SEO Lessons Day six: Creating Linkworthy Content

October 22nd, 2009

Here are some tips on creating webpages that other website will want to link to—to save you from having to do loads of legwork requesting links.

Buying Links is Getting Expensive

The Google AdSense program (which pays publishers for placing contextual links on their websites) and automated spammy "can I buy a link on your site" emails have made virtually every important online publisher aware of the value of links.

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SEO lessons Day five: Getting Started With Link Building

October 22nd, 2009

h3>Link Building is a Pain in the Butt

Prior to creating the SEO Book training program I conducted a survey of SEO Book members. One of the questions was, "What is the biggest thing stopping you from improving your website rankings and traffic?"

The most common answer to that question was "link building". If links are so important how do you build them? Here are some great techniques for providing content that people will actually WANT to link to:

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SEO Lessons Day four: Google’s Rise: a Link is Worth 1,000 Words

October 22nd, 2009

Automated Content Creation Scares Google

Yesterday we covered on page optimization, and mentioned how some people are too aggressive with keyword density. Of course copy that is dense with keywords likely sounds dense, and will not convert site visitors into buyers. But some automated content generation programs create content that is better than some page copy that people write.

Some major corporations, like Thomson Financial, publicly admit that they generate news reports using robots to write the content.
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SEO Lessons Day Three: Testing Keywords with Google AdWords

October 22nd, 2009

Test Before You Build

Here’s a simple tip that could easily save you 12 months of work:

Setting up an effective SEO campaign in a competitive market can be a long drawn out and expensive process. Worse yet, if you are focused on the wrong keywords, you might need to start over again after you find out that your site is not producing the results you want.

An easy way to avoid needing to start over is to test the value of keywords before you heavily commit to your SEO strategy. Buying pay-per-click ads (PPC) from search engines like Google (AdWords), Yahoo (Search Marketing), and Microsoft (adCenter) allow you to see what keywords have the ability to drive traffic to your site.

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SEO Lessons Day two: Keyword Research Strategies

October 22nd, 2009

Use the Most Relevant Keywords

Yesterday we discussed the precise targeting offered by keywords. But even if a keyword is valuable, it might not be valuable to your business. For example, if you are a dentist in Chicago, it is not worth the effort to try to rank for the word dentist. Why? 99% of the people searching for that phrase do not live near Chicago, and are irrelevant prospects. What you would want to rank for, if you were a Chicago dentist, would be things like

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SEO Lessons Day one: The Power of Keywords

October 22nd, 2009

Why is Google so Valuable?

Have you ever wondered why Google is worth over a hundred billions of dollars? Or why a single click from Google can go for as high as $50? The reason is the precise targeting offered by search engine marketing.

How Most Advertising is Broken

Most ads try to club you over the head and beat you into submission. Search engine marketing is a completely different form of advertising because rather than trying to tell you what to do, the searcher requests to see the ads and views them as relevant to their wants, needs, and goals. Advertisers bid to show up where they are relevant – when they are irrelevant. If they bid for irrelevant keywords they lose money on every click.

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Top 8 Wordpress Plugins Used by SEO.com

August 2nd, 2009

plugI know all of you SEO.com fans out there are wondering “what are the most important plugins that I can use on my WordPress blog for SEO”? Well, I’ve decided to unveil our secret stash of the best WordPress plugins for SEO because this is the year of sharing. And also I’d like to see if anyone else can think of any better ones. These are not listed in order of importance, Platinum SEO Pack is the best for overall search engine optimization though, so start there.

Plugin #1: FeedBurner FeedSmith

This probably won’t directly affect your seo on site, but the better reach your blog posts have, the more chance someone has to read it, and link to it if they were inspired by what you say. So you have to write good content first, and then this plugin becomes 100% more effective at building links.

Plugin #2: Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

A must have for every website, XML sitemaps should be generated on the fly and updated whenever you add a new page or write a new post. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Plugin #3: Friend Connect Commenting Plugin

You can now allow visitors to log in with their FriendConnect ID, and leave a comment with that same ID. This means that your visitors can log in with their Google, Yahoo!, AIM or OpenID account, by just clicking a button

Plugin #4: Google Analytics

The interfaces are fancy, and the fine grained stats and AdSense integration make it a particularly powerful tool when you’re seeking to push a product online using AdSense.

Plugin #5: Platinum SEO Pack

If you are already using All In One SEO Pack, this plugin will automatically import all the settings, that you have defined using All in one SEO plugin. You just need to verify the options, through Setting->Platinum SEO page of your wordpress blog. Platinum SEO Pack is also compatible with earlier versions of wordpress, though I recommend you to upgrade to the latest version of wordpress.

Plugin #6: Search Excerpt

It extracts out the search keywords, scans the content of matched post entries, and displays document snippets around the keyword, with that specific keyword highlighted. It adds a filter in get_the_excerpt() function so no modification needs to be done to WordPress’ 1.5/2.x theme. For other themes, make sure during “the loop” in search.php, it calls the_excerpt() to display the post entries.

Plugin #7: SRG Clean Archives

This plugin is designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion that’s search engine friendly on a dedicated page or in your sidebar.

Plugin Features: It lists the Month / Year, shows total post count for the month (enabled by default), the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article (permalink to article) and the number of comments (enabled by default) that have been made on each article.

Plugin #8: WordPress Database Backup

WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

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