SEO search engine optimisation tips to work from home

I recently received a request to produce a hub that gave some tips for working from home. To be honest I pondered on that notion and wondered whether I was actually qualified to write on that subject at this stage of proceedings.

Then I thought about it a little longer and I came up with the following rational. I do work from home and I do make money doing that, nothing special about that, lots of people do it but some are much more successful than others.

So what else qualifies me to write about this subject, well I left my native country, moved to France and beside the holiday rental we let out realised that I needed another form of income, that is when I started to look at Internet Marketing a little more seriously.

I had dabbled a little bit before leaving the UK and manged to register myself with several affiliate sites such as Amazon, eBay, Affiliate Window and one or two others. I have also learned how to use their software to create ads and place them on my various websites, these are all activities you can undertake for creating and sustaining an effective home business that can and often will generate money.

As I became more familiar with the whole process of Internet Marketing I enrolled with Google to participate in their Adsense program, actually one of the best and easiest ways to earn money on line.So all in all I was pretty much set up with the suite of tools you need to generate an online income.

Now I am sure that you will have heard this many times before but I will say it again because it is the absolute key to earning money on line, all of these tools are useless without traffic to your websites, blogs, articles or other online entities and more than that it needs to be targeted traffic consisting of visitors who are interested in what you are offering them.

To get traffic you can start from absolute scratch with your own blog out there with the other millions of blogs all vying for a niche, or you can adopt an established presence one that can give you a helping hand towards gaining the coveted Google page rank which in turn will lead to the even more coveted traffic.

There are a few of these presences on the Internet, domains that are already valued by Google for the quality of the content they bring to the Internet, but of course the one I am recommending today for anyone starting out is of course HubPages.

Here are the reasons: -

• an established and valued web presence
• a helpful and supportive community
• free single page webhosting
• page formats that lend themselves to optimising ad placement
• module format that makes it easy to edit and deliver new content on your chosen topic
• affiliate relationships with some of the top online Internet companies

I could go on but I think you are getting my gist, if you are just starting up and want to build an online business from scratch that gives you a great chance of actually getting an income for your efforts, then you could do a lot worse than HubPages.

Doesn't mean you don't have to do all the other things that I am going to talk about in this Hub, there are no cheats, but you will get a significant head start and while you go about the process of producing hubs that can in turn earn you an income, you will already be going through a learning process that will probably take you to a point where you start to stand on your own two feet with your own domains, blogs and websites. But when you get there you should already be in pretty good shape and be a lot more tuned into how things work on the Internet.

If you are ready then: -

One of the best tools for working from home = HubPages

So exactly how do you go about finding a topic, creating a hub and promoting that hub to your targeted audience. I would imagine that you have already guessed that a large part of the approach, from your initial thoughts through to the release and promotion of you hub is going to involve SEO, search engine optimisation.

It is indeed, but that is not all that is going to be discussed, you do actually need to decide if you are cut out for this type of work and whether you really want to do it, so lets get down to it and hopefully have a bit of fun on the way.

General Considerations

Before I get started on the nitty gritty I thought it would be a good idea to consider some generalisations for anyone wanting to work from home and generate an income for themselves.

• Are you self motivated and disciplined
• Can you work for the most part on your own with little social interaction during your working day
• Have you got the necessary facilities for working from home
• What skills have you got or you think you can learn for your business
• Do you know what your business financial model is and will it sustain your desired lifestyle (that's a tough one, but you have to set a target income so you know what you are working towards)

I think you will get my drift here, working from home will not suit everyone, as nice a thought as it is. The bare fact of the matter is that some people need a normal work environment in order to function. So before committing 100% if you have doubts, try some part time activities.

What's my business

First of all if you are going to work from home and you are serious about earning money at home, you have to be passionate about what you are doing, this applies if you are running a gite, designing a website or putting a hubpage together.

This actually doesn't rule out subjects you know nothing about or haven't been involved with in the past because actually a passion can be developed, when you start to research a new subject look for the signs, are you having trouble staying awake, are your eyes glazing over, then forget it, move onto something else.

So forget about the most valuable adsense ads or the most expensive affiliate products with the biggest commissions, if you are not passionate about what you are doing it will show through in the quality of your work and you will very quickly run out of ideas ultimately resulting in your business suffering the consequences.

If you look at the content of my hubs you will see there are a few core trends

• travel
• photography
• skiing
• websites (doing the hubs for example)
• internet marketing
• finance
  

So if you  feel that you don't have enough interests that you are passionate about, then start researching, you have the Internet at your finger tips after all, believe me you don't need too many because if you are truly passionate or you become truly passionate about a subject, you will ferret out new ideas and you will enjoy researching the subject more and in researching the subject more you will come up with spin off ideas for new topics.

I like the analogy of peeling an onion to describe this, you start with the outer layer and you start to pick away at it until the first layer is gone, but underneath there is another layer and then another and when the onion is gone there is a different onion which is similar but not quite the same and the process begins again.

So rule number 1

• If you are truly passionate about what you are doing, the ideas will keep coming and the quality can be maintained.

The very first thing you have to do is to come up with a name for your hub, well that's easy isn't it. You just say what the hub is about and hey presto you have a title. Well that is true, but have you considered exactly what it is the search engines see first, then have you considered why it is they are looking at your title.

This is your first and probably most important keyword or keyword phrase, the first one that the search engine looks at when trying to match the enquiry that has been made.

I'll give you an example, when I selected the title for this hub I used the words I did on the following basis: -

the phrase 'working from home' = 33,100 enquiries on average per month

the phrase 'work from home' = 90,500 enquiries on average per month

The data came from the Google Adwords: Keyword Tool when I restricted the results to an exact match. So by using the words I did, I effectively made my title fit the search enquiry for an additional 60,400 enquiries a month on average as reported by Google, nearly 3 times as many enquiries.

Now 33,100 enquiries a month isn't too shabby, so guess what my next keyword phrase was, and where did I put it, yes right there in the introductory paragraph. The search engines spider your site, look at your keywords/tags and verifies your content matches those tags, if it doesn't then it's 'quack quack oops' to you.

Also remember if at all possible you should be aiming for at least 10 to15 tags per hub that are all contained in the content of the hub and are aimed directly at your target audience.The most important ones need to be contained in the headings for your modules and these should be your primary keyword phrases.

Now we all know it's not that simple and there will be plenty of people out there using the same phrases and fighting for the same traffic as you, but if you don't pay attention to these details then you will be left at the starting blocks, keywords are just one piece (very important piece) of the puzzle that will help you on your way to search engine glory.

Also bear in mind that with HubPages you have a bit of a head start with ranking, this is one of the benefits with using HubPages, hubs already have a strong web presence and a support network so that helps when competing for traffic for the most popular key words. If you are going it alone with your own blog or website you may want to consider toning things down a bit and going after slightly less competitive keywords after all 0% of 90,000 is still zero, bit of a judgment call I am afraid.

For more of an insight into keywords/tags have a look at Yoshi's Hubbing 101: Finding tags (also known as keywords)

So here is rule No.2

• Use text that is based on actual search engine enquiries, make them your tags and ensure that you have exact matches of your tags in the titles and text of your hub.

Contents

Hopefully we have established that the text of your hubpage needs to be littered with keywords and phrases that are entered into search engines in high volumes.

But it's more than that, the subject matter will ideally be unique, new and refreshing. Not easy to achieve in that great big trillion words, world wide web.

So don't cut and paste, just write in your own words, there will be a fair chance you will be covering a subject that has been covered before but at least it can be in your own style with your own edge to it and it will appeal to your own audience.

You need to become an entertainer and I don't mean that you film yourself doing a juggling act and stick it on YouTube (actually that's not a bad idea, shame I can't juggle), but you do need to strike a chord with the audience you are targeting.

There are ways and means of doing that, interesting content, photographs, video, RSS feeds, reference links and really useful information. Also don't forget relevancy, relevancy and more relavancy. It is absolutely pointless having a YouTube video about photography techniques in a hub about poetry.

Search engines like original and fresh content that's for sure, everywhere you go you read that. I am pretty sure they like videos and photographs as well especially if they are driven by their tool sets (I know I am an old sceptic).

Now I read this on HubPages somewhere I think so if anyone knows the source give it credit in the comments, but as a rule of thumb if you can get at least one YouTube video in your hub and 3 RSS feeds providing fresh updates to your page with little to no effort from yourself, then you will be well on the way to satisfying the search engine cravings for multi media and fresh regularly updated content.

This really is turning into a bit of a SEO tips hub rather than a working at home hub, but if these techniques are employed you will need to spend less time revisiting and updating to add new content and freshening your hubs, someone else will be doing it for you.

Lets face it if you are at home and working on your own, you have to be super efficient and super effective, because if you are not you are the only one that is going to miss out. Very often you are your only resource so you need to find ways of utilising other resources legitimately so you can keep your personal workload to manageable levels.

So that is rule number 3

• use interesting, useful and original/unique content that is updated regularly with text that is mixed with graphical mediums to please your audience and the search engines.

So you are sitting at home, you have lovingly researched a subject you are passionate about, you have picked all your very best keyword terms turned them into tags and written them into your contents which consist of unique and refreshing information that perfectly matches your target audience in terms of complexity and detail.

Then you click on 'Publish' and you wait for the traffic to come rolling in and what happens, well at this point it's probably zippo, zilch, nada and what went wrong!!!!

Time to spend some of your precious time promoting and advertising. We all know about the social book marking tools and we post our hubs in Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, we email then use Stumbleupon, Delicious and Digg to get it out there.

There is also the network of friends we build up within the hubpages community and outside of the hubpages community, using forums, blogs, squeeze lists, favorites and becoming a fan, and yes you should use all or as many of these resources as possible, remembering this is a 2 way street and if you want people to help you then it is a good idea to help them and you never know you could learn a thing or two in the process. Be careful not to fall in the trap of spending all your time on social bookmarking sites however, there is only so much value they can bring and you will come across a lot of people where it is all one way traffic, they ask a lot and give nothing, to be honest you are better off without those people even if they do help make your numbers look good.

There is one proviso to the last statement, the squeeze list, your list of email addresses of everyone who has ever been in touch with you for one reason or another, e.g. by subscribing to your blog.

I think squeeze lists are dangerously close to being a spam tool and what I would say is that it's fine to use them as long as you consider that the addressee has a genuine interest in what you have written and/or they contact you on a similar basis. If it's email and hope then I would say don't do it, you will just become an annoying little irk.

So what else is there you can do, surely that is enough. Well not really, we are back to those dreaded search engines and their aspirations of what you need to do in order to fulfill their needs.

Reciprocal linking, one way linking and triangular linking. What on earth does that mean?????

OK you probably know the reciprocal linking, someone with a site that has the same subject matter as you swaps links with you so that you both benefit, grouping your own related hubs and linking to other hubs does a similar thing. Actually Google are not particularly keen on these types of links, they see it as 'you pat my back and I will pat yours' rather than the natural occurrence of one website pointing to another as a source of genuinely useful information, you can see their point really. That said as long as this is not done excessively you can probably get away with it, but something like a link farm is really a waste of time and likely to be seriously detrimental.

Then there are one way links, posting comments on blogs and leaving your URL, answering questions in Yahoo and using your URL as the reference for the information these are ways of getting one way links into your site.Article writing and posting your websites in directories is another.

Then there is who you point to for good quality reference information, Wikipedia is a fantastic resource for this sort of link, but any site that has high quality content especially if it has been rewarded with a good search engine ranking for it's contribution is worth pointing to i.e. you link to their site but they may not necessarily point to yours..

Never forget the relevancy, relevancy, relevancy rule for this however, break this rule and there is a good chance that you will do more harm than good.

Oh! I nearly forgot the triangle, this where you point to a website which points to another website that points back to you. Fantastic you tie 3 websites together without a direct reciprocal link, call it reciprocal linking with a twist, those search engines are sneaky, they like this because it is not seen as the back patting exercise.

One final point and another judgement call I am afraid, sometimes there are times when you do not want to give too much information freely, for example if you are going after adsense revenue it is a good idea for the ads to be your outgoing links in other words to get to the information they are after they need to click on an ad that offers that information. This is perfectly legitimate, you should have ads that are relevant to your content so visitors to your site may want to explore what they have to offer, the whole point of the exercise I would say, so sometimes less is more as they say.

Rule number 4

• Use every resource available to you for promoting and making people aware of the existence of your website including social networking tools, linking to high quality relevant websites for reference, reciprocal & three way linking, posting comments and participating in forums/self help groups.

You know that some of the best resources you have got available to you are right here on HubPages, people that have done the course learned the lessons and are happy to share their expertise

If you haven't already found it there is a HubPages Getting Started guide an excellent starting place for a beginner and quite handy as a memory jogger for anyone who has been going for a while.

Getting your affiliate memberships sorted out

This is how to Sign up to Amazon as an affiliate.

This is how to Sign up to eBAy as an affiliate.

This is how to Sign up to Kontera as an affiliate.(be wary on this one you need lots and lots of traffic to make it worthwhile)

All the above and more can be found via the Forum Frequently Asked Questions page.

A few more very useful hubs

How To Make Money From Hubpages was written by Jimmy the Jock and looks to me like an excellant reference hub for anyone wanting to understand how you make money on HubPages. It's clear to see why he is a top hubber.

Work online from Home this was the top rated hub I could find at the time of writing and looks like a pretty good reference hub for working from home to me.

Over 50 and working from home this was the second highest and is aimed at the more mature members of the hubpages community.

How To Improve Your HubScore
is an extremely well written hub on exactly what it says.

How To Improve Your Hub Earnings this another from the same author, Relache, who I actually think has got her finger on the pulse of HubPages and has worked out some really good techniques for promoting and creating excellent hubs. Definitely worth checking out if you haven't already.

More SEO, but in quite a lot of detail and very comprehensive as it is the first in a series of 4 hubs on the subject.

Successful Internet Marketing: Online Marketing Strategies is a more recent hub on the subject but has some interesting ideas, some of which I will try out myself.

This link is to a private blog from a guy who is getting great traffic to his blog, if he's doing that its worth having a look at what he is saying Work from Home Sites

For more backlinks to your hubs check this out Redgage

Well that's me done, if I find or stagger across any further information I think can be of use to you I will add some updates so might be worth bookmarking this for future reference and to help boost my Google ranking, there I go again.

Hope you find this helpful, SEO is a bit black magic and a little dynamic in nature but I really do believe the techniques I have included here will help your business even if it's only a nudge in the right direction, if I am wrong please let me know, the comments capsule is waiting.

If you want to start writing your own hubs it couldn't be easier just click on the HubPages link and start writing.