On competing MMO (Making Money Online) site this morning I also came across a post in which you can see the power of a impromptu cash giveaway promotion in action!

However, there are many other factors to consider, especially if making some money with your web site or blog is a goal. The reasons you should choose your niche carefully include:

• Once you begin building a body of content, it is very difficult to change or broaden the subject matter successfully.
  Some niches are highly saturated, including SEO, Webmaster Tips and Blogging, the primary topics of SEO Crunch, which I wouldn’t recommend unless you are truly determined and have the guts to stick with it for a long time before seeing any significant results. Better to choose a niche with less competition.
• Some niches pay much better than others. If your web site offers all the information in the world about mouse traps, flowers or tornados, you may well attract plenty of enthusiasts interested in your niche. But, consider the niche also from your advertisers’ point of view. If they sell something that is low cost or which is not generally purchased online, you may find that the click rates you get are quite low.
• Some niches attract more attention than others, which is related to the saturation and competition point above. If you write about a very small niche topic like ladybugs, flytraps or species of spiders, chances are you won’t see a whole lot of traffic since there will be fewer potential visitors. On the other hand, you want to find a balance between a niche that is too saturated and one that gets few visitors, so researching your niche is very important to your success.
• Some niches are more relevant to people who spend time online. Think about your target audience and do some research to determine whether or not they are among the “Web Elite” who spend more time online than watching television or other media channels. A site about retirement villas could be a great idea, but do the people interested in selecting a retirement home tend to do their research online? Hmmm …. Could be a niche worth examining closer!

Once you have selected a niche for your web site or blog, its time to begin doing keyword research. The goal of this exercise is to identify the keywords you will embed naturally and meaningfully within your site content.

The best tool we have found for such research is Trellian’s Keyword Discovery. Using this or another keyword tool allows you to find keywords that people actually query on Google and other search engines. You may think that flytrap is a great keyword, but if only 3 people enter the keyword into their search box each month, you won’t attract many users.

Now, unless you are one of the lucky few who have an aged domain, with hundreds or thousands of pages already in place and quality, related back links to match, then picking the heavy hitting keywords is also a mistake.

For example, if you are starting a blog about autos, good luck trying to get indexed and highly ranked for keywords like Car (639,182 monthly queries), Chevrolet (210,566 monthly queries) or Tires (544,795). Your competition will be fierce and the long established sites in the niche will outrank you every time.

If you are lucky to be a leader in your niche, then by all means choose the keywords that get the most queries. But, if you are like most of us trying to carve out a place in your niche, you will have much more success using so called “long tail” keywords. These are keywords that get far fewer queries and are not as likely to be saturated already by the competitors.

One general rule of thumb for a newer site trying to establish a mark within a reasonably popular niche is to select keywords that get between 1,000 and 2,000 monthly queries. Also try to select about three to five related keywords to use within each article or story you post, placing them contextually and naturally distributed throughout your article. Front load them in your page title, URL, meta description, image alt tags and excerpt as well.

In future articles we will discuss some of these techniques in more detail, but this hopefully provides you with the basics you need to more wisely choose a niche and keywords to use as you build your site content!

Sound harsh? Perhaps so, but most estimates are that Google is responsible for over 60 percent of search traffic today and Adsense is a viable source of income for most owners of content web sites today, so the paranoia and hyperbole is probably well enough deserved!

So, how does the smart Webmaster or Blogger get into the good graces of Big G in an attempt to get content indexed so that visitors find his or her web pages?

For starters, despite the scaremongering and penalties for paid links being doled out like so many school demerits these days, Google was founded on and still relies heavily on the algorithms developed back in 1999 by Page and Brin, which essentially ranks web pages based on nothing more significant than popularity.

And so, like a bunch of fisherman gathered at the same fishing hole, we Webmasters cast our lines, all hoping to hook a big keyword and reel in the number one SERP in our chosen niche. We write great content, put up shiny pictures, videos, keywords and whatever link bait we can think of, just to catch a little more traffic.

That’s right; if your web site has a lot of back links, especially from sites that are content relative, then you stand a good chance of being well indexed by the behemoth of search. But just try putting your best content on a freshly registered domain and watch it sink with despair in the sandbox, with hardly a visitor able to discover the gems it holds.

Those who with the insight to start publishing content and peddling their wares years ago have the huge advantage, since Google’s algorithm seems sure to give more authority to older domain names and those with a ton of incoming links, which it deems to be “votes of popularity” and sees as more worthy of top SERPs than those without.

Ironically, although the algo is supposed to provide the Big G users with “superior search results”, one can find countless examples of top SERPs given to pages with worthless content, shameless product promotions and Made for Adsense sites dangled before searchers like so much stinking shark bait.

Recently, we tried an experiment to prove this point and, without revealing the URLs, for fear of the penalties and because no self-respecting Webmaster will reveal his best SERPs, we can say that if somebody invents a more intelligent search algorithm than Big G’s, he may well do to Google what Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the young Stanford geeks, did to Yahoo, Excite and others only a few short years ago! Yes, the time is soon for a new and improved answer to producing the results searchers deserve.

And so we set out to test whether Google Bots and the legendary algo of Page and Brin’s genius could really sort the wheat from the chafe. Choosing two sites in our portfolio, one aged and having significant backlinks and the other, a fairly new site in the same niche and with similar content, we published two versions of the same article, containing the same well-researched keywords, on both sites.

On the one with high PageRank, tons of great search results and thousands of backlinks, we published a poorly written and relatively trite version of the article. And on the fresh site we posted a polished, spectacular and highly specific version.

Care to guess the results? Hardly a surprise of course; the “popular” site ranked highly for several of the keywords, while the ugly duckling site with the far better version got nothing higher than page four search results for the same keywords.

Take no pity on the poor Webmaster who toils away for hour on end to make good content available; he deserves no recognition from you or the Big G. But what about the poor searchers who rely on Google to take them to the promised land when searching for something as important as their next HDTV flat screen television or trying to find the latest spring fashions or a good article on how to lose weight, find a Wordpress plugin or perhaps looking for information on how to become a successful Blogger?

While they hope to find the content we published on our fresh site, all they will get from the Big G is a pile of garbage because that version is on the more “popular” site.

So, our conclusion is indeed that Google is a hard taskmaster; both to the Webmaster and to the unsuspecting searcher who has been brainwashed by the hype into thinking the answers to all their questions, the links to the best web sites, can be found by entering there query into the Big G search box!

Now that Google is gaining so many haters in the Webmaster community, to whom they owe a fair portion of their fantastic wealth and success, the tide may turn slowly away, leaving the doors open for a new competitor to come along finally, with a pure and simply better search algorithm and an attitude that Webmasters and searchers alike begin to prefer over the Big G.

CEO Eric Schmidt has said repeatedly that Google doesn’t care to own content, but prefers the strategy of guiding users to content instead. And nobody can deny the strategy has paid huge dividends, making Google the fastest growing company of all time. Well, so far at least.

But despite wooing many of the most talented software engineers and employing thousands of brain-bigger-than-a-planet minds, Google still apparently has no better way of judging the actual value and quality of content than how many links there are to a given web page or site!

This all seems a sad affair and, rather than intimidating Webmasters, what Google really ought to concentrate on is how to distinguish good content from utter garbage and rank pages accordingly. Then, they might not have to piss off the Webmaster community with threats against paid links and paid links could once and all go the way of the buggy whip!

If you like this post, please let us know. If you think its complete bullshit, don’t be afraid to tell everyone. Your comments are appreciated either way on our little web site that nobody knows and Google hasn’t confined to banishment. Yet anyway …

While I don’t in anyway condone this cruel trick, I have seen it done and it’s rather entertaining.

For some odd reason my mind compares this to writing blog titles that grab people’s attention.

I learned the power of writing good titles when I was in the newspaper business, where alliteration, titillation and fitting a title to the given column space were emphasized.

Following are a few tips to follow when trying to come up with your blog post titles.

To the Point but Offbeat

On my How Did I Do It? Web site, the most popular story has the title “Plant a Butterfly Garden”, which sounds ridiculous, but its offbeat; while others may write stories about butterflies, flower gardens and the like, I haven’t seen any others about an actual butterfly garden … well, now I will since you’ll probably use it in your next do it yourself, home improvement blog post title!

Also, it is important that you do not mislead the reader. Unlike tricking a dog into thinking he’s getting a treat, the peanut butter you feed your blog reader had better taste good and be what he’s expecting.

Put Keywords Up Front

The importance of keyword placement in web site content has been beaten to death by search engine optimization gurus, but keywords are still the only real way search engines can tell what your content is about.

There are a couple of aspects to placement of keywords in your web page title. First, put the 1 or 2 keywords that best represent the topic as close to the beginning of your page title as possible. Second, you might want to select keywords that you have researched and have reasonable certainty will get search engine queries.

Keep It Short

Take a little time when you write titles to consider options and how to cut out words like “a”, “the” and the like. The more space you insert between your keywords, the more you dilute them.

Unless you have a really creative, attention-getting idea for a long title such as “Why SEO Experts Are Completely Full of Crap” or “My Mom Makes a Million Dollars a Year on Her SEO Blog”, you are better off keeping it short and to the point.

Peanut Butter That Really Sticks

Some techniques for writing better blog titles are proven to catch readers’ attention on social sites, news sites and others that might be likely to pick up your story:

• Lists - People love lists and they’re easy to make up. Just think; “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover”, “Top Ten Things I Hate about Britney Spears” or “Five SEO Experts Who Don’t Know Crap”.
• How To - Often, people are on the Net looking for information on how to do something; “Plant a Butterfly Garden”, “Design a Wordpress Theme” or “Stick Peanut Butter to the Roof of a Dog’s Mouth”.
• Secrets Revealed - We all want the inside scoop; it’s what makes you the most popular person at the office water cooler. Think National Enquirer here; “Britney Spears Lectures on Semiconductor Physics”. I’m not making that one up by the way; Google it and see for yourself!
• A Deal You Can’t Pass Up - Everybody loves a deal and the Internet has become the bargain hunter’s oasis, so if your site has something to sell, offer them a deal they can’t say no to.
• Shock and Awe - Like slowing down on the freeway to rubber neck an auto accident, people can’t help but read something shocking; it’s the oldest trick in the Title Writer’s arsenal really. “The Coming Mortgage Crisis”, “Google Stock Goes Down 3%” or “Britney Spears To Have Sex Change Operation”.
• Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) - FUD is another great way to get people to read something; if they believe they could lose money, get sick or die unless they read your web page, they just have to read it!

While these techniques are good ideas to help you get started writing better blog titles, the main thing is to be yourself, have something interesting to say and say something people will want to read.

The most important thing to successful blogging is to write frequently and not worry about trying to make every post or every title a huge success; you’ll have plenty that bomb and some that strike the hearts of your readers and make it big!

And, if you need some inspiration, just look online and find something popular that you can use as a good idea starter for your next blog title.

An often overlooked aspect of developing blogs and web sites is the importance of category pages, which should be updated as you add articles or posts to your web site. If you use Wordpress, this is done automatically each time you add a new post, with the first several sentences from each new post being displayed on the category page(s) under which it has been listed.

Ideally, you want your web site category pages to get PageRank and search result rankings that increase steadily over time. But, unless you have optimized your Wordpress theme, your category pages simply display duplicate content that also appears in your blog posts, which is not a good thing for search engine optimization!

How to Use Optional Excepts to Display Unique Content on Category Pages

1. I will explain, step by step, how you can leverage the optional excerpts feature in Wordpress to create category pages that get search engine results and enhance your blog web site for users!
2. First, you will need to modify your Wordpress theme by editing the archive.php file in your theme folder. Using notepad or your favorite editing tool find the following code in your archive.php file: <?php the_content() ?>. Replace this code as follows: <?php the_excerpt();?> and add after it the code needed to provide a “Read More” link for the user to link to the post: <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark">Read more</a>

Use the optional excerpt field to add your unique category page intro content.
3. So far, you have enabled the optional excerpt text to be displayed on your category pages. But, unless you actually add content to the excerpt field in your posts, your category pages still only display the first few sentences of the post. To add text to your excerpt fields when writing or editing a post, look for the “Optional Excerpt tab in your wp admin write/edit post screen. Click the “+” sign to the right and you will see the text entry box. Enter about 2 to 3 lines of text here that introduces the article, frontloading the excerpt with appropriate keywords and a nice “hook” to draw readers into the content that follows.
4. Lastly, you should try using the excellent Wordpress plugin “All in One SEO”, which provides many SEO features for your blog. Look for the option “Use noindex for Categories”. Once you have added excerpts to your blog posts, you should uncheck this box and update the plugin. This will allow bots to spider your category pages so that they begin to get indexed.
5. Note that this feature should not be disabled if you are not using the optional excerpts or you will have duplicate content on the category and post pages, which is generally considered suboptimal from an SEO perspective.

StumbleUpon

By merit, I mean something that has value to your target audience and catches their attention long enough for them to actually read the text, view the images or watch and listen to the video content.

However, you will quickly find that mentions of your web site article or blog post will not make much money from the traffic that StumbleUpon and other social sites generate.

Why is it that you can generate huge traffic and little revenue from this seemingly great media of promotion?

The answer to the first part of this question is easy to answer. Social networks like StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati and others hold huge latent traffic for content that appeals to their users. Write an article that appeals to the right audience on one of the social networking sites and lo and behold, you can see huge traffic spikes if somebody mentions your blog post on one of these behemoths!

And if traffic is your primary goal, this can become like a holy grail to your web site or blog! But, if monetary gain is at least one of your blogging objectives, then you likely will not find a pot of gold at the end of the social rainbow unfortunately.

I cannot say exactly why the traffic generated by social networking sites is unprofitable, but I can tell you from direct experience that, regardless whether your niche is home and garden, cars, nature or Webmaster and SEO content, you are likely to see very little direct revenue from the traffic spikes generated from mentions on the social network sites.

For whatever reasons, these users seem to ignore advertisements when they visit a web site. That might make a profit-oriented web publisher think twice about the value of these traffic sources, but experience has taught me otherwise; while direct revenue may be low, there is considerable benefit from these traffic sources!

When you are able to get the traffic spikes generated by mentioning your own blog post, or, more hopefully, from the mention of another StumbleUpon, Technorati or other social network user, you will watch your page views go up and your click through rates (CTR) go down!

I do not understand yet why, but I have observed this phenomenon over and over again across the portfolio of web sites I own and operate.

So, you might wonder; what is the benefit of traffic without users who will click on your Google Adsense, cost per action or other advertising banners or links?

The answer lies in the fact that building traffic and attention is paramount to the commercial success of any advertising-supported web site:

• Build traffic and you are bound to get attention
• Build attention and you are bound to get backlinks
• Build backlinks an you are on your way to higher search results
• Build higher search results and you are on your way to even higher traffic
• And traffic is the only way to make profits on your website or blog!

So, even though you likely will not see direct profits from the traffic your web site or blog garners from the social networks, they are critical to driving your success, even if indirectly.

Try this experiment:

• Write a unique, compelling article or blog post of about 1,000 words on your web site. If you can’t write something interesting and relevant, then don’t bother; just go to StumbleUpon and stumble mine please!
• Stumble, Digg or otherwise mention your post or article on any of the major social networks; better yet, use as many of them as possible. Ask your friends and contacts to add stumbles, digs, etc. to your article
• Watch the traffic to that web page multiply like rabbits!
• Now, as the traffic increases, be sure to also watch the CTR and other revenue details for that web page to monitor the results

You’ll be amazed by the traffic you can generate using this technique and, while the immediate revenue results may be less than stellar, your long term financial success rests upon building an audience and enormous, regular flow of traffic.

Social networking is certainly one technique you need to master if you want to make money on the Internet!

Google Adsense – Perhaps the best known pay-per-click advertising network, Google’s Adsense is easy to set up and, depending on your niche, can pay you anywhere from five cents to a dollar fifty per click. Be sure to read the Terms of Service however; there are some limitations to be aware of in order to avoid being banned. Google can either ban your web site or your entire account, so following the ToS is very important.

Yahoo Publisher Network – It’s hard to get a YPN account these days and many people complain that the ads are not nearly as relevant to your content as Google’s. We all hope to see Yahoo improve their PPC ad network one of these days! Text Link Ads – Several text link ad networks exist, including text-link-ads.com, linkxl.com and tnx.net. While they all work somewhat the same way, there are differences in how text links appear on your site. You can approve or reject links and also choose whether you want links to appear site wide, only on the home page or other specified pages. With some of these services, you can also choose to allow links to appear directly within your blog content, which makes the links more relevant to your users. Affiliate Programs – These include Comission Junction, Linkshare, buy.at and others. With these programs you won’t get paid unless your clicks convert to some action for the advertisers, usually a lead or sale. Thus, the quality of traffic your Blog or web site generates will largely determine whether or not you are successful with these services. I have some web sites that make nothing with affiliate programs, while others do very well, bringing in several hundred dollars a month. Vibrant Media – Another great earning opportunity; Vibrant Media indexes your web site and places contextual links within your content. When a user hovers the cursor over the link, he sees a small pop up ad. If he clicks on the ad, you collect anywhere from ten cents to as much as a dollar, depending on the advertiser, product or service, etc. Private Ad Placement – If you generate enough traffic, consider putting up an Advertise Here or Advertising page on your site. The alternatives are limited only by your own creativity, but common options include text links, banner ads, site reviews and selling sponsored content like articles, templates or themes, tools, games, etc.

With visions of success and growing rich online, a lot of people go register a domain name, download Wordpress and begin adding a few posts.

But this is no get rich overnight scheme. Most people will give up after a few days or weeks, finding that after they’ve emailed their Blog domain name to friends and family, they get only a handful of visitors.

Read on to learn how you can create a blog that attracts attention, visitors and search engine results

Start a Blog with a Specific Topic and Reasons in Mind

You might start a blog from scratch with the vision of growing traffic and perhaps making money from pay per click, affiliate ads, etc.

But these days, if you have a company web site or operate an online E-Commerce storefront, then you have even better reason to consider adding a blog.

Here’s why! Most company web sites consist of a few brochure ware pages, with the typical topics like Who We Are, Our Services and Products, Contact Us, etc.

This gives both search engines and human visitors very little way to find your web site. Search Engines can only index HTML and text content, so the more pages and quality content, the more pages will be indexed and available for people to find your web site.

Many online retailers suffer from this issue substantially. They will put up hundreds of product pages with nothing but an image of their product with a brief description, giving search engines very little text content that can be indexed and made available for users to query.

Adding a blog to their site would give them a way to connect with potential buyers far more readily. By providing users with useful content that demonstrates you have domain expertise around your products and services, you create a useful online resource that can lead customers to your doorstep.

Know Your Topic

The first thing is to select a niche for your blog and to be sure it has a ready audience that wants and needs the content you intend to provide. Look around and do your homework.

Is the niche highly crowded already? If so, this could mean you have a large target audience, which is a good thing. On the other hand, it also means you will have substantial competitors, which means getting traffic could be a challenge unless you can find ways to build authority and traffic sources very quickly.

Also, you need to be very specific in the niche and topics you select, so you better either have substantive knowledge of the subject matter yourself or else have access to writers who do!

Too many blogs are already out there with average, generalized content. Most of them are rotting on the vine, neglected and hardly get any traffic.

Write Content Relevant to Your Audience

Largely, writing quality content means knowing who your audience is and what they want. So it better not be just like all your competitors. You need content that will stand out and get their attention.

Again, this is why it’s important to pick a topic you and/or your copyrighters know well. Interview experts on the topic and quote your sources. And don’t ever use duplicate content if you want to have any chance building a loyal audience. Not only is copyright infringement a serious legal matter, but search engines will penalize you as well for using duplicate content.

Get specific; give your readers as much specific information, ideas, and resources as you can. Also, you need to be prodigious. This means your content should exceed expectations and you need to publish often, providing a lot of high quality content. This keeps users coming back because they come to trust that you will continue to provide them will good ideas, humor, whatever it is that draws your audience in.

Edit, Edit, Edit

Now, some people will point to famous blogs out there like JohnChow.com or ShoeMoney.com and tell you that you should purposely use poor grammar, spelling and lots of slang on your blog. Depending on the audience, the style and tone you set, etc. that may be the right thing to do in some cases.

But for most audiences and niches, you’ll want content that is well written, without grammar or spelling errors. This means you want to edit your content thoroughly to be sure it follows a decent story line, with hooks to draw the reader in, logical progression and so forth.

Try following these tips if you are starting a blog or have one already and are trying to build your audience and site traffic! Also, if you have other useful ideas or thoughts please add your comments.

–Dr. Seuss

White Hat, Black Hat, Striped Hat

Much like Dr. Seuss characters, SEO techniques come in funny shapes and colors and most have stripes. What do we mean by this? Well, there are “pure” white hat and black hat techniques and then there are many that are “on the line”.

In this article, we will share with you some real world examples of this principle.

Purist white hatters will rely on providing their web site visitors good content and letting the search engines naturally rank their web pages over time. SEO is a secondary thought process for them and they belittle with contempt those who will pay for backlinks or otherwise try to “game” the search engines. Nothing against white hatters, but they are definitely missing out on many proven SEO techniques if they do not try to think outside the box sometimes.

Black hatters are mostly spammers and scammers. They will use easily detected spamming techniques like link farming, posting spam URLs in blog comments, spam email, and a host of other techniques to despise. Most of them know they will eventually get banned by search engines, but it must be worthwhile for them or there probably would not be so many. They aren’t worried about the longevity of their domains; they have a lot of no value, spammy sites they are working at any given time. Pity these pour souls for they have none!

Now, the third type is sometimes referred to as a gray hat, but we will refer to them as striped hatters. These are the really creative people who know how to bend all the rules and get their sites high ranking search engine results. And, in disguise like a imaginative Seuss characters, they know how to do this without getting banned!

Google the Grinch has really been cracking down hard on recently on “paid links”, with PageRank reductions and worse, in blatant cases even penalties that reduce a site to not even ranking for queries upon its own domain name! Some people surmise that this directive has emerged because paid links cut into the greedy Mr. G’s own profits, while others rightly defend Google’s desire to provide the most relevant search engine results possible; after all that’s how the firm became a household name and one of the most profitable companies in the world. There likely is at least some truth to both arguments.

Black hatters blatantly go after paid links, while white hatters will follow Mr. G’s advice and try to sell only links that use the now-famed nofollow attribute. Striped hatters, like the Cat in the Hat, are finding ever more creative ways to buy and sell links that even those brain-bigger-than-a-planet PHDs employed by Mr. G will have a pretty tough time weeding out. How could any algorithm detect the difference between a contextual and content-relevant link that has been paid for versus one that is unsolicited? We have yet to see any definitive proof that this is even possible, let alone that it is being done successfully!

It is important to remember that gray hat SEO techniques come in many shades and that the more risk one takes, the more results may be achievable. But that is a double-edged sword, since at the darker end of this blurred scale one inevitably joins the black hatters.

For instance, you can Digg your site (or use any of a vast and ever growing number of social networking sites) to get mentions of your web site. In theory, one would not argue this technique to be questionable. But in reality, there are services that allow people to buy Diggs, Stumbles, etc. and some of the largest SEO firms have vast networks they employ to Digg, Stumble, Blog, post on forums and so forth. Works great … unless you get caught, and plenty do because they are over zealous and buy these in large enough quantities and too quickly. Then, their domain is banned from said social network.

We also know that Google has stated that “news related” content can not be considered duplicate content due to the fact that many are broadly syndicated and RSS feeds are the soupe du jour. Many striped hatters closer to the dark side will take pieces of RSS feed and then “pad” this content with additional content that is contributed by users or, even more dubiously, generated by scraping comments on these stories from social networking sites and blogs and using a script to alter the text; removing or replacing words like “an”, “the”, “that” “by”, etc.

This in effect creates “new” content that will be readily indexed and produce search results. Over time, it is certain that such “content generators” will become even more sophisticated and effective, scraping the Net for related content and “reassembling” it into new and unique content.

Here’s another striped hatter technique described by Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz, called Wiki Jacking:

The important takeaway here really is the importance of using your internal anchors wisely; arguably a white hatter technique. But the creative and intelligent use of keywords within your internal links is a powerful method of funneling link power to specific pages that is questionable enough to be considered outside normal white hat techniques.

Next, good striped hatters will work out ingenious link exchanges with other sites. Instead of the dreaded direct exchange, my site A links to your site B, which links to my Site C. The more sites in your network, the greater ability you have to set up elaborate exchanges. The more related your sites are with each other, the better you will be able to set up quality indirect link exchanges using this method.

Then, there is the subject of link bait; attracting natural backlinks by creating what marketers usually call buzz. Any content you create that is good can be considered link bait. But the best link bait creates controversy, may be outrageous or even inflammatory. Good SEOs know how to use this technique shrewdly, even if it may bring some negative impact or reputation upon them. A great example would be this outrageous joust between an SEO author and webmaster forum moderator. Just look at the number of comments that were generated by this very public conflict! If you bothered to click on this link then the bait was quite effective and also the site owner has gotten another backlink here.

So, in reality there are no SEO hats; only various degrees of risk specific techniques incur. You always have to weigh the potential reward against the level of risk taken. There are many more techniques we will explore in future reports.

And that, before he scat, said the cat, is called a striped hat.

Here, we shall leave you with a funny page to go visit - Natural SEO Gods

However, no two links are of the same value, so will outline and discuss the top ten factors that determine the value of links to your web site.

1. Domain authority and quality of backlinks.
The number and quality of backlinks to the linking site is significant. A site that itself has a large number of inbound links with strong authority and relevance to its content will have far more value in raising the target site’s own authority and ranking. Links from sites with few inbound links or even many low quality inbounds has comparatively less value.

2. Importance of anchor text.
Anchor text refers to the words that appear in a text link. The more relevant the anchor is to your site’s content, the more value it will have. Perhaps even more important is how popular the anchor is as a phrase in search engine queries. For example, the phrase “Home Insurance” gets far more queries than “Home Design”. You can check the relative number of search queries a given phrase gets by using Google Trends.

3. Page authority and number of inbound links.
Like domain authority, page authority as measured by the number and quality of inbound links to that page also plays an important role in determining the value a link on it can impart to the target URL. This is one reason you want to get links to “inner” pages on your web site, not just the home page; it will in turn give your pages more authority, which helps to improve your pages’ search rankings.

4. Number of outbound links on a page.
Link Juice as it has been called, is passed from one page to another. This can be used to increase the authority of internal site pages or shared externally in the case of outbound links. However, since a given page has only so much juice to impart, a page with a large number of outbound links will have less value with one fewer links; less is more in this case.

5. Total number of links on a page.
As with the number of outbound links, the total number of links is also of significance. It is believed that spiders will not index more than about 100 total links on any given page, although this is a highly speculative estimate. One thing to give attention to on your site is how many internal links you have on each page; you wouldn’t want to link to every page on your own site, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of pages. Keep your page-level navigational links to high level or category pages only and use a site map instead of trying to link to all your pages in the site wide navigation structure.

6. Age of domain name.
The value of a domain’s age is another highly debated topic among SEO circles. Most agree that domain age, in and of itself, has little or no importance in SE algorithms. However, since an aged domain will tend to have more indexed content and inbound links, they can impart more link value than newer sites, which often have less indexed content and lower quantity and/or quality of inbounds.

7. Relevant authority and ranking of a page.
The SE rankings a page obtains will also play a large role in determining the value it imparts to a target URL. For example, a page about “Home Insurance” that has strong SERPs for that anchor has excellent value to a target URL that also contains content relevant to “Home Insurance”. A link from a page about “Waste Removal” will have very little value to the same target URL, regardless of its SERPs and authority with search engines.

8. Links from penalized pages.
A page which has been penalized by SEs, meaning that the page doesn’t even rank for its own title tag or very similar query, has no value to a target URL. Enough said.

9. Text links versus image links.
Text links with quality anchor text are more likely to impart value to the target URL than an image, even if the image includes the same anchor text in the “alt” attribute. To what degree exactly this statement is true, depends on the SEO expert you ask, but there is little agreement that text links have some degree more value than image links.

10. Links to pages excluded by robots.txt
An inbound link to a page on your web site which you have specifically excluded using robots.txt will have no value, assuming that robots.txt is honored and therefore will not be spidered.

Additional Links

Link Value Factors - Wiep.net

Search Engine Ranking Factors - SEOmoz.org

Paid Links and nofollow

The nofollow HTML attribute tells search engines that a hyperlink shouldn’t affect the ranking of the URL being linked to. This is supposed to reduce the value of search engine spam and enhance search results relevance.

Recently, Google has cracked down hard on the practice of paid links, reducing the PageRank of sites found or believed to be selling links. Exactly how the algorithm determines what is paid or not paid is one of the most popular topics on Webmaster and SEO forums these days. Most of what is written is completely erroneous and sometimes plain ridiculous.

On his blog, Google’s infamous Matt Cutts has provided some examples of blatant cases of paid linking. Reading most of what he says, we can infer that sites become easy targets if they have a heading or text that reads Sponsor Links, Advertisers, or something similar, which is then followed by a list of links that do not use nofollow.

This is even more obvious when the link targets have absolutely nothing in common with the content on the linking site! Footer links are another suspicious target. So, we think there are just a few simple rules to follow if you do sell links on your Web site … and who doesn’t unless they really don’t care about making money from their investment?

1. Don’t put up a long list of links to sites that are unrelated to yours. If you do so, use nofollow as Google instructs.
2. Don’t blatantly advertise on your site that you accept paid links. You might put a drop down item in your contact form for “Advertising” for instance, instead of putting “Advertise Here” on your home page!
3. Probably not wise to put the same external link on every page (commonly known as a site wide link). Again, if you do so, use nofollow, but good luck finding advertisers willing to pay for it!
4. Do embed external links within your body text and try to make them completely relevant to your content … which is how links naturally appear in most cases anyway. I defy even the brain-bigger-than-a-planet engineers at Google to develop an algorithm that could determine if this type of link is paid or not!
5. Do link only to quality sites, regardless how much spammers may be willing to offer you. Linking to MFA (made for adsense) sites, link farms, etc. adds no value to your users or search engine indexes and will only lead to your site also joining those lowly ranks.

Inside The Mind of A Searcher

There are a lot of different ways to attract traffic to your new web site, but probably none are as important as Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. Good SEO tactics can mean a huge influx of visitors to your web site, eager (or at least interested) for the information that you provide or the product that you sell.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is a straightforward concept; if you have any experience on the Internet at all, the odds are pretty high that you have experienced it to some degree. Any time you go to Google, Yahoo!, or one of the other big search engines for a search, you are likely going to click on a landing page for a site that has an SEO minded individual or team.

With their knowledge, they have created a page which ranks well on the search engines, one of the first pages a searcher will look at.

Why will a searcher look at that page?

Knowing how to attract a person searching on the Internet to your web site goes hand in hand with understanding why that person may be looking for a site like yours in the first place.

A big mistake that was made for quite a while by many web site developers was to use search engine optimization practices that worked great for the spiders the engines used, but really didn’t have that much appeal for a human searcher. Their sites ranked well, but once searchers got there, they were likely just to hit the back button and look for something else.

Really, if you just think about the times you have gone onto a search engine looking for information on something, you can understand the mindset of most people using the Internet. We’ve compiled a list below of some of the questions we think are the most important in the mindset of someone searching the web.

Where is this page ranked?

It’s been stated over and over again, and you can probably back it up with personal experience; if a page isn’t listed on the first three pages of a search, people are unlikely to go there. If you are going to make SEO a part of your web site’s success, then, you will need to make sure that your page(s) are listed within the first few results, preferably in the top five on the first three results pages.

Is this information useful?

We briefly touched on this above, but it is so important as to bear going into detail over. Whenever you are using SEO tactics, remember that in the end you are writing for the searcher, not for the Google crawlers. This mistake has been made over and over by web site developers, mainly because it used to work.

However, the search engines are not interested in sending their users to a page that is stuffed with keywords and not much else; they want to provide a useful service to relevant information and are changing their algorithms accordingly. In fact, the last year has been almost revolutionary in the way that the search engines are rating their content; gone are the days when the first 30 results would be a bunch of random, useless keywords.

The upshot of all this is that in order to be successful in a search engine marketing campaign, you have to think like a searcher, not like a search engine.

Remember, you don’t just want to attract traffic; you want the people who arrive at your site through a search engine to find what they were looking for and come back, hopefully letting everyone else they know in on your site. Pages that are ranked highly and which contain useful information will be successful in the search engine world.

Link Building

The answer lies in the amount of links which point back to the sites. Keep in mind that this is not a rule that is set in stone; generally the right content will be enough to get you ranked – and ranked highly – in the search engines. But even when the content is great, links will be valuable tools on many different levels when it comes to getting your site ranked.

How do links work for search engine optimization? There are several ways in which links help to increase the visibility of a site to the search engines.

Links are “road signs”. If you think of the Internet as a huge neighborhood, links are the sign posts which point users towards different websites. Those users include search engine spiders; the more links there are to your site out there, the more likely they are to find your site and index it.

Links indicate popularity. Having a lot of links pointing to your site will also tell the spiders that there is a good chance that the information contained on the site is relevant to a search. If lots of people find the information useful enough to create a link to, then it is likely that searchers will find the site of value as well.

Links indicate relevance. Generally speaking, links to your pages will be included on sites with related information. Searchbots can use this relationship to determine your site’s relevance to a number of different topics. And of course there is the all important PageRank tool that Google uses. PageRank assigns a value to your site based on the number of links which point to it. In this scenario, it’s pretty clear that the more links you have, the better.

Finding the right kind of links Not all links are created equally when it comes to their use in determining where your site ranks in the query pages. There are a couple of links which have little or no value as far as search engines are concerned.

Links on pages not in the index. If you have a back link from a page that is not indexed by one of the major search engines, it is not of much use to you. The spiders aren’t reading the page and therefore don’t see the link.

Link farms. These are sites which allow thousands of links to be created in hours through reciprocal exchange. If the search engines find link farms, all the links included in them won’t count towards your rankings.

Reciprocal links. Reciprocal links are increasingly recognized as having no value as far as search engine optimization, as they in effect cancel each other out. Now, it is important to keep in mind that links have a purpose beyond just the search engines. The whole idea of your search engine marketing campaign is to increase the traffic to your web site, and although a link may be of little use in search engine marketing, it will certainly serve the overall purpose.

Remember the description we gave in the beginning; links are like sign posts not just to spiders but to anyone on the Internet. There is always the potential for someone to see a link to your page and click on it, gaining you a new visitor, so don’t totally write off reciprocal links or even links on pages that aren’t indexed by the search bots

Good Landing Page

The Importance of a Good Landing Page The only way to measure the effectiveness of your search engine marketing campaign is through the reaction to your landing pages. Landing pages are the heart of the search engine optimization strategy, and your statistics will show whether or not you have done the work you need to in order to make sure your site works for you. Let’s take a look at what a landing page is and why it matters so much for the success of your web site.

What is a landing page? Basically a landing page is any page on your site where searchers “land” when they click a link on a search engine. Search engines rank pages according to formula known only to their staff but that is the subject of a lot of educated guess work and testing, and the better the criteria matches the material on your page the higher your landing page will be in the rankings.

There are two basic types of landing pages, both defined by the type of site you are running. Reference landing pages present information that the searcher is looking for; the value for the visitor is in the facts or entertainment they can glean from the page. For the web site developer, the success of the reference landing page is measured in the revenue of the advertising that is displayed on the page.

Transactional landing pages are landing pages which encourage a searcher to take a direct course of action, which can be anything from signing up for an account to simply filling out a form with some basic questions. While it might seem easier to create a successful reference landing page, creating a transitional landing page can be a lot more fun, especially if you really know what you are doing.

Major benefits of a landing page We have talked about the importance of landing pages as far as the monetization of a site, but landing pages are really the key to the success of your whole site. Here is a quick look at some other areas where a good landing page will really benefit your site.

A good landing page will lead searchers further in. No really good website consists of just one page with a bunch of writing on it. When you are designing your landing page(s) you should always look to encouraging visitors to delve deeper into what your site has to offer. A reference landing page with good links to other pages in the site will work to this purpose. With a transactional web site, a good landing page will tease visitors just enough to get them to fill out some information in order to learn more.

Good landing pages keep searchers coming back. Remember, the goal of your SEO campaign is to get people to come to your site, but you also want them to come back without having to go through the search engines again. Good landing pages will keep searchers coming back, with information that is updated regularly and teasers on what they can expect in the future. No matter what kind of web site you are developing, your landing pages matter because they will be where a searcher ends up after posing a query on one of the major search engines. Good landing pages are well researched as far as keywords and other SEO tools, and will be the focus of your search engine marketing strategy.

Additional Links What Do We Really Know About PageRank – Smashing Magazine

Writing Killer Copy For The Web

It’s no secret that good content is one of the essential foundations for success in search optimization today. In fact, most experts agree that when it comes to search engine marketing, content is king (although please note that you can’t just focus on content, neglecting some of the other important pieces of the SEO gamut).

A lot of web developers think that writing quality web copy is easy. If you are one of these people, you’re in pretty good company; most people think creating copy is easy until they give it a try themselves. The truth is that writing great website copy is a skill that needs to be developed, and some people may find that they never gain the skill at all. If you are one of the people who chooses to have a go at writing web copy on your own, here are a few components of great copy for the web.

Short and sweet. Never be wordy in your articles. You need a high enough word count to get noticed by the search engines, but you have to keep the mind set of the average Internet user in perspective. Points need to be clear and succinct!

Make your copy “skimmable”. Along the same lines, make your points in a format that is easy to skim across. See how we bulleted this list? It naturally draws the reader’s eye to the main point, and if they want it elaborated on they just need to read a bit further.

Don’t throw English out the window. There’s a line of thought on the Internet that says it doesn’t matter how you make your point, it’s how good that point is. Well, if you’re developing a web site, you need to forget you ever heard that. The people you want to read your site and make decision to buy a product or come back (or both) aren’t going to be sold using the grammar rules of a chat room or a message board, even if they aren’t aware of it. You have to look like you know what you are talking about, and that means good grammar and good spelling!

Get a good blend of human and spider copy. Not too long ago, keywords ruled the Internet and everyone was stuffing them in wherever they could. That time has passed (thank God) and the rule to live by today is content that makes sense. The truth of the matter is that really killer copy will naturally include the most important keywords on your topic, there really won’t be any need to force them in.

Go for a good range. Keep your site interesting for your readers by including more than just a few basic articles. There are a lot of great formats that are good for SEO purposes as well as for human readers; newspaper style stories, press releases, reviews, and product descriptions will all prove great as complements to your articles. Never forget the number one rule of writing killer copy for the web; you are writing for people, not for the search engine spiders. Ineffective copy really serves no purpose anymore; it never worked for searchers and it’s being brushed aside by the search engines. Learning to write killer copy for the web will mean your site gains success with the search engines and with the searchers.

Additional Links Web Copy That Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy Every Time - Maria Veloso

Future of Search

There are two problems with writing an article that dares to project what search engines will be doing in the future, unless of course you are Matt Cutts.

The first is that you run a big risk of dating yourself; the Internet landscape and the search engines are changing so rapidly that what worked even last night might not work the next day.

The second is the gremlin that haunts even the best search engine marketers; no one really know what the search engines are basing their rankings on, most “solid” information is fact just conjecture, although it is conjecture based on solid research (MOST of the time!!).

Be that as it may, we are going to present you with a few different ideas about which direction search engines might take in the future. Bear in mind that unfortunately we have no access to an Upper Google Guru, so any or all of these predictions may be wrong. They are, however, based on the direction that search engines seem to be taking currently as well as how best the big engines could overcome some of today’s glaring dilemmas.

Personalization

There has already been a blip on the Google radar screen indicating that personalization of searches is not too far off. Google, of course, has separate engines depending on country; this can be very beneficial to a web site developer familiar with media protectionist laws in countries such as Canada.

Get the formula right, and you will be number one. Google has also started to implement visitation history on many of their searches, and it probably won’t be long before they develop an algorithm that is based on IP address preferences.

Spider/human partnerships

One of the big negatives about a search on most of the engines is that searchers end up with a lot of useless pages. Developed using solid search engine optimization techniques, these pages forgot the Golden Rule: Write for people, not crawlers.

Look for growth in the method pioneered by Yahoo!; a combination of spider and human editorial staff. Not only will this help to make pages more relevant, it will allow some search engines to gain access to specific, and specialized, information. Web developers will have to write accordingly; the days of bad copy are almost done.

More PPC

We hate to say it, but money makes the world go ‘round, even on a network that was intended to distribute information for free. The search engines make big money off of their PPC programs, although many web developers have found the value is not reciprocal.

The big engines swear that organic searches will be kept alive, but my bet is that they become even more limited, sandwiched between several advertisements. Hopefully you can start planning your web site development now so that you are prepared to adapt when today’s techniques stop working, as they are bound to do. For our part, we think that the future of search will in fact become more focused on the searcher, even in the PPC campaigns.

The most solid prediction we can make is that on all matters pertaining to searches, the engines will want to see more landing pages of use to their users. After all, they exist to supply relevant information; it only makes sense to see them taking a more focused approach on what they rank.