Basics of Search Engine Optimization

I've been in the domain name and webmastering game for a couple of years now. It's not making me a living, luckily I have a good day job. However, it's starting to bear fruit now, after 2 years. Some of my websites are getting steady traffic and some are now ranking on the first page of google for their search term. PPC ad income is now sufficient to fund some additional domain and hosting solutions purchases. It takes a lot of work, and patience. Searh Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a tedious business - sometimes you get quick rewards, but most of the time, and especially with any competitive search term it's going to take time and determination.

My little internet business has grown to a point that I enlisted a friend of mine and we started up a little company. The company now owns all my domains and websites. This has opened up new opportunities, as we have some other streams of income, too, that we can use to invest in new domain names and websites.

The problem is, running a company, even a small one, takes effort and also requires some basic understanding of business administration. Actually, even before starting the company I had already wondered whether I should get a business administration degree. I already have a college degree, and a doctorate, too, but that's in natural sciences (neuroscience) - but I have long wondered whether to get a business degree as well. However, between the day job, domaining, webmastering, and family, it has proven impossible to take a year or two off for and MBA degree.

Recently, though I found out that you can actually do an MBA by distance learning. Excited, I registered DistanceLearningMba.org because I figured since I wanted to find out about distance learning opportunities for an MBA anyway, might as well blog about my research and experiences.

As things are now, I have not started the distance learning mba program, but I am definitely considering an online MBA course - and I did learn in my keyword research that this is a valuable search term, with high competition and potential for good PPC (pay-per-click) advertising income. One reason I am writing this blog entry is to educate my readers about the basics of optimizing for a search term, the other being that I just felt like blogging about what's been going on in my life lately.

The lessons learned from this blog entry:
1) Domaining and webmastering have the potential to produce sufficient income to try one's hand at starting a business, but you have to be patient - it's not going to happen immediately. More likely it will take years to just get started for real.
2) Always keep your eyes open for valuable search terms, and for SEO projects you need domains that are pure keyword domains
3) When you want to do serious Search Engine Optimization, link building is the way to go - write blog entries like this, that hopefully provide value to your readers while at the same time advancing your link building project

In this case, I have advanced my SEO project for the distance learning MBA site, and hopefully written a somewhat interesting blog entry at the same time. I enjoyed it, anyway. Hope you did, too.

SEO lessons: Anchor text is important, but it is not all there is to it. You have to wrap the link inside quality textual content that is relevant to the link. Google looks at the text surrounding the link, not just the anchor text itself.

Don't believe me? Just google distance learning mba and you'll see the effects. Another popular search is Distance Learning MBA India.

Now then, another secret is out: How does one produce content for the numerous websites that one has to set up in order to really get going in the business?

Simple: I can truly recommend spending $24.95 to get a quality 400-word search engine friendly article on any subject from GetContent.com. They write it, you own it, copyright and all. It's a great service.

Check out distancelearningmba.org - the content is from them. It has really been a good investment - the PPC income has paid their fee many times over.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to email me or comment here!