In my last post about SEO, I discussed how SEO wasn’t the only thing left to get organic traffic from. Many people did not share the same views as mine. I accept that, because what I’m going to tell you people is something that you may or may not already know.

In my case, I wanted to figure out a solution to the problem of having my website sit at level zero when it is in the Google Sandbox. Practically there is a 99% chance for you to get thrown into the sandbox, you may be quite lucky if you escape it.

During that 6 - 12 months in no-man zone sandbox, you get no traffic from search engines. You know, ideas come and go. By the time your website escapes from the sandbox, you might have lost interest in that niche.

This happens a lot of times and there is a very practical way of getting out of this situation without having to rely on traffic from social bookmarking websites. They say: At times, examples explain better than definitions. So I’ll also sum it up on an example.

You choose to enter the niche as an electrician’s affiliate. You just start a website and you try to rank for the keyword ‘wiring management’. Then you  discover that after 2 weeks it got sand-boxed. Now, we all know that search engine traffic is the best converting.

An alternative could be to use PPC, but I have a better idea. By doing a simple search  on Google I found that it has some competition by the fact that the first ranking website is a company, they have their website’s homepage ranking number 1, plus the website has sitelinks which makes it almost impossible for us to rank number 1 without having our website compete for it.

So my strategy is, if you can’t get the first position then get the 2nd, 3rd and 4th position. I’m not talking about each one individually. I’m talking about getting all three positions. Next you go to ezine articles and write 1 article. That’s right, 1 article which you think would be highly targeted for the keyword which in this case is wiring management.

Next create a squidoo lens and write a review of the affiliate. This will be used to generate direct sales for yourself and now you will put link to your main website on both the article and the squidoo lens in nofollow. Why? This is where my indirect organic traffic theory comes into play.

I say, use your main website as a middle way between customer landing and the merchant’s website. So basically, in both the article and the lens you will encourage the visitors to go to your website from where they will go to the merchants website.

This will lower your CTR on your main website by 1-2% but this technique is highly effective. I’m currently on holidays, but when I come back I will detailed article on all services that you can use and achieve the best out of it. Once your website is out of the sandbox, remove the nofollow from the links and your website jumps directly into the top 30. As I said SEO isn’t everything, there are many other ways to achieve the same aims you have for a page you’re trying to rank for SEO.

Moreover, ranking for a keyword using ezinearticles or squidoo is 10 times more easier than having your website’s page rank itself on the SERPS. If your website is already out of the sandbox then you can use this technique to dominate the top 10 results and maximize your level of conversions. So what do you think about this technique?

If you suck at SEO or don’t know how to optimize websites for search engines, it’s okay. There’s no need to feel left out. There are hundreds of people out there who don’t know a thing about SEO and most wont even know what it stands for.

I remember having a chat with this guy from UK and he asked me about getting traffic. I asked him, “Do you know about SEO?”, “Who? the Senior Executive Officer?” he replied. For such a guy, it’s hard to explain what SEO is and how it can benefit you and your business.

This is not only for those who do not know about SEO, in fact this is also for the people who do know about it. Let me just say: Would you be able to rank a domain you just bought for a keyword within 4-5 days.

If you’re a whitehat SEO believer I could expect a no. So where does you SEO go then? What if the keyword you’re targeting is time-sensitive. I mean, you just bought a domain yesterday (15th June) and you want to rank for keyword targeting America Day (July 4th), it is next to impossible to rank for keywords in 2 weeks.

So what I’m trying to tell is that keep you options open. Look for alternatives to SEO. I’m not talking about pay-per-click ads or traffic from social bookmarking websites.

Have you ever heard of the term indirect organic traffic? I’m sure you haven’t, because I just made that up. But what it will reveal to you might just change the ways you get traffic.

Yesterday I was talking to this guy who just received his $600 cheque from ShareAsale which was what he earned in a total of 2 weeks. I got him to tell me his marketing strategies and I was surprised when he told me that he didn’t know a thing about SEO and never used any PPC program.

Basically, this guy did not spend a cent and he made money with even les knowledge than me. Of course, he had his website which isn’t even indexed by Google as of now (around 3 weeks old). Curious to know his strategy right?

He joined a forum related to his niche. He spent 1 week gaining authority in a forum. Posting, answering, asking and helping like crazy. So once you have authority you obviously have a great deal of newbies asking you questions. So all he did was refer people to his website and after 2 weeks he makes 23 sales and makes approximately $600. Not bad eh?

The story doesn’t end here. I’ve been doing this for 3 months now and have gotten traffic to website which have been sitting in the Google Sandbox for around 3 months now. I will write a post sometime this week illustrating how you can get the best out of no SEO and let it prove to be more effective.

The fact is, I don’t trust or believe half of the SEO fluff I read online. Sometimes, I go through ridiculously absurd articles with information which is wrong. Though they might be some attempt of a link bait. The fact is it just makes them look a lot more stupid, not to mention some highly honored SEO websites who are making a lot of money on the internet. Talking about old techniques to find the keyword competition, this reminds me of the days when I was 15 years old.

Please note that the technique I’ll be mentioning on this post is not an advice from a professional, neither am I guaranteeing you any results. It is just a way which proved me good results, and as you read you’ll find that it is in fact more sensible and logical than the ordinary way of doing so and will surely help you while making money with niche picking.

So when you received your ‘SEO lessons’, you were told to just google the keyword and see the results google displays for it and there you have it. But as far as I believe this will not find you your actual competition.

The Actual Keyword Competition

In most cases you can outrank 95% of the websites just by putting the keyword in your title. Reason being, those websites are mostly not even about that keyword. If your website is in google’s index and you use a word such as ‘make money on the internet’ anywhere on your page. There you have it, you’re in Google SERPs. You might be at page number 893, but still you’re in the results right?

Hence, you need to be sure of your real competition. We’ll assume that make money is the keyword in this example. This isn’t going to be long, so just bear with me for a few lines:

• Open Google.com/webhp.
• Type inanchor:”make money” and record the number of results shown.
• Type intitle:”make money” and record the number of results shown.
• Add the 2 figures (Figure 1 + Figure 2).
• The result is your actual competition.

Talking about accuracy, your actual competition will be even lower. Don’t give me that puzzled look. You might think I’ve gone too far against your present knowledge but the reason why this is exaggerated is simple. Most of the times you check competition for your keyword, the results in both would have about 40-50% common results.

For example: X is a website about tennis shoes. When it is optimized for the keyword, it will have the term ‘tennis shoes’ in it’s title as well as it’s anchor texts and url. So when you do both of the searches, the same website will show up.

I wouldn’t really like to get into long discussions because everyone has their own ways. In SEO, there is no such technique which is engraved on a rock. This technique of finding keyword competition is fully tested by me and it works great. Since this is my way, you’re most welcome to follow my way and I will lead you to online success and help you to make money.

Since long I wanted to write this post because I’ve been getting frequent emails from people asking me about good seo tools for checking backlinks, checking internal pageranks,etc. without going through big processes. Hence I’ve compiled a list below of the SEO tools that I use which have made my work quite easier. You can use all of these SEO tools free of cost. I’ve listed them in the order of their importance to me.

1. SEO Quake: By far this is the SEO tool which I’m using every time I’m on the computer. To be concise SEO quake is an extension for firefox and internet explorer which helps us to obtain all important parameters that we need to judge a website (The SEO way). It includes parameters such as Google Pagerank, Yahoo! Links, Domain Age and many more. Hence, I would recommend this to all marketers who are serious about making their SEO work easier.
2. SubmitExpress Meta Tag analyzer: Without doubt, the team over at Submit Express has put in some serious efforts at their tools. To me their tools are extremely useful, I wouldn’t really recommend other tools by them but their Meta Tag Analyzer is one useful tool. You can get a good insight of the relevancy of META tags, learn where you’re going wrong and see facts like total links on a page or the keyword densities.
3. Seomoz Tools: I wouldn’t recommend any such tool which involves spending money, so you can try the free tools by seomoz which include term target, SEO toolbox and Link Scape. Especially Term Target which can show you the terms you’re targeting on a page as seen by a bot which can help you improve your on-page SEO factors.
4. Rank Checker: I know it can be a hard task to look for the keywords you’re trying to rank for all the time in google, yahoo and msn. This is when this powerful tool comes into play. In rank checker you can specify the keywords and the domain and it will check your position of the domain you specified for the keyword in all three search engines. You can create different presets to track each domain’s ranking. This tool is extremely helpful to me when I have over 40 keywords for different domains that I can’t check all the time. The only drawback with this one is that it will only show you the ranking if your domain lies in the top 200, but usually that is the range that matters and moreover in terms of traffic a position of 350 is no different than 3500.
5. Google Keyword Tool: I don’t think that there is any internet marketer who isn’t aware of this tool. The most legendary keyword tool in use by Google Adwords. You just enter your target keyword and it will show you the estimated search volume for that keyword and a bunch of other similar tools.
6. Backlink Watch: If you’re addicted to backlinks like me then you need this tool. It gives you a clear image of your backlinks, including the page they are on, the anchor text and the total number of backlinks on that page. I would really recommend this although their pagerank function doesn’t work.
7. SEO Tool Bag Backlink Analyzer: This isn’t much different than backlink watch but on this one, the pagerank displays fine and moreover it highlights the links which hold more importance. The only reason I put this after backlink watch is because it is a little slow because of the pagerank checking and sometimes it messes up the formatting of the page, which is a little bug and needs to be fixed.
8. SEO Tool Bag Internal Page PR: If you want to analyze the pageranks of all pages on any website, all you have to do is enter the its URl here and it will automatically show you the pagerank of all pages on that website which can also be sorted by the pagerank.
9. SEM Rush:  When you want to check on the SEO traffic coming to any website, you go to SEM Rush which gives you a complete insight of  what keywords are giving traffic to the specified website. It might not be extremely useful, but at least it is better than the lousy search terms shown by Compete.
10. Smart Pagerank Backlink Checker:  Although it is still in BETA version but I would still recommend their tool as an alternative to the two other backlink analyzing tools I mentioned before. This also gives you option to show you whether the link is nofollow or not, which can be very helpful in knowing whether the link is passing any juice.

Well, that is almost about it. These are the 10 best seo tools that I have found online. They would prove to be helpful to any internet marketer like myself. So you can check all of them out one by one. I hope these 10 SEO tools will make your work a lot more easier and it can save you a lot of time. If you have any SEO tools in use which are useful as the ones I’ve mentioned above then let me know about them and if they’re good enough, I’ll add them to the list.

Word of thought:  If you’re a serious money-maker, then you can avail the time saved to make more money, just my 2 cents.