You build a website and then … fizzle. Nothing happens. The fact is what you built is a little tiny island in the great big sea called the Internet. The only way people can get to your island–or even find out that it exists–if if you (a) take them there (that’s advertising, covered earlier) or (b) you build an airport and get some airlines to fly in and out.

The airline model, transposed to the Internet world, is links. Most writers don’t understand links, and it’s a shame, because we writrs have a natural edge in linking.

Basically speaking, a link (also called a hyperlink) is one of those blue underlined words or phrases that–when clicked–magically transports you to another place. When Internet mavens speak, they talk about inbound links and outbound links. It’s the same as planes to an airport. The links from elsewhere that take people to your site are inbound links. The links on your site that take people to other sites are outbound links.

Inbound links are better.

There are two reasons you want a lot of  inbound links, and one of them is intuitive. The more links on other sites that lead folks to your site (inbound links), the more likely it is that people will visit your site. It’s like setting up an airport.

There is another reason you want inbound links and this gets into the mysterious world of SEO (search engine optimization). When search engines evaluate your site to try to decide how it should appear when a person types in your keyword(s), one of the many things it looks for are inbound links. In other words, the SEO spiders (that’s what they’re called) want to know how many other sites think that your site is important. Inbound links is a bit like celebrity or popularity. Furthermore, the more important and authoritative the linker is, the better off you are.

Let’s take a medical example. The American Heart Association runs a website which is considered authoritative for the keyword heart disease and probably many other related keywords (heart attack, arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation, congenital heart disease, heart failure, etc.) Now let’s say that the American Heart Association thought that a website called “What Patients Should Know about Heart Attacks” was so important that it recommended readers check it out to learn more about heart attacks. It didn’t actually “endorse” the site in so many words, but what it did was offer a short description of the site and a hyperlink to that site.

That’s an inbound link and, furthermore, that’s about as great a link as you can get. It means a very respected, authority site like American Heart Association thought that “What Should Patients Should Know About Heart Attacks” was worth knowing. To a search engine, that American Heart Association authority link confers on your site a high degree of respect. The search engine is more likely to bump your site up in the search engine rankings because of that link.

On the other hand, if Dr. Smith’s Cardiology Clinic linked to your site, that inbound link would be great, but not as good as American Heart. And if some weird little site that nobody visited called “MakeYourOwnHat.com” linked to your site, it would be worthless. It would be worthless for two reasons: first, the site is little and weak so it doesn’t have much oomph to transfer to you. Second, and more importantly, it’s off-topic.  A hat-making website endorsing a heart attack website … not a good fit.

So you want to get links. The ideal link is from an authority site–but you may not be able to swing that. The next best links are links from popular high-traffic sites. That’s where writers can win.

What you ought to do is write some articles and distribute them to ezines. There are a lot of online sources that publish articles all of the time and offer them–free or at modest cost–to members. The only catch is that publishers of these articles have to print them exactly as is.

Let’s take an example. You have a website called Over50Wedding.com and your goal is to sell all sorts of things for people getting married later in life. Now let’s say you wrote an article about the 10 most popular over-50 honeymoon destinations or how to manage blended families in a late-in-life wedding or even the ins-and-outs of the quickie Vegas wedding. These are all good topics because they sound interesting and they tie naturally back to your Over50Wedding.com site. You write the article but at the end you put a resource box where you not only say your name and a bit about yourself, you add something to mention your URL. For example:

This article was written by Lurleen Thibodeaux, who has helped plan hundreds of wedding in and around her hometown of Savannah, Georgia. To find out more ideas for late-in-life weddings, just click to Over50Weddings.com.

Now you know that I’m a marketer. You can amp that up a bit. Try this:

This article was written by Lurleen Thibodeaux, who has helped plan hundreds of wedding in and around her hometown of Savannah, Georgia. To get a free report on How to Avoid the 10 Most Common Mistakes in Later-in-Life Weddings, just go now to Over50Weddings.com. This offer only good while supplies last.

The free report would be a document that is available on your website. I admit, it’s a bribe. But it’s an ethical bribe along the lines of a “free sample.”

Where do you distribute your articles? You can first get a list of ezines by just Googling Ezines. There are some mega-sites that offer a whole roster of topics. You can also go to Google Groups (just Google) and find weddings or seniors or related topics. You can also just search “keyword”+ezine.

You give the article away. In fact, if you’re smart, you’ll give lots of them away. If they are well written and would inspire a person to click back to your website, you’re doing great.

Most websites are content-starved and most webmasters are out online all of the time trying to drum up decent content. You are there … offering free content! Now any time they put your article on their site, you get an inbound link … and you may also get people who jump on that link to visit your site.

Offering your articles to some of the mega-sites is a good idea, too, because that gives you an inbound link from a gigantic, high-traffic site.

You can also target authority sites in your niche. If you knew of some great senior site or some excellent wedding site–you might be able to offer free content to them in exchange for a link.

This strategy is a strong one and it works well if you do it consistently over the long haul. So why don’t more people do it?

They can’t write!

That’s why writers have a real edge here.

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I’m not talking about how to avoid rude, crude, lewd, or unfair comments by people on the Internet. For some reason, the Internet brings out extreme qualities in people and people who are naturally rude and contentious in real life can get pretty obnoxious online. That’s not what I’m talking about today (although it’s a worthy subject).

Instead, I want to address problems writers can have when they try to start an online enterprise. Enterprise here can mean an actual business (like “buy my e-book” or “sign up for my online home-study course”) or more of a promotional enterprise (like a blog or a website that advertises your writing business). The web is a very different medium than most of us trained-for-print writers know about.

You can get a black eye building your website (or having it built). How much does it cost to build a website? Well, you might as well ask how much it costs to go on vacation. It depends–not just on how much you want to spend but what you want to do and how you want to do it. If you have the skills, you can probably build a super-great website for under $100. But few of us have the skills! If you hire a designer or web professional to build your site … expect to spend thousands, even if they give you a deal!

• When I realized how much it can cost to build a site, I started to learn how to do it. My reasoning was that investing a few thousand in learning website architecture was money well spent–since I could use it for other websites and business. If you’re only going to ever need one website, this may not be good reasoning for you.
• I also learned that you can outsource portions of your website. For instance, you can build the basic site and then hire somebody to add a forum to it or to design the header or to create some Flash graphic.
• However, I also learned that there are very few easy, comprehensive, logical guides that take you from ground zero to a fully functional website. You are going to have to get a lot of your education piecemeal.

You need to get a URL. That’s the “name” of your website. You do this by registering it at a business called a registrar. There are lots of them. I like GoDaddy.com but there are lots of others.  (Google “domain registrar” to find other ones.) You just follow the onscreen prompts and you can get your name.

• As a general rule, dot-com is better than any of the other extensions, like dot-tv or dot-me or dot-info.
• Lots of domain names are taken. In general, you often have to add a word or phrase to get what you want. For instance, if you want “cameras.com” that’s probably taken. But if you get narrower and narrower you can probably find something that works like “CameraTipsForWriters.com.”
• In general, search engines favor domains that are descriptive. Make sure it matches the content of your site. If you know what keywords are, try to use your main keyword in the URL, aka domain name.
• What about hyphens? Some folks say not to use hyphens, but I disagree. I do think a short, non-hyphenated domain name is best but I think it you can get a great name with a hyphen, it’s fine.

You also need a host. There are lots of host companies out there and many sell you packages which allows you to host more than one domain. This is good if you want to be an online mogul. Know that you need one root or parent domain even if you get a package that lets you host one hundred sites or more. One of my favorite hosts is Hostgator.com but there are lots of others.

• There are some companies where they try to get you to register the site and get hosting all in one deal. This may not be bad but be sure if you register the domain name that YOU OWN IT and not the hosting company. Sometimes hosting companies register it on your behalf but they actually own it.
• If you’re thinking multiple websites, here’s how it works. You have one root domain. Then you do add-on domains. Those are separate sites. You can also do sub-domains which are folders under a specific site–think of a sub-domain as a site-within-a-site. Some people do a site and put a blog on the sub-domain.
• Most of these sites work off of a c-panel or control panel. The control panels I see all of the time have online prompts and tutorials. Get familiar with this stuff and it gets 100% easier. Time spent learning the c-panel will pay off later on.

Those are a few of the early technical pitfalls. But you can also mess up your site by not having a clear purpose in mind. Make sure you know who your site targets, what your targets want, and generate content that meets that objective.

Your site can also flounder if you let it get out of date. You need to keep refreshing content often. Daily isn’t too often, although for most of us, it is a bit impractical. Wordpress and Joomla sites have options that let you “time-release” content, which can come in handy when you’re on vacation or otherwise don’t have access to your computer.

Your site will also fail if you don’t get traffic. Traffic may be one of the most difficult subjects of all. Fortunately, for writers, it’s no biggie. We’ll be starting a series on website traffic this month. Even if you don’t have a website, check it out. In fact, you’re better off if you don’t have a site … because what you learn about TRAFFIC now can help you create the right kind of site.

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One way to use keywords is in building the website. Websites with URLs that use keywords do better in search engines than those that don’t. For instance, if your keyword is “buy books” then a website with that in the URL (for instance 2buybooks.com) should theoretically do better than a website named Amazon.com. I used that as a trick example to show you that while a lot of this stuff is true in theory, you can market yourself to exceptional status. Amazon has been around so long and done so much marketing that it’s now in a class by itself.  But for newer smaller sites without a lot of marketing budget, a keyword in the URL is a good idea.

This is not always possible, but it’s not a bad idea. You should also work keywords into meta tags (for people who build sites, it’s kind of behind-the-scenes descriptors) and in titles on your site.

Now whether this is your own site or you’re the writer-for-hire, you are going to want to write articles that use keywords. You see lots of jobs posted on Elance for “keyword rich” articles. Here are some pointers for writing the keyword-rich article.

1. Do one keyword per article. If you have a list of 8 keywords, don’t use them all in one article. One keyword per article is the neatest.
2. Put the keyword in the title. The title doesn’t have to be just the keyword, but it should include the keyword exactly as the keyword appears. If your keyword is “defibulator,” a mispelling of defibrillator, you can write a cool article called, “Stop Pronouncing It Defibulator.” If your keywords are “drinking olive oil” you could title the article, “Is drinking olive oil good for you?” The reason you want the keyword in the title is that titles are given a lot of weight by search engines and may even appear in your list of articles. In other words, you get a lot of mileage out of the title. Don’t write an article without some keywords.
3. Now you want to write as great an article as you can, but you want to be sure to use the keyword in it in several places. This is called “keyword density” and it’s a bit of a controversial topic. Some people feel that you need a certain keyword density, that is, you need to use the keyword a few times. On the other hand, these same people would argue, you should not overuse the keyword because that would be unnatural. For instance, if you wrote 500 words on olive oil, it would probably be unnatural if the phrase “olive oil” appeared 200 times.
4. Your article should relate to the keyword. This is something I rarely see mentioned, but it is terribly important. The search engines have fancy algorithms and methods to see if related words are used in the article to make sure that you’re not just spamming some blahty-blahty-blah together and tossing in a few keywords. You could try to figure out how to do this or you could just write a related article. I do the latter.

Most sites are built with a keyword per page; of course, you can have many pages with the same keyword. But if you opt for a new keyword–for instance, “California olive oil”–then give it its own page. If you’re only writing articles, your webmaster will know to do this.

The next step is testing. Once the sites are up and running, the webmaster should see how well they rank for certain keywords. Business is also a good barometer. And from there, keywords can be adjusted.

That’s it, that’s what I can tell you right now about the art and science of keywordsmithing. You need to know about this, even if you don’t have a website or write much on the Internet, because it’s increasingly important in our world of “omnimedia” where even articles intended for print eventually wind up on the web.

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How on earth can you do real research to see how your potential customer will ask for your website? You can. It involves data.

Remember, you have a “target” website visitor in mind and you want that target to do something when he or she arrives at the website (be impressed, order your free report, get general information, become a fan of your enterprise, leave an email address, buy a product, etc.) You have worked out at least a few ideas of keywords in your head.

My first stop is a service that costs money. It’s called Wordtracker.com. You can get a free 30-day trial, so if you’re serious about keywordsmithing you test-drive the service. There are two main things to do at Wordtracker. The first thing is to enter the broadest, blandest, “main” keyword you have and then search “keyword universe.”

Coming back to the website example that sold gourmet olive oils, the best broad keyword in that batch is just “olive oil.” Test that out in Wordtracker and hit Universe and you’ll get a whole swarm of keywords that this particular service sees associated with olive oil. In the very top of the list are “extra virgin olive oil,” “virgin olive oil” and “California olive oil.” I don’t know about you, but the California keyword was a bit of a surprise. Another surprise is orthographic. Remember, search engines are terribly unforgiving. “olive oil” was the main keyword, but “Olive Oil” (capped) was in the top 10. Two different keywords as far as the search engine was concerned.

I can then use this same tool to sort out keywords by popularity. Wordtracker tells you how many Google searches were performed for those keywords in one month (you have to check with the service to see which month, but it’s always a past and relatively recent month) in the U.S. (or you can opt for the U.K.) You get a number. Now some people worry about that number in that it’s imprecise. After all, Google isn’t the only search engine in town. Google commands about 2/3 of all searches, but Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and other search engines are left out. Furthermore, the US or UK isn’t the whole world. And I have heard some keyword gurus say that Google tends to under-report. So the number you’re getting isn’t really the exact number of times that terms was searched in some past month in the whole world on every search engne. But the numbers are relative and work pretty well for drawing conclusions.

For instance, California olive oil got just 11 hits. Another key word “benefits of olive oil” got 42.

Using both Keyword Universe and Popularity, you can start to see the most popular keywords. You’ll also see some clunkers and some things off the mark. That’s part of the process, too.

Oh, and as I did the research for this article, I found an interesting keyword with over 30 hits: “drinking olive oil.” Again, a surprise.

The main keyword, olive oil, got about 395 hits. And if you look into the popularity list, you’ll see that people were using keywords suggesting that the interest in olive oil was both for health and skin/hair care.

So what do you do next? At this point you pick out the keywords that seem to meet two criteria:

1. They are keywords that you imagine your target readers would use
2. They are relatively popular

How popular is popular? Nobody I ever met in Internet marketing could answer this. Popularity is a relative term. If you’re selling olive oil, you go into that business knowing that your market is relatively small–there just aren’t all that many olive oil buyers online. So 395 for olive oil with some of the other related keywords might get you to the point that you can identify keywords that might hit about 500. Realizing this is lowballed, you might double it. About 1000 people are going to go for one of your keywords. Is that enough to build a business on? Hard to know, that’s a separate business call.

Some keywords are monster. Diet gets over 4,000 hits (but “lose weight” barely gets 700–see how keyword research is important?)  But niche marketing involves niches which are often very small.

If you’re a writer-for-hire for articles or websites, your client will likely hand you the keywords. Most marketers like to do keyword research themselves because there is a bit of “intuition” and “knack” and “art” to using the data.

Okay, now you have some keywords. What do you do next? Tune in tomorrow and find out!

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