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Posts Tagged ‘seo’

On Page SEO

This is where SEO starts, plain and simple; if your site is not optimized for the keywords you are targeting, you’ve lost the battle before you’ve even started.

Hopefully you have had a chance to go through part 1 search engines explained and part 2 search engine rankings and keywords. This will make more sense if that is the case.

In this post I will be pointing out the key features your site needs so that your site looks professionally optimized to the search engines! On page factors are just as important as building links and other aspects involved getting your site to the TOP!

Title & META Tags

Your Title and META tags are the first thing the search engine spiders see when visiting your site! Be sure that your home page TITLE tag is related to the keywords you identified!

Using the “forex” example from the keyword research chapter this is how it would be done!

As you can see I added the TOP 3 keywords to the title and the 5 keywords to the META keyword area. There are some other SEO META tags that I included so that your sites get indexed faster!

Here is the META tag sequence I use on all my sites that gives me top rankings! Feel free to use as a template!

Important Pages to Include

Here is a list of pages that you must include on your website. The spiders (search engine bots) will go to crawl your site and will be looking for these pages, you can simply put them in the footer or wherever you like.

1. Contact Page – It’s crucial that your prospects/visitors have a way of contacting you.

2. Disclaimer – If your sell products or information in particular on your site, it is a good idea to use a disclaimer to keep your visitors, in the “know”.

3. Privacy Policy – Spam used to be a big issue and mostly everyone hates it! Let your visitors know that you will keep the information you gather from them safe, i.e. their email address.

4. Sitemap – This makes it easy for the spiders to scan your site, making each page on your site available for anyone to see. It gives your webpage more structure. I will go over how to create a sitemap further in the ebook.

5. Five pages of Content – Google and other search engines look at how much quality content you have on your website that is relevant to the keywords you are targeting. Be sure to have at least 5 articles/web pages with quality content on them.

Creating a Sitemap

These days creating a sitemap is very easy; there are FREE automated tools that will do this for you. You want to have a sitemap on your site because it will make scanning your site a lot faster, thus indexing you’re all your webpage’s a lot of faster.

The spiders will visit your sitemap and see all the pages that your website includes, instead looking at the one by one. So here’s how to create the file…you would simply go to:

www.xml-sitemaps.com

You would simply enter your website URL and it will return an XML file that you would upload to your server to appear on your site! This is too easy NOT to do it!

Robots.txt File

I don’t want to go all nerdy on you and throw a whole bunch of techie stuff your way but it is important to know what your site needs. As more and more people catch on to the power of marketing on the internet, the more valuable this information becomes!

So what is a robots.txt file? It’s basically a text file that’s created with notepad or any compatible text editor. You can add certain web pages on your site that you DO NOT want the search engines to crawl.

The reason for this could be to keep your download page for your customers from showing up in the SERPS or showing duplicate content on your site. This way it won’t seem like your spamming the search engines with non-sense.

Even if you don’t have any web pages that DO NOT want to show up in the SERPS it is a good idea to have one uploaded and on your site so the search engines know that you’re playing by the rules!

So here’s how you create a “Robots.txt” file, these are very simply to make despite the name.

Like I stated before you would simply open notepad or your favorite text editor. This lines you will enter in this text file are as follows:

User-Agent: [Spider or Bot name]
Disallow: [Directory or file name]

It’s pretty much self explanatory; you tell which spider, i.e. Google, MSN or Yahoo not to crawl the “Disallow” listed sites. That’s all to it, too easy right?

Let me give you a few examples so you know exactly how this should look when you create your robots.txt file.

Let’s say you DO NOT want the Google bots (spiders) from crawling a particular page on your site. This is how it would look:

If you want to allow the spiders to index everything on your site and just want to have the robots.txt file on your site for good measures. This is how it would look. Feel free to copy/paste for your own use!

Submitting Your Site to the SERPS

This is the first step to getting your site recognized by the search engines! There are free and paid ways you can submit your site to 100s of search engines with the click of a button.

1. The Free Way – www.submitexpress.com

Here you simply input your sites URL and it will submit to over 40+ search engines. It doesn’t get any easier than that!

2. The Paid Way – www.submitedge.com

SubmitEdge offers a variety of link building services and they are worth checking out! You can submit your site to 200+ search engines for $29 with no work on your part.

If your budget permits, this is a GREAT idea, its gets those spiders crawling your site!

Super Linkbuilding

Building links is also known as “Off-Page SEO”. It’s all about the links, in most cases; the site with the most links will win in an SEO battle! Provided that the site is optimized for that certain keyword and followed all the On-Page SEO criteria.

How to Build Links & Use Anchor Text

You want to build your links in a way that looks natural to the search engines. I would say about 10 – 20 links per day will do.

Now about your anchor text, for those who don’t know what anchor text is, here is the definition right from Wikipedia:

The anchor text, link label or link title is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the Anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines.

You want to alternate your keywords for anchor text (if that made sense) so the keyword usage for anchor text would look something like this:

Keyword #1: Use 70% of the time for anchor text
Keyword #2: Use 20% of the time
Keyword #3: Use 10% of the time
Keyword #4: Use 5% of the time
Keyword #5: Use 5% of the time

Now you don’t have to go by those numbers exactly but close to it will make sure that the search engine bots done recognize your site for spamming for one keyword, with the sole intention of ranking for a certain keyword.

Now to the fun stuff! Below you will find close to a dozen ways to build links! I go over where to find these links and some tips and tricks for each!

Forums

Many people overlook the power of forum marketing but it has so many benefits it’s not even funny. I say the only down fall is that it takes a long time to do this right!

Forum marketing is one of the many ways to generate a lot of Backlinks to your website; it can also send a lot of traffic to your site, which will help you, get more sales or email subscribers.

There is definitely no shortage in niche communities, you can find a forum in just about any niche you can think of these days! I found one a few weeks ago on Bee Keeping; I mean who would of thought?

You can instantly build a good reputation in these communities and reach out to your prospects with just a few forum posts and a very enticing signature that shows them the links to your website.

Remember to start off slow when jumping into a conversation at these forums because the advocates in the group will notice your trying to sale something from the start! It’s important to be discreet and find some common ground with people!

You don’t want to bust onto the scene, spamming the threads with a lot of “me, too!” responses, because it won’t be long before you find yourself banned or simply ignored.

Be helpful, share tips, resources and information, and approach forum marketing in a similar way that you would approach social networking, by offering help and slowly building awareness of your brand.

This is how you will search for forums in your niche market. You would simply do a Google search like so:

Just replace “forex trading” with your main keyword and dozens of forums will pop up for your niche!

When creating your signature box, be sure to feature a free report or resource to entice people to click your link in the same way that you would create your article marketing resource boxes.

The easiest way to direct traffic to your website from a forum is by offering something of value, at no cost.
Focus on building a list of active subscribers that you can follow up with in the future with both free content, balanced out with promotional offers.

To locate some of the TOP forums with a lot of traffic, simply visit:

www.Big-Boards.com They show you how many members and posts a particular forum has, to make sure there is a lot of traffic there. This is a very good resource for Forum Marketing.

Blogs

I outsource my blog commenting, if I want to do it in mass. If I’m in the internet marketing niche, I usually spend a few hours writing the comments myself because you want to say something meaningful in your comments.

This is for 2 reasons:

1. So your comments will get approved
2. You build a solid online reputation
Of course there is software to automate you finding blogs that will give your sites some good Backlinks!

We have gone a little further than we planned in this post, but that is to your benefit! In our next and final post on this topic we will discuss Web 2.0 properties and social bookmarking. With the information we have covered so far you should be on your way to better rankings.

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If you have not read through part 1, search engines explained, please do so before continuing. Things will make more sense!

Time to get into the good stuff. You really need to bookmark us if you have not done so.

Bulletproof Keyword Research

The way I like to do keyword research is just about foolproof! The reason I say this is because most people complain that SEO doesn’t work and that it takes a long time before they see results.

That is mostly true if you’re targeting the WRONG keywords!

If you’re shooting for keywords that have massive competition of course your results will come much slower. The odds are already stacked against you. What I do is focus on the low-hanging fruit.

This way I can get quicker results and getting traffic becomes easier! These keywords have average traffic but it you target 3 or 4 it can add up really quickly. There are about 20 steps to this keyword research system. It may seem overwhelming at first but it works 100% of the time!

Alright, let’s get into it!

1. Use the Google Keyword Tool to start your keyword research. For SEO, they are the most accurate and receive the most traffic out of all the search engines on the net!

We are going to use forex trading as our example. First, enter your main keyword which is “forex trading” (without quotes). You will end up with about 200 keywords.

Go to the end of each section and “Add all…” you want to add all the keywords to the right side so you can export them. (You can add more search variations to come up with more keywords if you like.)

2. You want to export them as a text file shown below:

It should open as a text file, leave it open for now.

3. Log into your Google Adwords account. If you do not have an Adwords account it is crucial that you get one setup immediately! Simply visit the Adwords signup page.

4. Next, log into your Adwords account and find the “Tools” link in the toolbar. Go to “Traffic Estimator”.

5. Enter all the keywords from the .txt file you downloaded from Google keyword tool. You will also have to enter what countries you are trying to get traffic from. Next, you will simply click “Continue”.

6. Now the “Traffic Estimator” has given you a lot of data, but we are NOT concerned with that at this point. All you have to do now is click “Download as .csv”

7. This will return yet another Notepad file, don’t worry about what it looks like you will just be copying and pasting it. Yes, it will look like this:

8. Next you will need to grab this free software called “Keyword Corral” so you can analyze these keywords and see which ones have low competition! (You do need to submit a valid email but for the power of the software it is a trade that is much more than fair!)

9. After you’ve downloaded the software save each of the notepad files to your desktop, name them something you can remember.

10. Next you will open “Keyword Corral” and click “Open source file” and select the notepad file you downloaded from Google’s Traffic Estimator. It should be named estimates.csv

Once you do that, it will list all your keywords and now by selecting a group of keyword you can get the competition of each. Hold CTRL and click on the keywords you want to get data on.

Or you can press CTRL+A to select all.

11. Next you will press “Get Competition”. This will give you the number of sites that are currently optimized in the search engines for that particular keyword.

It make take awhile to pull the data from Google, so just sit back and wait for the results.

12. Now you have data on your competition. Be sure to SORT by competition. Anything under 6,000 means it is relatively easy to rank for. See screenshot below:

This means that less than 6,000 websites are optimized for that keyword! This is easy pikins’ compared to the more competitive keywords which may return results of a few hundred thousand or the hyper competitve words that will have results in the millions.

13. Now we want to create filter, that weeds these 6,000 and below keywords out. Simply click “filter” and set competition like so:

Then click “Apply Filter” at the top.

14. Save keywords by selecting the button at the top. It will save it as a .txt (notepad) file, save it on your desktop for easy reference.

15. Return back to “Google Keyword Tool” and copy & paste the keywords you just filtered from “Keyword Corral”.

Make sure you filter your Google keyword results to “Don’t show ideas”:

This way you only have results for the keywords you identified with low competition.

16. Now these are the results that we come up with and they are looking pretty good!

As you can see these low competition keywords are getting TONS of traffic and barely anyone is optimizing for them! That means you can go in and gobble up some of that traffic from Google!

I would generally choose the first 5 keywords, so in this example I would choose:

That’s over 112,600 searches per month, if you’re able to capture just half of that traffic; that’s over 60,000 visitors per month! It won’t be hard either since we’ve identified these keywords as having low competition.

17. Now you would simply build links around those keywords with low competition to get easy rankings in the search engines!

I hope I didn’t confuse you up there but that is the same science I use to rank in the search engines within a matter of weeks!

The only thing you have to do to rank for those keywords is build links with those keywords as anchor text.

Anchor text is the clickable text that leads a person to your website!

The formula for keyword research alone was worth the price of this ebook, hands down! Oh wait, you’re getting it for FREE!

All righty then…. I think that’s enough to chew on for now. Spend some time with different keywords and niches that you may be interested in. We will have part 3 ready in a few days. Next up we will discuss on page and off page optimization techniques.

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Search Engines Explained

I understand that many of you are coming from different levels of knowledge, some of you know little to nothing about ranking in the SERPS, some of you have a little knowledge but not enough to DOMINATE and the rest of you probably know enough about SEO to rank high for certain keywords.

With that said I want to cover the basics for that first group and as you go through this ebook you will feel the “snowball effect”. This is where you will constantly pick up new ideas until you reach the end where you’ll have all the knowledge you need to DOMINATE the SERPS.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is basically performing small tasks on and to your website so that the search engine spiders can crawl (look over) your site so they can include it in their directory, this is also known as getting indexed.

A spider is a robot that the search engines use to scour the web and check millions of millions of websites at super speeds. Since there are millions of sites being built each day, there is no way you or any company can keep up with a task such as that. These spiders index and sort web pages by relevance, so your web page shows up in the search engines when it is appropriate for the keyword you are targeting.

Keywords

All activity on the web starts with a keyword! People get on the internet to search for something and they generally go to the search engines to find this information. When a topic is searched in the search engines, the most relevant sites will show up first! These sites have optimized their web pages to show up first in the SERPS. Web pages with the TOP rankings get all the traffic for absolutely NO cost!

Most prospects/searchers only look at the TOP 3 results of any search engine listing! So you can’t be dangling at the bottom of the results page expecting to get traffic!

What are Algorithms?

Now that we know how your web page shows up in the search engines it’s important to understand what an algorithm is. Wikipedia says…

An algorithm is a finite sequence of instructions, an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem, often used for calculation and data processing. It is formally a type of effective method in which a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task…

So basically what this is saying is, the search engines critique your sites based on certain criteria to see where it will rank in their results. Some of these criteria include:

1. Location & Frequency of keywords on your web page
2. Amount of links pointing to your site
3. How your website is structure
4. How relevant & unique your content is

What is Pagerank?

I felt it necessary to include this inside this ebook because it plays an important role when you begin building links. I think Wikipedia is much better at explaining things, so here is the definition from Wikipedia:

Pagerank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.

A website can have a pagerank of 1 – 10, obviously the higher the pagerank the better! When you are finding sites to link to yours, it is important to find those links that have high pagerank (PR).

3 Major Search Engines

When doing your search engine optimization you want to focus your efforts on the search engines that will bring in the most traffic. Obviously Google is going to be the #1 contender!

Below is the percentage amount of search traffic that the TOP 3 search engines receive:

Google = 61% — Yahoo = 30% — Bing = 9%

As you can see Google is crushing its competitors. Yahoo only receives half as much traffic as Google does.

I generally focus all my SEO efforts on Google because not only do they have the most traffic but once you show up in their results the other search engines will start catching on and you will get traffic from them also.

That’s it for today. In our next post we will begin to get into the meat of search optimization beginning with keywords and keyword research. It’s not as hard as you may think.

Go to part two search engine rankings and keywords.

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We have spent a decent amount of time and effort putting together a guide on SEO and initially we were going to set up a site and sell this book. It was primarily targeted to newer search engine webmasters but even more advanced webmasters will surely get some good nuggets of information.

If you are brand new to this game you will most definitely want to follow along. The original guide came to about 40 pages, so we are going to break this up into the next 5 posts. Bookmark us now or sign up for our newsletter to stay informed. This is going out to you completely free and will always be available on this blog for you to refer back to.

We are going to show you the basics from site structure all the way up to link building and more advanced on page and off page requirements to get top rankings. This is what we do. Our thought here is to provide you with a ton of value. We know you will like it and learn from it. Below is the original introduction from the book. Hopefully this will wet your appetite. We will post the entire book over the next couple of weeks.

Introduction

We will be going over every aspect about gaining TOP search engine rankings! This is not like most SEO guides and courses where you buy one ebook and then have to buy another and another just to get the real Search Engine secrets. That’s not what I’m about! I want you to receive this information in a usable format, plain and simple! After finishing this course, getting ranked in the search engines (Google in particular) will be sooooo easy! Getting traffic to your site doesn’t have to be hard.

I always like to begin any material I write with a little pep talk, kind of like a coach before a football game… This is so you will actually put what you learn here to use! It makes my day to receive success stories from customers and friends.

After reading this information, read it again and implement the strategies that you’ve learned. Do it immediately! I see so many people including myself, purchase information just so it can sit on your hard drive to collect dust!

You must take Action

It is the reason you are reading this right now. Of course getting high rankings in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) takes time & energy but the results can be tremendous and last for years to come!

If you are monetizing your sites properly and making sure you update them periodically, say once a month or at least once a quarter…you are on your way to easy street, believe me!

I don’t like to play when it comes to getting FREE traffic! I want you to be in the same position, possessing this knowledge is like ruling the Internet.

You can take this knowledge and use it on your own sites or you can market your services to local businesses in your area. They will gladly pay you up to $2,000 a month just for you to perform SEO on their sites. Most SEO firms will charge businesses up $4,000 to do this.

So there you have it, I just wanted to lay the groundwork so that you know how valuable this information is, if you put it to good use!

Starting in a couple of days we will drill down and really get into “The Game” as we like to call it. Come back in a few days or sign up for our free newsletter to stay up to date. You do not want to miss it. And come on now, it’s free!

Go to part one search engines explained.

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Like Bigfoot or the Lochness Monster, many people have heard of the Google sandbox and wonder if it is real or is it an old wives tale. We have been doing search optimization and pay per click for many years and have heard arguments both for and against the sandbox. Personally, we think it does exist in some form.

What Is The Sandbox?

The easiest way to explain the Google sandbox is to think of it like a penalty box. Many people new to internet marketing are told that the more incoming links they have, the merrier in the eyes of the search engines. Way back in the day, (maybe 7 or 8 years) that may have been true. But just like anything else, the search engines get smarter and smarter every year. As the engines evolve so do the ranking algorithms they use. In layman’s terms, these are just the formulas the different search engines use when they spider your page. Each search engine uses different criteria to rank your page.

How Do I Stay Out Of The Sandbox?

Quite simply the way to stay out of the sandbox is to take things slowly from the outset. When you first get your site online DO NOT hire a service or spend money on the latest greatest link building service that promises you “1000 backlinks to your site in just 3 days”. We can promise you it is a waste of your time and hard earned money and ultimately may end up hurting your rankings from the get go. It is much better to take it slow and easy. Search engines today are too smart to fall for a brand new site with 1000 links. They would much rather see a slow build in backlinks as it seems much more natural.

With the right mixture of keyword optimization, meta tags, social bookmarking, quality backlinks with a few high quality articles sprinkled in, you may be surprised how fast you can rise to the top of the search engines. Done correctly you will end up at the top more quickly and more securely than you may imagine.

Feel free to drop us a line to discuss your goals and see if we can help you get there.

Sign up for our free internet marketing tips newsletter. Learn how to take your site to the top of the search engines. This is a free monthly e-zine. We never rent or sell your personal information and you can unsubscribe at any time.

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