Guest Post by Courtney Tuttle

After making 100% of my money online for the last four years, I have become more and more educated on the process of producing online income. I have made money through blogging, affiliate marketing, and through quite a few other methods. I have created my own products and have been featured on sites all across the web. The honest truth is that none of it holds a candle to making money through SEO. It's dang nice to wake up every day knowing that you're going to get a steady stream of traffic on your sites - traffic that you don't have to buy.

Whether I get out of bed or not, I know that I'm going to be able to make money and I want everyone to have that luxury. I want you to be able to learn how to make money online because if you do, life is going to become a lot easier. I have helped a lot of people to learn this business and hopefully some of my insights will place you on the right track.

The first area where people go wrong is that they choose the wrong keywords. If you are choosing keywords that are too difficult for your skill level, SEO is always going to seem difficult. On the other hand, if you choose keywords that are easy, SEO will seem easy.

Look For Weak Competition

When you're first learning how to make money through SEO, you want to choose keywords that weak sites currently rank for. I personally like to take a look at the PageRank of the pages that rank for keywords that I'm considering. If they have PageRank that's three or less, you know it's going to be fairly easy. If they have higher than PageRank four you know it will be more difficult. It isn't that you can't beat pages that have higher PageRank, it's that it will be a lot more difficult and when you're starting out, you want easy wins.

Look For Value

Another area where people go wrong is that they choose keywords that don't have any value. If you can't make money from a keyword there's no point in getting ranked for it. A great indication of whether a keyword has value is whether advertisers are paying for it with Google Adwords. You can check the CPC in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find out how much the advertisers are paying. I usually only try to rank for keywords that have at least $1 for the CPC.

Look For Search Volume

The last area where people go wrong is in choosing keywords that aren't searched for enough. They don't take the time to check search volume for a keyword. The Adwords Keyword Tool will also show you search volume so you should know how much traffic you can get from any keyword. You can plan on getting around 40% of the traffic stated by the keyword tool. I always target keywords that have at least 3000 searches per month, usually more.

Once you have chosen keywords by following the three rules above, you know you have solid keywords and you can set up sites to target those keywords. Use your keyword or something close to your keyword in your domain name (or sub domain name). Use your keyword prominently within the text of the page you want to rank, and most importantly use it in the anchors of links pointing at your page. Getting anchored back links is by far the most important aspect of getting ranked and if you aren't ranking #1 for your keyword it's because you don't have enough links or enough strong links.

This lesson is super basic but I can promise you that if you follow what's here, you'll be able to make money online through SEO and you'll be able to do it again and again.