The techniques that follow are ones that I routinely employ when I am looking to establish my presence in a niche. These skills should be applicable to any niche, though if you are looking for the post profit, you should do the first step many times until you find a stagnant niche you will be able to easily dominate and bring in lots of profits.

Know your Competition
Your competition is a gold mine for data about how the search engine is treating the term your competing for. Look into how much content is on their page, how long they have been around, how many links they have, who links to them, how fast they are gaining links, if they are still growing, etc. It is important to look at growth and freshness of the sites that are winning in the niche. If the sites are growing fast, your site must grow faster. If the sites are barely growing, and have no new inbound linking - congratulations, your job just got easier.

Look at where they are getting their links. Many times you will be able to exchange links, or get free links from the same places they are getting their links. This will also give you a good idea to how much work they have done to get where they are. This will allow you to estimate what it will take to dominate that keyword. Hopefully it is worth the effort.

Optimize your Page
To optimize your pages you need to properly use h1 tags, titles, and content to create a coherent message about your page. Beyond that, there really isn’t much to standard SEO techniques. Once you have optimized your pages so a spider can easily determine what the topics of the page are, then you can really optimize your pages for success.

The real optimization of your site should be concerned with marketing. How are you going to make people talk about your site? Giving away something free is a great way to get links to your site and build volume faster than your competitors. Creating a way for users to contribute content is another way. Image hosts are quite popular. What if you created a free image host that linked back to your niche site with each post, and you marketed this image host in relevant forums. That is one way to optimize your site for success.

Get Creative
Putting an image host on your site is obviously not the only way to build a user base, and get incoming links at the same time. There are many other methods that can be deployed on your site to do this. Remember, the key is that you want to be able to get content and incoming links *faster* than your competition.

Be social. Your site does not have to be a social networking site, but you can integrate with a social network in a creative way to bring users who are savvy enough to potentially help you build some links. If you put social aspects on your site it is a great way to build content though.

Make your site fun! Did I just use an exclamation point? Well anyways.. A site that is fun will attract users, and more importantly get talked about. You would be surprised at how many great one way links you can get just by having something fun about your site.

Winning in the search engine game is about applying a strategy over time. Even if you make it so your strategy involves setting something up, and momentum building from user interaction. There must be some sort of movement with your site, or it will go stale.

I believe it was Shakespeare who said “to follow, or not to follow. That is the question.” Well I have answered. To Follow! Since nofollow was developed to help get rid of comment spam, and it obviously does a worse job at it than spam filters, I decided to open my blog back up with links that the seo spiders will follow. A little incentive to post relevant comments… If people abuse this and clearly are only posting for links then my policy might change. But if you have something to add, then by all means add it. Viva la Community!

More about dofollow and nofollow
http://www.nonofollow.net/11-reasons-against-nofollow/

More about dofollow wp plugin
http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/dofollow/

I have had many discussions with people about making money with PPC. I have outlined 5 critical, but simple to implement steps to achieving success in PPC. This is not a guide to using PPC or a complete guide from start to finish. It is what people who are unsuccessful at PPC typically neglect to do.

1. Learn as much as you can about PPC

The PPC model may be pretty simple in a nutshell, but it is a business where money is made on a margin. Any additional knowledge you bring to the table will help increase your return. Take the Google Adwords course online. It is free, and provides a surprising amount of knowledge about how the system works. http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/

2. Do keyword research

Learn about your niche and how people search for items in your niche. Building a decent keyword list is very important for success in PPC. Just as important though is a negative keyword filter. Words you might be interested in filtering out are words that would imply the searcher is not interested in buying a product but instead is interested in getting information or getting the product for free. Of course you might be able to make a profit for these words if you make sure you bid less on them and your results prove that it is successful. I typically find that the competition is nearly as stiff on the words that are worth less as they are for the words that imply the customer is ready to buy.

3. Track your results

Collecting data from PPC is a very good side benefit of spending money on advertising. This data is very important in decision making and learning about your market. Set up tracking codes and hopefully an analytics program for conversion tracking. This information will support your decision making process about wether to stick with a campaign or pull the plug.

4. Use split testing

You do not have to use a complicated tracking and testing system in order to do testing properly. All you have to do is run two different ads or landing pages, and test which one does better. Use the better one, and then try another change. This is much like the process you go through at the optometrist to determine your correct prescription. What you want to make sure of though is that you make decisions on enough data. A good way of determining what enough data is for your niche is by testing and then doubling the time of the test. If that does not change the outcome significantly then you probably have found a decent test time period. Constantly test, do not ever accept the campaign as perfect.

5. Replicate Success

Figure out what makes you money, and keep doing it. Figure out what costs you money and stop doing it. This is actually universal advice and can be applied to all lines of business and life.