As with all user generated content sites, purging the submitted garbage is a never ending process.

Additionally, as with all things the more automated it can be, the better.

TheBitBot.Com Article Directory, one of our historically highest traffic establishments, has continually changed over time as have the submission rules and requirements.

What Effected The Submission Requirement Changes?

Updates in terms of acceptable levels of quality and engageability continue to change, will continue to change and we will continue to change with them.

As an SEO, I realized something this morning that had a most profound effect on both myself, and TheBitBot.Com moving forward, so profound, in fact, that it prompted a permanent change in the direction of this site and our article directory indefinitely.

As in the past, we have had no problem completely purging the entire database of all users and content as we have done this morning…yet again.

At peak index, TheBitBot.Com had just under 250,000 pages of content, 99.9% of which was user generated, which has now dropped to well below 1000 as of the writing of this article.

SEO Has Changed, So Should Yours

Now, as fun as high index number and tons of traffic are to watch, the underlying question to this whole process is:

“Does hosting other peoples content (if it is low on the quality and engageability end) do EITHER of us ANY good?”

Before answering that question, I would first like to point out the decay that the SEO mindset has allowed into the content generation community.

Before link building was discovered as a measurable/usable metric and later one that could actually be manipulated so as to synthetically coerce SERP results, a whole heck of a lot more attention was applied to copywriting and converting readers into paying customers.

Afterwards, unfortunately, it all went “South” content changed (slowly but surely) into spider food.

The SEO community (as a generalized composite), and their outsourcers, began to drift, slowly but surely like a boat in open water.

Standards, in terms of content quality, dropped and the entire process as with many businesses became more and more automated.

This community process has become exceedingly pronounced within the last five years or so.

TheBitBot.Com Article Directory New Rules

Obviously, as with all things, there are SEOs who have stood their ground in terms of quality and engageability, so I am not speaking in absolutes.

However, with all of the aforementioned in mind, here are some of the new rules in our newly re-purged article directory:

1 ) All article must be completely unique and unindexed. What’s that you say? Other article directories allow previously published content? Yeah. Let me link you to the answer to that one.

See here.

We are in no way shape or form concerned with other spammy article directories standards.

If we never receive an article submission again due to the enforcement of our own standards, then, well that’s just that much less “fruitless” work we have to do.

We do not give a “flying flip” about other article directory standards.

So there will be no “Syndicating” of articles previously published on your own site. We make articles available for “Syndication”, but we do not “Syndicate”, and there is no flexibility in this area.

2 ) Minimum word count of 1500 words. I think that the running average for most article directories is about 400 words in terms of a minimum word count. So what?

Following the status quo in this case can and will end up in failure.

What’s that? You can’t write an original article 1500+ words long? Oh well.

3 ) Account locking functionality enabled. All articles are read by native English speakers with copywriting experience.

If your article reads funny, has poor grammar, sounds like it has been run through a language translator, has poor punctuation or doesn’t meet any of the automatically checked requirements, then your account will be automatically locked.

Can you get it turned back on? Who knows.

In the past, we have fought a failure to follow the rules by hand, now users who are too smart to follow the rules will find themselves fighting with a machine that is faster and smarter than they are and that doesn’t forget anything.

Too many abandoned or invalid posts that do not follow all of the rules will be automatically deleted and the user account automatically locked.

So Who’s To Blame For This Big Mess?

Truth be told, the Google Panda update and a close consideration of the web after its inclusion have prompted these moves.

At some point in the game, article directories became link directories.

Article directories, we believe, are still a promising business model, but one should have a clear and concise understanding of the difference between a real article directory and a content farm, the majority of which are called article directories.

Hopefully, outsourced labor and the establishments that will understand this sooner rather than later.

Post-Panda SEO is an effort to focus on quality and the ability of your copy to covert readers into loyal customers.

Pre-Panda, I think, lost an appreciation for that fact. If you’re like me, then you’re enjoying the new changes and looking ahead with enthusiasm.

Recommendations: If you’re looking to make your content actually convert customers into buyers, then check out our number one recommended copywriting service [ here ].

Remember, you get what you pay for. I make this recommendation because I actually read this professional copywriters content, and I know that she is the real deal.

If you have a business that is having trouble converting readers into buyers, then maybe its time to “bite the bullet”.

Its raining outside where I am at this morning, so I am feeling a little blue…blue hat that is.

This is one of those “bean spilling” posts that nobody is supposed to write and you’re DEFINITELY not supposed to read because it will make your virtual existence just a little more dangerous, but I am writing it anyway for some dumb reason…so stop reading now if you don’t have the stomach for this type of stuff, but if you do, read on at your own risk and whatever you do, DON’T SHARE THIS POST. I don’t want some Google employee reading this junk. This post is really only supposed to be for our private newsletter.

Don’t Confuse Blue Hat SEO With Blue Fedoras

Blue hat SEO, if you didn’t know is the usage of SEO techniques that effect great SERP positioning and ranking by getting links on sites with lots of trust and authority.

There are actually a couple of ways this can be done, some are quick, some are slow, all of them completely “torque” organic search results at will even for highly competitive keywords…and it should be noted that they are all “pretty expensive” in one way or another either in terms of actual cash or time spent.

Just keep in mind as you read through this that “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” and SEO, just as in politics, favors the establishment with the most resources to “throw” at site promotion.

Site Promotion Is All About Trust

In terms of SEO, site promotion is all about trust. The more trust that flows to your site, the better. Private networks built from “dropped sites” are a great way to do this, but this is usually very expensive in terms of cash and there is an underlying secret to this process that will NOT be revealed in this post because, well, its just too black, but it is the catalyst that makes the whole process even feasible. Strangely enough, NOBODY has spelled it out online yet. LOL! I wonder why.

Therefore, we are going to focus on a very different method that can produce the same results…just more slowly. The required investment is still there, but its just in terms of time as opposed to cold hard cash.

I like this method because it is not so “hard core” black hat, but rather a bit more on the grey hat side and a bit more palatable for most.

What The Heck Are You talking About Man? Just Spit It Out!

It kinda revolves around “buying links” but in a round about type of way. Buying links, in my opinion is a really unethical and messy process. You will find all types of shady characters in this business…almost like bookies. Additionally, its expensive and deals go bad all of the time, not to mention the fact that Google hates it and will penalize you for it SEVERELY if you are caught.

But (uhoh, here we go), what if there was a way to respectfully leverage a process very similar to, uh, well, purchasing links, by, uh, well, “donating a little webmaster time” to those “not internet savvy” but who are owners of established brick and mortar businesses. This is not unethical. Just keep reading.

I have posted on this before and it is a great way to leverage highly targeted localized niche sites “on the cheap”. Additionally, it is a great way to make cash through affiliate referrals for domain names and hosting and generally takes a few hours any given afternoon to build the site.

Roll Up Your Sleeves And Let’s Build This Private Network

So what is the step by step process to getting this private network established and expanding and on its way to becoming the powerful “trust funnel” that it can EASILY be with a little effort, some half-way decent salesman ship, and a moderate amount of footwork. Well, here we go:

Step 1 ) Get Your Junk In Order. Set up an SEO site just like this one and contribute to it regularly. Accept guest posts and set up a “Small Business Web Services Page” just for local business to see when you visit them personally. Make sure it details all of your services and lists our the benefits of having a website for a business. Additionally, start a newsletter and start collecting targeted email addresses from day one. For this, you will need an autoresponder which you may already have.

Step 2 ) Get Your Affiliate Links In Order. Sign up for affiliate programs with respected organizations that you know will not “drop the ball” on your customers. After all, this will be the foundation of your private network.

You will need the following affiliate links:

a) and established domain registrar
b) solid hosting
c) a reputable autoresponder service

Step 3 ) Start Pounding The Pavement. Not literally. That would probably hurt your hands. I am talking about “cold calling on business” in your area and offering them a very low cost, professionally designed website for the bare bones cost of: domain name registration, hosting, and autoresponder. You, of course, will have to shine in your own way during this process. I really can’t help you there, but you could offer a sales pitch like this:

BEGIN SALES PITCH…

“Hello there. Is the owner of this establishment around? (Once you have identified the owner, you can start woo’ing them with hi-tech SEO terminology which 99 times out of a 100 they will not be familiar with.) I was just visiting local business in this area to try and determine if I could be of any advertising assistance to them. My name is (Insert Your Name Here) and I am the owner and chief editor of the marketing website (Insert Your Website Name Here). We are currently offering a special to local business where we set up a professionally designed website for them at rock bottom pricing. (Then break the whole process down to them.)

“I know what you’re thinking. These prices are too good to be true, right? Well, they’re not. There IS something in it for me and I’m going to be honest with you and tell you exactly what it is (Be totally honest with them).

“Currently, I am in the business of selling what is referred to as “organic search ranking placement” to websites across the world. If you’re not familiar with what “organic search ranking placement” is, it is when your website pops up in search results for a keyword. Good organic positioning can be EXTREMELY profitable for business that sell real products and services IF done correctly.

“Now, to get great placement, search engines like to see something pointing to a website that kind of acts as a vote of confidence in favor of that website and that something is a “link” or even better, lots of “links”.

“The reason I am contacting you and offering you a website that would normally cost thousands of dollars only for a couple hundred is because instead of charging you the thousands that you would normally be charged by a web design firm, I am just asking for “that link” that we just spoke of on behalf of some of my other clients that may or may not change year over year.

“I’m just being straight with you. You could either spend thousands of dollars on a website that you may or may not be happy with and feel like you got taken advantage of, which happens all of the time, or you could choose to use us and get the same or better (list out the advantages of having a website for their business: virtual storefront, organic traffic, lead capture, affiliate products..really ham it up) for pricing that is the equivalent of doing the whole thing yourself.

“To be totally honest, I am offering this to lots of local business and building a “private network of sites” this way. You’re more than welcome to join us. What do you say?”

…END SALES PITCH

Side Note: Whatever you do, don’t print this out and read it in front of them. That would be horrendously “corny”.

Odds are, at this point, you will be rejected. More often than not, getting “blitzed” with that much unfamiliar “techie” information totally scares the daylights out of most people, especially since they won’t understand most of it the first time they hear it, but rest assured, THE SEEDS HAVE BEEN PLANTED IN THEIR LITTLE COCONUT HEADS. I have personally watched this entire format overtake the mind set of entire business establishments. In many cases, its just a matter of time.

Now there are two things that you have to make sure to have in place in terms of your physical presence before you start the physical “cold calling” or “hard selling” process: a) a professional appearance, which means getting a haircut and a suit if you need one and b) business cards or a flyer (heck, you can just print them out – the more professional in appearance, the better – flyers are awesome BTW) so that they can contact you when that little seed you planted in their little “thinkers” finally sprouts.

What’s really cool about this entire process (and this has happened for me already) if, by any chance, one of the websites that you build for a local business actually drives real business to them (which some inevitably will – actually most will – even the crappy ones), then you will have just picked up an “affiliate” (for lack of a better term) who will “sell your service” with more heart and and enthusiasm than any paid sales rep or copywriter could every even DAYDREAM about doing. I am talking about good ol’ down-home-in-the-back-yard-over-the-barbecue-pit-beer-in-hand-on-the-weekend-private-buddy-hey-this-is-what-worked-for-my-business recommendations. THAT is called branding. It is only spreads by word of mouth when the receiver is slightly buzzed by alcohol on any given weekend and is the ABSOLUTE PINNACLE OF SALES AND MARKETING. IT IS THE FORM THAT ALL COPYWRITING, SALES AND MARKETING ASPIRE TO TAKE AND WHICH PROFESSIONAL ASPIRE TO ACHIEVE.

Side Note: Key to this entire process is the ability to portray a slightly shady element to your operation that appeals to the “darker side” of your potential clients psyche. Small business owners are particularly susceptible to this type of psychological trigger.

The Bottom Line

Remember, all of this is a way to build your private network of live sites established around “brick and mortar” business that offer real “products and services” to the real purchasing public.

This type of Blue Hat SEO is tough to beat or uproot for search engines because its roots are reaching down into “offline soil” if you get my drift. Oddly enough, many will find that there is more money in building the sites and networking with real business owners than “selling trust rank and organic search engine placement”.

Whatever you do: DON’T LINK ALL OR ANY OF THE SITES TO YOUR MONEY SITE. THAT WOULD COMPLETELY EXPOSE YOUR NETWORK AND YOU WOULD BE COMPLETELY RUINED. KEEP YOUR BUSINESS SEO SEPARATE. AND DEFINITELY USE A VARIETY OF C-CLASS IP ADDRESSES.

So that’s basically it. Its still raining here, so I am still feeling a little blue. LOL! BTW. If you are having trouble ranking any of your niche sites, then I highly, highly recommend that you sign up for our private network SEO case study. There is some information there that will make your life much, much easier. It is working for me.

OK. I guess it could be labeled as one, under the right circumstances, but for all practical purposes, its an industry that sells dreams, dreams of search engine rankings and money to boot.

Does SEO work? Well sure it does boys and girls, SEO does indeed work.

But understand that SEO alone is NOT what makes your business money.

Somewhere in time, somewhere shortly after Google emerged as the indexing/aggregating juggernaut that we all know it to be today, we all fell in love with the idea of having great Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings.

It Was A Romance Like No Other

(Side Note/SEO Tip: The heading tag immediately preceding this side note is a perfect example of a useless heading tag due to its lack of semantic relevance. See here: Heading Elements and the Folly of SEO Expert Ranking Lists)

All we had to do was launch a website or webpage, do a little keyword research, slap that keyword in the title tag and a few times in the content, drop a few high-quality anchor-text-relative, do-follow, deep links pointing in that direction and BAM…EUPHORIA…ahhh…the rankings…the money…ohh its all so wonderful (orchestra playing in background).

SNAP! SNAP! WAKE UP! LOL! (music stops playing)

SEO Ain’t No Magic Bullet!

Now, I’m not saying that it is not a bullet at all. It is a bullet. I have and have watched people do amazing things with it, but be fore-warned, it is, believe it or not, one of the later steps in the whole process.

So why are we so addicted to SEO? Well, like most things, its sold to us as this big end-all, be-all and promises us the world at the same time.

Again. It works, but not like you’re led to believe that it works, at least not on the average.

So What Does Work? What Has SEO Become?

I’ll tell you what works. What works is what was working BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER Google came on to the scene and inadvertently skewed the informational relay…writing for people.

Now, of course, this doesn’t mean that ANY article you sit down and write “from the heart” and with a “tear in your eye” can fulfill the same promises that SEOs currently make, but sitting down and writing from the heart about a subject that you are passionate about is a great start.

My SEO Of Old

My SEO of old was kind of a compilation of all of the bad advice that you will get in any SEO or Internet Marekting forum…

1 ) Keyword Research: I would look for “buying” keywords with highly exact match monthly searches and potentially low competition. KEYWORDS, BABY! YEAH!

2 ) Content Generation: I would sit down and force myself to write an article about this subject making sure that an exact match of that keyword was in the title and sprinkled throughout the body. After all, CONTENT IS KING, BABY!!! WOO-HOO!!!

3 ) Publish and Re-Publish: I would then publish it to my site and then to other sites linking back to the original with a source link. I BLANKET THE WEB WITH MY CRAP!

4 ) Analyze: I would then stand back, only to realize that my junk doesn’t convert, because, well, it was junk, well-SEO’d junk. THANKS SEO. YOU JUST WASTED MY LIFE AWAY!!! ARGGGHHH!!!

My SEO Today

My SEO today, and by today I mean as of this month being that search engine algorithms change so fast that we may as well be measuring months in years, is QUITE DIFFERENT as you will see in the following breakdown detailing what I do now:

1 ) Keyword Research: Now, I don’t let Google tell me what to write about, I use my own senses in addition to search engines, social media, news and everything else as a means of making a composite determination of what is actually hot right now.

2 ) Content Generation: I write articles with the idea of appealing to the people that I think would be genuinely interested in that subject. I really, really want to avoid just writing spider food for Google bot. Any time I have done that it was just all garbage, just garbage, non converting garbage, that sounded like it was written by someone with a gun pointed at them. BLAH!

3 ) Publish: I publish the article on my site and let it soak. Of course, I do blast it to my newsletter and allow people to republish it if they wish, but in terms of off-site SEO, I do ALMOST NONE now. Yeah, you read that correctly. Off-Site SEO SUCKS and is for the birds. It really doesn’t benefit you that much and neither will great SERP rankings if your content can’t convert the visitors.

4 ) Analyze: After my content has soaked, I crack open my Statcounter.com “Recent Keyword Activity” metrics and start sorting through data that is an absolute SEO GOLDMINE. You can, actually get this info from your Google Webmasters account, but it is much, much slower.

I Secretly Hate SEO

I actually only started following my new “LESS-IS-MORE” approach recently, like, as of 2012, and the difference is night and day. Even though my website sports the name “TBB SEO NEWSLETTER” I have learned that SEO is really just a tool that helps you to do two things:

1 ) It helps you generate targeted leads that you better darn well hold on to when they stop by.

2 ) It helps your FREAKING AWESOME CONTENT out-rank other peoples FREAKING AWESOME CONTENT. So you have to have FREAKING AWESOME CONTENT. Disclaimer: Occasionally someone without FREAKING AWESOME CONTENT will rise in the SERP results and enjoy a top spot, but rest assured, they won’t stay there long and won’t be happy with the conversion rates they had during their honeymoon period, right before they drop like a rock out of site never to return. LOL! Side Note: I bet this post eventually ranks handily for the keyword: FREAKING AWESOME CONTENT.

So What’s The Bottom Line Here? What Are We Getting At? What’s The Takeaway?

The takeaway is this. I honestly believe that SEO’s days are numbered. 2011 gave it a seemingly unrecoverable gut shot. And you know what? I’m totally OK with that. I hate SEO. Sure, it will never go away completely. Because, truth be told, if humans write search engine algorithms, humans will be able to reverse engineer them. But the idea of not having to worry about it as much is an idea that attracts me.

Returning to the old days where writers focused on writing and didn’t have to worry about SEO is a great thing. Focusing on writing real content, copy-writing that converts, and detecting buzz surrounding the real keywords that aren’t on the radar yet. THAT’S WHEN TO STRIKE! As far as SEO goes, what you can get away with is definitely getting narrower in terms of outranking your competitors FREAKING AWESOME CONTENT with your FREAKING AWESOME CONTENT. I am currently working with private networks and picking apart the data. We have a long tail case study that I will actually be releasing the results to here.

Sure you should. But I am going to be completely honest with you here, it shouldn’t be at the core of your business model. The odds of you making a living as an affiliate marketer are not good. They are not good at all.

Before you read the rest of this article, I want you to realize something. There is a very good chance you have been led to believe that you can make tons of money as an affiliate marketer.

Well, while there are exceptions to every rule, the rule here is: odds are, you won’t. Now, this doesn’t mean that you can’t make money at all as an affiliate marketer, you can, but dreams of CRUSHING IT ONLINE are (for the most part) just that, dreams, and more often than not, they have been pitched to you as an effort to sell you on the re-selling of a product or service.

Let’s Hype This Junk UP!

Most of this type of marketing is based around hype and is designed to appeal to your inner desperation.

Now affiliate programs take many, many forms. Examples known to many are the Amazon.com affiliate program, the Google Adsense affiliate program, the Clickbank.com affiliate program…the list goes on and on.

So how does a typical affiliate website work? Well, it generally goes something like this.

A blogger-to-be buy an information product that spells out a re-hashed version of a plan that is really the exact same thing that everyone else sells as the next best thing.

The Best Business Model Ever!

The blogger then follows the same steps that every other MMO informational product spells out just like the same one they just read which is the following:

1. Research a niche and find one that has great affiliate products developed for it.
2. Buy a domain name that is an exact match or something brandable on which to launch a blog.
3. Launch a WordPress-based (or other popular platform) website and begin writing articles that can draw organic search traffic.
4. Build some links to your site to push it up in the rankings for your keywords of interest.
5. Use your newly-found SEO traffic to build a list of targeted subscribers and pitch the affiliate products to them via email or place the links directly in your content.
6. Sit back on your newly purchased Caribbean island and laugh hysterically as the money pours in.

What is wrong with this scenario? Well, what’s wrong with this scenario is the fact that it doesn’t work as advertised. This doesn’t mean that it can’t work as advertised, it definitely can, but there are a few points that need to be considered for this model to be realistic for MOST people and by most, I mean the majority of people by far who will read this article.

The aforementioned model is a micro-model. I bet that is the first time you have heard that term. Yes, this is a micro-model. A micro-model is a model that makes just that, a micro amount of money. Again, in rare cases and under the right conditions, a micro-model can make macro money, but odds are, in your case, a micro-model will make micro-money.

Micro-money is the making of a sale here and there, or some pocket change here and there.

The Best Model Ever?

For any individual to make money with the micro model, it will have to be thought of in terms of scaling up, way up and there are basically two ways to do this.

The first way is the “rinse and repeat” method. This method can VERY EASILY become most overwhelming because of the fact that the operation can grow very large, very quickly.

The rinse and repeat method is simply following the micro model as advertised by the “pie in the sky” hypers but with one small modification at the end (see if you can spot the difference):

1. Research a niche and find one that has great affiliate products developed for it.
2. Buy a domain name that is an exact match or something brandable around a keyword on which to launch a blog.
3. Launch a WordPress-based (or other popular platform) website and begin writing articles that can draw organic search traffic.
4. Build some links to your site to push it up in the rankings for your keywords of interest.
5. Use your newly-found SEO traffic to build a list of targeted subscribers and pitch the affiliate products to them via email or place the links directly in your content.
6. Struggle to maintain this first micro-model website by attempting to keep your scripts up to date, fresh content flowing to it, and high quality emails flowing to your lists as the domain name registrars, hosting and autoresponder fees begin to pile up and consume all of your meager profits (if you even have any at this point)
7. Start your next micro-mode project and compound your pressure as your hosting reaches the end of its bandwidth and you are forced to buy more.

Again, this model can work, but only if it is a finely tuned machine. Just keep that in mind as you feel the frustration pouring on.

Wait A Second, What’s Going On Here?

Now lets stop for a second and see if there is a way we could actually leverage this process and work with it instead of against it.

Honestly, the best way to make money online is NOT to focus on affiliate marketing, but rather to have an affiliate program.

Yes, you read that correctly, you need to have your own affiliate program.

Well, if you are going to have your own affiliate program, then you are going to need to have what? YOUR OWN PRODUCT!

THAT is the secret to making money online…NOT affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is something “pitched” by product owners as a means to build up their affiliate base. If YOU build an affiliate site that at BEST makes ONE SALE per day and you split the profits with the product owner 50/50 for a product that sells for $100, then you each take home $50 (pre-tax) of course.

Now if the product owner has 100 affiliate each doing this, then the product owner gets 100 x $50 = $5000, as opposed to your $50, which I might add you would be thrilled to get. Those are actually where the “pie in the sky” numbers come from, if they are even real.

But, honestly, we have to stand back here and look at the bait-and-switch that just happened.

Affiliate Marketing Sucks!

Here is a break down of the product owners business model:

1. Research a niche and determine a market need.
2. Develop a product, be it a tangible good or service or even (gulp) an informational product.
3. Purchase a domain name closely related to or brandable around a keyword that outlines the solution.
4. Launch a squeeze page or WordPress-based website that actually sells the product/service/solution directly.
5. Recruit affiliates to sell your product for you outlining for them the following micro-model:
   1. Research a niche and find one that has great affiliate products developed for it.
   2. Buy a domain name that is an exact match or something brandable on which to launch a blog.
   3. Launch a WordPress-based (or other popular platform) website and begin writing articles that can draw organic search traffic.
   4. Build some links to your site to push it up in the rankings for your keywords of interest.
   5. Use your newly-found SEO traffic to build a list of targeted subscribers and pitch the affiliate products to them via email or place the links directly in your content.
   6. Preach to them that they will be able to sit back on their newly purchased Caribbean island and laugh hysterically as the money pours in.
6. As the money actually pours in, since you are the actual product owner with a healthy base of affiliates off of which to leach, go an actually purchase a small Caribbean island and actually laugh as the money really pours in while your army of affiliates does your work for you feverishly pursuing the micro-model dream that you sold them while you sit comfortable and securely in your knowledge that you promised them macro-model number using your micro-model methodology.

Finally! Someone Speaks The Truth!

Affiliate marketing is really kinda of a busted model. Oddly enough as with anything, there will always be those who succeed with this model and give everyone else “something to shoot for” which in itself, is a form of slavery, but hey, who cares, right? Not really. In history, one of the best ways to enslave the masses is to create a privileged class of slaves that the others can look up to. Works every time.

So What’s The Bottom Line Here?

The bottom line is this: Can you make money as an affiliate? Sure you can. Will you get rich as an affiliate marketer? Well, lets just put it this way. The odds are not in your favor. Sales will “trickle in” as you struggle, but remember the house always wins and you are not the house.

If you really want to make money online, you need to dump the “affiliate marketers” mindset and start focusing on a macro-model “based on and built around” your own HIGH QUALITY product or service. If you don’t, you will simply be enslaving yourself as you indefinitely agree to wear blinders and work for the “machine” that you don’t even know exists.

Affiliate marketing is fine for beginners, but if you’re serious about all of this, you need to seriously DOWNGRADE how you perceive affiliate marketing to what it really is, a supplemental catalog of products that are based around your core offering: YOUR OWN PRODUCT OR SERVICE WITH YOUR OWN AFFILIATE PROGRAM! WAKE UP!!!

The thought of making money while sitting in front of a computer is a temptation more than most can bear.

Many newbie IMers, my self included, have spent plenty of time in the past pitching flashy products only to find them NOT CONVERT on the back end.

Why is this? Why would someone who is considered targeted traffic come to your website looking for a product that you are reviewing or recommending and not pull the trigger when it comes to buying it?

Why Visitors Don’t Buy From You

How is this possible? I mean everything was perfect, right? The traffic was pre-qualified because it was from organic search and you were offering a review. Additionally, you did a great job pre-selling. So what gives? Why couldn’t you close the deal?

Well, my friends, this brings me to a topic that is becoming more and more pronounced on my internet marketing radar as of late and that is this: VENDOR TRUSTWORTHINESS.

Is The Product Or Service The Real Deal?

How trust-worthy is the vendor and product you are promoting? How is it perceived? Do you REALLY believe in it.

Well, if you do or if you don’t, make no mistake, that fact will bleed through in your pre-sell.

How we feel about a product is mirrored in how we describe it in our copywriting.

So all of this begs the question: How do I choose an affiliate program about which I can exude such enthusiasm?

What To Look For In An Affiliate Program

Well, my experience has taught and continues to teach me that there is no substitute for having experience with and knowing that a product or service is the real deal.

This is SO important and it WILL be reflected in your writing about the product or service.

As of late I have found that there are actually many less products and services that I am willing to recommend to the masses and the list is actually shrinking. Additionally, I am finding that the products and services that I do want to recommend, in many cases, don’t even have an affiliate program.

So what happens in this case? Well, I contact the product or service vendor and ask them to start one. More often than not, they like the idea because it almost invariably turns out to be a win-win.

So what do I look for in an affiliate program if I decide that I want to join it or request one?

Here is my checklist:

1 ) I want first and fore-most to KNOW that the product or service actually works. More often than not, I am now seeing that this actually requires a case-study of sorts to be performed. A case-study is great because it actually documents the effectiveness of a particular product or service.

For Example: We are currently performing a case study on a private network to see if it can successfully rank one of my clients sites for about seven different keywords. Lookin’ pretty good so far. If you want in on this “push-button” solution to off site SEO, [ CLICK HERE ] and get on the list and I’ll drop you a line when its ready. Are you tempted to click. Odds are, you are, at least a little, because of the fact that the service is in the process of being tested and proven as you read this. It’s the real deal…for once.

Sure. A case study may sound like it requires a lot of work, but it is worth it. Ask yourself: Would I rather put in the required work and make a sale or put in less than required and not make a sale? Its as simple as that.

2 ) The product or service has to work well. All things work…to a degree. Unfortunately, the level of effectiveness of a product or service, more often than not, will not merit its price. Again, this is where case studies come in.

I actually have one case study on the table now, and two more behind it. These things commonly take more time than expected, but they have to be done right otherwise, the trust factor just isn’t there.

3 ) The product or service has to be tangible…preferably, no informational products. I can’t stand informational products. They’re all stupid. All of the information they contain is freely available on the web. This of course, doesn’t mean that I will never recommend informational products, but I do tend to steer away from them as they are rarely worth the money they are asking for them and almost always have high refund rates. And, they all look kinda shady if you ask me.

I have never purchased an informational product because, well, I have never had to, I have always found what I needed for free. Sure, there are IMers who will tell you that their information is different, exclusive, effective, but my take is that it is all just a bunch of scarcity tactics built upon emotionalism and psychological triggers…you know, kinda like the ENTIRE GLOBAL ECONOMY.

These reasons are, for the most part, why I try to steer clear of “informational products” and affiliate my-self with “tangible products” (think Amazon, think private affiliate programs) that come in the form of hardgoods, digital tools, and actual services that have real people standing behind them.

Looking for these three aspects (something that works, something that works well, and something that is a tangible product or service with real people standing behind it) in any affiliate program will go to great lengths to boost your conversion rates.

When affiliating yourself with these types of products and services, you will go to great lengths to establish yourself as a resource in your niche, a resource that makes great recommendations and that is trust worthy and “in this game” for the long haul.

Truth be told, websites live and die by their traffic numbers, “targeted” traffic that is.

If a website receives lots of targeted traffic, then, generally speaking, conversions will be good.

If a website receives lots of non-targeted traffic, then, odds are, conversion rates and such will be bad.

What type of traffic do you want? If you’re like me, you want traffic that is legitimately interested in the information found on your site. Anything less is a waste of bandwidth.

So what are some sources of non-targeted traffic that is simply a waste of time?

Sources Of Non-Targeted Traffic

Traffic Exchanges. Believe it or not, I actually used to use one of these things and let me tell you, I would give anything to have that time back. What a waste. Everyone on the traffic exchange site seemed to be “desperate for traffic”. It wasn’t targeted at all, unless you are targeting “people desperate for traffic” or “people employed by people desperate for traffic”, namely, outsourced work.

Is there a niche for traffic exchange traffic? Sure. But odds are, you’re not in it. If you ever do try a traffic exchange, you’ll quickly be able to identify those who target that type of traffic because you’ll see them about every tenth ad driving a Ferrari.

Blog Commenting Traffic. Especially if you dofollow keywords. This is actually some of the least targeted traffic available. We actually link out here, and for good reason. Blog comment traffic, if the comments are thoughtful, do indeed add very valuable User Generated Content (UCG) to a blog post, which dominoes into a fresh ping. This is very valuable in terms of SEO value and freshness, but in terms of traffic that converts…not valuable (in most cases).

There can be value in blog commenters, but to a great degree, its like panning for gold, you have to sort through a lot of dirt to get the gold. Most comments dropped by visitors are by SEOs or those that they outsource to. In those cases, the traffic is very, very low quality and more often than not, it is reflected in the UGC.

Social Media Traffic. Social media traffic can be targeted in rare cases, but more often than not, it isn’t. I remember during Twitter’s initial months, it was a great source of traffic and actually is for many, but for me personally, it never converted.

Now, I will add that I am a bit biased in this regard because I know that I never used it properly and never coddled relationships on it like I should have, but for me, I honestly felt that any targeted efforts put forth on social media would have been diluted by the fact that it was on social media platform. I liken it to trying to discuss business while your favorite movie or TV show is on…there is a certain disconnect there that interferes with conversions.

Sources Of Targeted traffic

Targeted traffic is like digital gold. Any business that has it will thrive and any business that doesn’t have it will die. Its as simple as that. Here are a few of the sources that I have found to actually convert.

Organic Search Engine Traffic. I know. I know. I post all of the time about how SEO sucks and it hard and how its no fun, but the bottom line is, it is the most sizzling hot traffic available on the web…especially long tail keywords. Short tails convert too, but not like long tails. How do you get it?

Well, you can try PPC as a way of stealing it from actual organic search results. Of course, many argue that it is easier to actually rank for the keyword than to successfully run a profitable PPC campaign. I admit, I am no PPC expert and I don’t pretend to be. PPC mystifies me and I look like a “deer in the headlights” when I see it. So I stay away from it.

However, if you can write great content for your website, and perform a little soft promotion in the form of some blog commenting (see what I mean about blog commenting, you are not targeted traffic when you do it), maybe a little follow-up article marketing, then that would be a great thing.

Forum Marketing Traffic. Actually, forum marketing has for me, historically been some of the best converting traffic available. It even rivals organic search traffic, because, more often than not, it is pre-qualified by both organic search and community.

If you can actually contribute to a thread and post relative and helpful information on a forum that actually allows you to link to yourself in your signature file, then you are well on your way.

A side not about signature links: Not all forum moderators allow this. It is very commonplace for a forum to allow sig-links only AFTER contributing and only AFTER asking for special permission from the moderators.

Forum marketing is generally more of a long-term, relationship-style, branding effort than simply advertising. You have to be in this for the long haul.

Classifieds Traffic. I really don’t have a whole lot to say about this because Classified marketing has gotten pretty tough as of late due to the fact that internet marketers have been hitting it pretty hard the last few years and classified ad site owners have been getting annoyed. However, classified ad traffic is, just like forum traffic, pre-qualified in that targeted prospects drill down through the layers to find you and when they do, there is a greater likely-hood they they will convert when they have found you.

List Building Traffic. List building is absolutely great IF and that’s a big IF, you build your list using targeted sources of traffic and not a list that was built just for the sake of building a list.

When built properly, a list can be a source of the most targeted traffic you can find because it is essentially, a source of “targeted traffic concentrate” kinda like “orange juice concentrate”. LOL!

Awesome Content. I am only going to say this once. All of your content better be AWESOME, and by AWESOME, I mean well-written, grammatically correct, it must have appropriate punctuation, it must be fun to read and it must be engaging. Anything less is a massive waste of time.

What does this mean? It means this (and this may be the first time you have been exposed to this concept). POOR COPY WILL CONVERT TARGETED TRAFFIC INTO NON-TARGETED TRAFFIC! Ahhhhhhhhh! Nooooooooo! Yes. Its true. Poor copy will literally DESTROY all of the efforts you put forth to draw targeted traffic to it. If you copy can’t convert visitors when they find you, IT WAS ALL A COMPLETE WASH!

The Bottom Line

I would like to finish by pointing out that I believe in spending money on only two classes of things: tools and copy.

By tools, I mean things like Domain Names, Hosting, Autoresponders.

By “copy”, I am referring to a “sales copy critique” by an established copywriting professional.

Occasionally, I may invest in an information product such as a conversion rate course, but this is very, very rare as most information products are just a re-hash of old information and usually not worth their salt.

In any case, I hope you get the point about types of traffic not to waste your time with. Obviously, there is more to driving traffic than just driving traffic, it has to be targeted traffic. What do you consider to be sources of targeted or non-targeted traffic?

For starters, I am going to assume that you are targeting certain keywords that you feel will be profitable to you. Additionally, you are writing (or buying) content based around those keywords as well as making efforts to build contextually relevant links to your site based on those keywords and others semantically related.

So what is a website owner to do if one day they boot up their “Super SEO Software” to check their rankings only to find that their (seemingly) life’s work has been DESTROYED, DECIMATED, DEMOLISHED, and ABOLISHED by the heartless BEAST Google? LOL!

Well, first of all, don’t panic. Why do I say this? Because the mentality that surrounds “ranking for keywords” is really one that is fundamentally flawed.

SEO Sucks!

I have found myself writing on this topic more and more as of late because I am increasingly seeing the benefits of “not worring about SEO” to the point that you lose sleep.

Why do I say this? I say this because most of what self-proclaimed SEOs preach simply doesn’t work.

Sure, there are fundamentals (or basics if you will) that do have to be in place, but for the most part, SEO doesn’t merit the type of stress that you “may be” feeling from it.

So back to the original question: “What do you do if your site slips from the rankings for a particular short-tail keyword that you have been targeting?”

I Say: REJOICE

Now the pressure’s off and you can focus on creating high quality copy and content that will actually convince people to buy something.

I can’t tell you how much time I have wasted (yes, wasted) on SEO to successfully rank for high competition keywords only to be disappointed with the conversion rates thereafter. And when I am talking about high competition keywords, I am talking about keywords with hundreds of millions of competing pages where every imaginable EMD variation was registered and actively used.

Truth be told: I have a big problem with the fact that the SEO industry preaches that ranking for short-tail keywords is a great thing. Short tail keywords suck! Their highly competitive. They take a substantial amount of time and resources to rank for, not to mention maintaining those rankings when you finally achieve them, and in many, many cases, they are too general to convert anyway.

Long tail keywords, however, are a-plenty, are easy to rank for, are applied to your website and the content that it contains naturally, and best of all…they are much, much better at converting readers into buyers than generalized short-tail keywords. I like to call this: LOW-HANGING-FRUIT.

My SEO Strategy…Which Works!

So what is a great strategy if you find yourself dropping in the rankings for your short-tail keywords? Simple. Add great content to your site and lots of it. Write naturally and then comment on high traffic blogs that will deep-link to you using CommentLuv. This is a great way to network. Remember, high traffic blogs.

What’s the goal here? The goal is to build a targeted following of loyal readers that DOESN’T RELY ON SEARCH ENGINES FOR TARGETED TRAFFIC. Search engines are PICKY, WHINY, FLIGHTY, EASILY ANNOYED, CHANGE FROM DAY TO DAY, AND MAY DECIDE THEY DON’T LIKE YOU FOR A REASON THEY’LL NEVER TELL YOU. So I say: “Why RELY on someone like that?” That would be just foolish.

NEW SEO RULE FROM THIS DAY FORWARD

Any and all traffic that comes from SEO should be targeted to one place and one place only…YOUR LEAD CAPTURE PROGRAM. To do anything less would be a waste of time.

Sure SEO is great for targeted traffic. If you can rank for a short-tail term and get tons of sign-ups per day, then by all means, do so.

But at the same time, focus on lead capture and relationship building. Focus on problem solving and creating great content. That way, when the next big algorithm change hits the SERPS, you will be one of the people “laughing at the frenzy” instead of “crying about it“. LOL!

By the way, if you interested in taking advantage of highly targeted traffic, then definitely check out this course on making the most of your traffic in terms of conversion rates: [ CLICK HERE ]

Additionally, if you are running WordPress, then definitely check out this cool optin-form plugin that pre-populates your optin fields with your visitors information: [ CLICK HERE ]

Genuine blog posts on the web are a rare thing in my opinion.

So often, as bloggers or internet marketers or webmasters or SEOs or a hybrids of all of these, we often feel compelled to be “content generating machines” just for the sake of writing articles as a means of feeding the Google bot.

Well, this article is nothing of the sort. This article is the product of inspiration and inspiration only.

Actually, I never even intended to write this article, it just sort of appeared out of thin air. So how did it happen?

Here’s how:

You see, as an SEO, one thing I try to do on a regular basis is comment on blogs related to subjects that I blog about.

I really like doing this for several reasons: many link out, you get to see how other people run their blogs, you get to see how active their blogs are, you can emulate cool things that they do that you didn’t know about, the list goes on and on.

I have really learned a lot by doing this over the last year and I think that it has helped me to increase my level of professionalism a great deal, although I still have a long way to go.

As I moved around the circuit so-to-speak, I became familiar with many faces, in the form of their gravatars of course.

One such face that seemed to be particularly well-networked was that of Jane Sheeba, whom I now know is an accomplished guest blogger.

Guest blogging interests me a great deal. It is simply a great way to network and advertise yourself.

I had the feeling that Jane knew what she was doing in this area just by watching her activities, but I knew this to be a fact when I saw her personal guest post archive page. Pretty impressive.

I remember thinking to myself. “This person knows some secrets about guest posting that I need to know.”

So I thought,”Why not interview her?” So that is what I did via email and she was kind enough to answer all of my questions in the following email interview:

Side Note: Some secrets will be revealed here-forth and I will add PERSONAL NOTES notes showing what I personally appreciated about each answer…

Begin Interview…

1) How long have you been blogging?

Although the audience had no problem in keeping up with me, I had troubles in keeping things organized with the 3 niches. So I rebranded and relaunced www.probloggingsuccess.com for the blogging tips/IM niche in 2011; and I simultaneously started 3 other blogs www.techbuzzonline.com, www.merryrelationships.com and www.janesheeba.com and exported my niche related posts from findallanswers

PERSONAL NOTES: Never rely on a 3rd party to host your blog as Jane pointed out as they may be deleted without notice on any given day for absolutely no reason. Additionally, it is a good practice not to mix niches on blogs as there may very well be a variety of organizational and technical issues that may arise. Good points. Also note that Jane has been blogging for around five years now, so she has some good experience.

2) How long have you been guest posting?

My first guest post went live on December 2010. Since then I’ve done 230+ guest posts.

PERSONAL NOTES: So far, I have written two guest posts. Jane has written 230+. I have a loooong way to go.

3) How often do you write guest posts?

I write 2-3 guest posts per week unless I’m extremely busy with my day job

PERSONAL NOTES: All I can say is: WOW Jane! You maintain multiple blogs that you own as well as write 2-3 blog posts for other blogs every week AND hold down a day job?!? I applaud your work ethic! By my calculations, you actually average 3-4 guest blog posts per week if you average them out starting in December 2010, so you’re working even harder than you realize AND you have a day job!

Interesting. I though I was the only blogger who had a day job. Seriously. I honestly had that impression. I am actually a scientist. TheBitBot.Com is somewhat of an anomaly in time-space that should have never happened. The reason it is here is still somewhat of a mystery to me.

4) How do you find blogs to guest post on?

I choose blogs to guest post depending on my purpose. And I usually don’t guest post for one purpose but sort of mix mash. I currently have a list of great blogs on which I’m more or less regularly contributing. I’m also expanding my connections in finding newer blogs.

PERSONAL NOTES: Interesting. I like the fact that you guest post for more than one reason or purpose. I have personally found that if I do anything for only one reason, I can easily find myself stranded with no motivation. Additionally, I like the fact that you are always looking to expand and improve and network. I think this is a great way to keep your operation from becoming stale. Its as the saying goes: “The Only Constant Is Change”

5) Do you pre-write the articles and offer them to blogs or do you request subjects to be written about?

I usually write guest posts myself and submit to blogs. Occasionally when guest bloggers ask me to write on a specific topic, I take it up if the topic sounds good and interesting to me.

PERSONAL NOTES: Good perspective. Flexibility is key. Never constrain yourself to doing anything one particular way because there are situations in which that methodology simply will not work. Be willing to research and write about a variety of subjects. I am actually planning on doing this in the near future.

6) Are you planning on increasing or decreasing the number of guest posts you make?

I actually would love to increase my guest posting rate, but time is the only constraint. Given that I’m not a full time blogger yet, my day job decides when and how much I write Certainly I wouldn’t think about decreasing my guest posting rate.

PERSONAL NOTES: So my suspicions are confirmed…we are all constrained by time. Too bad. Same here Jane, my day job controls my life too, but I think that the people I have met therein are invaluable as to what I will be writing in the future. Strange how these things work themselves out.

Jane, if you had never written all of those guest posts, this interview would have never happened. In the world of quantum physics, that could be referred to as a “quantum state algorithmic vector”, a time-space phenomenon that only the gods, some native American Indians and only recently some scientists are familiar with…really.

7) How do you feel that guest posting has benefited your blog/business?

The competition is very tough with thousands of blogs being started everyday. So build it and they will come won’t work anymore, you need to build it and reach out so that people can find you.

PERSONAL NOTES: Jane, I just realized that the answer that you gave to the seventh question was what I was looking for before I started this entire process. Much thanks to YOU! You have officially confirmed what I suspected to be true all along and that is the fact that simply having a blog or even a great blog, for that matter, is simply not enough in the majority of niches (if any). Promotion is key and promotion requires MORE THAN SEO CAN GIVE, and MORE THAN SEARCH ENGINES CAN GIVE.

I think that this concept has been lost since Google became the “Earth-Wide Information Aggregator” that we all know it to be. Honestly, since Google, I feel like the human race is a tad bit dumber for its convenience. We all think that SEO is some sort of mystical promotional phenomenon. Its not. Its just a tool…that’s all. Promotion requires taking your standard to your audience…not having them search you out. Awesome Jane!

What is the key to getting your guest posts approved on other reputable blogs?

Apart from that I’d see that I read the blog’s guidelines first before submission. I also don’t submit my guest posts out of the blue. I always see that I have started developing some sort of relationship with the host blogger prior to that.

PERSONAL NOTES: Agreed. Building a professional relationship is key in this case as it is with all things. Its never personal, its just business and it requires all of the professionalism, relationship building, and cordiality that any type of relationship requires.

Honestly, I’m kinda surprised you even accepted this interview Jane, because I am not well-established like you are. I am a total newbie and you didn’t know me from a “hill of beans” (Southern U.S. expression) LOL!

End Interview…

So there you have it, fellow bloggers, the key to blogging success. As you can see, its not being a content machine, and its not SEO (even though SEO is a vital factor).

My take is that the ability to brand YOURSELF, not necessarily YOUR BLOG, is what makes the difference, something that Jane does very well and that I intend to do better on in the future.

Thanks to Jane Sheeba for this great interview and for divulging all of her insider secrets!

The bottom line is…you don’t. What is that you say? You copy and paste the URL of your article in Copyscape and you show that it is unique to your site?

Or, you copy and paste excerpts from your article into Google only to find those specific blocks of text indexed on your site only?

Congratulations! You just proved one thing…that you can’t detect your stolen content using OLD technology! Yes, that’s right, old technology that is very, very yester-year.

What Google and Copyscape Can’t Detect All Pirated Content

Let us now fast forward, not to the future, but to the present because it would probably be a good idea if we woke up, wiped the slobber from our face, rubbed our eyes, and realized that blue hatters aren’t that dumb and there is currently no technology in place to detect this.

What am I talking about? One word: Homoglyphy

What in the world is a Homoglyph you ask?

In typography, a homoglyph is one of two or more characters, or glyphs, with shapes that either appear identical or cannot be differentiated by quick visual inspection. This designation is also applied to sequences of characters sharing these properties.

In 2008, the Unicode Consortium published its Technical Report #36[1] on a range of issues deriving from the visual similarity of characters both in single scripts, and similarities between characters in different scripts.

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

How Scrapers Take What They Need And Leave

Imagine for a moment that you write a well researched, informative, 5000 word article on a subject that you are passionate about. Meanwhile, a scraper bot picks it up on your RSS feed immediately after you publish it because you have been dialed in being that you are a source of high-quality and unique content.

Immediately after publishing, your article is scraped and run through a type of character set spinner that spins not the article itself, but the characters that are used for the words, in other words, the Unicode Characters themselves.

Interestingly, if you placed the two articles side by side, they would look and read EXACTLY the same, but in the eyes of Google and Copyscape, they would look completely different.

Welcome to spinning in the 21st century and this may be how content thieves are ripping your content with impunity.

So what character sets are being used for this heinous activity?

Character Sets Being Used

Cyrillic
Cyrillic, by far, is the most commonly used alphabet for homoglyphs, largely because it contains 11 lowercase glyphs that are identical or nearly identical to Latin counterparts.

Hebrew
Hebrew spoofing is generally rare. Only three letters from that alphabet can reliably be used: samekh (ס), which sometimes resembles o, vav with diacritic (וֹ), which resembles an i, and heth (ח), which resembles the letter n. Less accurate approximants for some other alphanumerics can also be found, but these are usually only accurate enough to use for the purposes of foreign branding and not for substitution. Furthermore, the Hebrew alphabet is written from right to left and trying to mix it with left-to-right glyphs may cause problems.

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

Pretty weird stuff huh?

To be totally honest, I do not see how anything that has been spun using this type of character set spinning could have any SEO value because all of the keywords in the article would not match any of the keywords search engines are looking for because of the fact that they would’t match anyway. Keywords are based around specific Unicode character sets and when they are mangled up by character set spinners, they no longer match keywords that anyone is looking for.

So what’s the big deal then. Well, one way this could be a big deal is if you buy “hand written” unique content from a third party that can deliver better than average content at what seems to be superhuman speed and that passes both the Google and Copyscape litmus test, meaning it appears completely unique.

That is a problem and it goes without saying that it could land you in serious trouble.

So how can I detect this type of thing?

Well, there is really only one way. Simply type the sentences in question in by hand into Google to see if they appear indexed in search results.

This will allow any character set spinning to be automatically overwritten by the manual read and type process. If nothing shows up at that point in search results, then you should be good to go.

Who Needs To Worry?

That’s an easy one. Individuals who generate high end content that has been professionally written and that has proven to be content that converts.

Honestly, I am not sure how far this phenomenon has spread, but I will say this, my blue hat side sees tons of ways that it can be used to spoof other people, such as blog owners if they accept guest posts and check for uniqueness using Copyscape and Google, article directory owners that accept articles en mass, newsletter owners that blast articles to their lists because they enjoy receiving high-quality, high-converting, unique content, the list goes on and on.

What Can I Do To Prevent This

Absolutely nothing. Unfortunately. It amazes me how reliant we have become on search engines such as Google. In a case such as this we quickly realize how vulnerable we are in this age of technology.

As far as solutions go, there is really not much. Probably, as far as I know, the only technology even remotely capable of detecting this type of activity would be one non-commercially available Multilanguage Electronic Phototypesetting System.

Outside of that, the internet may as well be the “Wild West”, at least for the time being.

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!

.

The software used for the design purpose also plays a key role for designing any particular site, as it would actually determine how a site would turn out to be. It helps create the site, a client is looking to build, in the way it should look like and how it should be.

It is very important that you take a while to ponder about if the software best suits your requirements, would it be the most appropriate one to use and whether it appears to present the best design. Explained in the following are some of the features which are a part of professional web design software, making them extremely desirable when compared to the others which exist.

• User-friendly aspect

It is necessary to understand that most of the users going to use the software do not really have much knowledge about designing. Therefore, the software needs to be very easy to use (easy to design, modify, etc) and understand (friendly interface). Most of the software these days comes with good in-built functionalities in order to comply with the requirements to aid in various projects.

• Useful tools and features

It needs to include great features such as those of link inserting, keyword adding and more, besides other important features such as the security. Also tools which prove to be useful for image editing, communication tools, besides other creation elements are essential. All these need to be properly utilized for a proper site design, where the software needs to make sure these are easy to use as well.

• Help and support features

Quality and professional web design software always includes good support facilities (customer support). It is of great significance that they include an e-mail feature or other communication medium (messengers, forms, etc) so that they can get constructive feedback (which would include compliments and criticisms) from the users. This would help to increase the quality of the software, to help create better designs for the users in future.

• Value

The higher the value of the certain software automatically makes it of high quality, which also appears to be a crucial feature as it helps determine the integrity of it as well. It therefore only makes sense to go through the reviews of particular software before using it, as it would help get prior opinions and ideas about it. One also needs to ensure that the software has been used for similar projects previously and that it would match your requirements appropriately.

It proves to be pretty important to choose the software by considered the points explained above. Discussed above are just a few factors which a professional web design is expected to have so that it aids the designer in designing a visually attractive and interactive site. A web design company from India has the experience and the expertise to effectively make use of the professional software to develop sites which helps in the online success of a business.

Author Bio: This post discusses about the some of the features which professional web design software needs to possess and how web design India Company can help you regarding the matter. Smartkathy also likes to share information about the various web-design trends and tools and services, besides the benefits which it exhibits.

Partial is the word that strikes the chord here and it gets you thinking of the fact that despite of having a sound online presence and descent traffic, why is your website staggering?

What counts for the bounce rates and why aren’t there a good number of positive lead conversions? How can you turn the picture around? Two ways.

One is to do it yourself and the second one is to hire the services of a good search engine optimization company who can offer you integrated SEO solutions to drive more sales. Handling it all on your own can be tricky and so SEO companies can just be the perfect partners who can turn the picture around.

But before you actually knock the doors of any SEO company, it would be helpful to know about the ingredients that will go in generating profits for your business. Having some knowledge works as a guiding factor because if you know yourself, then you would be able to match the requirements with the chosen search engine optimization Company who will be providing you with the services.

It might sound very clichéd but it is a well known fact that content plays an important part in gaining favorable visitor attention. Content acts as the base of a good page. It actually speaks out what your website is all about. It is the engaging factor which makes visitors come back again and again to your website.

So how can you use it to your advantage? Simple. Introduce a blog in your site if you already don’t have one. Use Twitter stream and Facebook profile in your favor so that any updates in the website can be reflected here. One can also go for publishing videos or white papers and get visitors comment on the content. Active participation and correct information are the keys to success in driving traffic to the website.

Big companies have their strong customer support to keep them sustained in the market. Small businesses have to strive on their own for a place. It is all about the brand value that gets the sales graph ticking upwards. Small business owners need to create that brand value and in this era social media is the right choice for it.

Add social media toolbars to the Homepage, discuss and share any new update related to your company and share it in the profiles, use content aggregators as Slideshare. Try to bring your target audience to where all the buzz is. This is a step that SEO companies offer as a part of their internet marketing services.

Search engine optimization companies point out the next step in getting the traffic to your site is by simplifying e commerce which means that make the entire shopping experience of the visitor easy. The simplest way to do this is by first evaluating all the purchase scenarios which stands for determining all the possible routes through which the customers can come in and do a purchase. The easier the process, the better are the chances of the conversion rate going high. Any reputed search engine optimization company will suggest the addition of HTML widgets and Javascript offered by PayPal and Google Checkout.

The last step to success constitutes an integral part of internet marketing services – SEO strategies which includes appropriate keyword identification followed by the optimization of the keyword by using it in the content and meta description and lastly by external link building where other sites link back to your site and render it value in the eyes of search engines.

Hence, you might have started out as a small business website but it does not harm to trust a good SEO company to turn the tables in your favor.

Author Bio: SEO Eagles is a prominent internet marketing services company providing online marketing solutions to suffice the needs of their clients. They have a large customer base mainly for the high quality services they provide.

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.