wheels
Tumblr – Emii has a Tiger Tattoo

Now, the questions I have are:

1) Are there enough sites in the rim of the Cluster?

2) Is it essential to do this with every site that is in the rim of the main Link Wheel?

3) Can someone please arrange for me to have more hours in the day?

Oh boy!

It’s a faBtastic tattoo, so it gave me some material to post in the blog. But it also gave me the theme for a new lens that can point to the Blog!

As I have said before, Tattoos is the most searched phrase on the internet. On the SquidBlog the other day Megan Casey posted some top search phrases to give people ideas to make some new lenses and Lady Gaga’s tattoos was one of them. However, as she does not have a tiger tattoo I did not take it any further.

Emii is an “unknown”, but I have a hunch she may not be unknown for much longer. I checked out the videos her record company has already released on YouTube and although her music genre is probably not quite my taste, I am gambling that she is going to be a hit. We shall find out when her debut single “Magic” is released on 06 April.

And of course Emii has that fab Tiger Tattoo, which turns out to be a Chinese Tiger tattoo. Bingo!

So today has been spent researching the material to pull together a blog post about Emii and the symbolism of her Chinese Tiger Tattoo plus a lens, called Emii’s Tattoos, which has just been published.

Another “nugget” I turned up in my research is that Emii is trying to “go green”, so there’s a link to my Going Green Ideas blog as well, plus a potential post about young Celebs who are going green – it’s amazing what you can turn up when you start digging!

Am now heading over to the blog to draft a post about the meaning of Emii’s Tiger Tattoo. Fingers crossed Emii becomes the celebrity I hope she becomes!

Currently I am only making lenses if they are part of my Link Wheel strategy. However, it is amazing how I have been able to use my lenses: Year of the Tiger, Tiger Clipart and Year of the Tiger Tattoos to do some deep linking. This is where I am linking to specific blog posts, not just the blog.

Then today I realised that if I added a specific page to The Year of the Tiger Tattoos blog, then this may benefit me even more. Both the Year of the Tiger lenses are linking to an external website, so that people can check their Chinese Zodiac sign. This helps them, but it also helps me as the Lensmaster, because clickouts are very beneficial to Squidoo Lensrank.

I realised that if I had the information that people are looking for on my blog, then I could drive more traffic my way, rather than to someone else’s website. This resulted in a new page on the blog: Chinese Zodiac Signs.

Obviously, if I’d had any quality backlinks from the site I was originally linking to then I may not have taken this action!

I cannot believe it is nearly a month since we started this experiment. The Stats are still encouraging with a total of 437 views. Now all I have to do is convert that traffic into some sales!

As anyone who has an Adsense account knows, this Google programme can generate some worthwhile income for bloggers, lensmasters, website owners etc as the ads will normally be relevant to the topic of the page on which they appear. However PSAs normally only appear when there’re no ads available that are relevant to the content.

I have no idea why these ads are appearing on Becki’s blogs, but I offered to take a look at one of them, that has been inactive due to the Adsense problem, and see if either I could help her come up with the solution. Or perhaps someone else on Crabby’s Beach may be able to shed some light on what may be going wrong.

And before you ask, yes, Becki has contacted Google – but let’s just say, the various automated responses she has had, have not helped.

Having just looked at Becki’s blog, it began by displaying the Adsense ads you would normally expect such as links to Bible websites etc. However, it then changed to a Virgin Media ad, which is a Cable company here in the UK and not at all relevant to Becki’s topic, then it switched back to more relevant ads.

While checking, I did spot some things with regard to the keywords and their placement on the Blog Post: Examining Titus 2 in Scripture.

In the Keywords chapter of the Squidoo Step by Step Guidebook, we discuss the research and placements of keywords in lenses. However, many of the principles apply to blogs and websites too.

The first thing that struck me about Becki’s post is that it is a good introduction to what she intends to do with the blog in the coming months. However, some crucial key words and phrases do not appear in the first two sentences . These are the words that appear in the summary of the post in Search Results. They are the “hook” to reel people in to demonstrate that the site may be what they are looking for and can be the crucial difference between a click on the link or moving on without a second thought.

If you look at the first two sentences of the blog, they contain the word Scripture but the all important key phrase Titus 2 appears nowhere.

Another key phrase that does not appear at all in the blog is marriage scripture. I know it is a key phase because I researched it on the Google Adwords tool and discovered that there’s 5,400 searches for this phrase each month.

I then checked the phrase in Google for competition (remember to enclose the phrase in “ “), which at 26,100 pages means that if the blog set up is optimised properly, using Alex’s tutorials on the All in One SEO Pack and Simple Blog Setup, Becki stands a good chance of ranking pretty high for that search term, if she uses it.

I doubt that the lack of key phrases is causing Becki’s Adsense problem, particularly as the Bible-related Ads were displayed when I first looked at the blog and they have since reappeared. So, if anyone with any ideas about what is going on and what may be causing it would like to comment, then Becki and I would be grateful.

Update on Year of the Tiger Tattoos

On the Year of the Tiger Tatoos Blog, the post about Free Tony the Tiger has received more views as a result of searches, than any other topic, including Angelina Jolie’s tiger tattoo, which is probably one of the most famous tattoos in the world! As I said on Giant Squid Open Mike on Tuesday, I started this blog wondering how the heck I was going to find new material but the advice Alex gave me to set up a Google Alert for “Year of the Tiger Tattoos” is some of the best advice he has given me.

Not only are the Tiger Tattoo links from Google Alerts giving me new ideas, they have given me some key phrases that receive a lot of searches and are doing a lot to drive traffic to the blog!

Alex and I went through how the project came about and the thinking behind the project. We also talked about what we each had learned. Here’s just some of the issues we discussed:

The links on the outer rim of the Link Wheel have to be from quality sites with good Google page rank

Examples: Hubpages, Squidoo, Tumblr, EZine – this will help establish quality backlinks

Set up a Google Alert for key phrases

I now have a Google Alert for Year of the Tiger tattoos, which gave me material for yesterday’s post: Free Tony the Tiger and which it looks like is going to snowball. I have already had visits from 3 different people involved in the Free Tony the Tiger Campaign!

DO NOT be tempted to use commercial software to “spin” articles quickly

Google is looking for honest and quality content. You should write all your own articles and ensure they are in your own writing style

Leave honest and relevant comments on other sites

When looking for sites that are relevant to your blog, be genuine in the comments and links you leave

However, none of this is going to work very well if you have not optimised your Blog properly, so we reminded people about Alex’s tutorials on Crabby’s Beach, that will help you set up a Wordpress Blog and optimise it for the Search Engines:

Simple blog set up

All in One SEO pack for Wordpress

On 06 April, Alex and I will return to my “first Tuesday slot” on Giant Squid Open Mike and talk about Keyword research and how to narrow a niche. This will include a live search on air, that we hope people will also do on their own PCs using Google keywords but in the meantime, if you missed it, you can catch up with last night’s show, which is available as an archive recording.

At Alex’s suggestion I have set a Google Alert for the phrase “Year of the Tiger Tattoos” and although I do need to sift carefully through them, I do turn up some nuggets every so often. One such nugget turned up this morning and has formed the topic for today’s post Free Tony the Tiger.

I am still having problems accessing the Affiliate Section of the Tattoo membership site I have been promoting and it really bothers me. If they cannot even give access to their Affiliates, what sort of service are they giving their members? I know the affiliate part of the site has only just been set up, but I may just have to start looking for other sites to promote.

Tonight Alex and I will be discussing Link Wheels and Blogging for profit with Kate and Joan on Giant Squid Open Mike at 5pm EST. I am really looking forward to it

Stats for Year of the Tiger Tattoos

The Search Terms being used include: 1950 year of the white tiger,  water tiger tattoo,  white metal tiger tattoo,  tiger tattoos,  tirger year and it is interesting to see how interested people are in learning about The Year of the White Tiger, which I think should be a topic for my next post on the Blog.

Comments on my last post on here have been interesting and I was caught between two opposing views as Alex and Katinka discussed whether some links between lenses in the Link Wheel should be changed to “rel=nofollow”.

Both Alex and Katinka know I hold them both in the highest regard and it is really tough when two of my friends have different views, particularly when it is a topic that I am only just getting to grips with.

So, what do I do?

Given that I am undertaking this experiment at Alex’s suggestion, I feel I should carry on following what he believes. That is not to discount what Katinka has to say, because she has a lot of knowledge, which I have benefitted from in the past.

However, at Katinka’s suggestion to use Blogger to establish backlinks, I have revived my Blogger Blog and will endeavour to post on there on a regular basis. The biggest problem I have on there at the moment is getting to grips with the new Amazon widget they provide. I thought it was “topic sensitive” but cannot work out the correlation of Mickey Mouse PJs with the subject matter of my last post!

Am now working my way through the “to do” list for The Year of the Tiger Tattoos Link Wheel and then I need to get to grips with “clusters”.

The simplified Link Wheel has now been revised and is complete, with everything connected and flowing in one direction:

Blogging for profit - revised Link Wheel

There’s been a few changes:

• Instead of an Ezine article, I have linked through Tumblr
• The Year of the Tiger Tattoos lens has been published
• The link back from the Tiger Clipart lens to the Year of the Tiger lens has been changed to “no follow”

(And yes, the links above, in the bullet points, have been made “no follow” so as not to spoil the Link Wheel with reciprocal links.)

Tasks remaining:

• Set up an Amazon widget in the sidebar
• Schedule two new posts each week (and I have a list of topics)
• sort out my access to the Affiliate section of the Tattoo membership site, which seems a bit unstable
• revive my Blogger blog to establish backlinks
• check that each site in the “rim” has some good backlinks
• look at the “clusters” – as per the discussion that Katinka and Alex had on the last post

I think the trick for not running out of ideas for new blog posts is to make sure I use very specific topics within the niche. If you look at my original four posts, which were very “general”, in there are many topics that I can post about, e.g. there’s some well known celebrities who have tiger tattoos, in addition to Angelina Jolie. All I have to do is take each celebrity and give them their own specific post from time to time. It’s the same with religions, culture and tigers in literature.

The questions I have are as follows:

• There’s three Squidoo lenses in the rim – is this too many?
• Should I look to have more “articles” in the rim – I have used hubpages but what about other sites?

So now I better work my way through my “to do” list – but the priority has to be a new post and there has not been one on Year of the Tiger Tattoos for a few days!