Tag Archive for seo

Using SEO for Practical Online Marketing

April 28, 2011 Internet Marketing, Marketing, search engine optimization, Traffic 15 comments

Google Using SEO For Practical Online MarketingSearch engine optimization is more important today than it ever was. There are those out there that will disagree, but as a marketing professional, I rely on hands-on knowledge rather than industry gossip.

Without search engine optimization and search engine marketing, a company can easily end up going out of business before they get their feet off the ground. That’s why every internet marketing campaign should include the search engines.

I am providing this as a general article rather than blogger-specific because many bloggers end up getting into the niche website business. This article will benefit everyone looking for information on search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Onsite seo factors that matter

The following issues must be taken care of before the offsite marketing can commence.

Meta Tags - While many seo professionals (and I use that term loosely) would disagree, meta tags still matter. As a matter of fact, they matter now more than they used to. While it used to be easy to manipulate the serps with meta tags alone, that is no longer the case. Your meta tags can make or break your results however. It is a must that your keywords and descriptions match the page that they are on. Mismatching these items can result in a penalty. Not having the tags can also hurt your site. Matching them however, can result in a boost in your results.

Alt Tags - If your images are lacking alt tags, then you are leaving a huge seo item off the table. You will also hurt your rankings by not using the alt tags. Search engines like to know what an image is saying to the real people viewing your page.

It also helps the blind with accessibility because of text-to-speech technology that is available today. Having alt tags will increase your visibility in the search engines, and perhaps some directories.

Keyword-Rich URLs - Those dynamic urls that look ugly at the top of your browser aren’t as bad as they used to be. Search engines have come a long way since php and other languages were introduced. But it is still a must that dynamic urls get changed to be search engine friendly.

It is important that keywords are introduced into the urls of the pages they are relevant to. This makes it look as if your dynamic website were actually static html. There are plugins and modules for many scripts that are available, and provide this seo-friendly functionality.

Anchor Text - The anchor text is all of that text which is linked. For example, if a link said “click here”, then the words “click here” are the anchor text. Of course, click here is not a good keyword.

It is important to use keywords in your anchor text that match the page or website they are linking to. An example of this would be if you were linking to a website about Michael Jackson Memorabilia, then you would probably want to use that as the anchor text.

Using anchor text that matches the content of the actual link will benefit you by telling search engines that your website is as relevant as it gets. Avoid using general keywords like click here when linking to something.

Anchor text works for both internal links, and external links. If you are doing onsite optimization, you want to link to pages on your site using keyword-rich anchor text. If you are a web designer and have multiple services, then you want to link to the service pages like this… Graphic Design; Web Design; PHP Development; etc. Those are keyword rich anchor text linking to relevant pages, and are more likely to help you rather than using a general term.

Outbound Links - Outbound links matter a lot. Anchor text is just one issue you need to consider. More importantly, never link to another website that you feel is questionable. Also, it would be wise to not link to unrelated websites. Linking to a website that turns out to be bad can end up costing you. Remember, you are the one that’s vouching for them, so you are responsible if they do something bad in the eyes of Google.

Offsite seo factors that matter

Article Marketing - There are many websites out there that allow you to publish articles with author links back to your website. Some of them will allow keyword rich anchor text to be used in those one-way links to your website too.

Social Networking - Google relies on social networks to tell them how popular a blog or website is. For example, if there are 20,000 tweets on an article, it has more social network weight than one with a hundred tweets.

It is wise to sign up with all of the major social networks. They not only provide backlinks and provide traffic, but the shares actually matter more than you can imagine.

Social Bookmarking - Social bookmarks are similar to what social networks do for you. It shows Google your popularity. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are a couple of the majors, and a must-have in your search engine marketing arsenal.

Video Marketing - Youtube is a very important tool to utilize when marketing. When you create a video, you can benefit from the traffic that Youtube already has, but also get some good links through your video description.

Video marketing is more than link building though. You can use it to generate a crazy amount of traffic. If a video goes viral, it can really explode your traffic and result in many people linking to you on their own websites.

Link Building - This can be done in many ways. The best way is through one-way links rather than reciprocal linking campaigns. To build links, you can do many things including but not limited to:

  • Directory Submissions
  • Forum Participation
  • Blog-Hopping
  • Guest Blogging
  • Link Baiting
  • Web Template Sponsorship

Direction submissions are easy, but can be very tedious work. You can find a good list of directories that are free by doing a quick Google search for “free directories” or something similar. If you have an auto-fill feature on your browser, then the work can become easier for you over time.

Forum participation is tough to get going because you have to establish yourself on a forum as a decent contributor rather than a newbie spammer. Take part in actual topics on the forums, and only include your link in your forum signature. I promise you will get traffic this way.

Blog hopping is something I do often. Commenting on an article on a blog is a great way to get backlinks and traffic. Make sure you actually contribute with a thoughtful comment, and not just a “me too” comment. You want to get links and traffic, not blocked.

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to get backlinks, and a ton of traffic. You are establishing yourself as an expert this way, and putting yourself out there in a manner that gets results.

Guesting on some blogs can also result in your article being copied across the net with your link in-tact which results in even more backlinks. I have had every guest post on ProBlogger copied against their rules, but I still benefitted from the stolen article. It’s when people steal and take off your link that you should be offended and in pursuit of justice.

Link baiting is all about writing in a way that turns an article into a viral machine. Such things can happen with resource posts where you link to a lot of useful resources that people just can’t resist referencing.

If you use something like Ninja Affiliate when linking to outside resources, you can easily change those links in the future to ensure they never become broken links.

Web template sponsorship is a trick I have had up my sleeve for years. As a web designer, I have been able to create some nice templates, and offer them under the Creative Commons license for free as long as my designer credit remained in place in the footer. This allowed me to get backlinks using the anchor text that I desired. People love free!

If you want to jump in one template sponsorship, I actually offer the service of designing such templates with your link credit in the footer.

Remember that seo matters

These tips are just the tip of the iceberg. When done correctly, seo can transform your website into a money-making machine. Whether you just want to collect leads, or you want to generate an affiliate revenue, seo will decide how effective you are in your pursuits.

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New Sales Position Open

January 18, 2011 Business, Employment, Sales, search engine optimization, UPDATES Comments Off

I normally post this information on the careers page of my web design company, but this time I am posting it here because it is a commission based sales job. I am very generous with my commission sales positions, and I give you 50% of the initial cost for search engine optimization with a 30% monthly residual commission for sem/internet marketing clients.

If you are able to generate seo/sem leads and close on them, then contact me right away. Comments are closed on this post as I prefer you contact me directly on this page. You will be referring clients to this blog and webdesigntaxi.com for reference.

Again, if you have lead generation and closing experience, hurry and contact me. Last time I announced a sales job, I got 100 responses. Commission based jobs work as an independent contractor.

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Free Coaching for IBP Buyers

January 11, 2011 Internet Marketing, REVIEWS, search engine optimization 3 comments

Until the end up January 2011, I will be providing 2 weeks of consulting and coaching to anyone that buys a copy of IBP Standard, and 4 weeks free for those that buy IBP Professional from this link. After you purchase the best seo software on the planet, forward your receipt to me at brandon [at] brandonconnell.com. Just make sure you purchased the software from this link or you will not qualify for my services. Below is a chart showing you what you get from each license.

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How Important Is Your Traffic From Google?

January 3, 2011 Blogs, Internet Marketing, Marketing, search engine optimization, Traffic 29 comments

Google SEO How Important is Your Traffic From Google?For those of you just starting out, this may not be the article you are looking for. However, if you are a long-term blogger that has been doing it for awhile, you may be interested in tracking how much of your traffic is coming from Google.

Remember firstly that traffic must come from multiple sources. Never keep all of your eggs in one basket. If Google were to drop your blog, then you would be out of luck unless you went at your marketing from many angles. But to this day, Google is my biggest traffic supplier and the amount of traffic they refer grows every single day.

Your ultimate goal should be to get a minimum of 5,000 unique visits per month from Google (low amount) which is realistic when you have hundreds of articles published on your blog. If you opted for the larger articles, then you should be able to land more Google traffic with less articles. That’s how it works because Google simply loves content. If I had a chance to start over, I probably would have posted less of the smaller articles, and more of the larger ones. Luckily, I have tons of both types and they all bring me traffic from natural search engine rankings.


Many people don’t understand the logistics of blogging, and what makes it work over time. It’s not just the fact that you are establishing relationships with other bloggers and general readers. That is a very important aspect of growing your blog, but it’s just a small piece in the big picture.

What makes a blog grow easier over time is the search engines that bring you traffic. Why? Because as your blog grows with more content, your blog has more entryways for search engines to refer traffic. Consider your blog to be a house that is constantly growing and creating more doors. The more content you create, the more doors you have. You may end up being ranked for keywords and phrases that you would never have expected to bring you traffic.

The key steps to growing your Google traffic is:

  • Create Content Regularly – It goes to reason that if you are going to be a successful blogger, you need to create content on a regular basis. Anything done differently can be considered blog abandonment. Work hard to establish a schedule for writing articles. This used to be a tough job for me back when I started because I looked at it as a job. Now that I have been doing it since forever, it just comes naturally. It is just something I do to make my days entertaining.
  • Opt for larger articles – It is ok to write small 300-500 word articles if that is all you can crank out. But if you want that search engine traffic to come sooner than in 2 years, then you need to work hard to make your articles between 1,000 and 5,000 words each. You can easily do this by talking about the things you wrote about in more detail. Explain why they are important, why you like them, how to do them, etc. Help yourself extend a post with a list in the middle of it. Break it up with pictures or videos to make it more entertaining to both you and your reader.
  • Use tags and categories – The more tags and categories you have, the more content and doorways you have on your blog. Make sure your tags and categories can be indexed and followed. They are NOT duplicate content, but rather an extension and filing method for your articles. Don’t be afraid to create multiple relevant blog tags or categories and using multiples for a single article. It will only work in your favor.
  • Google loves Twitter and Facebook – So should you. It’s smart to assume that the more Twitter posts and Facebook shares pointing to your blog, the likelier that Google will assume your content is relevant and make it appear higher in the natural organic search results. That’s one reason why you should take your social networking seriously. It may be about the initial traffic at first, but as a long-term blogger, you will learn that those relationships will ultimately make or break your organic search traffic.
  • Keyword Research – As I previously stated, you never know what keywords and phrases will end up bringing you traffic. However, that does not mean that you do not have to try and target certain keywords that are relevant to your blog. Work on your keyword research, and find out what is popular. Don’t assume that because there is a massive number in competition, that you can’t receive that traffic. When you build up a blog with lots of unique content, you can easily compete with the big guys and steal some of their traffic. Better yet, we can call it shared traffic because those readers will consider you to be one of the gurus too.
  • Diversity in brand – Did you think that EzineArticles and Associated Content were only good for backlinks and direct traffic from article marketing? You were wrong. There is a thing that is a ‘secret sauce’ to local search engine marketing. It is about saturating the market with your brand. The more you can get your brand out into the front, the likelier you are to get that targeted traffic. For instance, if you have your blog ranked #1, your EzineArticle #2, and a review site #4 in Google for the same search term, then the reader will most likely click on one of your links, and ultimately your blog. That’s because they assume that because you are on multiple sites, you must have the most relevant information. When I do local search marketing for my clients, I work hard to get their brand on article sites, review sites, press release sites, and their onsite search engine optimization at the same time. In the end, they are likely to get the customer, and I am likely to keep my search engine marketing client.
  • Blog SEO – Probably the obvious out of all of the things that I mentioned here. But I have come across some blogs that still don’t even have permalinks setup. Dynamic URLs are not cool, and neither is the lack of a plugin like All-In-One-SEO-Pack which can do all of the meta tags for you. Fine, you are not an expert at search engine optimization, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn the basics and get your blog search engine friendly. Do a little blog seo research, and get yourself on track for Google rankings. You will thank me later.
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Are You Getting Top 10 Rankings Yet?

December 13, 2010 REVIEWS, search engine optimization 8 comments

Back when search engine optimization was still a mysterious thing for the majority of the population, I came across a software that has since kept my loyalty. That software is Internet Business Promoter. You can download a free demo of their software, and if you buy, you have a 100% money back guarantee if you do not get top 10 organic results!

250x250 square Are you getting top 10 rankings yet?I have been using IBP over other software like SEO Elite because IBP is just way too advanced than any other software out there on the market.

IBP is a proven SEO software that works

A search engine optimization method that really works is to analyze the web pages that currently have a high ranking for your important keyword. Since these pages have a top 10 ranking, the pages must have all the best settings.

With IBP, analyzing the top ranked web pages is as easy as 1-2-3. IBP analyzes the web pages that currently have a top 10 ranking in the search engine of your choice and compares them with your page.

IBP tells you how the pages have achieved that ranking and how you must change your web pages and the links to your website to obtain a similar ranking. Improving your website has never been so easy. IBP helps you get more customers and more sales with increased search engine rankings.

How to optimize your website for Google

IBP‘s Top 10 Ranking report demystifies Google’s ranking algorithm and tells you in easy-to-understand words how to optimize and prepare your website specifically for better results in Google.

Suppose you want to know how to get a top 10 ranking for the search term “outdoor equipment” in Google. IBP will tell you how to optimize your website for exactly that search term in Google.

IBP‘s advice is based on in-depth analysis of current, up-to-the-minute top 10 results in Google for that search term and it is specifically for that search term and specifically for Google.

IBP‘s high quality analysis results are always up-to-date, specific, and accurate. You won’t get that level of search engine optimization accuracy with any other tool.

IBP also works with Yahoo’s latest search engine ranking algorithm, with Bing Search and all other major search engines. IBP helps you get the rankings you deserve.


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Google Instant on SEO News

November 6, 2010 Internet Marketing, search engine optimization, Traffic 2 comments

This is a guest post by Dan Stevens @ http://www.keywordshack.com

As a blogger and an SEO professional myself, I always try to stay on top of the latest news and developments in the field of search engine marketing and optimization. A significant part of that effort has to do with following various SEO news sources, popular blogs and the recently published articles on the subject. You might imagine how many of those are out there, each claiming to be the most comprehensive and informative source of information. Well, that’s a given – in the SEO sphere everyone has their own opinions on practically everything, me being one of that lot – needless to say that we don’t always see eye to eye on many issues. That is, in part, what makes the field of SEO such and interesting occupation.

Anyway, before I get completely carried away, one of the online SEO news resources I always try to keep up with is the Weekly SEO News section on Axandra. These guys know their stuff, and in most cases I end up sharing their posts with whomever they may concern. But as I have mentioned above, everyone gets it wrong from time to time, and they are no exception to this rule. On Sep 14th, around the time when the Google Instant buzz was at its peak (as I’m sure we all remember), they published an article on how to get more visitors with the Google Instant search feature. It is a very well formed piece of info indeed, though misinformed. They basically outlined a scenario according to which the new search feature does more that merely suggest possible queries by way of drop-down, and present real time SERPs as we type, but it also modifies search behavior. In a perfect world (well, perfect for Google but not necessarily so for the Googler) that might well be the case. Alas, it isn’t so.

Several comprehensive researches have been conducted since the launch of the Instant Search feature, the most impressive from my point of view being the one managed by Nathan Safran of Conductor, and all of them conclude that the Instant feature has had absolutely no influence on search behavior. Without unnecessarily going into the details of this SEO News blooper, I will just mention that their suggestion to “optimize as many of your pages to rank highly on the keywords suggested by Google Instant” is more than just wrong in the way of SEO, it’s unwise (to say the least) in Search Engine Marketing terms. Google suggests the shorter tail keywords, and those are known for high levels of competition that make it practically impossible for the vast majority of pages to rank highly on. Suggesting optimization for these words in order not to “miss a lot of traffic” is like recommending fighting a windmill in order to get more air.

Anyway, the real point of the matter is not that these guys got it wrong and might have convinced others to follow their advice. It is that they neglected to follow up on this issue altogether. I mean, even the aforementioned Conductor research into the Instant feature’s effect on search behavior was re-visited a month after the first data analysis, and the updated info was made public. One would expect to see a retraction or some sort of an article re-evaluating previous advice. In a field as dynamic as SEO, there is always a lot of educated guesswork and testing going on, and that is precisely why it is so important to avoid misinformation and make sure that whatever we’re absolutely, objectively sure of is set right (even if it is in hindsight). As I mentioned in a post on my own blog a couple of days ago, it is better to think wrong than to be wrong without thinking – but in both cases it is best to admit the mistake and set it right when possible.

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Killer SEO: Not Having It Will Destroy Your Blog!

July 6, 2010 Blogs, Internet Marketing, search engine optimization 18 comments
Google 150x110 Killer SEO: Not having it will destroy your blog!

Google Logo

I have been working with search engine optimization since I was 13. I am 29 now, which means I have 16 years of trial and error experience under my belt. Since 2002, I have been doing seo professionally and making some very good money at it. I decided to write this lengthly post because seo is very important to a blog. Don’t think that just because you have a constantly updated blog that you are in the clear in that department.

Seo is the art of optimizing a website for search engine spiders. With a blog, you generally want to create content for the readers. That doesn’t mean you can’t optimize that content so search engines can digest it easier. Understanding the seo process can be fairly easy if you just take it one step at a time.

The very 1st seo changes

Your initial work when doing seo will be an analysis. You need to do things differently if your site is static rather than dynamic. With static pages, you have to do everything manually which can be very tedious. With dynamic sites, you can make changes easily with little effort. In the case of a blog, there are generally freely available plugins that do all the work for you.

Your analysis should check to see whether you are using keywords as permalinks (URLs), alt text in your images, nofollow on “some” outbound links, etc. The reason I said “some” outbound links is because you want to give link love to your fellow bloggers. It is a must that pays off because they return the link love. You might bleed a little bit of PageRank, but it is nothing compared to the amount of commentary that DoFollow blogs receive.

Your initial seo changes should take care of the meta tags. Because you have a blog, hopefully you are using WordPress. If so, then you can grab the all in one seo plugin that will add meta tags to all of your pages and articles automatically. Imagine all of the tedious work you are saving yourself with this plugin. Meta tags are deemed unimportant to most “seo experts” but trust me and my many years experience when I tell you that those so called experts are full of shit. Meta tags are important because Google and other search engines look at them to see if they match the content on that specific page. If they do not, then you get penalized. If they do match, you get brownie points. If you lack them altogether, Google thinks you are a sneaky worm.

Your alt tags have many purposes

Alt tags are something that many seo professionals talk about in terms of search engine friendliness. But did you know that alt text actually was designed with a different purpose in mind? That purpose is to help the blind understand what’s being displayed on the computer screen. There are computer programs out there that read the text on a web page, and convert that text into a voice that will help the blind navigate your website. Imagine if your website used graphics for navigation buttons. Those software programs cannot read the embedded text on an image. If that image was to have alt text, then the reader software would tell the person what that button says. Did you know that there are laws created to make websites accessible to the blind?

Alt text might have been created for the blind reader software, but it is a thing that the seo industry stole for their own purposes. Alt text being as important as it is was added to the algorithm of Google  because they know you are less likely to “lie” about the contents of the graphic. Especially for the entire accessibility issue. It is important for your search rankings that you be as descriptive as possible in a short amount of words within your alt text.

seoelite 300x300 Killer SEO: Not having it will destroy your blog!

Click image for #1 ranking!

Inside linking has it’s anchor

When you link to other pages within your own website, what text do you use? There is this thing called anchor text which means the text contained within a link. If your link code looked like this: <a href=”http://www.brandonconnell.com”>make money blogging</a> then your anchor text would be “make money blogging” because that text is what people click on to get to the link.

Anchor text is your way of telling people and search engines what to expect on the next page. If they click on that “make money blogging” link and find a site that talks about spaghetti recipes, then you are misdirecting them and will obviously piss people off. Aside from humans, if you get caught doing that by a search engine then you will get a nice big penalty.

It is important to use descriptive anchor text when linking to all of your inside links. Your contact page should be linked to with “contact” or “contact us“, your seo services page should contain “seo services” or “search engine optimization”, etc.

Your sitemap is your index

Believe it or not, there are a ton of sites out there that do not have a sitemap. A site map allows your visitors to find all of the content on your website. But for larger sites, it is important to use an XML sitemap so that search engines like Google can find and index everything on your web site. Luckily with the invention of Google Sitemaps, you can easily set one up on your blog. There is a handy free WordPress plugin with the same name that will generate a sitemap and update it every time your blog is updated. It then pings Google to notify them of the new update on your blog so that they re-crawl that link.

Lacking a sitemap is a really bad idea. It means that Google has to just follow link after link on your blog in order to find everything, and they might get tired and just stop crawling. Giving them direct links is helping them to index your blog, so why fight it?

Outbound links and bleeding

Outbound links are the links that lead off of your website. When you have a blog, you tend to link off-site often. You may be reviewing something or providing a reference. Either way, you will bleed PageRank unless you use a nofollow tag on your outbound link. In a standard WordPress installation, nofollow links are standard when linking off site. You would actually have to get a plugin if you want links to be DoFollow (links not containing a nofollow tag). Some WordPress themes even have nofollow hard coded into the theme files so even a DoFollow plugin would not help if you wanted to change into a DoFollow blog.

When you link outwards, you have to consider the anchor text that you use just like you do with inside linking as mentioned earlier. You want to be as descriptive as possible of the website you are linking to. Not just the website, but the contents of the exact page on the external site you are linking to.

If you simply do not want to bleed PR, or the site you link to is unrelated and you don’t want to get a penalty, then use the nofollow tag on the external link. A nofollow tag looks like this <a href=”http://www.yahoo.com” rel=”nofollow”>Yahoo!</a> and you can manually create one in html mode if you have DoFollow enabled.

It is OK to bleed PR when you are linking to quality websites, and websites in relation to your niche. DoFollow will actually help you in this case because it shows you are linking to relevant websites and not just because someone paid for, or exhanged a link with you.

Reciprocal link exchange

Reciprocal links are ok to use, but there are some guidelines. I don’t use reciprocal links with my blog because honestly I believe that my content can stand on it’s own merit and I will gain inbound links naturally. But for those of you who are just starting out, there is nothing wrong with a reciprocal linking program. I used to do it, and it gained my new website a PR4 status in just one month.

When I was reciprocal linking on a service site, I was careful with whom I traded links with. I made sure that the links were relevant to my sites topic. If it wasn’t relevant to my topic, then the inbound link held no value to my PageRank. In addition, outbound linking to a non-relevant site would have penalized me.

Reciprocal link pages should not be named “links”, “partners”, “resources”, or something similar because Google knows to look for such things. They give them less value because they know it is a manipulation method used to gain PageRank and natural search engine rankings.

When you do link-trade, try and find relevant sites that already established some PageRank. This will help you grow your PageRank faster because it shows that established websites think that your site is a great resource.

Make sure that when you do reciprocal linking that you use a broken link checker. You want to ensure that you are not linking to a non-functioning page. you also want to make sure that the page than linked to you did not remove your reciprocal link or add a “nofollow” tag to it in order to get some blackhat benefits.

All of the work involved in reciprocal linking was too much for me with this blog because I spent so much time adding real value to it. A reciprocal link campaign can easily eat up a few hours of your day which could be better spent adding content that others will provide a one-way link to instead.

Content is king

That is a very old saying in the seo industry, but content is still king regardless of what some idiots say. Content is what someone out there is searching for. You are reading this article right now, and this article is content. If I didn’t have this content here, chances are you may have never found my blog.

Your content should be added and updated often to be relevant to your visitors. With blogs, luckily adding content is easy to do. You just have to login and add some words here and there until you have a complete article. It is important to provide good articles though, and not just some pitch for an affiliate program or service offering. If you provide free quality content, then the affiliate sales and other money will come if that is what you are looking for.

The more content you add to your site, the more search engines will crawl it. I have Google and tons of other spiders on my blog throughout the day non-stop.

Link masking

I find it important to use pretty links because not only to they mask my affiliate offers and look more attractive, but they also add nofollow links to off-site affiliate products. In addition, they ensure that I don’t end up with broken links throughout my blog because I can go in to the pretty link setting and change the url that it links to anytime I wish. I find myself addicted to the pretty link plugin and often create new links to track.

Summary

While this is in no way an entire course on search engine optimization, it is the basics that will ensure your blog is doing the best it possibly can to own some search engine real estate. If you follow the techniques I specified here, you can compete with even the big bloggers out there and overtake them in a year or less.

If your blog search engine friendly?

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How to Build Your Email List With Google’s Help

June 28, 2010 Internet Marketing, List Building 11 comments

This is a guest post by Alex Whalley

email list 150x150 How to build your email list with Google’s helpIf building a list is so critical to online success, wouldn’t it make sense to get help from as many places as we can. Google provide the biggest helping hand anyone can get online and bloggers use it all the time to help get their content read, so why don’t we get Google’s help with our subscriber count too then?

Everyone talks about how to SEO the crap out of your page, heck even I do it – a lot, but no one seems to touch on the importance of your actual opt in form. We use SEO to get more targeted traffic from Google and other search engines to our site, but why not employ Google to help get that traffic on your list too?  The money is in the list, or so I am told, and building your mailing list is crucial to your long-term blogging success, so doesn’t it make sense to optimise this process from the very beginning?

When you build a mailing list with your blog the most common thing to do is to place the opt in form somewhere above the fold in the sidebar or header and this is all well and good, but what chance do you have of optimising that opt in form when it sits on your main blog, a site that is competing for a whole gamut of keywords. Why not take a leaf out of the ‘squeeze page’ book.

Put your Opt in form on a domain all by itself.

Squeeze pages have been doing this for a long time and there is good reason for that – because they work!  A single page opt in has no distractions to stop the visitor giving up their email address, there are no exit points apart from the opt in form itself and the sole reason the page exists is to ‘squeeze’ the name and email from the visitor thus adding them to your sales funnel. By creating a separate page for your opt in form you can eliminate all those distractions that your blog provides. You can then configure the Auto Responder Service to send them to a page on your own blog where you can give them their gift and thank them. That way those who find your page through Google can still see your blog and all your amazing content. It’s a win win situation, but moving your opt in form to a separate page has a few bonus benefits too.

Space is a commodity.

I am sure I don’t need to try and convince you that there is not enough room on both sidebars combined to add all the widgets and links that you want to add. The Optin form is usually quite large and seeing as it needs to be above the fold, you can lose 50% of the sidebar to it. By having your offer on a separate page you can simply add an image and link to it in the sidebar or header. This looks a lot neater, takes up less space and best of all, those who are regular readers and already signed up to your list don’t have to stare at the opt in form day in and day out.
By creating a separate page for your offer and opt in you are able to Optimize it for the right keywords, link to it (a lot) with keyword rich anchors from your own blog, Create less distractions for those coming for the first time, and keep your current subscribers happy by removing the obtrusive form from their face. It really is a win for everyone so go and register a domain; It’ll be the best $7 you ever spent.

BIO:
Alex Whalley is the author of Alex Whalley.com where he writes about blogging, niche site marketing, and keyword research techniques. Alex recently quit his full-time job to tackle niche marketing full-time and uses his blog to catalogue and document his experiences with making money with niche sites and search engine marketing. If you’d like to see how easy it is to build, market and monetize niche sites check out his blog. You can also Follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his RSS Feed.
Twitter.com/alexwhalley23
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CSS vs Tables. Why Styles Have the Advantage in Your Seo

June 16, 2010 search engine optimization, web design 9 comments

Back when I first started coding html, I learned how to do so with tables. I was self taught, and I spent hours upon hours learning new things. Eventually, there wasn’t a single thing that I was unable to do with tables. As an seo expert though, I changed with the times. Tables were very bulky, and took up space in an html file. It was important to get all of your text content as high up in the code as possible, and tables didn’t allow that to happen. That’s when I taught myself css (cascading style sheets).

Css allows you to get all of your content positioned with as little code as possible. You would place all of your styles in a css file, and reference it in your html header. That way, the code wouldn’t bloat the html file and you can call a style and position with a small one-liner peace of code.

I decided to write this because as a blogger, you have to consider your seo aspects. Blogs are very content heavy, and it is important to get that content high up there in your code. It is important as a blogger to know css rather than rely on someone else. What if something happens to your site that needs to be fixed right away?

I can make some recommendations… A book sitting not more than 3 feet away from me right now is:

stylinwithcss 300x229 CSS vs Tables. Why styles have the advantage in your seo

Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide (2nd Edition)

Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide (2nd Edition)

This book is not too large, but teaches all the basics and some advanced stuff. When you are done with it, you will know a good amount of css (buy this book on Amazon).

I am not going to write a huge review or anything because that’s not what this post is about. I just want to tell you that it is one of the only 2 css books I own. Why? Because it is nice to have a reference book laying around, and I already know css pretty well.

Starting at around $16.80, this book won’t break the bank so there is no excuse not to know some css yourself.

Stylesheets are amazing. They have allowed me to take a website with 200 lines of code, and recreate it with about 20 lines of code. That’s an amazing 900% reduction! It’s also cool to watch as it happens.

Now I am not saying that you have to be a css master to be a blogger. I am saying that knowing css will allow you to create your own blog themes, and fix a theme you want to use. I often find WordPress clients that need to make small changes to their layout and have no idea how to do it. As a designer and coder, I am not cheap. I charge industry prices as any serious designer would expect to do. If one were to learn css, they would save hundreds of dollars when they need something custom.

I am also not saying that tables are bad and a definite no-no. Tables have their place. You can use them as what they are, and lay out some data in a table format. An example would be when you are looking at a comparison table when deciding which version of software or a service to buy. Tables can be very helpful, but they should not be your web layout backbone.

The great thing about css in general is not it’s seo properties. It is the fact that you can do some exciting things design-wise. You can do things like creating a css dropdown menu without using dhtml or javascript by using a css hiding element. You can overlap graphics, and position things in a way that tables do not allow. The potential is limitless.

What are you waiting for? Go learn CSS!

Already know it? Or want to learn it? Tell me about it below!

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The SEO Book for Bloggers… Make These Changes for Greatness

May 29, 2010 Blogs, Internet Marketing, search engine optimization 12 comments

Why an SEO Book for Bloggers?

Google 150x110 The SEO Book for Bloggers... Make these changes for greatnessI decided to write an in-depth tutorial on search engine optimization (seo book for bloggers) for my fellow bloggers because it is a topic I am very knowledgeable about. I have been doing seo since I was 13 and I have over 15 years experience in the field. Nowadays, I can easily rank 1st page for competitive keywords while all the other seo experts eat my dust. It is something I am proud of, and I want to share my techniques with you.

Let me give you fair warning. This is a huge article, so set aside the kids and get the reading chair ready. Unfortunately the only way I could provide in-depth is by really explaining everything in detail.

Ok, so what is search engine optimization exactly?

Search engine optimization also known as SEO is the art of making a website search engine spider friendly. It is the tweaking of HTML code and on-site content in order to make your website index-able by search engines. If you know a little bit if HTML, you can do your own optimization work, but only on a static website. What does this mean exactly? Well, larger dynamic websites use programming languages that make it difficult to optimize correctly. A static website has no programming. It is created by using plain HTML. These types of sites are easiest to optimize, but for a blogger this is not the solution for you. Blogs like WordPress for example are PHP based and PHP is a programming language.

Dynamic sites are way different than static. There are different types of dynamic websites out there. Some are custom, some commercial, and some open source/free. Because you are blogging, you will most likely use a commercial or open source blogging solution. My recommendation has been and will always be WordPress as a standalone solution. By installing WordPress on your own hosting account or server, you are maintaining control of your blog. If you decide to opt in for a free hosted blog like blogger.com or blogspot, then you will have zero control over your search engine optimization. On top of that, you will also have no control over monetization of your blog on a free hosted platform. It is best to start out with your own hosting or server and installing WordPress or having someone install it for you.

Why wordpress?

Ok, this is great. I LOVE talking about WordPress because it has so much to offer. Aside from the fact that is is much more search engine friendly than anything out there, it also has free tattooed all over it. Everything from free design templates, to free plugins which add to it’s already extensive functionality.

There are elements of search engine optimization that you need to know about, and I am going to tell you what they are and how they relate to WordPress. I am going to get some hate mail from some of my followers because they use Joomla as their platform which is also free, but not as extensive or search engine friendly.

Meta Tags

Meta tags have been around since the beginning of web pages. As a matter of fact, anyone could get top 10 rankings in search engines just by telling search engines what they wanted to rank for in their meta tags. This died out shortly after because search engine were in the competitive industry of being relevant. But over the years, many so-called seo experts swore on their mothers graves that meta tags no longer had any say in anything search engines. I was an outcast for calling them liers. Of course, their “knowledge” has caught up to reality. Meta tags are important because it tells search engines that you have nothing to hide. If you have meta tags that match your page content, then you are more reliable than a web page without meta tags at all. If you have meta tags that do not match the page content, then you end up getting penalized for spamming the search engine.

WordPress has a wonderful plugin called All In one SEO Pack which is a free download. This plugin will automatically generate meta tags for your posts as they are created. The meta tags generated match the content on that specific page so you don’t have to manually insert the title, description and keywords. This is a major time saver. The plugin also allows you to manually choose what you want the tags to say in case you want more control over them.

ALT Tags

These are the tags that get attached to images on your site. Now you can go and manually add alt text to every single image you upload, or you can use a free plugin called seo friendly images. This will add the functionality of automatically adding alt text to your images that have none. Search engines look for alt text to describe the image because a search engine spider cannot read a picture. It needs you to tell it what is on that picture.

Another reason why alt tags exist is that there are blind people that surf the net too. Because they cannot see, they have software that tells them what is on the screen. In order for that software to tell them what they are looking at, you have to specify the alt text on a picture.

Anchor Text

A very important part of optimization is making sure you have the proper anchor text used when linking both on-site and outbound. Anchor text is the actual text you read that is linked to another page. If you were to look at the categories on this blog, you will notice linked words. The words that you see are the anchor text used to go to that category.

Anchor text has to match the content on the page it is linking to. You would not link to your homepage by adding anchor text that says “about us”. Anchor text tells search engines (and humans) what to expect when they click on that link. Just like humans, search engines will get upset if you lied to them.

Anchor text allows you to use keywords to link to your content. This helps you get ranked higher for those keywords so it is important you spend some quality time working on your anchor text.

You will also need to spend some time deciding on how to link to other websites. Anchor text works outbound as well. If you are linking to a blog, then use anchor text that describes that blog. For example, you would link to this blog with the anchor text “make money blogging” because that is what I write a lot about. If you were to link to this specific article on this blog then you would want to use the anchor text “search engine optimization tips” or something similar.

Anchor text is something that can really affect how your website ranks in search engine. Web designers actually design free templates and use anchor text hat they want to rank for in the footer where there design credit goes. That way, they end up with hundreds or even thousands of inbound links with their desired anchor text telling search engine what their website is all about. I am about to release my own free premium web templates with my anchor text included for this blog. This will also help me increase my PageRank.

Content

Probably the most important of seo, content is what search engine spiders like to see. They love text, pictures, and video content, and each one of those things can bring you search engine traffic.

Because I wrote this with bloggers in mind, content should definitely not be a problem. If you ever want to make your blog successful, then you need to add fresh content on a regular basis. Blogging allows you to add text, images, video, and even audio. If you wanted, you can even provide downloads for your readers. WordPress provides all of these features out of the box.

The article you are reading now is huge, and search engines will love it. But it is important to keep in mind that you are providing content for your readers and not the search engines. If you provide value to your readers, I promise that you will do well in the search engines.

When you start a blog, the first thing you probably did was choose what topic you were going to write about on a regular basis. That’s called choosing a niche. When you have your niche in place, you know what keywords you are going to want to use in your articles. How ill people find you? What will they search for? Those are the keywords you want to provide in the title, and content portion of your articles as well as the tags and categories.

While it is ok to provide small articles with 500 words of content or less, it is better to at least occasionally write articles with 2,000 words or more. Not only will these articles be rich with keywords in their content, but they are more likely to attract inbound links from webmasters who thought your article was worth sharing with their own readers.

When you write any length of article, make sure you provide sources for some of the things you are talking about. What I mean by this is that you occasionally link to a website or a tool for readers to use in order to understand what you are talking about.

Site Map

A site map is a necessary item for any website, static or dynamic. Luckily, Google Sitemaps is a free plugin available for WordPress and is the only sitemap you will need if you use WP as your blogging platform. It will ping Google every single time you publish something new or updated. A sitemap will allow every single post and page of your blog to get indexed by search engines. If you have a static site, then your site map would be targeted more to the actual visitor so that they can find every page within the site all linked from a single page.

If you do not have a sitemap on your blog, and you install one now, you will see a huge improvement in your Google traffic. Chances are, not all of your pages are indexed right now but can easily get there fast with a quick install of this plugin.

Interlinking

What is this big word? It means linking to other posts and pages on your blog within posts and pages. But the question becomes how to do this on a blog with hundreds of posts. I use a solution called BM KeywordLink. The BM stands for blog mechanics. This is one of my favorite WordPress plugins of all time, and I install it on every single blog I setup.

Interlinking is important to help search engines deep index your blog. Not only that but it allows you to automatically link to a page or post you deem appropriate for a specific word or keyphrase. I also use it to link to an affiliate offer, and I allow automated linking as an advertisement option on this blog.

You will find BM KeywordLink useful because it will automatically link to pages using the anchor text of your choice (see anchor text above).

Link codes

Link codes are HTML codes that you provide for your readers so that they can easily link to your website or blog with little effort on their part. If you notice, I have an easy linking code underneath this article that you can copy & paste on your website to link directly to this article.

I own other websites where I not only provide linking codes, but some of them I designed banners for and provide linking codes for those as well.

Understand that off-site factors have a huge impact on where you stand in the serps. By providing an easy way for other websites to link to you, you are inviting one-way links to you.

Now that this article has reached it’s end, I am inviting you to use the linking code below and link to me.

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