I said this before, but comment SPAM is going to happen on your Wordpress Blog.  The amazing thing is how often this can happy.  Even a low (or NO) traffic website will receive SPAM commenting and anything bigger can result in dozens (if not HUNDREDS) of spammy comments per day.

Now simple moderation will clean this up, but having to go through dozens of comments per day and delete them is a big waste of time.  Of course, you can turn comments off altogether, but (like I mentioned in the past) that defeats the purpose behind why most of us create a blog in the first place.

There is a way to combat much of this comment SPAM and most of you already have it!

For most installations of Wordpress (and this includes a Wordpress.com account, too), there is a plug-in that is already uploaded called Akismet.  The Akismet plugin is a tool that analyzes all of the comments that are made on your blog and compares them with an ever-growing SPAM database.  This way, the tool is automatically moderating (and removing) known SPAM comments.

In most cases, the Akismet plugin will be able to identify and remove close to 90% of all comment SPAM.  This is awesome!  (and I know all of you current Wordpress users will be seeking for this type of SPAM-killing solution at some point!).

To activivate the Akismet plug-in, you need to do 2 things:

1)  In your dashboard, Go to Plug-ins and and select the “Activate” button beside the Akismet Plug-In.

2)  You will need to have a Wordpress.com account to get your activation key (You don’t necessarily need a Wordpress.com blog, but you do need to register with them to get the activation key.  This does not cost anything.

Once you get your activiation key, you will be able to turn on Akismet in your Akismet Configuration (which is will now be under the Plugin Menu). That is it!  You are done and you only need to set this up once.  Akismet will also give you statistics on the number of comments it is identifying and removing.

I literally save myself close to 15 minutes per day with comment moderation by simply turning on and activating this simple Akismet plug-in.  If you have a Wordpress blog and have not turned on Akismet, do it today (it is totally worth it!).

cheers…matt

Don’t jump in head first. You might consider dipping your toe in first by trying a campaign based on a free gift certificate. You’ll find plenty of coupon codes around for $50 Adwords credits, for example.  But $50 isn’t going to assure you of the best results possible. Some people spend hundreds before making their first sale.  What else can you do to maximize your campaign without cleaning out your pockets to find out what works and what doesn’t?

Here are some PPC tips:

1. Read the sites. Google, Yahoo, and MSN Ad Center provide a lot of detailed information for new PPC advertisers. A lot of people glaze over this but read up and you’ll find dozens of articles that teach strategies surrounding PPC that can save you time and money.

2. Cruise the IM blogs and forums. You’ll find loads of forums filled with tips, tools, and advice

3. Invest in a tool like SpeedPPC (reviewed recently by Matt Bredel) which can help you with advanced pay per click campaign tools

4. Track and manage your quality score. Learn more about this on the hub: 4 Tips to Maximize ROI on Pay Per Click Advertising
5. Split test. The best way to save money is to carefully watch your results. That way, you can mimic campaigns that are working and tweak or delete ones that are not—before they cost you more money and drive your Google quality score down

Part 8 of 10 of the SEOExciter Series, which you can watch all of them right now at  -> Top SEO Strategies.

So if there is just ONE SEO tip that I felt was the most important, this may be it.  This made SO MUCH difference when it came to getting ranked for the terms that *I* wanted to be ranked for.

This is the concept of the anchor text.

First…

“What is Anchor Text?”

Essentially, it is the clickable text on a web page that takes you to another web page.  Below are three examples of anchor text:

http://www.thewebreviewer.com

TheWebReviewer

Home Based Business Reviews

We identify these as hyperlinks (clickable objects on a website directing us somewhere) by (in most cases) the blue coloring and underline (You can change these styles if you wish, but by default, they are blue and underlined).  The anchor text, therefore, is the TEXT that clickable (in this case, http://www.thewebreviewer.com, TheWebReviewer, and Home Based Business Reviews, respectively).

All three serve the same purpose: they will take you to thewebreviewer.com if you click them.  But the anchor text and WHAT you write here is often overlooked, especially by people new to the internet.

As I have been talking about with off-page SEO, major search engines (like Google) measure your website’s popularity by who is linking to you.  But that is only part of it!  It is also taking note as to WHY that website is linking to you.

The anchor text is the most critical piece of information that a search engine has about your website or web page from an external source!

If your goal is to rank for a specific keyword in Google (which is the whole point of SEO), getting your “money keywords” into these anchor text positions is crucial!

In the example above, it may seem natural to write something like:

..For more information, visit TheWebReviewer.com…

In this case, we are telling the search engines that your site is highly correlated to the keyword “TheWebReviewer.com” (which is true), but are people really doing searches on this???

…For more information, visit Home Based Business Reviews…

In this case, we are telling the search engines that the keyword “Home Based Business Reviews” is most relevant (that is worth a LOT more to me in the search engines!)

…For more information, Click Here…

DON’T DO THIS!!  This is perhaps the worst thing you can do!  Do you really want to rank for the term “Click Here”?  And not only that, you won’t even rank for it since it is used SO much, that this term would actually be hyper-competitive in the search engines.

Few final tips on this:

1)  To define your anchor text in HTML, simply do the following:

<a href=”http://yourtargetsite.com“>Your Anchor Text Here</a>

2)  Sometimes you have no control over what anchor text a third-party website places on their website.  Don’t sweat it!  A backlink is still a backlink!  This DOES improve your over-all popularity, even if the anchor text is not optimized for you specific keyword.  In fact, having a few “un-optimized” anchor text backlinks looks more natural.

3)  Remember that anchor text is also very powerful WITHIN your own website.  Here, you do have control of ALL your anchor text, and therefore, think very carefully about EVERY link you create to yourself (and include your keywords here, too!)

cheers…matt

Don’t Forget to Watch All 10 Parts! (with full downloadable transcriptions) They are now available to watch for free!

Go to: SEO Tips and Getting High Search Engine Rankings

http://www.SEOExciter.com

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P.S.  Do you notice above how I use anchor text to link to the SEOExciter.com???

So I drove up first thing Friday from San Diego and arrived just in-time for Rich Schefren.  Yep, all these guys were there and I have to admit it was one of those “revolationary” events for me.

You see, since the new year, I have been finding myself “struggling” online…but not in the way that most people struggle online.  Personally, I have been finding my websites kind of running a-muck.  The direction and growth of everything kind of reached a stand-still and I have been finding myself treading water in a sea of internet chaos for months now.

Sure, the money is still coming in just fine, but the growth has nearly halted.

You might want to blame “the recession” for this (which I have been doing most of the year), but the real person to blame is myself…and this weekend opened my eyes to it!

One thing about the internet business is that making money online is really not that tough, but that is rather dangerous, especially when you have never built a business before.

My focus has been all messed up.

My business, as a system, was not well-oiled and needed a serious tune-up.  In fact, the turn “system” has never been a part of my internet marketing vocabulary, until now.  Each one of these speakers taught me something about my business that was extremely valuable (and hint, it had nothing to do with SEO, PPC, rankings, keyword research or Google Analytics!).

It was about the relationship between me and my business.

It was about the constraints that I was not focusing on.

It was about the fact that I am a technician playing the role of entrepreneur.

It was about my lack of a system.

It will take too long to explain this all within just one post, and in fact, I am still trying to absorb, decipher and accept these facts, as well.  But this was (as Paris Hilton would say) “HUGE!”

Great event, InfusionSoft!  I have much more to say about this.  Stay tuned!

cheers…matt

P.S.  I do use InfusionSoft for my shopping cart, customer relations manager, email marketing and follow-up needs for all of my websites now.  It IS my all-in-one solution for my online management needs.  And events like this for their members just strengthens why Infusion Soft is becoming a leader in the Small Business CRM Software.  To learn more, check out my full InfusionSoft Review.

There are things you may choose to outsource because you’re busy or because you need a certain level of expertise but a lot of people have negative outsourcing experiences before they have positive ones because they’re unprepared for the process of finding the right people for the job.

What can you do?

There are a lot of different ways you can thwart negatives with outsourcing to contractors. The first thing you can do is really take the time to find the right person. You’ll find job bidding sites (such as Elance, Guru, and Odesk) and you’ll find professionals who advertise on webmaster or internet marketing forums, as well as who SEOize their own website so that you’ll find them when you search for a certain level of expertise. Here are some tips for making the experience as positive as possible:

• Research. Look at the person’s samples and look them up online to see what their online reputation is.

• Use an escrow service. Some job bidding sites will hold the funds until you’re satisfied with the work.

• Use a site with a feedback mechanism so you can ascertain skills and work ethic by checking out work history with other entrepreneurs.

• Start off small. Don’t outsource your whole business right away. Try a few small tasks with a new provider to see if they meet your needs an expectations before assigning a large scale project

People who want to make a living online are in great supply but not all of them will have the skills or the work standards that meet your needs. Due diligence and research can help you make the most of outsourcing.

I know, some of your are wondering “Who is going to write something bad, anyway?”  My sister actually asked me this about her San Diego Mom blog.  I said “you’d be surprised” and within two days of turning on her comments, she started to see the garbage (called blog spam or comment spam) to appear.

The moral here is that you do need to set some limits to what and when you want your user comments to appear in the blog post.   There are three main categories of moderation:

1. No moderation - Post everything immediately.  I discourage this because it is a gigantic opening for spammers and “inappropriate” comments.  Comments like “You Suck” for “F’ this Blog” is not good for your social presence.  Of course, no moderation means no work.  Still, I discourage this course of action.
2. Moderation with Rules - This is what I recommend to most people.  Usually, I prefer to “moderate” any comment that has a link in it.  Why?  First, links are SEO candy and spammers seek these opportunities out.  So my rule will be to “hold” any comment and not post it until I review the comment and either approve or disapprove it.  You can set up Wordpress to send you an email when a comment is held in moderation.  I always, by default, tell Wordpress to email ALL comments, even if it “passes” the test (which WILL automatically approve and post the comment!).  Remember, you can always remove (disapprove) a comment after it has been automatically approved.
3. Moderate Everything - In this case, every comment must be manually approved by you.  This is, of course, the safest way of protecting your blog from any malicious comments or spam.  Still, this is the most labor intensive and from a social networking stand-point, may discourage visitors from commenting in the future (since their comment is not immediately posted).

You need to choose the best method of moderation for you and your Wordpress blog.  I prefer to moderate with rules, but depending on your blog and your time, you may want to make this stricter or easier to comment.

And even with setting these rules, blog SPAM is still a problem!  Next posting, I’ll talk about the Akismet Anti-Spam plug-in to help you tons of moderation time.

cheers…matt

P.S. Don’t have a Wordpress blog and want me to set one up for you for only 19 CENTS/Day?  Check out this at: Personal Wordpress Blog Offer

Work on your PPC quality score

Google assigns a quality score based on many factors and working to keep your score high will keep your placement good and your minimum bids low. Google wants to maintain integrity of the program so they look at your ads, your conversion rates, your keyword relevancy and other factors in determining your score.

Long tail instead of short tail

Choose ad groups, optimize ads and SEOize your web copy for long tail keywords. This will get you a better quality score and will attract more targeted prospects than simply optimizing for short tail keywords.

Customize landing pages

A good way to customize your landing page is to ensure the keyword people are searching on is in the URL and on the page. A tool like SpeedPPC (reviewed by Matt Bredel here: SpeedPPC Review and discussed here: 7 Ways SpeedPPC Can Save You Time / Money) offers customized landing pages which adds keywords to the page and the URL. This helps not only the search engines see that you’ve got relevancy but helps your prospects feel like they’ve landed somewhere related to their keyword search and this can help you convert better.

Diversify and test

Look closely at your reporting to determine whether or not your ads are effective. Instead of just running one ppc ad campaign to see how things pan out, consider running multiple campaigns on various keywords and by utilizing varied ad strategies. Moving around a sentence or expanding to a longer tail keyword could make a huge difference and if you’re not dabbling with a few strategies, you could give up too soon (with too much money spent.)

Can you spend a lot of money on pay per click and earn nothing? Yes.

Could you hit the jackpot?  Yes!  Knowledge, tools, and sound advice can help you tip the scales in your favour!

Part 7 of 10 of the SEOExciter Series, which you can watch all of them right now at  -> SEO and Get Ranked High in the Search Engines.

So far, we have focused a lot on the things that you can directly do to your website to get it indexed in Google (or the other search engines for that matter!).  Now we need to focus on the other side of SEO, which we call Off-Page SEO.

Remember the old proverb:

“If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it really make a sound?”

This is similar to what we are talking about now.  If we built the greatest and most SEO optimized website on the internet and Google does not find it, will we get ranked?

The answer is no.

So we have two tasks as website developers:

1)  We first need to tell Google (and the other search engines) that we exist!

2)  We need to convince these search engines that we are both important and relevant.  (we are going to talk about this more in the next three parts!)

So how do we tell Google that we exist?  (The proper term for this is “getting indexed” in the search engine.)

Now I know many of you consider the idea of “submitting to search engines”, but personally, I think that is a waste of money.  These “search engine submissions” are more suggestions rather than indexes.  Yeah, I am sure they tell the search engines you exist, but it really gives you no credibility or popularity…and getting indexed really does not require this.

All you need to do is get a website that is already being indexed by a search engine to link back to your website.  We are going to talk more about getting backlinks (these are links from external websites pointing back to your website) in Part 9 of the SEO Exciter series, but just a quick preview…

• Write articles and Submit to Article Directories
• Submit to Directories (this is different than Search Engines!)
• Ping your Website or Page (Try Google’s Ping Service)
• Create a Social Profile (We’ll talk about this in Part 10)
• Create Forum Posts or Blog Comments

The point here is to get Google to find you naturally.  It will give you credibility, authority and relevance.

And just like we started this conversion…

“Just because Google indexes you, doesn’t mean you will rank for anything!”

THAT is what we talk about in the final three parts of the SEO Exciter Series!

cheers…matt

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Don’t Forget to Watch All 10 Parts! (with full downloadable transcriptions) They are now available to watch for free!

Go to: Getting Ranked and Indexed in Google

http://www.SEOExciter.com

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I don’t quite understand this, but for some reason (by default), a new installation of Wordpress will usually require your visitors to register on your blog/website in order to leave a comment.

Personally, I don’t think that is a great way of encouraging comments (and for most of us, the point of having a blog is to encourage conversation with your visitors).

So how do you turn on (or customize) your Wordpress comment access?

It is really not hard (as long as you know where to look!).

First, select “Discussion” under the left column SETTINGS column:

From here, all of your default comments settings appear.

I personally allow all new visitors to post comments, as long as they provide a name and email address.  (We’ll talk about moderation in the next post!)

Also, you can always override some of these settings within each post individually.

It is that simple!

cheers…matt

P.S. Don’t have a Wordpress blog and want me to set one up for you for only 19 CENTS/Day?  Check out this at: Personal Wordpress Blog Offer

Part 6 of 10 of the SEOExciter Series, which you can watch all of them right now at  -> Getting Your Site to Rank on Page One of Google.

Today I want to focus on perhaps the simplest SEO strategies to increase your presence in the organic search listings.

These are some of the “Unseen On-Page SEO Factors”.  Lately, though, we have focused on topics like the structure of the site, the meta tags and the content.  Those are all really important factors, but there are a few cardinal sins and heavenly blessings associated with things YOU might not see, but the search engine spiders, like the Google-Bot WILL see.

The Image Link

YIKES!  I admit it, I used to do this!  It looked cool, too.  You know what I am talking about (I hope!).  If I put a cool image link like:

Looks GREAT, but where is the anchor text???  This is the inherent problem with banner ads (and why some people are willing to pay MORE for a text link rather than banner space).  Sure, there is a time and place for banner ads and images, but one place it should NOT be is in ANY menu bar or internal link on your website.

Javascript and Javascript Links

Much like the image problem above, but worse!  At least with the image, you are still sending some type of backlink to yourself.  Realize that Search Engine bots cannot read Javascript.  Therefore, if your website is using javascript to do linking, you are essentially giving the search engines nowhere to go.  This was more common in early website design, but most website platforms do not use javascript for linking.  Using “Flash” links is still debatable, but I would still avoid it.

Make sure that your “Page Source” (”View” -> “Page Source” in most browsers) shows all of your text links surrounded by the anchor tag:

<a href=”SITE”>Anchor Text</a>

If your links are surrounded by:

<script></script>i

Everything within t is being ignored by the search engines!

Note, though, that javascript CAN be embedded within an anchor tag, which is OK. It looks like this:

<a href=”SITE” onclick=”javascript:someaction();”>Anchor Text</a>

Alternative Text for Images

Speaking of images, we just said that images contain no text by default.  That is partially true.  In fact, there is an image parameter called ALT which you can define text if the image cannot be found.  This text is fairly weak in the whole content scheme of things, but it is text that the search engines can read and will attribute to content.  It would look like this:

<img src=”YOUR IMAGE” alt=”PUT GOOD TEXT HERE“>

Again, I would still avoid using images for links, but for the images that are found elsewhere, you might as well put a few good keywords in the ALT text.  Also remember that Google has an image search engine, which would correlate this image with the text!

Training the Spiders

This really has nothing to do with images, text and backlinks.  This is the simple concept of writing more content and updating your website and blog regularly.  Remember that the search engines have limited resources in what it will “spider” every day.  It cannot spider all websites equally (most websites never change, in fact).  So the spiders are smart enough to know which websites change regularly and when they change.

Powerhouses like YouTube and Digg would be changing always (and the spiders visit big websites like this about just as much!…that is why content put on YouTube or Digg can be found in the search engines results pages so quickly!).  But for us, we don’t change it that often.  BUT, if we get into a routine of making changes once per week, it will start coming once per week.  If we made changes once per day, it will visit once per day.  Get what I am saying?

Continuously grow your website and blog and be consistant about it, too!  (That is one reason blogs are so well loved by Google! )

cheers…matt

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Don’t Forget to Watch All 10 Parts! (with full downloadable transcriptions) They are now available to watch for free!

Go to: Ranking for Any Keyword on Google

http://www.SEOExciter.com

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