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This is a guest post by Adriana Copaceanu who loves doing
keyword research and talks about her online adventures at My Online Business Journey

It’s a fact: in order to start a successful online business you need to research your market first. Do you struggle finding the right keywords for your niche? It’s not hard if you know how to do your research. Many use Google’s External Keyword tool, the WordTracker tool, or a tool that pulls their data from one of these. And there is nothing wrong with it, but if you want to be ahead of the game, you need to be a little more creative, and research in ways that others don’t.Today we’ll take a look at how eBay can help you with your keyword research.

Go to the home page of EBay, and start typing your main keyword in the search box. Let’s say I was researching “men’s watches”. As soon as I start typing my phrase, there is a drop down box that shows several potential key phrases.

Click on search and you’ll be taken to a page that lists men’s watches, of course.

But what’s important is that you look right under the search box, at the related searches, and you’ll notice some more specific phrases:

mens fossil watches

mens watches seiko

mens watches rolex

If you go over at the google keyword tool and search for “mens watches”, you won’t see any of these searches, yet, they have many exact searches daily. Let’s take a look:

As you see, none of the 3 key phrases discovered above with the eBay search are on this list. So let’s just enter those individually in the Google tool and see what happens.

Surprise, surprise! These key phrases have quite a good number of exact searches.

What you do next, is go back to the EBay search and dig for more key phrases. Click on any of the “related searches” and you’ll get more specific terms. For example, if I click on the “mens fossil watches” which I discovered above, here is what I see:

This search uncovers at least 2 more key phrases I may be interested in: “mens guess watch” with 5,400 exact searches and “mens diesel watches” with 1,600 exact searches. You can go on and on and on, and discover key phrases your competitors won’t, just because you dug a little deeper and thought creatively.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of different ways you can acquire links. Every link buildling tactic comes with pros and cons. I have found that the most effective way to build links is by taking the time to build relationships with experts in your industry, than to just dropping a link in a directory or forum. I understand this is a time intensive process and it requires a lot more work, but the end result are highly relevant, authoritative links. Below is a step by step process to effectively approach potential link partners.

Follow this 4 step process:

1. Make a Potential Link Partner List

If you read industry blogs, than you probably have a pretty good idea who the major influencers are in the industry. Start by generating a list of potential experts/bloggers you would like to contact. Take note of their blog (if they have one), what sites they contribute to, and any social media sites they engage in.

2. Start Following Them

Before you even begin contacting anyone, start following them. If they are on Twitter, start following them. Pay attention to what they tweet about, who they tweet about, who they are tweeting with, and pay attention to their style/personality.

If they manage or contribute to a blog, sign up for their RSS feed and being reading recent and upcoming posts. Start to understand their style of writing, how often they blog, and what topics they cover.

If they use social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, start following their bookmarks. See what type of sites interest them. Find out if they have other types of passions besides just the industry you are in. You may be able to connect with someone on a deeper level (similar intersts, location, background, experience).

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This is a guest post by Daniel Mcgonagle. Daniel writes about link building and SEO at his blog.

Source: Diamanx

The best types of backlinks come from amidst contextual content published on sites very closely related to the sites you’re getting links to.

Adding or getting blog roll or sitewide links provides less SEO value, linkjuice and potential Page Rank “pass-down” than could be achieved with just one article published on the correct type of site.

Getting your content published on other related sites (not just relevant categories) does a lot of tihngs for you.

If site is a top quality site, then it will already have RSS subcribers who will read your content, and these are REAL “eyeballs” who will be reading content they have already expressed interest in, hence their RSS subscription, and they may consider you a new source for top quality information.

This generally leads to increased RSS readership for you and your site if your content is good enough and gets put on the best types of sites, in the right way (good relevant sites, good information being delivered, etc…)

These types of sites are generally called “Optimal Link Targets” which means they’re the best (optimal) places from which you could hope to get a backlink.

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What is a discovery?

You discover a page when you are the first to submit it to StumbleUpon. You can see the member who discovered the page as well as the date when it was discovered to the right of the submission page (http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/url-of-the-submitted-page):

What is a category?

A page is discovered in one of the multiple categories. The category the page is submitted to determines who will see it. StumbleUpon is based on the relevance mechanism: each member is categorized based on his interests – these interests are determined based on the preferences specified by him and also based on the member’s browsing behavior (topics of the articles the member usually stumbles and reviews).

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With the seemingly endless number of social sites popping up all over the web, venturing into the world of Social Media and community voting sites can be an exercise in masochism, if you’re not careful. Every site has its own community, its own culture, its own etiquette and its own set of rules & regulations that users are expected to adhere to.

Unlike many social voting based sites, like Digg and Reddit – which tend to have an inherent hostility toward the search marketing industry – Sphinn, which was started by the team at Search Engine Land, caters specifically to the Internet marketing community. Much like other voting sites, the ultimate goal is to generate enough votes to make it to the “Hot Topics” page, which will expose the content to the biggest Sphinn audience.

Being that Sphinn was created by, is moderated by and its community is made up of Internet marketers, it’s no place for the faint of heart. As a rule, the community is somewhat suspicious of newcomers initially and there are some dues to pay before you’re welcomed into the fold. Spammers, the thin-skinned and whiners need not apply. Don’t believe me? Here’s a taste of what my first few weeks at Sphinn were like… (more…)