Google is increasing focus on quality measurements which is translating into actual ranking factors. Recent updates have shifted some ranking factor weighting form keyword relevancy to quality criteria.

But first, a little background reading…

Since taking over the reins of this blog from Mike, I have been writing a few new articles and working in the background, getting ready for a big relaunch of eBlogCamp, which *should* be rolling out very soon. (For those that don’t know, Mike has completed his College Degree in the US and now has a full-time job. He no longer has the time to update eBlogCamp, so I have now taken over as the main contributor).

For me, eBlogCamp is a long-term project. So I can brand it correctly and add my own personality to the blog, I started reviewing some of the older blog posts. Mike was quite a prolific writer, but since English was not his first language, there was the odd grammatical mistake here and there. Fixing up those errors would make the articles easier to read.

Is Grammar Important?

I’m the sort of person that can spot spelling and grammatical errors right away. I am not an English academic expert, but I am a native English speaker (who has dealt with tough English teachers at school). I also think that I am a bit fussier than most when it comes to grammar. I try to convey my thoughts using the minimum amount of words possible and each word has to fight for its place in a sentence.

Lots of people no longer care about grammar etc, but the main problem for me is that I like to scan and read text as fast as possible. If there are grammatical and spelling errors in the text, then that slows me down. Imagine if every newspaper and magazine you read was full of article-spun gibberish? That would make it very hard to read the articles fast. The content and intention would be in the text, but it just wouldn’t read well at all.

The Plan & Results

After reviewing the existing posts on eBlogCamp, I thought I had better start going through each one and just tighten up and tweak the articles a bit so they read a little better. I needed a plan, so I decided to work on the articles that receive the most traffic first and then work my way down the list. There are around 80+ articles, so this was going to take a while.

As I re-published the articles (with modified grammatical text), a very interesting thing happened. Traffic started increasing on those re-written articles. I didn’t add any new content to the articles or do any additional backlinking or article submissions etc, so the increase in traffic must be solely due to the way the articles are presented (grammar / spelling etc).

Natural Language Processing

I always suspected that Google performs natural language processing on articles to determine the actual quality of the articles. This “article quality” would be yet another parameter in the huge Google algorithm that influences the SERP of your articles.

Recently, another interesting thing also happened. Since this blog is a bit of a brain-dump of all the things I do (and think could help others as well), I wrote an article on my preferred WordPress Permalink Structure.

At the start of that post I stated that there are millions of results for that search term in Google. I had no intention of trying to make a top ten position in Google for that term, since I have nothing to sell, it’s just some good advice that people will find useful.

But the interesting thing is that I did not promote that Permalink Structure article at all. I did not create a thousands backlinks to it, and did not repin the article and then repeatably submit it to another thousand article directories.

I basically did no promotion and the article is in the top ten results in Google.

I can only conclude that since that article makes sense and reads satisfactorily, it outranks millions of other similar articles because Google has evaluated it as being of higher quality.

Conclusion

After seeing the traffic increase on the reworked and re-published articles, as well good traffic and rankings on my recent articles (that do not have masses of backlinks etc), I can only conclude that the “quality” of the article and how Google determines that quality is very important.

Before you hit that Publish button, read your entire post again and fix up anything that doesn’t make sense. If you are not a native English speaker, try to hire someone from Fiverr to proof-read your articles. Correcting the grammar could make the world of difference to your rankings and ultimately how much traffic and income you can generate from your website. Poor grammar and spelling can make a bad impression on your readers, resulting in loss of trust and lower conversion rates.

You might not think that grammar is important anymore, but Google does!

This is why I am not a big fan of article spinners that churn out gibberish that reads like a five year old wrote it. You can’t just change every possible word to another synonym and hope it reads properly. If I really had to re-spin an article and did not have the time to manually do it myself, I would get someone from Fiverr to manually re-spin it for me. Just focus on creating good content, others will see the value in your work and your traffic will increase.

What do you think?

Have you also noticed this effect on your articles? Am I too picky on grammar? Does the word “grammar” make your blood boil?

Most websites can be reached via two web addresses. One web address has the www in it, like http://www.eblogcamp.com, whereas the other web address has the www missing like http://www.eblogcamp.com.

In order to have better SEO for your website, you need to pick one domain format and be consistent with it. If you do this, then Google will not give separate PageRank for two URLs that point to the same page.

At this point, you might say… that’s crazy! Aren’t they both the same site!?

But think of it like this. You are running your own hosted blogging platform called “blogmaster.com”. Each blog user will be given a subdomain such as “kirk.blogmaster.com” and “chocolates.blogmaster.com” etc. Now if Google treated all the subdomains as part of the main domain, the PageRank results will be inaccurate. It’s a similar story for www, which is just another subdomain.

Fix #1: Set a Preferred Domain in Google Webmaster Tools

Login to your Google WebMaster Tools account and set the preferred domain. Once you have specified your preferred domain, it may help determine PageRank for your site more accurately since the value of each page will not be split across two domains.

From Google Help:

The preferred domain (www or non-www) is the one that you would liked used to index your site’s pages (sometimes this is referred to as the canonical domain). Links may point to your site using both the www and non-www versions of the URL (for instance, http://www.example.com and http://example.com). The preferred domain is the version that you want used for your site in the search results.

Fix #2: Add a 301 Redirect to the Preferred Domain

After you have set your preferred domain, you need to force all users to use the preferred domain by using a server-side 301 redirect. The 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location.

You can do this by editing the .htaccess file in the root directory of your domain on the web server. It is usually located at /public_html/domain.com/.htaccess

In my case, I want everyone visiting eBlogCamp to do so with the www in the URL. To force this, edit your .htaccess file and enter the following Apache directives:

File: .htaccess

# BEGIN 301 Redirect
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^eblogcamp\.com$ [NC]RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.eblogcamp.com/$1 [R=301,L]</IfModule>
# END 301 Redirect

You need to replace “eblogcamp.com” with your domain name. The code above is an Apache directive that redirects all eblogcamp.com to www.eblogcamp.com.

Notes:

• The redirect code in the .htaccess file only works on Linux web servers running Apache with the Apache Mod-Rewrite module enabled.
• If you are using a WordPress caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache, make sure that you add these new Apache directives to the very top of your .htaccess file.

How it Works

By having one preferred domain format, you are ensuring link consistency.

For example, if ten sites are linking to your article with a www prefix and another ten sites are linking to the same article without the www prefix, then Google sees the article as actually two pages. Thus the article will not receive the same weighting as having all twenty sites linking to the preferred domain. The .htaccess code ensures that all requests goes to the domain format that you want.

What do you Think?

Did you already have a preferred domain and your .htaccess file configured? If not… did my fixes take you less than two minutes to implement?

For example, you might need to:

• Export all your product details from a particular WordPress plugin to a CSV file.
• Increase all the prices in your eCommerce store by 10%.
• Modify links globally across the entire database.
• Update email addresses globally across the entire database.
• and so on…

WordPress uses the MySQL database and one of the benefits of MySQL is that you can easily import or export data to and from any MySQL database table (or even the entire database). You might not know that there is a great tool called phpMyAdmin that you can use to do all the exporting and importing of data. You can access phpMyAdmin from your cPanel (most hosting providers offer cPanel with your hosting account for free).

It is extremely easy to use phpMyAdmin and it is also free. You just need is a good tutorial that shows you how to use the phpMyAdmin tool, so I created one for you. Once you learn how to use this tool you will be able to make all sorts of changes to your data quite easily.

For the tutorial, I setup a scenario where I want to increase all the product prices in my eCommerce store by 10%. I’m using the WordPress eStore plugin from Tips And Tricks HQ.

In the tutorial I will show you how to:

• Make backups of your database so you will be fine in case you need to reload the original data back into the database.
• Export all the data from the relevant database table into a text file.
• Manipulate the data in the text file.
• Import the modified text file data back into the database.

Please feel free to leave a comment below and let me know if you liked the tutorial or if you have any questions.

I run another Web Design blog and the community of readers supply “news” content to the blog. Since there are about 20 news items per day, I need to exclude the News category from the main RSS feed.

There are a number of ways you could do the category exclusion, but most of the techniques require changes to your WordPress template or function files.

I don’t like modifying the theme files since it can be a problem to remember all those changes when a new version of the theme is released. I would much prefer to just use a plugin.

After a bit of searching, I found a plugin that does exactly what I need and you might also find it useful.

It’s free and it’s called Ultimate Category Excluder.

The great thing is that you can exclude categories from your Main Page, RSS Feeds and Archives which is really useful, and you do not need to change any code.

So why should I write another article about WordPress permalinks? Hasn’t this been done to death? The short answer is that the majority of those “best wordpress permalinks” articles give bad advice which will make it very hard for you to change your permalink structure at a later date when you have hundreds or thousands of blog posts on your site.

Over the years I have setup quite a few WordPress installations with different permalink structures, but after doing all the research and finding what works best for me, I thought I had better share it with you… so you do not get your blog into a bad state that you cannot easily fix.

I will also show you how to change your permalink structure to the one I recommend without generating 404 File not Found errors for anyone linking to your posts.

What are WordPress Permalink Structures?

If you are reading this post, I assume that you already know what permalinks are, but I will give a short overview for those who are unsure.

So your readers can access your blog posts, WordPress needs to serve up those pages as unique URL’s. The way that the URL’s are displayed can be configured.

If you go into your WordPress Admin Panel and go to Settings -> Permalinks, you will be presented with the following page.

Here are the default suggestions from the page and the reasons why you should not use them:

• Default – http://www.domain.com/?p=123
  This human unreadable format is useless for SEO purposes, but could be more efficient since it results in faster database lookups. Quite simply avoid this permalink structure since the efficiency gains do not help your SEO. You would be better off to move to a faster web server, rely on WordPress speed improvements as the core is updated or use caching plugins.
  Verdict: Do not use.
• Day and Post Name – http://www.domain.com/2011/07/21/sample-post/
  This permalink structure is better since it displays the post name in human readable form, but it also puts the post date in the URL. There is no need to put the date in the URL since you would not expect your readers to manually enter or change the URL’s. Some people have told me that they like to manually alter the URL so they can see what posts were made in say 05/2010. But seriously, your users should be using the web interface to select posts. Next time you are in Gmail, have a look at the URL. It’s a GWT application, but I don’t think there is any benefit in trying to manually punch values into the URL yourself. You are bypassing the applications API and this will generally lead to unpredictable results.
  Verdict: Do not use.
• Month and Post Name – http://www.domain.com/2011/07/sample-post/
  Same reasoning as above.
  Verdict: Do not use.
• Numeric – http://www.domain.com/archives/123
  This is similar to the default permalink setting. Might be slightly more efficient, but results in poor SEO.
  Verdict: Do not use.

Here are some other common variations that I have seen:

• Category and Post Name – http://www.domain.com/category/sample-post
  This one isn’t too bad since it is human readable and adequate for SEO. But there are a few reasons why I do not like it. The first reason is that by having the category in the URL means that you will not be able to rename or delete that category in the future (since other sites may have linked to that particular post). I like to keep my blogs organized and regularly move my posts into different categories, so this structure is not good for me. The second reason is that the keywords in the post name are pushed further away down the URL and hence the search engines will give less weighting to those keywords. It is simply best to have your keywords in the URL as close to the top level domain name as possible.
  Another variation of this permalink structure is to use the tag name which obviously has the same disadvantages.
  Verdict: Passable, but I would avoid it due to the reasons given above.
• Only Post Name – http://www.domain.com/sample-post
  Right… we are now getting closer to the optimum permalink structure. This permalink structure has no dates, categories or tags, just the human readable post name which is located close to the top level domain. It’s just about perfect, but a little more research reveals the reason why it isn’t.
  According to the Codex page on Permalinks, only postname may cause you problems “If you use postname as the only element in your permalinks to create a structure such as example.com/post-title, the rewrite rules may make it impossible to access pages such as your stylesheet (which has a similar format) or the /wp-admin/ folder. It’s best to include some numeric data (e.g. the post ID or date) in the permalink to prevent this from happening.”
  Verdict: Passable, but this permalink structure may mask other similarly named files on your web server.

And the Definitive Answer is…

• Custom structure (Post Name and Post ID) -

  http://www.domain.com/sample-post-123/

  This permalink structure is human readable, perfect for SEO, has the keywords close to the top level domain name and also contains a unique numeric identifier so it will not mask other files on your web server.
  Having the Post_ID in the URL is also handy when you are hacking away in the database or you need to find a post quickly on your site after viewing logs etc.
  Google News includes quite a few multi-author blogs in their index and one of their technical requirements says that all article URLs must contain a unique number. If in future, this blog grows and gets included into Google News, I won’t have to alter the permalink structure because there’s a unique number already in the URL – it’s called Post ID.
  The permalink setting to use is: /%postname%-%post_id%/
  Verdict: This is the one to use.

Does my Recommended Permalink Slow Down your Blog?

Previously (pre WordPress 3.0), my recommended permalink structure may have had slightly worse performance. But since WordPress 3.0, lots of changes have been made to the WordPress core, so this should no longer be an issue. But in any case you should do your own benchmark testing and make your own decision. You can always upgrade to a faster web server or use a CDN to boost your page load speeds. I run this permalink structure on WordPress sites with thousands of posts and have no issues. The SEO benefits far out-weight any slight loss in page load times.

How can you Change your Permalink Structure without Losing Page Rank?

You are probably in the situation that your blog has hundreds of articles that other sites have linked to. If you change your permalink settings, this will result in many 404 File not Found Errors and your site will definitely lose page rank.

I have been in this situation myself and there are a number of WordPress plugins that allow you to migrate from one permalink structure to another. Simple go to WordPress.org and search the plugin repository for “permalink”.

But there is one plugin that I have used in the past that is quite useful. As long as your original permalink structure had the post name somewhere in the URL, you can use the Smart 404 plugin.

The Smart 404 plugin stops your viewers from seeing site errors. When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.

I have successfully migrated sites from the “category-postname” and “postname” permalink structures to the permalink structure that I suggest without losing page rank or causing any other issues.

If you are setting up a new blog… then now is the time to get the permalink structure correct from day one.

One Last Note – Use Shortlinks for Internal Links

Now that you have setup your permalinks to use the structure I recommend, there is one last thing you need to be aware of. If you are linking to other pages in your blog, make sure to use the shortlink instead of the nice human readable URL.

You can determine the shortlink of any post by clicking the “Get Shortlink” button that appears when you are editting the post.

By using shortlinks, even if you do change your permalink structure at a later date, those internal links will still work ok.

But first, to clear any confusion about what SEO actually is, I’ll go over the definition again. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a site’s visibility in the unpaid / organic section of search engine result pages (SERPs). The usual ways to improve your site’s SEO is to determine the keywords most relevant to your site, featuring high quality content on it, regularly updating your site with new content, optimizing your site’s HTML and the overall user experience.

Knowing which strategies you should use to improve your desired results is the key. Here are five ways that you can improve your SEO strategy and raise your site’s rankings:

1. Start with the Right Keywords: You really need to research the keywords and phrases that online users are using to search for your industry or type of site. Use Google Insights or Google Adwords Keyword Tool to identify keywords that are popular, drive traffic, and that you can rank for in the search engine results pages. Once you do have some traffic to your site, analyze the phrases that people entered into the search engines and then click through to find your site. Write some more articles on the same topics since you know those topics are popular for your niche.
2. Maximize your Link Juice: The best possible situation is to get high authority sites to link to your site and additionally, make sure those links contain keywords in the anchor text (clickable text in a hyperlink). The search engines value backlinks from high authority sites more than ones from lesser known and trusted sites. Download the free SEOmoz toolbar, this measures the authority and trustworthiness of any site you visit with a Domain Authority score (0-100). A high Domain Authority can deliver more “link juice” to your site, and the more link juice your site has, the higher your chances are for ranking well in the search results pages. A valuable way to encourage someone to link to you is by following them on Twitter, engaging with them on Facebook, and regularly reading and posting insightful comments to their blog. All of these will help build trust and improve your chances of getting a quality backlink. If you are running multiple online projects, put a lot of effort into one site so it can achieve a high Google Page Rank. When you have one site with a Page Rank of 3+, you can use that site to feed link juice to your other sites.
3. Spend Some Time Creating your Title Tags: Title tags are the HTML elements that create the title of a web page. They are usually displayed in the web browser title bar, or as hyperlinked text in search results. Title tags should always contain targeted keywords. Additionally, title tags should only be 65-75 characters in length. Anything longer than that will not be fully displayed in the search engine results pages and can dissuade online users from clicking them. Use a WordPress plugin such as All in One SEO Pack to make SEO optimization and maintenance easier for you.
4. Ensure your Anchor Text Reflects your Keyword Strategy: Anchor text is also important because it is the text that is clickable in a hyperlink. Search engines use these to determine the content of the linked-to page. Make sure that your anchor text reflects your keyword strategy so that it continues to improve your rankings for that particular term.
   One beginner mistake to avoid is stop adding meaningless links to your text such as “click here”.
   For example, instead of writing “… the most popular search engine is Google so click here to enter your search terms…”, write the following “… use the most popular search engine Google to enter your search terms”. Make sure that the anchor text contains the keywords that reflect the target.
5. Monitor your Site’s Performance: The search engines know that online users enjoy fast-loading sites. This is why they all reward high performing sites with better rankings in the organic search results. Compressing your JavaScript and CSS files is a great way to improve page load speed times. If you’re operating a WordPress site, consider installing caching plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP SuperCache and uninstalling poorly developed ones that slow down performance.
   I have a number of websites on a shared hosting plan (with a fast Web Hosting provider). But as my traffic increased across my sites, my account kept getting suspended for causing too much load on the server. I tried everything to optimize my sites, but in the end I was still overloading that server, so eventually I had to upgrade to a VPS account which is much faster, but more expensive. Your shared web hosting account can easily max out with just 1000 visitors per day across all your sites.

A well thought out SEO strategy can make the difference between having your site show up on the first page of the SERPs and virtual obscurity. SEO is not some mysterious phantom science, but rather a series of practices that are aimed at improving your online visibility. The key is to stick to your efforts and test the different strategies and methods mentioned above until you find a streamlined strategy that works for your site.

In this article, I’ll discuss tactics that you can use to turn the tables on the spammers and leechers and actually turn the negatives into a positive outcome for your site.

But First… Should you use the NoFollow Link Attribute on your External Links?

Before getting into the tactics, here’s an overview about using the NoFollow link attribute.

There is a common myth that if you add the “nofollow” attribute to external links on your site, then the search engines will not follow the link and therefore will not index the site it is pointing to. This is an incorrect assumption. If there is a link on your site, Google is going to follow that link regardless of the “nofollow” attribute.

But what you need to know is that Google will take into account whether the link was “dofollow” or “nofollow” and assign a different weighting to that site which then feeds into it’s indexing algorithm (which will then influence the ranking for the external site).

Note: A “dofollow” link is just a link without the “nofollow” attribute. There is no specific “dofollow” attribute.

So by using the “nofollow” link, you are telling Google that you do not really trust that external site and hence less link juice will flow to it.

My advice is that you should use “nofollow” on any paid links on your site and anywhere else you think it is appropriate. For sites that you trust and want to promote, give them “dofollow” links. Typically, the Blogroll on my sites have “dofollow” links, whilst all other links on my sites are “nofollow”.

I use the SEO Smart Links WordPress plugin to automatically make all external links “nofollow”. But more importantly, I make sure that all the links in my Comments section are “nofollow”.

I’ll now explain that reasoning. If your blog allows “dofollow” links in the comments, then you will be targeted by comment spammers trying to get backlinks to their site. Your blog will also feature in blog posts that list blogs that allow “dofollow” links in their comments. People use these lists to find blogs to spam with comments. By using “nofollow” links, it will cut down on the spam comments that are submitted to your site.

Recently someone emailed me to say that this blog was listed in a blog post that listed hundreds of “dofollow” blogs. Why my blog was listed there I do not know, but the person who emailed me was upset when he found out that I have “nofollow” on all my external links. He was obviously a newbie trying to get decent backlinks by manually entering spam comments. I had a look at that blog list and in the comments on that post, people were saying how great the list was and were spamming every blog  on the list. Its best to make your external links “nofollow” so your site is not targeted.

Tactics for Spam Comments

If you are using WordPress, then the Akismet plugin correctly identifies 99.9% of the robotic comment spammers. But the bigger problem is how to deal with the manual comment spammers that are using black hat SEO techniques to target your blog.

These are the people that will manually go to your blog and leave a useless comment in order to get a backlink to their website. The article they are commenting on usually ranks quite highly in the search engines for certain keywords so they will leave a useless comment such as “Nice post” or “Well written post, really enjoyed it” so they can get the backlink.

Now don’t take this the wrong way. I really like people leaving comments on my blogs and emailing me directly. But what I don’t like are comments that just do not add any value to the discussion such as “Great article… thanks for sharing!”.  Having to moderate these comments wastes my time… and if I approve those comments it doesn’t add any value to the discussion.

So this is what I suggest you do to cut down the spam comments to your blog:

1. Use the Akismet plugin to filter spam comments.
2. Use the “nofollow” link attribute on all your external links, especially in the comments section. Automate this by using a WordPress plugin.
3. Consider closing comments on older posts. If you have a popular blog you can send out an email to your list notifying your readers that you will be closing comments on a recent post very soon. This tends to get some great meaningful comments from your readers, since they know their comments (and their backlink) will be locked in on a popular post.

For the comments that make it through the spam filter, you could just delete those comments. But sometimes if I am in the mood, I like to turn the tables on the spammers by doing the following:

1. Update the Name field in the comment to whatever you like.
2. Update the Email field in the comment to whatever you like. It’s even better if you create some extra Gravatars for you to use so it looks authentic.
3. Update the URL field to point to one of your other sites (or to your friends site). By doing this you are naturally creating backlinks to your other sites.
4. Update the comment text to say whatever you like and fix the spelling errors. For some reason, spammers are quite bad spellers since they are probably trying to get through the spam filter.

It’s not the nicest thing to do… but these people are wasting your time. By using this tactic, the spammers are actually helping you with the SEO campaign for your site and the other sites you will point the links to. The beauty of this tactic is that if a spammer found your post doing a Google search, then Google will analyse what that user was doing on your site. Google will record the IP address of the user, and if they leave a comment, Google will record your post as having some relevance since it assumes that your blog post was very important since the user interacted with it and left a comment. Since the IP addresses are coming in from all over the world, it looks completely natural. The great part is that you hijack their comment at the last moment and enter your own info. Score: Blogger 1, Spammer 0.

Tactics for RSS AutoBlog Leechers

There was a time when I was quite upset when other people leeched the content from my blogs using RSS, and then reposted my articles on their AutoBlog sites.

But now I don’t care! I’m going to tell you a tactic I use to combat them. Once you implement it, you will want the RSS AutoBlog Leechers to keep stealing your content as much as they want.

The first thing to realize is that Google has probably indexed your site first, so Google knows where the original content came from, so your article should always rank higher than the duplicate article.

The autoblogs may copy your entire article, or sometimes they just copy the first and last paragraphs, since those paragraphs usually contain keywords. The article probably doesn’t make sense anymore, but they are hoping to get traffic from the search engines due to the keywords in those paragraphs.

What you need to do is make sure that the first and last paragraphs in every article you write has a link to another article on your site. By doing this, if someone uses an RSS AutoBlog plugin to copy content from your site, they will also be copying the links back to your site. Hence you will automatically get backlinks to your site which will increase your ranking. The more AutoBlogs that copy your content… the better. Google knows which article was the original article, and now there are backlinks to your site as well. It’s win-win for you. You should also make sure every article you write contains some internal links to other posts on your site.

If you really want to turn the tables on the RSS AutoBlog Leechers… make sure to add some affiliate links to your posts as well. How great would it it be for 500 other blogs to steal your content that contains backlinks to your site as well as some affiliate links!

Web Scraping Example

Here is my original post: Simple Guide to Getting Backlinks

And here is the same post on someone else’s blog

That post has links back to my site and some affiliate links as well. Go for it AutoBloggers!

The most important thing for your blog is the domain name. It should be keyword rich.  For example, if I was creating a site where I was going to promote BBQ Grills as an affiliate through Amazon, I would try to find “deep level” keywords. First I’d go to Amazon and find a sub category like “grills gas” or “grills charcoal”. Just start typing the main “grills” keyword into the Amazon search box and use the automatic search suggestions for your deep level keywords.

Next I’d use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and type in “grills gas” to find keywords. I’d look for something with about 10,000 to 20,000 searches a month. For example, I found “stainless steel gas grills”.

The ideal domain would be stainlesssteelgasgrills.com, so that’s where I’d start. That domain is taken, but you could try using one of the other domain variants such as “.net” or “.org” etc. You could also try adding an “x” or “-hq” to the end of your domain name which works almost just as good as the regular domain and is almost always available. For example try stainlesssteelgasgrills-hq.com

You really want to have a good keyword rich domain name. The next thing to do is install is the All in One SEO Pack on your WordPress site. It’s easy. Just log into your WordPress admin panel, click on plugins, then in the menu underneath it click add new. Then do a search for “all in one seo” and install the plugin.

With the plugin installed, you can now easily modify your SEO to help you get ranked higher. The first thing you need to do is change the “Home Title” to something with a keyword rich description. In this case it could be “Stainless Steel Gas Grills”. You change update the config in Settings -> All in one SEO

Next, update the “Home Description”.  This is what Google usually shows as the text underneath the link when you do a search in Google.  So you want to write it to also be keyword rich, but with a call to action for people browsing Google to click on your site.

In this case it might be something like – “a review of stainless steel gas grills from Vantage, Weber, Char-Broil and more. Don’t buy a stainless steel gas grill until you visit this site …”

See how we put in the manufacturers – those are excellent keywords as well.

Next to configure is the “Home Keywords”. Separate the keywords with commas. Here’s a really easy way to do this. Get your site operational and live with some content first. Then go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool, enter your domain name in the “Website” search box and have Google scan it for keywords. Then put the most targeted of those keywords into your “Home Keywords” field.

That’s really all you need to configure with this plugin.

Now onto more optimization. I recommend that you  change your footer to insert your keyword. Also, change the “About” page to “About [keyword]“. Create separate categories for each complementary keyword as well.

Then, in the post of your titles, put each keyword you are going for in the post. Place the keyword once in the opening, and once in the last paragraph.

That’s really all you need to do.

And here’s a final tip. When Google is indexing your site, it will give your site a better ranking if the domain name expires a few years in the future. So if you are creating a site that you know you are going to be running for a few years, purchase 3 – 5 years up front. I use GoDaddy for all my domains and when they send me a good discount coupon, I renew my sites for a few years. You can also search for “GoDaddy Coupons” in Google and you should easily be able to find a 30% discount coupon.

GeneratePrivacyPolicy.com is a free online service which makes creating one very easy.

I have tested this service out and I am quite pleased with it and I am actually using it on my other sites where I am selling products and collecting users data.

It’s much easier to use this tool than copying someone else’s privacy policy and tweaking it. If you do that, you just don’t know what was left out of the version you copied, so doing that is not ideal.

It asks several questions such as the name of the business, the URL and the type of data collected (and why they are collected). Once all details are entered, it generates a professional policy instantly.

The service requires registration (free) and you can list and edit any of your previously created privacy policies.

What is a Privacy Policy?

A privacy policy is a document that discloses some or all of the ways to your website vistors about what you will do with information gathered from them, how you are gathering that information and how the information will be stored and managed.

Why do I need a Privacy Policy?

Any website should have a privacy policy, and if your website uses third party services for serving ads such as Google Adsense or processing payments, then you are pretty much required to have one. Not having an accurate privacy policy can expose your business to liability in a number of different ways.

How can “GeneratePrivacyPolicy.com” Help?

Each privacy policy statement should be specific to the website or business. Only you, the owner, can say whether your privacy policy accurately describes the use of personal information collected from your users. GeneratePrivacyPolicy.com offers a user friendly online privacy policy generator that can help you create a free privacy policy specifically tailored for your website and how you operate it.

However, it’s not really that simple. The Google search algorithm is constantly tweaked and if you just created thousands of backlinks overnight, then Google knows you are trying to game the system and your site will probably be removed from its search engine results.

So instead of getting the high ranking that you think you will get, you might not get any ranking at all!

Create Outbound Links!

But here’s a tip. What you need to do is create outbound links. This means that you link out to other sites. This is counter-intuitive to the usual strategies that you will hear… which is why it works. While everyone else is busy building vast numbers of backlinks to their site in hopes it getting their site to rank higher, you can start creating outbound links to other sites.

The easiest way is to start with about four outbound links – not affiliate links. These are are just plain links. Link to a really good authority site about your subject that is ranked very high for a general keyword. Or a site like Wikipedia, or a government site or a YouTube video.

Putting those links on your WordPress site is easy. Login to your WordPress Admin panel and expand the “Links” menu item on the left. This reveals a few options so you can easily add some new links. Then go to the “Appearance->Widgets” Admin page and simply drag and drop the Links widget to your sidebar.  Real easy.

Or just write some short blog posts that contain those plain outbound links. You can decide the best way that you want to do this. Notice that I am sprinkling a few of those plain links in this post?

Creating Backlinks

Now let’s discuss how to get backlinks to your site. There are many tactics and not all of them work all the time, but all of them do work some of the time. It’s best that you experiment with different tactics until you find results that work well for you.

Create Videos

You should create at least one YouTube video. You can create a screencast video for free (5 min limit) by using Jing. Or some professional alternatives are Camtasia (Windows) or ScreenFlow (Mac). Both have trial / demo versions so you can still use those for free. Just shoot a video where you talk about your blog.

Then post the video on YouTube. In the description, make sure to put in the full URL to your site starting with “http://”. You know you added the link correctly if the link is clickable. Also put your keywords in the description and the title.

Since YouTube is owned by Google, YouTube videos show up in the Google search results. For example, a search in Google for “banana” reveals:

Example: Here’s a recent

 I did for the WP Lightbox Ultimate Plugin. I just wanted to show you it’s not difficult to produce your own screencasts using good tools. For this screencast I used ScreenFlow and the video is hosted on Vimeo since I do not want Ads to be shown on our product demonstration (as is the case with YouTube).

Add Breadcrumb Navigation

You should also add breadcrumb navigation to your WordPress theme. A breadcrumb plugin will automaticaly create links from one of your pages to another page etc and shows the user where they are in your category hierarchy. That’s great, because those internal links count the same as links from other sites, in terms of quantity. So you are controlling the creation of those backlinks automatically.

Create Informational Pages

Another simple place to get a backlink is to is create a lens at Squidoo. Don’t make it spammy. Just make it simple, straight forward and informational and only include one link to your site. You also want to link out from your lens to regular authority sites with no commercial intent, so you look less like a marketer and more like someone who is just creating an informational site.

You can also do the same thing with HubPages

Outsource for Cheap

A great site to experiment with is Fiverr. This is a site where you pay people $5 to do simple tasks. Go there and do a search for “backlinks”.

For example someone posting on Fiverr says they can create five .edu backlinks for your site for $5. That’s a good deal and worth experimenting with since .edu sites are generally worth more because they are higher quality links.

While you are at Fiverr, explore what you could use other people to do for you. For example you could get someone to setup a WordPress blog for you, or do some keyword research, or some Twitter promotion etc. There are a lot of possibilities there, so it’s worth checking out.

Other places to get backlinks are social bookmarking sites. OnlyWire is a good resource for this and they also have free options. Another tactic is to outsource through Fiverr, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Freelancer or oDesk etc.

The outsourcers will find relevant blogs that allow comments with links in them, and your outsourcer will post a quality response with a link back to your site.

Summary

Don’t be too greedy with just trying to secure backlinks to your site. You need to make your site look natural to Google, (and not look like a backlinking black hole) so make sure to include some outbound links to authority sites about your subject that are ranked very high for a general keyword.

Exercise

Time to take action.

• If you have been only concentrating on creating backlinks, now is the time to also consider creating some plain outbound links.
• Also explore Fiverr… for $5, it’s worth the experiment.
• Creating screencasts is also worthwhile and a good skill to have. Try the free options and make a test screencast about something simple.