One of the really annoying things about SEO is that it follows a formula.

By following a formula, I mean that it is for the most part, a numbers game or an arms race. To date, SERP ranking has largely revolved around the number of inbound links that a webpage has as well as the quality of those links, so the race is always “on”.

In all honesty, that really isn’t a good thing, because it means that SERP results can be manipulated in a way that may not bring you the most relevant results, but, rather, just ones with the most quality links.

For this reason, to help even the playing field, Google has applied several updates this past year that have gone to great lengths to remove tons of sub-standard content from the SERP results.

As you know, among the targets were sites with tons of content that had already been indexed elsewhere, sites that failed to update and deliver fresh and up-to-date information as well as sites that were over-advertising above the fold.

Here is a run-down of each of these updates and how you can navigate around them and not become one of the site-owners that gets penalized by some rogue bot looking to remove you from the SERP results.

Google Panda Defined

I really like the way our Wiki Authors explained it when they defined it as such: “Google Panda is a change to the Google’s search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011 .[1] The change aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality sites”, and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.[1][2] CNET reported a surge in the rankings of news websites and social Networking sites, and a drop in rankings for sites containing large amounts of advertising.[3] This change reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12 percent of all search results.[4] Soon after the Panda rollout, many websites,[5] including Google’s webmaster forum, became filled with complaints of scrapers/copyright infringers getting better rankings than sites with original content. At one point, Google publicly asked for data points[6] to help detect scrapers better. Google’s Panda has received several updates since the original rollout in February 2011, and the effect went global in April 2011. To help affected publishers, Google published an advisory on its blog, thus giving some direction for self-evaluation of a website’s quality.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda

How To Beat Down The Kung Fu Panda Update

OK. This is going to sound strange, but the best way to beat down the Google Panda update is to write great unique content and then SYNDICATE YOUR CONTENT. As you can see, there were tons of losers after this update, many of which were completely legit sites that were simply scraped. Google, of course, is going to show the results they trust the most which really has nothing to do with trust but with backlinks.

Therefore, you will have to have content that is unique and indexed on your site FIRST and then syndicated with a link back to the original.

See Google’s comments on syndicating carefully: “Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.”

Source: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

This will build links to your original copy AND dilute its scrape value. Having a high scrape value is a bad thing, because scrapers remove or change your links which essentially makes your article useless in terms of convertability and you make (you guessed it) no money.

I syndicate each and every article on my sites by making the HTML available for republishing. Crazy, I know! Kids, don’t try this at home!

If you want a reminder of just how non-unique content farms took it on the chin, here is a reminder.

Google Freshness Defined

We all like hot fresh cookies right? Well, search results are no different. Hot and fresh search results are, on the average, more relevant than old content that more often than not is dated in many ways.

The Official Google Blog referenced this particular update when it states: “Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.

We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.”

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html

How To Keep Your Cookies Hot And Fresh

Disclaimer: I would like to point out that before you read what is below, this technique is experimental and unproven in terms of the Freshness update and your ability to keep your content fresh in the eyes of search bot, but that being said, here we go…

To start, to perform this highly radical and dangerous maneuver, you may have to take steps to convert your blog, if you have one, into more of an evergreen blog.

To do this (and you can do it too, you just have to understand the implications involved) you simply have to take a few steps that will be a bit on the painful side to watch. Just remember, this is all about blog promotion, and we are looking for a paradigm shift here.

The first step you will have to do in terms of “out-of-the-box” blog promotion is change your permalink structure to a permanent one. Your site’s permalink structure is VERY IMPORTANT. If you change it, you essentially eliminate all of the links pointing to your site.

However, this situation can easily be salvaged by performing a 301 redirect for each URL on your site.

So, for example, if your permalink structure is http://your-site.com/year/month/article-title/, which is a non-evergreen permalink structure, you can convert it to an evergreen structure by changing it to http://you-site.com/article-title/.

This can easily be done using the Dean’s Permalinks Migration plugin for WordPress if you are running WordPress.

Simply install the plugin, activate it as you would any plugin and then change your permalink structure to the one you desire.

This is a bit of a painful process being that you will have to watch all of your inner pages reset and recapture their Page Rank. But in all honesty, what is more important? Having blog pages and posts with high Page Rank or having blog pages and posts that make you money. I think the answer is clear.

Moving on. Once permalink migration has been accomplished, you can now begin rolling over your posts. When I say rolling over, I mean republishing older posts by placing them back in circulation and back into your RSS feed.

This also can easily be accomplished using the Old Post Promoter (OPP) by “Blog Traffic Exchange” who I am giving honorable mention in this post being that they so graciously provided this awesome plugin for us free of charge. Thanks guys!

Once the OPP plugin is installed, simply enable it to republish older posts every twelve hours with a four hour random window.

That’s basically it! You just turned your blog promotion protocol into one that makes your blog an evergreen blog, one that is constantly rolling and publishing.

Source: http://thebitbot.com/blog-promotion/

Of course, going through all of this trouble would be meaningless if we didn’t actually “reheat our content” or “update” it so as to really and legitimately keep it fresh for our readers. But that’s easy, as articles are re-posted and re-dated, simply read them and update the information accordingly.

There is no sense in having old, out of date information cluttering up your blog anyway, right? It’s not ALL about SEO. Sometimes the best SEO is NO SEO.

Google Page Layout Defined

It’s all about HEATMAPS right? The more ads your visitors sees the sooner, the more $$$ you will make, right? Sure, if all your visitors are searching for are ads, which is NEVER the case. Honestly, who “searches” for ads?

For this reason, Google enabled the “Page Layout” update and gave the following reasons for doing so: “In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.

As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.”

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html

Let’s face it this is a great update because it is going to strongly encourage us to turn our operations into more classy outfits.

Keep Content Above The Fold And SERP Results Out Of The Dungeon

Honestly, there is really not much to say here, but this has to be said: Put your content above the fold. It will convert better like that anyway.

The goal of any copywriter is to (as quickly as possible) engage your readers before they get distracted by anything else.

In many cases, advertisements are distracting and can easily dilute the attention of your readers. BUT, if you can get them reading your content, THEN you can begin “pre-selling” and “selling” to them.

Having two giant 336 x 280 ad blocks above your content which forces your scroll down the page looks spammy and cheap and NOW can get you penalized.

Of course, this presents an excellent opportunity to webmasters looking to boost conversion rates using a page layout that displays ad blocks down the page beside the content.

Imaging keeping your reader engaged all the way down your page as they continuously scan from left to right as they read (or the reverse). Either way, their eyes brush the edge of ads all the way down the page IF your copy is engaging enough. Keep that in mind.

So there you have it, ways to leverage the Panda, Freshness, and Page Layout updates to your advantage. From this point, its all about writing content that sells.

Hopefully, this post will help you continue to enjoy profitable SERP rankings indefinitely…hopefully.

Actually, yes, SEO is easy…first, second, and third order SEO that is. Fourth order SEO…hmmm…maybe not so much.

What in the world is “Fourth Order SEO”? For that matter, what in the world are the first, second, and third orders of SEO?!?

Well, its really not that complicated, but first, I must confess, blog posting and SEO are not actually what I do for a living. Truth be told, these are just a hobby, albeit one that I am very passionate about.

I am actually an industrial scientist. I study and calculate chemical phase behavior.

Now, I am totally aware that phase behavior is something utterly boring to most people, so I don’t force people into discussions about it, but there is one aspect about it that I have come to appreciate as being applicable to SEO, fourth order SEO that is.

So what are the first three? They’re easy. You already know what they are:

First Order SEO

First order SEO is simply great content. If you search this blog, you will find tons of it here. Well written article on all classes of great subjects such as: SEO, Social Media, Email Marketing…the list goes on and on.

This type of SEO is actually what is most important to Google, because its reputation as “The Go-To Index” for high quality content completely relies on it ability to aggregate great and relevant content on YOUR website.

Make no mistake, in terms of its informational and organizational capabilities, YOU are what feed the machine. So just keep that in mind.

OK. So we understand the fact that first order SEO is great content. Got it. No problem. We have that covered, right?

Second Order SEO

The second order of SEO is really not SEO, but rather Google’s reaction to your first order efforts. You’ve heard of the Honeymoon Period, right?

If you haven’t heard of it, the Honeymoon Period is a variable span of time that search engines give to a new “web page” as a means of collecting very relevant data as to its content?

Why do they do this? Simple. Aggregators like to know what’s “HOT” and what’s “NOT”. Your content is what feeds this process, very much like a taste-tester looking for a great batch of Cabernet Sauvignon. Quality is recognized through a variety of metrics that biochemically tell the tester which batch is “On Spec” so to speak.

In light of this, if we had to give second order SEO a label, it would have to be: “Buzz”.

Now, as much as I would like to sit here and tell you that great “Keyword Research” is the key to all of this, I can’t. By the time something becomes “a keyword” its already old news to aggregators.

So, as content generators, our second order SEO will have to have a certain “foresight” built into it. Not only that, we will have to apply it to our first order SEO. I know. Sounds a bit like “time travel“. Well, it kinda is.

All of this, of course leading up to third order SEO.

Third Order SEO

Third order SEO is probably a little more familiar territory for most of us because it deals with something that we’re all familiar with…link building. Ahh…link building…the magic billet, right? Not necessarily. Not anymore.

As an occasional article directory owner, I was literally floored by the results that I would see when monitoring SERP results for plain ol’ articles sitting four levels deep in some of our article directories that would rank for high-traffic long-tail search terms with tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of competing results: http://thebitbot.com/files/RecentKeywordActivity.pdf.

What was always so striking was the fact that many of the best performers had absolutely zero inbound links and no Page Rank.

So what was the deal? SEO of the first and second order was the “deal”. Basically, the right content was “the deal” and Google absolutely “craved” it in an insatiable way to say the least.

So where does link building fit into all of this? Well, we are talking about third order SEO and that is link building, but in these cases, there was no link building, so third order SEO is knowing when NOT to build links and that is when content truly has the potential to go viral.

As SEOs we are always anxious to “get our content indexed” by blasting it with article directory links, or forum profile links, or link directory links, or Social Bookmarking links…STOP!

Links can be dangerous, especially if your website it new. Keep that in mind. Sure, you can build a couple of links to new content, but always do so sparingly and in a SPAM-FREE way.

Once the Honeymoon Period is over, then you can worry about Fourth Order SEO.

Fourth Order SEO

Fourth Order SEO encompasses all of the first three but introduces a highly unruly element in terms of “the buzz factor” or “the signal” that tells Google that your content is the “real deal”…and that element is “TIME”.

Search engines, especially Google and especially if your website has Google Analytics installed on it but also even if it doesn’t, are very good at identifying what is real “buzz” and what is synthetic.

This, like phase behavior, is a very time-sensitive process. Fourth order SEO is a very time-sensitive process.

What does this mean? Simple. This means that if you are going to leverage SEO to your benefit, you are going to have to have a “good bead” on this “timing” element.

So you might be asking yourself at this point: “How in the world could I ever even begin to understand the timing of all of this?”

I know that is what I asked myself. And its not easy data to come by, especially if you own a handful of websites or even one. Honestly, it took me ten article directories and roughly 250,000 indexed pages in Google to figure out that the first two “orders” even existed. But rest assured…they do.

My take is this…if an SEO is going to get a handle on just what type of timing is required in terms of “third order SEO” the are going to have some pretty comprehensive analytics at their disposal.

Obviously, Google is not going to hand us this information because, well, that is all proprietary…and who can blame them.

However, if an SEO takes it upon him or herself to build a Private Network of blogs, article directories, and niche sniper sites and then offer outbound links from those sites to clients looking to “rank” for “long-tail” keywords, then they would have at their disposal what could ultimately be termed a “comprehensive catalog” of “fourth order SEO case studies”.

THAT is what we are interested in and THAT is what gives us the “HOLY GRAIL” of SEO…the ability to create great content and then “manipulate the system” using a private network and dominate SEP results synthetically.

Enter Private Networks

Since I started evaluating Private Networks and actually testing to see which ones work and which ones don’t, I have found that “fourth order SEO” or the “time element” is the real deal.

I am actually performing a case study as we speak and so far the results are actually more impressive than I though they would be.

One thing about Private Networks is the fact that they vary dramatically in terms of total IP count and Page Rank range. These metrics make a difference and if you’re in the business of building and ranking websites for clients, even if they are for low-competition, long-tail keywords, you can quickly find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of work that SEO requires.

My philosophy now is: OUTSOURCE IT.

Don’t waste your time on menial tasks when there are people who (naturally) do it really, really well…you know, kinda like link building.

Focus on producing great, well-researched content that will benefit your readers…i.e. SEO order numbers one and two and let the experts (not me, unfortunately) focus on order numbers three and four.

Of course, this is not all there is to say about this subject…check TheBitBot.Com for more on this in the future. This entire subject can get much, much, much more interesting and much, much, much more BLACK…OOPS…I didn’t say that

What a weird title, right? This article has been sitting in the back of my mind for a while now and I recently received a question that finally catalyzed its writing, so here we go.

Obviously, off page SEO is very important and even though many of the link building techniques that have worked in the past (most of them blue hat), the future of search engine optimization and search engine marketing demands two things:

1 ) Quality Content – Articles that convert your readers into subscribers and buyers and actually teach them something

2 ) Quality Links – Contextual links that point to those articles and boost their SEO value

OK. OK. I totally realize that everything you have read up to this point is so “last year”. But, do you actually have a plan to get this stuff rolling?

So often in forums, people get lost in the details. That is very easy to do, but if you have a tried and true SEO routine, things get much easier very quickly and your quality level raises substantially.

Content Generation And Linking Plan

So what is this big “super game plan” that I am touting? Well boys and girls, here it what I do:

1 ) Pick a niche and check competition levels using Traffic Travis
2 ) Start a blog/newsletter (each post is an issue)
3 ) Write articles with as much quality as I can stuff in there
4 ) Make each article available for re-publishing (you will see the HTML for each article on my site in a text area just beneath each article)
5 ) Blast each article to my opt-in newsletter
6 ) Network and build links to each article by commenting on like blogs that link out using CommentLuv (for deep links)
7 ) Submit the article to top article directories for syndication
8 ) Take the article and let the boys at Leading Articles manually spin it
9 ) Take the seed and blast it across the web with AMR for link and IP diversity (this forms my lower tiered links)

Its All In The Details

Now, lets take a look at each of these in a little more detail so that we can understand what’s really going on here and I will explain why I believe each step is imoprtant:

1 ) Pick a niche and check competition levels using Traffic Travis.

This is so, so important. Whatever you do, you have to pick a niche that has a hungry market, hungry for solutions to their problems, hungry for products that provide solutions to those problems. You will have to do your research on this one and you will have to become an authority in that niche. Lean sites? Forget about them. They will be too hard in the near future for keywords with any type of traffic consistently.

Additionally, you will want to check a variety of keywords, buying keywords that is, that define your niche and then check their competition levels respectively using Traffic Travis Pro. I use this and I like it. There are many alternatives, but I find that they keep this one update regularly.

Once you have your niche picked out, its time to get to work. There is no push-button system for this. All things take work. There are no exceptions.

Sidenote: Don’t be afraid of a competitive niche, because this outline works for both low hanging fruit and highly competitive niches. Its simply a function of how much time and energy you want to invest.

2 ) Start a blog/newsletter (each post is an issue).

OK. So you’ve done your research and you feel that you have found a niche that you can give REAL VALUE to.

If you are going to establish yourself as an authority figure in that arena, you will have to prove it. Basically, this means starting a blog/newsletter on the subject and simply writing about it…regularly, with 1000 word articles.

One way of getting your content out there is, of course, by starting a newsletter…one that every article you write will be an issue of.

3 ) Stuff your articles with as much quality as you possibly can.

The more high quality content you can get out there the better. Do interviews with experts. Do research. Do case studies. Both people and search engines love this stuff and will feed it to their search queries and lists.

Don’t skimp. Give them the best of everything. Why you ask? Simple. That is what everyone else is doing, so you really don’t have a choice.

4 ) Make each article available for re-publishing (you will see the HTML for each article on my site in a text area just beneath each article).

Actually this one is as much of an anti-content-piracy tool as it is a “branding machine”. If you look at this site, you will see each and every article available for republishing via an HTML text area. All a reader has to do is copy the HTML and paste it to their blog, article directory or newsletter.

If you go this route, make sure and add to the HTML text area a “Source” link pointing to the original. That is actually a major part of SEO…helping search engines to identify the original.

5 ) Blast each article to your opt-in newsletter.

Personally, I love the idea of people getting my content via email. Sure, there are deliverability issues, spam filters and all kinds of stuff like that to worry about, but make no mistake, having an “underground” or “off the grid” network of subscribers that doesn’t rely on SEO is something that should form the absolute core of each and every operation, most of all…YOURS.

SEO is far too volatile in terms of traffic to be relied upon for income. Last year taught us that many times over. SEOs earth-wide have been feeling the pain as have been their clients in many cases. SEO is tough, real tough, and the less you have to rely on it the better.

6 ) Network and build links to each article by commenting on like blogs that link out using CommentLuv (for deep links).

OK. So, once you have written an awesome article with tons of helpful information and resources both in the information itself and in terms of links to other resources, build some quality links to it.

CommentLuv enabled site are very helpful in this regard. CommentLuv enabled sites link to your article through your RSS feed USING YOUR ARTICLE TITLE AS ANCHOR TEXT. Therein we find the pinnacle of relevancy. The only way it could get better is if the link was actually in the article, but that would require guest posting. More on that later.

7 ) Submit the article to top article directories for syndication.

Once your article has been indexed and Google knows that you wrote it from the fact that it found the block of text on your site first and there are other copies sprinkled across the web linking back to it, feel free to submit it to article directories.

This is very much like the text area that you created beneath each article, but a little more pro-active in nature being that webmasters frequent some of the top article directories is they are absolutely “desperate” for mediocre to “less-than-mediocre” content.

8 ) Take the article and let the boys at The Leading Articles manually spin it.

Forget using software to do this. It will destroy your copy. You need a human to do this. Coding and scripting simply does not have the ability to spin content and make it readable. That’s just the truth of it.

Let a content wizard do this for you. They are faster and better at it than you are. Anything less than their level of talent is a waste of your time.

To be frank, spinning takes so much time and effort to do correctly, I don’t even do it. I outsource it to pros and spend the hours upon hours that would be spent spinning in a way that doesn’t destroy copy to managing projects. This is an outsource MUST.

9 ) Take the seed and blast it across the web with AMR for link and IP diversity (this forms my lower tiered links).

Blast away with your seed. Get tons of unique copies with resource links pointing back to your money site and deep linking to it.

Every time I do this I immediately get 10-20 indexed copies of unique articles pointing to this site, which has benefited our operation substantially in terms of unique IPs linking in.

Of course, this forms the low-quality link tier, you know, the ones that don’t really pass on link juice, but are required for a “natural in appearance” link profile…just FYI.

So that’s basically it in a nutshell, a daily plan that you can perform as an SEO and article marketer.

This Outlay Will Do Three Things For You

1 ) It will systematically give yo the time to produce the most important requirement of any business…great content and a constant supply of it at that.

2 ) The beginnings of an email list and newsletter that will allow you to progress and advance in an SEO-Free environment which is the real long-term plan.

3 ) You will automatically have an awesome backlinking strategy that will eventually help your awesome and relevant content outrank your competitors awesome and relevant content because, well, everybody has awesome and relevant content.

Any time you have left over should be spent writing awesome guest posts for other blogs and ezines and contributing to high traffic forums.

So that’s it…ENJOY!

If you think about it, SEO really shouldn’t exist. The fact that Search Engine Optimization even exists at all is really an anomaly in what will ultimately be “the history of human information management”.

Really, its kind of a rough spot that will be looked back upon as a “temporary chaos as humanity organized its information and knowledge for the first time on a massive automated scale”.

Old School Blue Hat SEO Is Kinda Losing Its Effectiveness

In an SEO world that is now quickly being reformed into one that makes use of social and behavioral metrics, sometimes (and increasingly more so), the best SEO is thinking pre-SEO, which will also be post-SEO.

How can one prepare for this “return to innocence” so to speak? Well, its really not that hard…just get your content in front of people without Google’s help.

Now, there are a couple of ways to do this and they are all pretty simple but before you pursue any of these avenues you first have to have one thing…articles that people actually want to read.

Prepare Your Non SEO-Optimized Content

This means that they will have to have the following qualities:

1) They will have to offer real value. No self-serving ads. No synonymized garbage. No blurbs. No SEO (keyword stuffing or any SEO technique that makes them sound funny).

2) They must have impeccable grammar and punctuation. Grammatical errors (which I admit I have sometimes) drive editors absolutely nuts and their existing at all is the fastest way to get your content thrown in the garbage. Editors are not mean people, its simply that their job relies on the non-existance of grammatical errors in publications that they edit. Additionally, they do not have time to fix everyone else’s mistakes. You have to do that on the front end.

3) A layout that allows the reader to skim through the article and speed read it. One of the fastest ways to get you visitors to hit the back button is to have an article that is one giant block of monotonous text. Formatting is very important. You giant block of text has to be very broken up and scannable if you are to convert your reader.

OK. So My Content Is Intentionally Not Optimized. So Now What?

Now, once you have articles that people actually want to read as opposed to being just “spider food”, search engine spiders that is, you need to publish them on your own site.

Many people do this using a blog and some people do this by posting their articles in their own private article directory which can be very similar to a blog in many ways.

Some people post their well-researched articles to their blog first and then to article directories, if the directory accepts content that has already been indexed by search engines. Not all sites allow this. You will just have to make not of the terms of service of each.

After posting your article to your site, you can then email it to your newsletter.

What? A Newsletter! Ugh!

What is that you say? You don’t have a newsletter? Well then, start one. This is very easy to do. All you have to do is sign up for an autoresponder service and use the HTML provided by the autoresponder service to add an opt-in form to your blog or article directory.

Then, every time you write a stellar article, email it (in its entirety – not an excerpt) to your newsletter list of subscribers and offer them republishing rights provided they retain the links in the article and do not change them in any way.

Additionally, if you are running WordPress, you can make the HTML of any article on your site available for republishing by displaying the article HTML for each article beneath each article as you can see [ here ].

As far as I can tell, I am the only webmaster who has hacked their own blog and made their articles available for republishing and let me tell you from personal experience, I am glad I did. I no longer worry about scrapers stealing my content and my natural backlinks and reach have already extended far beyond what I could have done if I had focused exclusively on building links in the mean time.

Now Lets Get The Word Out For Real!

Once you have emailed your latest article/issue of your newsletter to your email list using your autoresponder service, offer it to other newsletter or e-zine owners. Many e-zine owners have deadlines to meet and if your content fits their purpose, they will publish your article. If you need some suggestions, [ here ] and [ here ] are some you could start with.

Simply Google “Your Keyword” + “E-zine” and start building a list of potential re-publishers. Remember, we’re not worried about SEO, because this is not about SEO, its about delivering great content to people who want to read it and will actually benefit from it. This line of thinking far exceeds SEO in every way. Any traffic that you get from search engines at this point should be considered “bonus traffic”. The core of your traffic should come from quality and syndication, then SEO.

Now, once you have successfully written a great article, had it indexed by Google on your own blog or private article directory, emailed it to your list of subscribers in its complete form while making it available for republication on your own site and in your newsletter and then offered it to your compiled list of newsletter and ezine re-publishers, you can then do all kind of cool things with it.

For example, [ here ] is a great list of ways that you can actually re-use old content or recycle it so-to-speak.

Feeling Blue? Blue-Hat That Is?

And we finally, we come to the SEO part. If, as a matter of fact, you are feeling particularly “blue hat” that day and you really want to round out the “usage” of your content and “leverage” it, you can do the following, but don’t tell anybody about this.

You can take your article and spin it. Shhhh. Now before you fly off the handle and freak out, bear in mind that I am not talking about destroying your contents readability by synonymizing it to death with software, I am talking about spinning it using the following [ methodology ].

Quite frankly, taking the time to do this properly sucks, is extremely labor intensive and is really easy to screw up. Personally, I have done it in the past and have actually enjoyed the results, but, truth be told, I simply don’t have the time is takes to do this right. I now have it professionally done as needed by contracting this out to [ these guys ] who are actually professionals at this and can do it much more quickly and much more cleanly than I ever could. They are my secret weapon and they can be yours too.

So what do I do with them? Simple I [ blast them ] to [ private networks and article directories ].

This technique absolutely “shreds” in terms of IPs linking in. IP diversity is very important. And unique articles containing unique anchor text pointing to a variety of pages on your website simply ROCKS!

You would be amazed how well a “buried” page containing unique content can rank in search engines with absolutely no backlinks, even if it is for a honeymoon period. LOL! If it converts, even better.

OR…You could Spindicate it [ here ]. What is spindication? Spindication is simply syndication of spinner seeds.

As you know, article directories make articles available for republishing. What if each and every article that they provided the HTML for was unique each and every time the page was refreshed. Some of you reading this will quickly realize the magnitude of what I just wrote. Some of you will be clueless or skeptical, but know this. Nothing is better than having loads of unique articles linking back to your site. Nothing.

Currently, there is only one place in the universe that you can Spindicate (a practice that consistently gets us in trouble with our Hosing provider in terms of server usage) and that is TheBitBot.Com Off Topic Article Directory.

If you submit seeds here, do yourself and us a favor and have it professionally formed using [ this service ]. Anything less in terms of quality will be wasting your time and my resources.

Long story short, there’s nothin’ like creatin’ a literal buzz around your content padded by a synthetic one.

So What’s The Take-Away?

Anyway, in conclusion, lets get things back on track because this article has gotten off the path. Remember, sometimes, no actually always, the best SEO is setting up a format that is not a slave to SEO. At the core of SEO should always be great content. Focus on that and you will do well.

This actually is not an article so as much as it is an announcement.

We are currently in the process of performing a post-Panda, post-Freshness off site SEO case study using what we are hoping is a
high-powered private network.

I am not sure how long this is going to take (I am guessing weeks or months – these things take time to do correctly), but we are already seeing positive results.

If you are reading this and you are a Google employee or outsourced Google employee, this is not being applied to this site. Just FYI.

For everyone else, stay tuned and we will release what I consider to be highly relative details that document a variety of metrics, the most important being actual SERP movement.

All site details, of course, will be omitted so as to protect both my client and the talented team that is in place and performing the work as we speak.

Stay tuned. Book mark this page if you have to. Just don’t miss this case study because you will not find THIS information anywhere else.

Mark

Sign Up For Case Study Updates Using This Form:

.

Important Note: Any and all information that we release concerning these updates will be offline via “TheBitBot Private Networks Newsletter”. If you’re not signed up, you’ll never see it!

.

Now there are two ways to do this, there is the blue hat way where you perform forced takeovers of websites from their existing webmasters (yes, this type of thing exists) and then there is the much slower, white hat version of this and that is what we are going to layout here.

Funneling And Converting Trust Rank

Page Rank and Trust Rank can be converted from one niche or keyword into another niche or keyword quite easily much like chemical energy can be converted into mechanical energy in an internal combustion engine.

To do this, all you need are trusted links from a variety of, you guessed it, trusted sources. Personally, I have found that one of the best ways to become a trusted source is gain the trust of those sources if that even makes sense.

How do you do that? Easy, get small localized businesses to link to you while they are small potatoes. If you haven’t guessed it yet, we are talking about small city-specific brick and mortar establishments that do not yet have a website.

Localized Search Terms Rock!

If you live in a city, any city, then that city is simply brimming with small businesses that would love to have a website but feel that it may not be in their budget.

This is where you come in. All you have to do is simply walk into their business and offer them a simple website that lays out their offerings online.

Small business love this and what-is-more, they immediately get the “$” symbol in each eye like this: “$”|”$” (blink, blink) LOL! All you have to do is offer them a cheap WordPress based website.

Simply set it up for them on the spot by using Godaddy as their registrar and Hostgator as their host using your affiliate links.

Now here is what happens soon thereafter. Being that they are a brick and mortar establishment and if you set up your SEO properly, links will automatically start building to them…and these will be natural links…the best kind.

Being that you are their webmaster, simply place a small excerpt at the bottom of the index page describing and linking to your money site.

As you set these up month after month and year after year, whatever your money site is will dominate for whatever keyword you optimize for onsite almost at will.

Additionally, as their webmaster, you can literally sell trust and rank to the highest bidder (I didn’t say that).

Here is why this works:

1 ) Your piggy-backing off of the trust of real, established businesses.

2 ) Your clients are ranking highly trusted localized relevant search terms.

3 ) You are gaining clients by making face to face contact, so you actually get clients unlike when you simply advertise online.

4 ) Trust and rank do not decay, but rather strengthen over time.

5 ) You have tons of opportunity for a strong up-sell. If you can’t stand writing articles, then this is for you!

Actually there is much more to this story, but I really don’t feel like divulging all of the secrets in this post. Stay tuned.

Discipline is also one of the major things that separate the successful and flourishing websites from the ones that shut shop within a short while.

Discipline helps you capitalize on all available online marketing methods

Online marketing is a vast field. There are so many different ways in which you can take your marketing strategies forward. Some of the most profound and effective marketing grounds are social media, article marketing and backlinking. So, how do you manage so many things simultaneously? This is where discipline comes into picture. Discipline helps you establish a routine and allot time for all marketing strategies so that you do not end up neglecting any of them.

Discipline helps you plan well

Discipline helps you establish a perfect plan that can help you make the most of online marketing. Not only does it help in time management, but it also helps you take a well organized path for executing plans. Having a disciplined approach towards plan execution can increase its probability of success. This can be a huge attribute for every online business and is one of the few foolproof ways of sustaining your business in this competitive world.

Discipline enhances your reputation

Disarray is like a pyramid of cards – it can crumble at the slightest provocation. When things are haphazard, there are higher chances that you overlook something that can cost you dearly later on. A disciplined approach avoids such problems and your entire machinery functions smoothly. When you are online, your business is exposed to thousands of people. So, inefficiency can cost you very dearly indeed. On the other hand, being disciplined and organized enhances your reputation of efficiency, which is a huge advantage in the online marketing world. A disciplined approach is appreciated on social networking sites as well.

Discipline helps you focus

With more than three trillion websites on the internet, you can hardly expect to succeed unless you move forward with a focus. You need to have a mission, a vision and the drive to move gradually up the search engine ladder. When you are disciplined, your focus is not lost from the aim. You can protect yourself from being influenced by so many undesirable temptations that prompt you to take the shortcut route to success, which only turns out to be temporary effervescence. If you are looking for long term existence on the World Wide Web, you need to be disciplined and have your focus right.

The internet is a huge, deep, never-ending ocean. If you want to swim up to the surface and make yourself be noticed, you need to be disciplined, consistent in your efforts and extremely focused. Only then can you expect success on the internet – success that will last because you will continue to work with the same disciplined approach.

About the guest author
James is also an avid investor and blogs about his trading successes on MoneyMagazine.ws

If so, you may be the victim of a WordPress update.

More often than not, whenever there is a WordPress update, there actually seems to be a decent chance that any one of the plugins you have installed on your blog may thereafter become incompatible with the latest version of WordPress.

So what generally happens at this point? Well, if you’re like me you immediately become irritated with the fact that your “internet connection is bad” or that “Google Chrome keeps crashing” or that “Firefox uses too much ram” or any host of complaints that are actually not related to the problem at all.

I immediately, of course, began researching online so as to determine the root of the problem.

One blogger recommended “Firebug” for Firefox which essentially breaks down all of the processes when any give web page loads.

Honestly, this wasn’t much help, because all Firebug told me that there was an “Ajax” process that was taking forever to load.

Many WordPress plugins Use Ajax As A Means To Effect Specialized Modding

That kind of goes without saying, I realize that.

Ajax (also AJAX; pronounced an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications.

With each and every update to the WordPress CMS, there exists the possibility of a plugin residing on your blog not meeting the new standard.

What happens when this is the case? Generally, any page using a plugin that has coding incompatible with the new standard fails to complete it function and that particular aspect fails to load and your page simply continues to wait and wait and wait and wait…you get the point?

So what should you do in this case? Common theory online suggests that you disable all of the plugins on your site and slowly enable them one by one checking the functionality along the way checking for the observed lag each time.

Firebug is actually very helpful during this process because it gives you a visual load time metric that is easily observable as all of the page elements load.

So that is what I did. I disabled all of my plugins at once as directed and that is when the real problems started.

My site crashed so completely that I had to get my host to restore it using the last save point a week prior. Apparently, many of the databases had become completely corrupted during the process. I had no idea why. They had no idea why. The tech nsaid he had never seen a case like this.

Fortunately, the tech working on my case was competent enough to capture all of the information post-back and pre-crash and re-integrate the two in a most graceful fashion using their server-side backups.

Once this was accomplished, I tried the process again, but a modified version of it this time.

This time, I slowly disabled my plugins ONE-BY-ONE and checked back-end performance each step of the way.

Side Note: If you do this, start with non-essential plugins first so as not to affect front-end appearance and functionality as your site is most likely still being used by visitors.

Gradually, I noticed performance increases until site speed on the back-end was restored to its former standard, which leads me to believe that multiple plugins had become incompatible over time with subsequent updates.

What I Learned From This Mishap

After all of this I learned what I really knew all along. Never load your site up with tons of plugins simply because you think that they may have an interesting functionality.

It is always a great idea to use only plugins that you need to have working on your site. Plugin authors do not always update their scripting which may very well lead to a crash for you.

Before the crash, my site was running about 100 plugins. After stripping down to the essentials, we are now running 29. And just think, all this time I was blaming poor site performance on the 1000+ hack attempts we receive daily (literally).

How’s that for “trimming the fat”?

Oh yeah. The site runs like it is brand new now

Of the tools that I have used that I have come to appreciate the most are the WordPress and Joomla content management systems. The nice thing about both of these content management systems is the fact they are both highly customizable platforms. Both platforms boast extremely large libraries of modular plugins that are available for download free of charge.

Thus, one has the ability to take the functionality of their website in just about any direction in that all of these plugins are ready-made. After all, that is what modular means.

This article is about the top twenty essential WordPress plugins that I would highly recommend to anyone using the WordPress CMS. So here we go. Keep in mind that these are listed in alphabetical order, not order of importance.

1) Add Widgets To Page. This plugin gives you WordPress blog the ability to add Widgets to your articles and not just to the sidebar. So for instance if you want to install a widget where other bloggers can submit potential guest posts, you can add this widget to an actual page where there is plenty of room for them to work as opposed to them having to write a blog post in the sidebar.

2) All in One SEO Pack. Instead of trying to keep up with basic SEO on your WordPress blog manually, the all in one SEO pack places fields for your Title, Description and Keywords meta tags at the bottom of your new post page. You can even drag it up and place it right beneath where you write so that you do not forget you basic SEO tags and every article gets optimized.

3) Chap Secure Login. Hide your password from over-the-shoulder snoops just taking a look out of sheer curiosity. This plugin cloaks your letters and characters so that they will not be recognized by uninvited visitors.

4) Feedburner Feedsmith. This plugin detects every route that one may use to access your WordPress feed and channels them all to your Feedburner feed. The nice thing about a Feedburner feed is that it can be monitized with Adsense, if you are interested in that type of thing.

5) Google XML Sitemaps. This is a great one. his plugin will automatically build a sitemap for you and submit it to all of the major search engines each and every time your site is modified. Functionality includes prioritizing which pages are crawled as well as feedback as to whether sitemap submission was successful or not. Definitely check this one out.

6) GTranslate. Why limit your guests to those who read your language exclusively? After all, we are all on the World Wide Web. There are more languages out there than any one of us can count. This plugin boasts the ability to translate your WordPress posts in to 58 of the most commonly spoken languages and 98% of internet users as of the date of this post. The only drawback is that sometimes, people will leave comments in other languages.

7) Hal HTML Widget. If you want to customize your sidebar with some HTML for a specific purpose such as an opt-in form or rotating ads, this makes it easy for those of us that want to go this route.

Login LockDown. This is a great plugin that assists in protecting against those brute force attacks where some script on some server in some country decides it is going to crack your installation. This plugin reduces the number of login attempts from a specific IP range to a small finite number. This one is definitely essential.

9) NoFollow Free. By default, WordPress adds the no-follow attribute to all commenter URL’s. This is great if you are worried about leaking PR but bad if you are worried about deterring SEO conscious visitors. This plugin removes the no-follow attribute allowing you to show a little “link love” to those who comment on your blog.

10) Ozh’ Better Feed. This plugin adds a custom footer to your feed. Great for adding messages or links to post footers. This plugin makes your individual post footer highly customizable. This is a great plugin for syndication as the links will show up on the sites of webmaster who “scrape” your feed and post it on their website.

There are many more plugins available. These are just some of the ones that I recommend.

It is possible to have a site that gets traffic from other search engines, but the fact is, Google is the number one search engine. That means that more people search with Google than with any other search engine. You want a piece of that traffic, no doubt.

Behold – The Sandbox

When a site is placed in the Google sandbox, it means that it is penalized. A site’s penalty can range from being pushed off of the first pages of Google to being completely taken out of the search engine results of Google.

This is called being de-indexed. Obviously, neither of these penalties are something that anyone would want for their site. The closer to the first pages of Google a site is, the more traffic it receives. For many people, the amount of income derived from their site directly relates to how close they are to the top of the rankings.

Hey. Where Is My Traffic?

When a site ranks for its keywords and lands at the top of the search engine results it can receive a flood of traffic. The true is opposite as well. When a site is pushed into the Google sandbox, the traffic can slow down tremendously.

There may be people who visit the site regularly – the regulars. But, as far as seeing new traffic, it is not very likely that there will be a lot of new traffic when a site is ranked low in Google.

What Is Link Velocity?

One way to avoid being placed in the Google sandbox is to take it easy with link building when you have a new site. Sometimes people go all gung-ho on the link building of a brand new site, and that looks unnatural to Google.

It is not natural for a site to a new site to have thousands of links pointing towards it and Google will see that and take note. It could result in a penalty. And it should also be noted that just because a site has a lot of backlinks pointing to it initially, that does not mean the rank will increase. During the first part few months of a site’s creation, you should only use a small amount of backlinks of high quality to point to your site.

Uniqueness Counts

Unique content is another thing you need to be careful about. Google does not like to see a new site full of content that is borrowed from another source.

There is nothing wrong with borrowing content, with permission of course, from another site every now and then. However, if your site is just an aggregate of other sites, Google might slap it with a penalty. Take the time to make your own content and you can keep Google from de-indexing your site.

About The Author: Nirra is a freelance writer who writes about a variety of topics, including Seo. She has a blog about mystery shopping, on which she writes when she has time.

So how do we determine if there is money being spent in this niche?

One of the simplest ways and probably the one most commonly used is that of paid listings. In short, paid listings follow the money because there is an inherent ROI or Return On Investment. This means that for every dollar spent on advertising, some multiple of that number is being made back. Hopefully, the return is greater than the investment. Keep in mind that there are no guarantees, but generally, paid listings are a good starting gauge.

Let’s look at an example. Take the search term “bodybuilding” for instance. If you search Google for the search term “bodybuilding” you will find as of the time of this post, about 17,300,000 results. Interestingly, you will notice that there are no paid links at the top of the organic search results and only three to the right of the organic search results. What does this tell us? Well, it tells us two things. First it tells us that the search term “bodybuilding”, although receiving about 6,120,000 searches per month according to Google, is apparently not a niche search term where money is being spent. Maybe this search term is too general. Whatever the case, people searching for simply “bodybuilding” apparently not looking to spend money. For that reason, we are not interested in focusing our efforts there.

Now, let’s refine that search term a little and focus on something is a slightly smaller niche. Let’s try the search term “bodybuilding supplements”. Here, we find a completely different scenario. If you search for this term, you will immediately see a huge difference with respect to the number of paid links placed around the organic search results. You immediately see that the right side of the page is filled with paid links selling information or products related to the “bodybuilding supplement” niche. This tells us one thing…that there is money being spent on “bodybuilding supplements”.

This research makes perfect sense in one thinks about it because if a person is searching for “bodybuilding” then they may be just looking for general information on that subject and not looking to actually buy anything. If they are searching for body “building supplements” then they have probably already searched for information on bodybuilding and are now looking for information or a product that fills a particular need or want in the very large and generalized bodybuilding niche.

The interesting thing about the search term “bodybuilding supplements” is that is receives 165,000 searches per month according to Google, but more importantly it has 1,390,000 competing pages as opposed to the 17,300,000 for the term “bodybuilding”. Believe it or not, anything with a search to competing pages ratio similar to that for “bodybuilding supplements” is quite manageable even though one would think that by this point “bodybuilding supplements” would be completely saturated, and it is to a degree, but keep in mind that there are other sub-niches within that one that are NOT saturated. For more on keyword research, see the link in this sentence.

So there you have it, the absolutely simplest way to see if money is being spent in a particular niche, paid links.

As always, I am interested in your comments…:)

For that reason, I have decided, for this post, to condense everything I have learned into one short article that can act as an outline for anyone who has not yet obtained a personal road map to this end. So, here we go.

Step 1 ) Select a niche that you will write about. Take a moment and reflect on your life experiences, your interests, your pastimes, things you are passionate about, things that have consistently held your interest over the years or problems you have worked hard to overcome.

Odds are, there are a great number of people who have the same interests, passions, pastimes or the same problems that you have had to overcome and who perhaps have not yet found the solutions that you have discovered. Whatever it is that you discover can be turned into an internet marketing business.

These days, whenever anyone has a problem or interest, the first thing that they do is refer to their favorite search engine and begin researching their problem or interest to find what? Information on that subject or problem. Out of these two scenarios, solutions to problems are actually more profitable in that people are usually willing to fork over money for a solution.

Once you have selected your niche, move on to step number two.

Step 2 ) Open your browser and go to the Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool and enter keywords related to your subject of interest. For information on how to research what keywords to use, check out the link in this sentence. Checking your competition in the article linked to in the previous sentence is very important. Find keywords with high searches per month and low competition. Once you have selected about five potential keywords, proceed to step three.

Step 3 ) Direct your browser to a domain registrar such as GoDaddy and begin searching for potential domain names that are exact matches for these keywords. If you find it, register it. If not, try to find something as close as possible and then proceed to step four.

Step 4 ) Acquire hosting for your soon-to-be-launched website. Hosting is very important. You want reliable hosting so that when visitors come to your website, they are served the website and not some error page stating that your web page is inaccessible. This is important because, statistically speaking, this is the one and only chance you will have to impress them. Personally, I prefer Hostgator. They have been the best that I have found so far. Now proceed to step five.

Step 5 ) Launch your website. This is much easier than it sounds because there are so many tools available today to do this with. For the absolute easiest route, use a popular blogging platform such as WordPress, which can be downloaded for free. Once you have downloaded it, upload it to your server using an FTP manager such as Filezilla. Note: if you go this route, a high speed internet connection is highly recommended. Of course, you can skip all of these steps if your hosting service offers a free script install for platforms such as WordPress in the CPanel (i.e. Control Panel). Next proceed to step six.

Step 6 ) Begin writing short articles about your subject of interest. On a slow and consistent basis, post the articles that you write to your blog or website. If your articles are unique and useful, your blog will begin generating traffic. It is important to note that you will not provide the solution to the problem you are writing about here. The solution will be withheld and revealed only in a special report that your produce in step seven.

Step 7 ) Write a short and sweet report or ebook on the subject you chose. Make sure that the report provides a definitive solution to the problem you chose to write about. Additionally, break up the report into several chapters so that you can give the first chapter away for free. Once the report is complete, save the first chapter in the form of a PDF file. Additionally, save the entire report in the form of a PDF file and then proceed to step eight.

Step 8 ) Register with an autoresponder service such as Aweber or GetResponse. Once you have registered for an autoresponder account add the code provided by the service to your blog or website in the form of an opt-in box placed in the sidebar of your website. Alternatively, you can add it to a squeeze page that describes the benefits of your report. Proceed to step nine.

Step 9 ) Once you have added the opt-in form to your website, set up your autoresponder to deliver the first chapter, as promised, to your visitors. Congratulations. You have now began harvesting emails and started building your list. Proceed to step ten.

Step 10 ) Using your autoresponder service notify your list of updates to your blog or website and begin developing a relationship with your subscribers. From this point forward, in each post, refer to the complete report that you produced that will be available for sale on your sales page that you created specifically for selling your report.

Step 11 ) Continue to research and continue to develop solutions to problems in your niche. Provide real value to your subscribers and help them discover real solutions.

Step 12 ) Reward yourself. You have created an online business.

That’s it. That is a year’s worth of research condensed in to one thousand words that took ten minutes to read. No need to buy expensive “make money online” products now.

If you have any questions about steps 1-12 or the underlying details of them, just leave them in the form of a comment on this page or send them to me via the contact for at the very top right of this page.

I have actually posted some stats about this client before because of the fact that their site metrics and keyword traffic are always telling.

Anyway, as I was looking at my StatCounter “Recent Keyword Activity” page, I couldn’t help but notice that Google was being very, very friendly with the images and natural keywords it was finding in the blog posts specifically.

Why Were The Blog Posts Ranking So Well?

Of course, this makes sense for two reasons:

1 ) The keywords are highly localized and easy to rank for.

2 ) The behavioral metrics surrounding the pages, even though they are not massive in terms of traffic, undoubtedly fit “the natural fingerprint” as it is defined by Google.

Now, I always like to point out the fact that naturalness in terms of behavioral metrics is always the result of and a function of relevant content. If you haven’t read the article entitled: Sometimes The Best SEO Is No SEO, then it is highly suggested reading.

Anyway, back to the subject.

Fresh Long Tails

The blog posts have been consistently ranking for a large variety of long-tail “highly targeted” keywords in the area of the business.

Personally, I would like to attribute that to the awesome posts that I have been writing for him. After all, this is a restaurant and he gives me free food to blog about and I love to eat, so getting excited about it comes naturally. LOL!

Truth be told, however, I honestly feel that the benefits are coming from the light “White Hat SEO” efforts we have been applying to this site in addition to a little Private Networking, if you know what I mean.

Really, its all a big chaotic “mish-mash” of great, relevant content, and light (and I stress light) off-site SEO. We are certainty not looking for penalties.

So what’s the take-away here?

You Need A Blog

The take-away is this: Google loves fresh stuff.

If your business doesn’t have a blog, then building “buzz” around your products and/or services is much, much tougher.

Marketing a website is all about keeping things fresh and relevant as well as fun and informative. I have seen many-a-website where the webmaster contracted to do the job built a static site that essentially faded away after the SEO honeymoon period.

Promoting a website IS NOT a “one time deal” just as traditional advertising is not a one time deal.

Indefinite are the efforts one must put forth if they are going to “maintain” their rankings in SERP results.

Therefore, if you are a small business and your website doesn’t get the traffic you think it deserves, follow the lead of my restaurant friend and create buzz with a blog.

In his case, we show off his food, but in you case, you should be showing off your knowledge and expertise of your niche or field of interest.

Blogging is very easy, once you learn basic web copy. So definitely give it a try.

The best strategy of increasing web traffic is through search engines. Though you can allocate some funds towards search engine optimization (SEO), you can succeed in the same without investing a single dime. Before, one needed to be an expert to succeed in SEO but today anyone keen to learn the tricks can easy rank high.

All you need to identify are the queries that people in your niche use to browse the internet. Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing Crawl websites searching for relevant content to their internet users’ queries. Therefore, the content you generate for your seemingly small business should be optimized. With a few changes you too can rank high and thus increase web traffic to your website.

As you work on your visible content, make sure your hidden content is also optimized. By this I mean your HTML tags. Ensure your “META” elements content are well optimized with relevant keywords. Since search engines cannot read images, the images on your site should also be identified with alternate tags.

It is good at this point to remember that Google, Yahoo and Bing all use different tactics to rank sites. For example Google takes into account the use of keywords in your “description” META tags while other engines concentrate on “keywords” META tags or both.  Therefore, when choosing keywords, ensure that they are common in your market niche and not so competitive. This will make it easy for your website to be found on engines first result pages thus increasing web traffic.

Important to note in addition to getting a high page ranking is the need to build rich content that ensure reader retention. Follow the links below to learn more on free online marketing ideas hence increase web traffic.

About the Author

Stephen builds authoritative and quality content on Increasing Web Traffic. His website shares Money Making Ideas and Free Website Promotion Strategies. Visit his informative and insightful website at Make Money Online Secrets and learn more…

Imagine for a moment that you’re sitting at your desk with absolutely nothing to write about. You have a blog and you started a newsletter that you blast to your list of subscribers each time you post.

But there is a problem. You are running a little lean in the idea department. And you begin to panic because every time you try to “force write” an article or post, you have to keep balling it up and throwing it in the garbage completely frustrated.

Have no fears, my friends. Here is a secret to finding out the questions and the answers to those questions that are on the hottest topics and the most relevant to the people in your niche.

And the answer is: FORUMS

Forums are literal goldmines when it comes to finding out what’s hot in terms of “subject matter” in any niche.

The net is literally packed with forums loaded with people that form a cumulative community of experts on any subject you can think of and YOU can tap and leverage that knowledge and insight and skim the “crème de la crème” so to speak and refine it into an awesomely informative post for your newsletter.

Now, before we move on…I am not talking about copying the content (that would be plagiarism). I am talking about finding a thread where an OP asks a “hot” question and a lively discussion follows and then capturing all of the best ideas and putting them into your own words in the form of a blog post for your site.

This works very well as more often than not all of the secrets of the matter will be revealed by a small number of “sarcastic experts” that have nothing better to do than to hang out on forums all day and argue with people. LOL!

Honestly, if you actually get into the discussion a bit, you will at many times be a bit inspired from it as you begin to write about your point of view in your article. Happens all of the time.

Get Ready To Totally Dominate!

Here is what is really cool about this whole process. SEO can give you leverage that forum owners and moderators are not willing to invest in one single thread, so if done correctly, your article can actually out rank the original thread that originally covered the same content.

Once you write the article, you can do all kinds of cool things with it.

This is where SEO really shines as a promotional tool in terms of capturing traffic for long tail keywords and keywords that are in question form. If you have an SEO routine, then this process practically becomes automated.

I have personally used this method for about a year now and it has been responsible for some of my posts that have actually gone a bit viral.

So Where Are These Communities?

So where do you go to find extremely active communities in just about any niche? Big Boards! Of course.

When you think about it, all you’re really doing is gathering information, packaging it, and then delivering highly targeted niche information to a highly targeted niche grouping of people…and that’s really all IM is…the packaging and delivery of niche information.

Forums simply refine this process and in many cases can speed up your research on a subject matter. Of course, take this information with a grain of salt, because forums can also be a horrible place to get information being that anybody can post there. Your goal is to sort through the comments and dig out the real answers and solutions which actually can take a bit of effort.

Lets face facts. Some niches will be easier to dominate than others. IM is multi-layered process that kinda requires you to be an expert in many, many different things.

In Conclusion!

Hopefully, this idea will ease the pressure for you in terms of coming up with the foundation of your operation – stellar content – regardless of what niche you are in.

At this point, if you’re still worried about producing great content, you can always check out Writing Copy for Dummies. LOL!

But, before we even begin to discuss syndication, we have to point out that unique content will draw traffic on its own even before it it is syndicated. As search engines crawl the web and look for new content to serve, original content easily finds its way into the search results with little to no search engine optimization or backlinking. For this reason, it is always best to start with original content.

Once you have original content, the easiest way to have it crawled and indexed on a regular basis by posting it to your own blog first which is always the best thing to do and then ping Google and Bing (which now handles YAHOO search as of the date of the writing of this article). Additionally, you can submit bookmarks to social bookmarking services and speed up this process.

After your content is indexed you will want to begin syndicating it. The first way to syndicate you content would be to release it as an RSS feed. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and that is exactly what it is, the simplest way you can syndicate content. The reason is because it is done automatically. Once your RSS feed is set up, then you will want to submit it to RSS directories that will help you syndicate it.

So, who will use your RSS feed? Generally, individuals who are interested in the subject that you are writing about will find your feed and add it to their reader which will, in turn, automatically deliver and updated content stream every time the reader is opened. Many webmasters will also add your feed to their website as supplemental or additional content for their visitors.

Once you have set up an RSS feed and added content to your site, you can boost your number or readers by submitting your blog and feed to the RSS directories in this list:

The second way to syndicate your content is to submit your articles to article directories. Article directories have the ability to drive traffic to your site in several ways.

First, article directories usually have fairly strict standards with respect to the content they allow to be published. For this reason, the level of quality found in their database of articles is consistently high. Search engines such as Google and Bing, constantly crawl their databases looking for fresh content to index. When fresh content is found and indexed, search engines will serve the articles in the form of aggregated search results. This will be one source of traffic.

The second way article directories can drive traffic to your site is through other webmasters browsing their genre of interest in the directory looking for useful content to syndicate to their site directly. Usually this is done by downloading the article from the article directory and directly posting your article to their site. This is the essence of syndication and is standard procedure provided the resource box links are retained and credit is given to the original author. The links included in the resource box of syndicated articles are what drive traffic to your website. In this case duplicate content is something that the author welcomes and search engines such as Google and Bing understand this and easily recognize syndicated content.

Despite rumors you may have heard, their is no duplicate content penalty.

Last, but not least, here is a video that we wanted to share with your that shows the potential power of article marketing as a traffic driving and SEO tool. Enjoy!

Everyone into SEO knows that backlinks are the backbone of any SEO campaign. Building backlinks both helps your site to gain traffic and it helps you to increase your authority with the search engines.

When other sites link back to your site, it shows that you have information that is important and noteworthy. When the major search engines see your link in an anchored text for the keywords for which you are trying to rank, it will show that your website it important.

So you undoubtedly want to focus on the backlinks that give you the most benefit. What kind of backlinks do you focus most of your time on?

Types of Backlinks

Some spend their time getting as many backlinks as possible. There are such things as low quality backlinks, however. It would not be a good idea to get links from just any site.

Sites like those that promote gambling, drugs, and pornography are not ones you want to have associated with your site. Instead, you should aim to get high quality backlinks.

It is also not a good idea to just get as many links to your site as possible as if linkbuilding is done too quickly it might throw up a red flag to the search engines.

If you have a brand new site you are trying to rank and all of a sudden you go on a link building spree, it might signal to the search engines that you are trying to work the system. They don’t like that at all.

Relevant Backlinks

Relevant backlinks are those that are relevant to the topic of the site you are trying to rank.

For example, if your site is about tennis and tennis accessories, if you can get a backlink from another website about tennis and tennis accessories, this is a relevant link. This type of link is the most desirable of all links.

This is the type of thing that looks good to search engines, especially if the link is from an authority site itself. It would be like the site is casting a vote for your site when they include a link to your site.

However, it is not easy to gain these types of links. Why would your competitor want to link to you if you are in the same niche? You will have to give them a good reason to link up to you or else they will not be likely to give you a link.

So you can simply buy a link from them, right? That is actually not a very good idea. Search engines can slap you with a drop in rank if you are found to be purchasing links from other websites as this is seen as a way to kind of work the system. At worst, your site might be dropped from the search engine index all together.

Yikes!

What Kind of Links to Get

What you can do is get links from high authority, high quality websites. You want to focus on getting links from websites that have some age to them. As a website increases in age, it tends to get more authority from search engines.

You also want to get links from websites that have quality content. The content must be relevant to whatever topic the site is about as well as being unique. Some would argue that unique content is not really that important but if you are searching for a site to gain links from, their content needs to be unique and not something rehashed from another source.

High authority websites, the kind you wish to get links from, should have content that is updated regularly. They should also have a pagerank from Google. Of course, the higher the pagerank, the more desirable they are to receive a link from. Even their internal pages should have pagerank.

So to sum it all up, if you are thinking about doing some linkbuilding to help your website improve in its ranking, be selective. Choose only links that come from relevant or high quality sites. You also want to make sure that you don’t build your links too fast.

Linkbuilding is a great way to help your site increase in the search engines but only if it is done properly. If it is not done correctly you are wasting your time.

Bio: Nirra is a freelance writer, teacher, wife, and mother. She has a blog about mystery shopping and couponing called mystery shopping teacher. She writes about SEO and other topics as a freelancer.

All you need is two things. You will first need presentation software. The most common presentation software is Microsoft Power Point. However, I did say that you can do this for free so, if you do not have Power Point, you can download and install OpenOffice.org, the free office suite. It will do the exact same thing. Personally, I prefer Power Point because it is faster but the quality of the OpenOffice.org version is just as good.  Second, you will need to download and install a free article to video screen recording software that will allow you to capture your presentation in the form of an AVI file.

Once you have your software downloaded and installed, open up your article in your browser or office software. Copy the article and paste it to a text editor such as Microsoft Notepad or and equivalent for Mac users. This is very important because you want the text editor to strip and and all HTML formatting from the article to prepare it for use in the presentation.

Once you have pasted the article into your text editor and stripped out all of the HTML which is done automatically, hard return after each sentence so that each sentence is on it’s own line. Now, save the article as a *.txt file.

Next, open Microsoft Power Point. Select “File, “Open” and navigate to the folder containing your article that is saved as a *.txt file. You will not see your file in the folder until you change the “Files of type:” drop down menu to “All Outlines”. You should now see your *.txt file. Select it and open it. Power Point will automatically place each sentence on it’s own slide. If you are using OpenOffice.org, you will have to cut and paste each sentence and paste it on to it’s own slide. That is why I prefer Power Point. It is much faster with respect to this step.

Now click on one of the mini-slides to the left and go to “Edit” and “Select All”. Right click on one of the mini-slides again and click on “Slide Layout” or the OpenOffice.org equivalent. Navigate to the right side of the screen and select “Title Slide” as the layout for all of the slides. Each sentence has now been converted to a nice, clean slide using the “Title Slide” format. You can now add anything you want to dress it up and make it look nice. Save the presentation.

Your final step will be to record the presentation as you present it using a free article to video screen recording software. Download the software and install it. Only a windows compatible version is available at this point. Hopefully, in the future that will change.

Once the software is installed, begin cycling through your slides as a full blown slide show using your presentation software. You can record it as a silent presentation or you can talk and record your voice as you read and discuss the slides. If you do not want to speak, you could simply play music in the background. The possibilities truly are endless. Here is an example of a ultra-plain version of what you can expect. Remember, you can dress it up as much as you like.

Now that your article has been turned into a video, upload it to your YouTube channel. If you do not have a YouTube channel, create one. YouTube is a great source of free traffic, as are forums and other social media sites.

I hope this tutorial helped. Please leave a comment if you like.

The top way to do that is by making your blog easy to discover. Search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, use robot crawlers to uncover pages for their algorithmic search results.

Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted physically because they are found robotically by the automated crawlers.

Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be generated and submitted for free to confirm that all pages are discovered, especially pages that aren’t easily uncovered by automatically following links, but the majority of bloggers won’t need to use that.

The most significant thing is knowing what crawlers search for. Search engine crawlers may look at a number of diverse aspects when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines, especially pages isolated from the root directory of a site.

Additionally, search engines occasionally have complications with crawling sites with different kinds of graphic content, flash files, pdf, and dynamic content. You want your blog to be found, and you want your pages to be indexed, so be cognizant of what can hamper that.

A plethora of methods can increase the level of a webpage within the search results. Cross-linking between pages of the same website to deliver more links to the most significant pages may increase its discernibility.

Writing content that includes regularly searched keyword phrases, so as to be pertinent to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic. But don’t put emphasis on keywords to the impairment of the content. Search results will only get you so far; you must have the content to back it up!

Modernizing content so as to keep search engines crawling back regularly can give extra sustainability to a site. Adding applicable keywords to a web page’s meta-data, counting the title tag and meta-description, will tend to expand the accuracy of a site’s search listings, thereby growing traffic.

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct robot crawlers not to index definite files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Moreover, a page can be clearly omitted from a search engine’s database by means of a meta-tag specific to robots.

Pages characteristically prevented from being crawled include login-specific pages; such as shopping carts, private information, and search results from internal searches. Anything you do not want incorporated as part of the search for your site should be secured by the robots.txt file.

It is pretty simple. Write respectable content and lots of it. Ensure you use key words. Stop unwelcome advances. And, finally, enjoy yourself! This is your blog, after all, make it what you will. You are only notable if you are noticeable.

Author Bio : Coleen Torres, blogger at Phone Internet, Save money on home phone, digital TV, and high-speed Internet by comparing prices from providers in your area for standalone service or phone TV Internet bundles.

The part that website owners, or whomever is in charge of SEO, cannot control is who places a one way link to their website. When building links by article submission, social bookmarking, and guest blogging, there is some control which in this type of off-page SEO. However, that is a whole new post all on its own.

This post will focus on some tips that can be followed to have success with on-page optimization. As simple as it may seem, there are many who do on-page optimization incorrectly. Or, there are also some who do not pay enough attention to on-page optimization since it accounts for only about 25% of the success for ranking of your chosen keyword or keyword phrase.

It is an important thing to consider, however. Since most people do not create a site that is properly optimized, it provides a huge opportunity for those in the know to properly optimize a site for higher rankings.

To start with, it is important to remember that your content needs to be in the correct format when you are trying to optimize your site. Google, and other search engines, need to know what your content is about right away. It also needs to be relevant content.

In order for your site to be ranked as an authority site, it is important that all posts made offer a sufficient amount of information. This usually equals at least 500 words.

More is better, however, so if you are able to create longer posts, it is a great way to help your site become an authority site. Another benefit of writing longer posts is that you can probably rank for some longtail keywords unintentionally, which is good for you site.

If you can crank out more than 500 words, great! If not, make sure everything you post is at least 500 words of unique, informative content. No fluff!

Another important thing to remember is that you need to focus on keyword density. You should aim for getting your keyword into your content anywhere from two to four percent. And don’t think that more is better either. If you use your keyword excessively, Google will not be happy. Don’t overdo it!

It is also a good idea to use bold, underline, and italics of your keyword at least one time. There is software that can do this for you. Software can also analyze your keyword density, but software is not necessary if you will just pay attention to what you are doing.

You should also remember to include meta every time you write a post. Don’t leave that part out as Google, and other search engines, do use meta tags and descriptions to show people what your post is going to be about.

It’s a good idea if you can make sure that the meta descriptions are interesting and created to draw people in.

These are just a few tips you will want to make sure that you do when you are focusing on on-page optimization. You will want to do everything in your ability to make your page stand out to search engines so you will be better able to rank and receive a nice boost in traffic.

Take the time to focus not only on on-page SEO, but also off-page SEO and you will reap the benefits.

About The Author
Nirra is a freelance writer for a top seo agency London. She enjoys writing about SEO and many other topics. You can find her on her blog, Mystery Shopping Teacher.