Well tonight I wanted to go to www.seomoz.org but mistyped it and entered wwwseomoz.org and was surprised to see that I was actually redirected to http://www.vibratingdesigns.com/ (I’m not going to give these sneaky gits the benefits of a free link). Come on Vibrating Design surely you can think of a better, and more ethical way to get traffic. Do you really think any of SEOmoz’s users will want to work with web agency who are typo squatters?

1) Add &pws=0 to URL of search query, e.g. if you searched for “SEO” the normal url would look like this:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=seo&meta=

this is with personalised search turned off:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=seo&meta=&pws=0

2) Use this search engine Depersonalizer. The only problem is it only provides Google.com results not Google.co.uk

The guys over at SEOmoz have put together a tough SEO Quiz which is well worth a try if you want to know how good you are at SEO. Its multiple choice but if you think that means it’s easy you are going to be disappointed. There are 75 questions in total and you need to set aside about 35 mins if you want to complete it without rushing. Some of my incorrect answers where down to me not reading the questions probably, so make sure you read the questions slowly and read all the possible answers.

My own SEO knowledge has increased massively over the last two year but I was pleasantly surprised to achieve the level of SEO Master, one below the top level of SEO Deity. If you want to improve you own SEO knowledge I highly recommend you read all the forums and blog listed in my own SEO category.

Finally, if you want to see what a bit of SEO knowledge can do for you performance in the rankings have a read of my post about how I got a site to number one in Google.

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Take a look at this SEObook blog post, looks very simple, very few graphics, so you would assume that it’s pretty light and fast to load, but in fact it would take 38 seconds to load on a 56k dial up connection. I assume that most people who are reading this have a broadband connection and so downloading a 174k webpage would only take about 5 secs, so you are thinking “so what?”. But just think about these issues:

a) Only 50% of UK users have broadband access, so for about 50% of people SEObook might feel slow. Ithink broadband penetration is even lower in most other countries.
b) A slow loading page won’t directly affect a site’s ability to rank well, but if the slowness of the site annoys users, then less people will use it, and less people will recommend it, which could result in less people linking to it, and ultimately this can negatively affect the site’s ranking.
c) Bandwidth costs – hosting is cheap these days but Aaron does get a LOT of traffic and considering the un-optimised graphic is on every page his bandwidth is much higher than it needs to be.

Ok so how slow is SEObook.com, well if you compare it to Mattcutts.com/blog it is very slow. (Note: I pick two blog posts which were short and had no comments or pictures. I used this great tool to get the page weight and download estimates)

SEObook.com homepage = 200k (44 seconds to download on a 56k connection)
SEObook.com single blog page = 174k (39 seconds to download on a 56k connection)

Mattcutts.com/blog homepage = 62k (16 seconds to download on a 56k connection)
Mattcutts.com single blog page = 41k (11 seconds to download on a 56k connection

So that make Aaron’s blog on average 207% slower than Mattcutt’s blog!!

So why is Aaron’s blog so slow? Well a lot of the extra weight is down to one small graphic, see below.

It doesn’t look particularly big but it’s an amazing 85k or in other words that single graphic accounts for 43% of the total page weight of the SEObook’s homepage. I’m not good with graphics but I would estimate that it would be possible to optimise that graphic to under 20k. This would reduce the page weight of the single blog posts on SEObook by 37%. Even using an online tool (spinwave) I was able to reduce the offending graphic by 63%.

So come on Aaron get that graphic remade and optimised. It will certainly improve your blog’s download speed, please your readers who have a dial-up connection, massively reduce your bandwidth usage, and even potentially improve your search engine rankings.

If you would like some more advice on how to optimise your blog, check out these post:
6 ways to speed up your blog
Why my wordpress site is so much faster than yours

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Assuming you have time to read this post you are going to find out how to live the life, make the break and cut down your working week to 4 minutes - leaving 6 days 23 hours and 56 minutes for leisure time. Sound good? Bloody right, and its about to hit you now!

Are you sick of having to work to pay the bills, sick of answering emails and sick of having to get out of bed at some ungodly hour of the morning i.e. before lunchtime? Well, not any more, sit back, put your feet up and let us take you through the rest of your working life. The 4 minute working week, the 16 minute working month, the 208 minute working year - sound good?

Follow this guide to the letter and you are sure to be successful, and have a social life as well!

Tip One - Only answer your emails once a month and set yourself an autoresponder saying that - the only people who ever chase you are the ones who you owe money - and they can damn well wait!

Tip Two - Sales technique - who needs it! If your products are good enough they will sell with no blurb from you - set up auto delivery systems, with the odd automatic follow up email which makes it look like you care.

Tip Three - Don’t bother with a business phone, it only gets in the way of your social life - if they need you, they will email you, and a 28 day turn around time is better than some companies I have dealt with!

Tip Four - Complaints, who needs them? At the first sign of trouble, tell them your lawyers are on the case and you will be in touch shortly - be as evasive as possible, and soon they will go away.

Tip Five - Sub contract, out source, palm the work off. There will always be someone more desperate than you for work - just palm off the hard stuff to a third party and let them take the heat.

Tip Six - Never give out personal contact details - who needs be to bothered when you are living your life. Again, a 1 month turn around in your email replies aint bad - what more do they want?

Tip Seven - FAQ - make good use of your FAQ section, covering every topic that has ever been brought up. Pages and pages of boring chat will soon see off any queries or complaints, more time to watch the Football.

Tip Eight - Put aside a full 2 minutes a month to check what you account balance is - after all this is the most important bit, and once you have the funds, they aint getting them back!

Tip Nine - If it aint broke why fix it? Who says you have to keep up with the most fashionable of gear. Old is cheap and cheap means more profit - stick with what sold yesterday, and only change it when sales reach rock bottom - i.e. not even enough for a night out.

Tip Ten - Who needs broadband? It may be quicker, but it only means you can receive more complaints and queries, stick to “snail band” and keep that work load under control - don’t worry, all emails will filter through at some point.

Tip Eleven - Get yourself together a list of people you don’t want to hear from, and if they send you emails, just wipe ‘em out without looking - who cares what they think?

Tip Twelve - Don’t buy the latest equipment - keep that old one your mother bought you when you were 10 and grind it down to the floor. As they say, every penny helps!

Tip Thirteen - Take a minute each month to clear your desk, just take the lot and bin it! Always start a new month with a clean desk.

Tip Fourteen - Always keep on the move, and never stay in the same place too long - its only a matter of time before your creditors will find you.

Tip Fifteen - Don’t set yourself any targets, targets mean pressure and you aint got time to deal with it.

Tip Sixteen - If last months sales were bad, just double the price of your product. Keep doing this for each bad month and sooner or later you will find some mug who will pay the price, then start again.

Tip Seventeen - Never give advice, but always take it when it is on offer - help is a losers game, and you are in it to win it!

Tip Eighteen - Don’t get a business partner, they take up too much of your time - get a dog, it’ll never let you down, and teach it to bring your newspaper in the morning..

Tip Nineteen - Enquiries - don’t even think about responding, you told them about the product, you told them the price, what more do they want? Time wasters.

Tip Twenty - Always keep your playstation next to the computer, that way in the unlikely event you get bored, you can always check your emails. Passers by will also think you are working, hey presto!

Summary
While we have taken something of satirical look at Tim Ferriss’s book “The 4 Hour Week”, his advice and opinions have been very well received in the market place. He attempts (and in many ways succeeds) in changing the reader’s general perception of work and time - i.e. the longer you work, the more productive you are, which is not always true.

By grouping very similar tasks together it is easier to get into the mindset for that particular action, e.g. answering all of you emails in one session, rather than as they come in. Interruptions are costly and probably take up a vast percentage of your working life - cut them out and you are on the way to success.

Tim Ferriss has made a lot of money out his book, and there are some great tips in there, however if your competitors are using them as well as you but they decide to work eight hours a week, you could be in real trouble. We work in a competitive industry so your working week can’t be defined in isolation.

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This change follows some recent comments in a SEOmoz post in which Matt Cutts said:

As I mentioned at SMX Seattle, my personal preference would be to drop the “Supplemental Result” tag altogether because those results are 1) getting fresher and fresher, and 2) starting to show up more and more often for regular web searches.”

Matt Also said:

I believe it’s good to remove this query because I don’t want people to get fixated on Supplemental Results and focus on them to the exclusion of other aspects of SEO. We saw that happen with the toolbar PageRank bar and ended up slowing the update rate on the visible toolbar PageRank to every 3-4 months so that people didn’t spend too much of their time concentrating on PageRank and less on other parts of good SEO”

I understand Matt’s argument but Rand has a pretty strong counter argument, which is, “if we can easily see the supplemental results, we’re able to fix those pages.”

Google has removed the tag because they don’t want people to get fixated on the supplemental results instead of focusing on more important aspects of SEO, like good content. However, if we don’t know which pages are supplement we don’t which pages need that extra bit of work.

Read more here:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3409993.htm
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-i-escaped-googles-supplemental-hell

It has been notoriously difficult to make a living from selling content on the internet. There is simply so much free quality information available that most people find it difficult to justify spending money on content. So I was originally shocked to see that SEOmoz were planning to start charging for content, I thought “no way, they are wasting their time”. How wrong I was, because Rand has just released some very interesting figures over at SEOmoz, which indicate that they will make over $1 millions in the first 12 months alone.

“We’ve had 58,669 visits to the premium landing page total, resulting in 374 individual purchases of articles and 1498 premium signups.”
(Data is from February 1, 2007 - July 17, 2007)

So I thought I would do a little number crunching on those figures. Individual articles cost $29 each, so that is $10,846 in revenue. Calculating the premium sign-up is a lot more difficult because you can buy the premium membership at various different price points depending on whether you purchase it monthly $39, six monthly $199, or yearly $299. (Please note: The premium member prices increased on the 17th July to: Monthly $49, Six monthly $249, Yearly $399.)

Here are some possible combinations:

Highest possible - 100% Monthly - 1498 x $39 x 12 = $701,064
Lowest possible - 100% Yearly – 1498 x $299 = $447,902
Equal split – 33% Monthly, 33% Six Monthly, 34% Yearly = $580,294

I assume the equal split is nearest the truth. So considering that $591,140 was generated within five and a half months, Rand and his crew should be on course to generate a whopping $1,289,760 in the first full twelve months. That is pretty amazing considering that in the previously 12 months they simply gave away similar information and tools for free.

So well done SEOmoz you deserve all the rewards you can get. You have given loads of fantastic help and advice to the whole SEO community.

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“Computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until; finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach).”

Alexa data is certainly not 100% accurate, its probably not even 70%, but it’s probably the best free tool for estimating traffic. Hitwise is more reliable but it’s not cheap.

Below is a list of the top 30 UK affiliate marketing websites in order of their Alexa Ranking (on the 25th July 2007).

Update: www.affiliatebounty.com have been added so list now totals 31. Thanks Jonathan.

1. www.affiliatewindow.com 4431
2. www.affiliatefuture.co.uk 6495
3. www.affiliates4u.com 6504
4. www.tradedoubler.co.uk 9278
5. www.webgains.com 10130
6. www.paidonresults.com 20239
7. www.buy.at 23016
8. www.here.org.uk 55149
9. www.omguk.com 58517
10. www.affiliateblog.co.uk 74082
11. www.dfinitive.com/blog 128894
12. www.keithbond.co.uk 153232
13. www.affiliatebounty.com 158,707
14. www.mooseontheloose.co.uk 163206
15. www.affiliateprogramadvice.com/blog 166760
16. www.affiliatestuff.co.uk 171322
17. www.webaffiliate.co.uk/blog 182636
18. www.morleymouse.com 195213
19. www.internetmarketingblogs.co.uk 231438
20. www.affiliatemarketingblog.co.uk 277658
21. www.niche-marketing-blog.co.uk 284324
22. www.onelittleduck.co.uk 286571
23. www.3wdl.co.uk 352830
24. www.startasanaffiliate.co.uk 377697
25. www.fishandclicks.co.uk 383885
26. www.leemccoy.co.uk 475497
27. www.monetisethis.net 481195
28. www.lammo.net 628358
29. www.kandevil.com 656371
30. www.existem.com/blog 796266
31. www.affiliatedogma.co.uk 949590

I might have missed a few affiliate marketing website so if your has an Alexa.com ranking off over 949,590 just let me know and I will update the list.

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Why I hear you ask, well as I previously explained you dont have to pay the 20% VAT on your Google Adwords spend if you are a business. So a big, big thanks to KirstyM who made me aware of this tax “loophole”. I bet there are a lot of businesses out there that could also benefit from this, so if your Adwords account is currently set-up for an “individual”, simply email google and ask them to change the setting to “business” and then they will refund you the VAT that you have already paid, nice.

That was the easiest money I have ever earned.

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According to “The Headline King” Brian Clark of Copyblogger:

“Your headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader. Without a headline or post title that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist. But a headline can do more than simply grab attention. A great headline can also communicate a full message to its intended audience, and it absolutely must lure the reader into your body text. At its essence, a compelling headline must promise some kind of benefit or reward for the reader, in trade for the valuable time it takes to read more.”

But if you want to optimise your title tags for search engines they should:
• Target no more than three phrases
• Separate each phrase with a hyphen “-“ or pipe “|”
• The shorter the title tag the more “weight” each word will receive
• Only include “keywords”, try not to using words like; the, and, their, etc.
• Try to keep the title tag shorter than 63 characters (including spaces) to get the best results.
• Put your main target phrase at the beginning of the title tag, ensuring maximum exposure.

So ideally the title tag for a post should be different to the post title. Also it has been previously difficult to change the title tags for the homepage, other pages, and categories within your Wordpress blog. So I was very happy when I stumbled across this plugin - SEO Title Tag plugin from Netconcepts. Here is what the developer has to say:

“SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your Wordpress-powered blog or website. Not just your posts, not just your home page, but any and every title tag on your site! If this plugin, along with a few hours of keyword research and copywriting of optimized titles, doesn’t make a significant impact on your search traffic, you’re doing something wrong!”

This is a fantastic plugin and definitely deserves to win my Plugin of the Week Award, well done Netconcepts.

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