Top 7 SEO Blogs

After seeing Adam’s list of blogs for creative writers and noticing an SEO blog, I couldn’t resist the temptation to put together my own list of must-read SEO blogs. Whether or not the industry has a bad reputation among bloggers, staying abreast of search engine news can give your blog a real edge over the competition. What can I say; I can’t help but defend my profession.

Here’s my rundown of the top seven SEO blogs (ordered alphabetically; it’s really hard to rank them against each other for such a broad category).

• Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog - Bruce is an old name in the industry. His blog is a great resource for SEO news and tips in general. What keeps me coming back, though, are the hilarious in-post comment wars he has with Susan. Think we could do something like that, Daniel?
• Marketing Pilgrim - Andy Beal’s got some great material on a variety of different marketing-related topics, including a lot of articles on SEO and blogging.
• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO - There’s nothing quite like getting news straight from the source. Matt works for Google. He’s a great read to begin with, but you just can’t beat his blog for authority when it comes to the internet’s #1 search engine.
• Search Engine Land - Although the blog itself has only been around for a few months, Danny Sullivan has been an SEO bigwig for much longer.
• Search Engine Roundtable - If you want to stay abreast of conversations on the hottest SEO discussion boards (e.g. Cre8asite, WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint, etc.) without, well, having to read them, this blog is your first stop.
• Search Engine Watch - This blog is definitely one of the oldest and most respected sources for search engine news. It’s a bit drier than the others; good for information, bad for personality, but still useful if all you’re interested in are the facts.
• SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog - Rand Fishkin and co. provide some great information. Be sure not to miss their whiteboard fridays.

The way I see it, as a blogger, you can hate SEO professionals for their methods or learn from their success. And since you can’t beat them (they rank too well for that), you might as well join them.

Update: This is Daniel writing. While the blogs that Stephen listed are certainly awesome, I think that there are 3 missing: PronetAdvertising, Search Engine Journal and SEO Blackhat. Make sure to check them out as well!

Source: Dailyblogtips.com

Improve Search Rankings with Internal SEO

Earlier this year I wrote a post about the stimulus package that passed Congress in February. I titled the post Government Stimulus Package because I thought the only thing it was stimulating was government. I got lucky with this, because apparently a lot of people searched for the phrase “government stimulus package” to learn about what was in it.

The post did ok on Digg and Reddit, nothing spectacular but it brought in some traffic. It may have gotten a few other links, but not a ton. A few days after the post was published, I noticed that I was getting some traffic the search engines. The post was on the front page of Google, around 6 or so for the keyword phrase “government stimulus package.” This is the first step in improving your SERPs.

1. Look at Your Stats

Find out which pages you are getting traffic to from the search engines and what keywords are being used to get there. This is where we need to focus. Improving your ranking for a term from 7429 to 43 takes your traffic from 0 to 0. If you can improve from 9 to 1, you will see a huge increase in traffic if it is a phrase that people are searching for.

Now that we have a few pages that are getting some traffic and the keywords they are getting it from, we have to do a little keyword research.

2. Keyword Research

The first step is to find out which phrases we want to target. Look at the keywords that are getting the most traffic and find out where you currently rank. You could use your web analytics program for this, and then check the rankings on Google.

At this point, you can also use a keyword search tool to find out how much traffic each of these phrases gets.

Now we want to focus our efforts on the terms we rank the highest for that get the most search traffic.

3. Internal SEO

Have you ever written anything similar to this before? Go through your archives and find where you have mentioned this topic before. Update the old article with a link to the new one using the keywords you are trying to rank for.

If this is a topic that people want to know more about, consider writing another post or two expanding on the first one. In each new post, link to the original article with one of the keyword phrases you are targeting.

Next, go back to the post you are hoping to rank higher. Is the keyword already in the article? Consider making it bold. Is there a section where the phrase would make a good header? Consider adding it. Don’t stuff the article full of keywords as you still want the people that come to enjoy your writing. However, if these changes can be made without affecting the quality, they may help improve your ranking a little bit.

These things do two things. They show the search engines what your pages are about (hopefully the keywords you are targeting) and they show them that they are important pages. The more links you have pointing to the page, the more important you are making it in Google’s eyes.

4. Watch your Rankings and Traffic Surge

I went back to my post and made the keyword bold when I used it. Then I went through the archives and found another post that talked about the stimulus package and added a link to the new post. I also wrote a few more articles in the following weeks that talked about the stimulus package, so I linked back in each of those as well. The result? I moved up to #1 in Google for the phrase “government stimulus package” before it passed. It brought thousands of visitors to my blog, and the week that the bill passed is my highest traffic week ever.

The part of this that is really powerful is that all of this was done several days after the article was posted. The regular readers had read it already, and anyone who was going to link to it already had. I was then able to move from #6 to #1 in Google simply by telling Google what the page was about and that I thought it was important. Never underestimate the power of linking to yourself internally.

I have since dropped behind irs.gov and recovery.gov, but that post has been viewed more times than any other. It also gave me a valuable lesson in SEO that has helped increase my search traffic to many other posts as well.

Source: Dailyblogtips.com

Guide to Meta Tags

Although off-site optimization is generally considered to be more important, ignoring on-site search engine ranking factors can be costly. Things like solid internal linking and keyword-rich titles can have a very significant impact (as I’ve said before). Meta tags, while they’ve fallen out of vogue as the on-site optimization method of choice, can also play an important role in your site’s search engine rankings.

What are meta tags?

For those who don’t know, a meta tag is an HTML tag that resides in the section of a web page. Unlike other HTML tags, meta tags do not appear anywhere on the page itself, so most visitors never see them. Different meta tags serve different purposes, but they are generally used to provide additional information about the page. The meta description tag, for example, provides a brief summary of the page’s content. How this information gets used varies from tag to tag.

Examples of meta tags:

Which meta tags are worthwhile?

There are a lot of meta tags out there, but very few of them are useful. In fact, chances are good that a site that doesn’t use any meta tags at all will function just as well as a site that does. Some have their uses, however, particularly when communicating with search engine spiders. Here’s the breakdown of every meta tag you’re likely to come across:

Abstract - Use the meta description tag instead.

Author - Sure, it’s nice to plaster your name all over your content. However, the best place to do that is somewhere in the content itself to avoid confusion.

Cache-Control - It’s historical use has been to keep users from seeing outdated versions of your website. Since this is rarely an issue nowadays, it’s no longer as useful. Note, also, that it will do next to nothing to prevent your site from being cached by search engines; you should use the robots meta tag for that purpose.

Classification - Considering how badly spammed the keywords meta tag has been, I can’t see such an arbitrary tag doing any better.

Content-Language - This one’s iffy. Ascertaining the language of the content on a site is rarely a big issue. Use it only if you need to clarify from one page to the next, such as if you have multiple translations of the same page.

Content-Type - This one’s actually important. You can assign the character set of a page using one of several methods, including the content-type meta tag. Make sure you do so in some way on every page.

Copyright - Like the author meta tag, you probably should add the copyright notice directly to the body of your website.

Description - Although its no longer useful for ranking purposes, the description tag is often still used in generating snippets (the text that appears beneath the title in the search engine result pages). It is, therefore, a very powerful tool for drawing in potential visitors. Never underestimate the power of controlling each page’s marketing message to the world.

Designer - The same as author and copyright tags, insert this on the website itself.

Distribution - If a page is meant for internal distribution only, it should be properly blocked using robots.txt or the robots meta tag (below). This tag is completely unnecessary.

Expires - If you have content that shouldn’t be crawled or indexed after a certain period of time, it might be useful. For bloggers, the occasion will probably never arise.

Generator - This one is only used by automated web authoring software, so there’s no point to input it by hand.

GoogleBot - If you have some dire need to instruct one search engine spider differently than another, go ahead.

Keywords - Once upon a time, this might have been useful. Since it was so frequently spammed, however, it no longer carries any ranking benefit. It’s still commonly used, however, and it might even be worthwhile in second-rate search engines, but it won’t get you anywhere with the big boys. If you choose to use it, do not, but do not stuff it!

MSNBot - See the note about the googlebot meta tag.

Owner - See the note about the author meta tag.

PICS-Label - See the note about the rating meta tag.

Pragma - Telling browsers whether or not to cache your page could be handy for usability depending on your site. However, I’ve heard that it doesn’t enjoy a lot of support.

Publisher - See the note about the generator meta tag.

Rating - Like so many web standards, it would be great if it were actually used. However, the sites that deserve a rating of “Mature” or “Restricted” rarely broadcast it. Don’t bother with it; let the rating of your content speak for itself.

Refresh - If you’re redirecting one page to another, use a 301 redirect. Meta refreshes are generally regarded as spam.

Reply-To - See the note about the author meta tag.

Revisit-After - Even if getting frequent visits from search engine spiders offered any competitive advantage (it doesn’t), they aren’t going to visit your site more frequently just because you ask them to. This one’s only useful for limiting the frequency of spidering, not increasing it.

Robots - Although you can use the robots.txt file to issue site-wide directives to search engines, the robots meta tag is very handy for controlling spidering on a page-by-page basis. You can tell search engines whether a page should be indexed, whether it should be archived, whether or not its links should be followed, and even how to generate its search result snippet.

Subject - Your title tag should communicate your subject; using a meta tag to do so is unnecessary.

Title - Don’t bother with the meta title tag when your ordinary title tag does the job much better.

Unavailable-After - Believe it or not, this one’s brand new and supported by Google. Why they didn’t just go with the expires meta tag is anyone’s guess. At any rate, like it’s identical twin, it will rarely if ever be useful for bloggers.

There are literally dozens more meta tags out there, few of which enjoy any widespread use. When in doubt about whether a meta tag is worthwhile or not, it’s probably best to assume it isn’t. Otherwise, you’ll just end up cluttering your page headers with a lot of useless junk.

If anyone has any additional meta tags or insights to add, please share them in a comment and I’ll update the original post as needed.

7 free SEO tools

When you first started blogging, you probably used to spend a lot of time refining the design and making sure your site loaded quickly. You basically made sure that is was technically sound and working well for your visitors. However, after some time, your concentration may have shifted to other important tasks such as writing good content, marketing

your blog, commenting on other blogs, writing guest posts, etc.

Here’s a list of free tools you should definitely check out to make sure that your website is running at an acceptable level compared to your fellow bloggers. If your site is not running optimally, then you’re probably not getting the your full potential of traffic.

1. Website Grader - I wrote about Website Grader a few months back as a free search engine optimization tool that you should be using if you’re a webmaster. Website Grader will give you a report of many aspects of your site and a final grade out of 100. When I first ran it on my site, I was at 56, now I’m up to 98. And my traffic has gone from 100 visits a day to 5000. I’m not saying it’s because of Website Grader, but it helped me determine problem areas.

2. Xinu Returns - Another web site I had written about a couple of months back that lets you quickly check things like your pagerank, rating, backlinks, and indexed pages. It’s a great tool to get a quick overview of your the status of your site in the blogosphere. It also gives you tips for your title tags and meta keywords.

3. BrowserShots - This site is really awesome for webmasters. You type in your web address and then choose all of the browsers and OSs that you would like to see your website shown in. You can see how your web site looks on Linux, Windows or Mac and in all of the different browsers, including Firefox, IE, Safari, and Opera. You can also choose the screen size, color depth, etc. Really great tool.

4. YSlow - YSlow is a Firefox only addon, but it is an amazing tool for analyzing a website in terms of performance and speed. It checks 13 different factors for a web page and generates a final score for the site. It also lists out the improvements that need to be made to ensure the highest possible grade. I wrote two articles on YSlow, one about how it helped me reduce the load time of my site by 50% and another on how to setup YSlow. Make sure to read them and install Firefox just for this purpose.

5. WebSiteOptmization - Another tool you can use that is similar to YSlow, but no need for Firefox. It gives you a breakdown of various aspects of your site, including HTTP requests, DNS lookups, etc and gives you recommendations on how to make it load faster, etc.

6. BuiltWith - BuiltWith is a very cool site that creates a profile of your website based on what technologies your site is running on. This site really focuses on the actual technologies that your site is built with, i.e. PHP, Apache server, Google Analytics, etc. It also gives you a score out of 5 stars depending on how good those technologies are. Microsoft.com has a rating of 2/5! IIS sucks!

7. CSS Optimizer - Just about every website uses CSS in some way or another and each call to a CSS file takes time to download. If you can shrink the size of your CSS files, even by a little bit, you’ll save a lot of time on page loading. You can also go to the W3C CSS Validation site to make sure your CSS is valid.

8. Minify - A very powerful tool that will take your JavaScript and CSS files and combine them together and remove all unnecessary comments and whitespace. I have used this tool before to reduce the size of my Javascript files by almost 40%. You can imagine the savings in load time because of that, especially if you use Wordpress where each plugin usually has it’s own Javascript file.

Going through these websites for a few hours and really analyzing your website will help you improve the overall user experience with your website. I learned many things that from these sites that would have been impossible for me to figure out myself. Enjoy!

Increase Page Rank..Trackers can increase your PR

Getting backlinks (links to your site from others) is necessary to increase your Page Rank in the long term.

Google bots are quite busy. So it is useful to have a page listing all your backlinks to tell them what pages they should analyse. That's why I recommend to dedicate one page of your site to list the pages linking to your page - I say page and not website in purpose-.

But if you're using spamming on blogs, forums and other websites to get backlinks, it would be better to keep track of those backlinks elsewhere than on your website.
Because if your website is linking to too many sites that are not related you may suffer from a downgrade backlash from Google.

So the best tool to keep track of those backlinks (the referrers) to my viewpoint is

Have a look to the tracker created for this blog: My Tracker

All my referrers are listed. When Google bots analyse this page they collect the links. And when they crawl (analyse) them later, they will find links to my blog. For a website it would be better to have a tracker for every page, but for a blog it's easier with only one.

NB: not many backlinks on my tracker because I'm not actively promoting my blog, this blog is indeed a kind of non-lucrative initiative. ;-p

Extreme Tracking has some credit with Google bots, because it's an old domain (the older your domain the better). So the tracker you set up may get a good PR with time (so put the keywords you are competing in the tracker's name when you create it !).

Other aspects of trackers:

Trackers also allow a better understanding of your visitors: you may know the referring link, the keyword used in the search engine and much more.
Data-mining may help to improve your website.

To keep track of your visitors, here below a list of free trackers (but not for SEO):

StatCounter Invisible, no Ads :-)

Activemeter Invisible, no Ads :-)

Motigo Webstats Logo + PopUnder Ads :-(

I strongly recommend the invisible counters. Unfortunately even if Motigo is user-friendly it cannot compete because of those 'damned shit' PopUnder ads.

Top 10 SEO Tips

The Top 10 SEO Tips contained in this tutorial were created after years of experimentation with a half a dozen websites, mostly those of our clients who insisted they should be on the first page of the search engine results pages. We hope you find these SEO tips valuable. For an in-depth study of everything we know about search engine optimization, please read our eBook.

SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords

It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don't be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery.com.

Below is a screenshot from WT that shows the results you'll get when doing a query for "putter". Notice that "golf putters" has the highest search volume with 100 searches in the last 24 hours, yet there are over 100,000 websites to compete against. Using the tool's Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), you'll be able to see that "custom putter" would have a better chance at higher ranking, since there are only 2,640 competing.

Here's a key part of the top 10 SEO tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous like we did in the example above for "putters". The results will always return suggestions, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of.

You can get less comprehensive results by using DigitalPoint's Keyword Suggestion Tool. This SEO tool will give you a summary of information without the KEI. Personally, I like to know how many people are competing before I design a web page.

SEO Tip #2: Discover Your Competitors

It's a fact and one of my top 10 SEO tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.

My tool of choice is SEO Elite, which digs through the major search engines by keyword to not only tell you who your competitors are, but also provides you with an in-depth analysis of each competitor. The analysis includes these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:

• Competitor rank in the Search Engines
• Number of incoming links
• What keywords are in the title of linking page
• % of links containing keywords in the link text
• The PageRank of linking pages
• The Alexa traffic ranking information

Here is a screenshot of their SEO software that shows the search results and the module that has the email functionality:

Stats, such as the above, play a critical part in determining what tools your website will need to compete in the Internet marketing competition. SEO Elite also offers you the ability to see who the website owner is and even send emails to all websites discovered to have quality link potential.

SEO Tip #3: Optimize Your Title

The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert's have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them. Don't click off this site until you've read the top 10 SEO tips below to see what I've discovered works best for search engine optimization.

SEO Tip #3: Optimizing Your Website Title

There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 10 SEO Tips for the title would be to keep it under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some may argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion.

Bar none the most important of the top 10 SEO tips involves your keywords. If you wish to be on the first page of the search results, you must include your keywords in your Title tag. Preferably before all other words in the Title. No need to repeat your keywords in the Title, that's interpreted as spam by the search engines. Here is an example of good Title:

This one excercise could make or break your SEO campaign. Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don't forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well.

SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your META Tags

META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines. The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:

1. description
2. keywords

Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say "may" because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I've noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.

The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There's also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I've seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don't think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.

However, if you want the listing to look clear and to the point, my Top 10 SEO Tips for this META tag would be to keep it under 150 characters and to not repeat your keywords more than 3 times. It may be a coincidence, but I've also noticed ranking improvements when I put my keywords at the beginning of the description. Here's the syntax:

The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google's search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this top 10 SEO tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. Based on my experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in this tag (including spaces).

SEO Tip: if you repeat your keywords more than 3 times it can be a pretty good indication to the search engine that you are trying to spam their search results. Also, don't waste your time including keywords that aren't used in the BODY section of your website, that could be seen as another spam technique. Here's the syntax used on this Top 10 SEO Tips page:

SEO Tip #5: Use Headings

In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C's guidelines as well as commonly accepted "best practices" for organizing a web page.

Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1-H3 when assembling your page. Using cascading style Sheets (CSS), I was able to make my h1 at the top of this page more appealing. Here's a piece of code you can pop into your heading:

Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 400+ words on each page.

SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes

More often then not, web addresses (URL's) do not contain the topic of the page. For example, the URL www.myspace.com says nothing about being a place to make friends. Where a site like www.placetomakefriends.com would tell Google right away that the site being pointed to is about making friends. So to be more specific about where we are pointing to in our links we add a title attribute and include our keywords.

Using the Title Attribute is an direct method of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link. It's also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads Title and ALT attributes. The syntax is:

SEO Software

The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the Title Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually disabled. Here's how you would use ALT in an IMG tag:

SEO Tip #7: Nomenclatures

Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media.

More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).

SEO Tip #8: Create a Site Map Page

PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. I could spend two days trying to explain how PageRank works, but what it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the sitemap, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content. This SEO tip is one of my favorite of top 10 SEO tips.

It use to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only two clicks. The PageRank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to #1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site.

Feel free to search Google for any of the terms on this catalog page, such as MITSUBISHI Monitor Repair. See how powerful a site map can truly be.

SEO Tip #9: Include a robots.txt File

By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website".

Here's one of my best top 10 SEO tips: Because the search engine analyzes everything it indexes to determine what your website is all about, it might be a good idea to block folders and files that have nothing to do with the content we want to be analyzed. You can disallow unrelated files to be read by adding "Disallow: /folder_name/" or "Disallow: /filename.html". Here is an example of the robots.txt file on this site:

SEO Tip #10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google

Though you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google's search engine result page, believe it or not that isn't Google's intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they've even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you'll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.

For Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own. To view the one on this page, website simply right-click this SEO Tips Sitemap.xml file and save it to your desktop. Open the file with a text editor such as Notepad.

Effective 11/06, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will be using one standard for sitemaps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.

 

    http://www.example.com/

    2005-01-01

    monthly

    0.8

 

The equivilant to the sitemap.xml file is the urllist.txt for Yahoo!. Technically you can call the file whatever you want, but all it really contains is a list of every page on your website. Here's a screenshot of my urllist.txt:

SEO BONUS Tip: Validate Your Code

There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website's source code. The four most important, in my opinion, are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.

Start by analyzing broken links. One of the W3C's top 10 SEO tips would be for you to use their tool to validate links. If you have a lot of links on your website, this could take awhile.

Next, revisit the W3C to analyze HTML and CSS. Here is a link to the W3C's HTML Validation Tool and to their CSS Validation Tool.

The final step in the last of my Top 10 SEO Tips is to validate your search engine optimization. Without having to purchase software, the best online tool I've used is ScrubTheWeb's Analyze Your HTML tool. STW has built an extremely extensive online application that you'll wonder how you've lived with out.

One of my favorite features of STW's SEO Tool is their attempt to mimic a search engine. In other words, the results of the analysis will show you (theoretically) how search engine spiders may see the website.

Other SEO Tips

If you liked the SEO tips above, you're going to love my popular SEO eBook, entitled: The Four Layers of the SEO Model, How to Rank Higher in the Search Engines. It's packed full of more tips and tutorials, was well as some great ideas for developing incoming links.

Top 5 Ways to Get Your Site Banned From the Search Engines

Getting your site ranked high for your main keywords is an absolute must if you are serious about developing a profitable online business. There are many steps you need to make in order to achieve those top rankings and in the process many developers make critical mistakes that some are even unaware of, that get their site banned from Google and other search engines.

I'm presenting to you here the top 5 practices that will get your site banned in the hope that you will avoid using them.

1. Keyword stuffing

As you should know, having a good keyword density on your content pages is highly beneficial as it will help your search engine rankings. However, over doing it by stuffing your main keywords all over your articles, in title tags, in outbound links etc will surely get your site banned. If your keyword density reaches 10% on any given page then you are taking a high risk - it is recommended that the keyword density be kept around 5%.

2. Linking to link farms and other suspicious/low-quality sites

Google considers every outgoing link from your site as a vote of relevance and quality for that particular site. If you exchange links with a link-farm type site that will get you banned from most search engines, not just Google. You will also get banned if you provide links to sites that promote pornography, violence, racism, hacking, cracking, gambling, prescription pills etc or sites that for one reason or the other are already banned from the SE's. It is highly recommended to check your link partners on a regular basis or it may harm your business.

3. Illegal/Duplicate Content

We all know that content is King as far as the internet is concerned. Having freshly written top quality content on a regular basis will help your site and your rankings flourish. However, using someone else's copyrighted content on your sites will likely get you not just banned from the search engines, but in serious legal trouble as well. Using articles already published on other sites can harm you to a lesser degree, mostly if that article is old and has already been published on thousands of sites. Article directories however aren't usually affected as all their content is submitted by original authors on a regular basis.

4. Invisible text

Some webmasters try to fool search engine spiders by adding invisible text - that has the same color as the site background - in an effort to raise the keyword density. While this technique used to work in the "old days" of the internet, search engines spiders have become a lot smarter and this sort of "black-hat" technique will get you banned.

5. Cloaking

Cloaking is another "black-hat" technique that involves content separation, meaning the spiders see one highly optimized page while you and I see something completely different, usually different types of promotions. Just another powerful way to get your site out of major search engine rankings, so make sure to avoid this one too.

So there you have it, 5 great ways to get your site kicked out of Google and any other decent search engine out there - hope you'll use this information wisely.
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eCovers Photoshop Action Scripts

One of the things I have noticed in the past 6 months is how new people seriously lack many basic tools to be able to perform basic task. No doubt it could not only become overwhelming but also expensive when it comes to acquire all the things we need.

Many of the tools we need are just basic and also a must. In internet marketing you will need graphics, private label products, templates and a solid ebook cover script. Now many of these things you can buy from a supplier for example I pay $147.00 per mini-site and this includes a template and ebook cover with banners. I outsource this for some special projects but most of the time I do myself.

In the next few days I will launch sites that will have products you need but instead of paying huge amounts of money I will make it affordable for you.

Today I will launch eCovers Unleashed (LMAO!! Yeah I know “Unleashed” what can I say) most ecover action script packages run from $47 to $97. Most of you can not afford this. The ecovers Unleashed action script package will only cost you $17 I also added some basic products as bonuses since I have learned that many of you do not even know the basics.

At BU I only try to teach advance things. The stuff you do not get from the 500 shit ebooks. So in every product launch I make I will do my best to try to add in bonuses that provide you the basics to get you going.

I decided to start with the ecovers action script because I was asked over 100 times over both at the live channel and emails where to get cheap ebook covers, unfortunately there are no cheap ones so you either cough up the $47 dollars and make them yourself or you are deeply fucked.

Now you will not have to cough up $47 or $97, with $17 dollars you will have access to the same scripts that the pros use to make ebook covers.

As you folks should know by now I try my best to not only to teach you but to help you in anyway I can to maintain your expenses as low as possible. I decided to use the 7 Dollar Script as my sales software to provide you a way to get your investment back. In other words you can sell my eCovers Unleashed action scripts with an affiliate link and get paid directly to your email. All you have to do is make your affiliate link like this: http://ecoversunleashed.com/index.php?e=you@yourpaypalemail.com in other words all you need to do is replace the email in this example with your paypal email and if the person buys you will get paid instantly directly to your email. You will not have to wait 60 days to get paid it will be done instantly to your paypal account.

In order to take advantage as an affiliate you must buy eCovers action scripts, the affiliate email only works with people that bough the software.

To use this and every other ebook action script you will need Photoshop. Photoshop is expensive as fuck so my recommendation is download the trial which is 30 days and make ebook covers like crazy and hopefully by the time it expires you have made enough money to buy it.

How to Make Money on the Internet - Blogging

The internet is full of ways to make money and there are a lot of different approaches you can take to make money on the internet. Let me introduce you to blogging - more specifically let me explain to you how people make money on the internet with this fairly new method (think back 5 years, not 5 months).

What Exactly Is Blogging Anyway?

According to Wikipedia:

A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

In plainer English, a blog is a website that shows the newest entries at the beginning, usually on the homepage. This website is a blog, and for that reason you will always find my newest writing on the homepage, at the top. As you scroll down, you will find the other entries I have written, newest to oldest.

What Are Blogs About?

There are blogs about everything! This blog teaches people how to make money on the internet. There are blogs about sports, news, fitness, cooking, humor, teaching, parenting, celebrities, and everything else you can imagine.

Blogs are a great format for news sites. Since blogs show the newest entries first, readers can easily find the most recent news stories. Bloggers (those who blog) post news about every industry, and provide their own opinions on the subject matter.

When blogs first started, they were created primarily to be online journals, but have now evolved into websites about anything and everything.

How To People Make Money Blogging?

The simple answer to that question is that blogs get traffic and convert it into money. Getting traffic is very possible with a blog, in fact it’s much easier to get traffic to a blog than it is to get traffic on traditional websites. I’ve created an entire series of posts on why blogs are the easiest way to get traffic and covert it into money. The method is called ‘Keyword Sniping’. In a nutshell, Keyword Sniping is the fastest and most direct way for people to pull search engine traffic to their websites and create a steady, low maintenance income.

Because of the immense popularity of the Keyword Sniping posts, I’ve created a free, downloadable report called “Introduction to Keyword Sniping: Your Shortest Path to $1,000 Per Month Online” that breaks down the entire philosophy. You can grab your copy of the book by filling out the easy form below (obviously I’ll never share or sell your information - it’s completely safe with me). The report will take you through all the steps for getting your first Keyword Sniper sites off the ground.

First Name:
Email:

Blogs can develop quite a following by people interested in the blog’s industry. Popular blogs can get thousands of hits per day. Gizmodo, Engadget, and Perez Hilton are three mega popular blogs which all get hundreds of thousands of visitors per day.

The traffic of most blogs is converted to money through advertising. That probably sounds difficult to you if you’re new, but it’s actually really easy. The primary revenue streams of most blogs are:

• Ad-Boxes
  • Google Adsense - Anyone can sign up for this service and it’s 100% free to use. Google will display ads on your blog and pay you when they get clicked on. This is by far the easiest way to make money with your blog. If you look closely at my pages you will find ad units labeled ‘Ads by Google’.
  • Yahoo! Publishing - Yahoo’s version of Adsense. Yahoo’s version is also free to use.
• Contextual Ads - These are ads that are displayed throughout the text of your blog. If you look closely through my pages you will see links that are double underlined. These are actually ads and if you hover over them, a little ad-box will pop up. The contextual ad company will pay for clicks on the links or the ad-box.
  • Intelitxt - The first major company to offer this type of advertising. It’s quite difficult to get an account with them unless you have over 500,000 hits per month.
  • Kontera - Another player in the contextual ad game. Kontera is easier to sign up for when you’re still small.
• Affiliate Programs - Many bloggers sell products and services for other sites and receive appropriate commissions. There are tons of sites out there that offer free, affiliate programs including:
  • Amazon
  • eBay
  • Shopping.com
• Text Links - Bloggers can sell links from there pages to other websites. Most bloggers that use this kind of revenue stream use a company called text-link-ads.com. Their service is free to use and their company will sell the ads for you. The sites that purchase them pay monthly, and you get paid monthly.
• Direct Sales - Some bloggers sell their own products and services.

How Much Can A Person Make Blogging?

That’s really tough question to answer. Some blogs create $500,000 per year and some make $0. The amount a person can make with a blog depend on a lot of factors including:

• Blogger’s Knowledge and Experience
• Quality and Quantity of Blog’s Information
• Marketing
• Determination
• Longevity
• Luck (This isn’t a joke but it is of course possible to create luck.)

I think that it’s very possible to create an income in the high five and even six figures for individuals that posses the right talent and determination. If you are thinking about becoming a blogger, you should visit this article: Making Money Online - Is This Business For You?

In my opinion, blogging is the easiest of all the methods of making money online, at least for beginners. It is also a stepping stone for those wishing to move onto more difficult online, money-making methods. If you’re interested in starting a blog, you should read this: 5263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog. It provides the basics of getting a blog set up to make money on the internet.

Making Money On The Internet Rules
Update: It has now been almost four years that I have been making money on the internet and I can tell you that it’s probably the funnest way to make money ever. I have to say that I freaking love it!

Here's a new site I came upon. It's called Page Rank 10 The SEO Experiment. The idea is by linking to this site you can improve your Google Page Rank and increase your traffic at the same time. They are currently PR4 but there goal is to reach PR10 by getting as many people to link to them as possible. Every time you send a visitor to them. Your site gets listed on the front page. Also as the PR of there site increase so does the value to your site. Sounds interesting. Have a look.

Top 3 Ways To Get Free Inbound Links

There are numerous reasons why incoming links weigh a lot from a search engine's point of view. First off, they establish your page rank and search engine rankings. The amount of sites linking to you is proof of your worth to Internet users. If you’re really doing well, you'll be able to land even at the top spot of the natural search results, which means heavy traffic and greater conversion rate for your online business.

So how exaclty do you get free quality inbound links? Here are 3 easy ways to achive just that:

1. Write keyword rich articles and send them to as many article directories as possible. Content is without a doubt the king of the World Wide Web. You should add links in the body of your article, which will bring quality targeted traffic to your site, not just incoming links. Also, remember to write a compelling resource box, one that will make the reader want to find out more of what your site has to offer.

2. Develop your own blog. More and more people discover and enjoy reading blogs. This is because bloggers are very generous with their information. They reveal some personal insights and past experiences that can help you in your business and/or personal affairs. Blogs, from the SEO point of view, provide a major advantage as they get indexed by Google a lot easier than a normal site. That alone provides you with a big advantage. Moreover, if you leave a link to your blog by making comments on other people’s blogs, you’re actually providing yourself an incoming link.

Developing your Blogroll is also very important - this means exchanging links with other bloggers witch will benefit both parties.

3. Take part in forum discussions. You should begin searching for related message boards and chat rooms. After developing a good list, you should start signing up. You will discover that these forums actually let you to build your own profile as well as add your signature, which should contain links to your sites which will of course appear in every single post you make. As long as your chosen discussion boards have a good Google Page Rank, you can look to benefit from their increased page rank. Even more, webmasters could find your site useful to their readers and link back to you from their site thus sending you quality traffic.

It is recommended to use all of these different methods on a regular basis if you really want to grow your site and your business.

Hubpages for Revenue and Traffic

I recently created a site at Hubpages. It's called Make Money Online Tips and Resources
There are many benefits to creating "Hubs" at Hubpages.
First off there is Traffic. Hubpages is a search engine favorite so any sites you create are quickly crawled by search engines. And you can make as many sites as you choose as long as there not judged to be spammy. Make "Hubs" and link them back to your main blogs and sites for increased traffic.
The Second reason is for income. You receive a % of any ads shown on your Hubpages. They use 3 Affiliate programs. Adsense, Ebay and Amazon. If your not an afffiliate of any of these programs you can sign up right at Hubpages.
Many people have created 100's of Hubs so you can see how the traffic and revenue can start to add up.
Get on over to Hubpages and Make Money Online.

How to submit web site into directories?

1. Why it is important to submit website in directories?
- Direct traffic. Some directories can deliver very good targeted traffic.
- Directory links can improve SERP for the front page by anchor text used for directory submitting (title).
- All directory links can increase site PR up to 4.
- Weight from main page of web site will be redistributed within all pages => improve SERP of internal pages.
2. Which directories are suitable?
- At the beginning of website life, all directories should be free and without reciprocal links.
- For newbie website directories should be from the same language or the same region. English website into English directories etc.
- Mature web sites will have a lot of benefits from submission into international directories.
- Directories should make direct link to your website.
- Most preferable are niche directories.
- Should I register my website in new directories with low PR? Yes! This make your link profile more natural with a lot of weak links. This is unusual when the new site have only links from strong websites.

3. How to submit website?

- How many different titles and descriptions I should use for substituting? The answer is very simple – unique title and web site description for each new directory. This will allow you to avoid link duplications.
- Should I make reciprocal links? If directory is very important for you – then yes, but do not do more than 5-10 reciprocal links from your web site in total. This is very bad for your ranking.
- Some directories check reciprocal links only once during submitting – for these directories you can create special page, but do not forget to delete it after submission. This operation required special scripts.
- Should I pay to directory owners for accepting? Only for very strong, well known directories.
- What should I do for suspicious websites (farma, adult etc)? In many directories moderators do check website description but do not check website itself. So, try to make nice description and title. If you want to use bad keywords like viagra or cialis, you can do trick by hiding these words in more long words. For example “socialist party”.

Google Adsense Optimization Tips

Here are the Google Adsense optimization tips for bloggers and webmasters. To make more money from Adsense, you have to learn Adsense optimization and implement it in your blogs or web sites. I summarized here the Adsense optimization tips from Google and from Adsense experts.
Adsense Optimization for Ad Types

Adsense Text ad is the best among Adsense ad types available that include text, image, and link unit. Readers easily captured the information displayed in text ads compared to others. Though there are texts in image, the readers will process first the visualization of the image and the text. While link unit captures also the readers attention, it takes 2 clicks to make money from it and the readers are normally lazy to do the 2nd click. But, this is the best ad type for maximizing space in the web page. This adds more resources to the readers.
Adsense Optimization for Ad Formats

Wide Adsense Ad format works better than vertical Adsense ads. The wider ad format lets the readers easily captures one-liner texts of information at convenient width of around up to 500 pixels. Readers can conveniently capture the information at a glance. Narrow ad formats inconveniently force the readers’ eyes move down to the next line.

Here are the Adsense ad format suggested by Google from the most effective to the least and how to implement it in your blog or web site:

1. 336×280 large rectangle: Embed or blend this ad format with content or make it stands out from others within your blog or web pages.

2. 300×250 inline rectangle: Place this ad format at the top, on the right and at the bottom of your blog or web site pages.

3. 160×600 wide skyscraper: Place this ad format on the left, on the right or embed it with content in your blog or web pages.
Adsense Optimization for Ad Colors

Optimizing Adsense Ad colors has a great impact to your Adsense income. Ad colors can make relevant Adsense links as additional useful resources to readers who are looking for more information or solutions to their problems. Google suggested to blend, complement or contrast Adsense colors with the colors of your blog or web pages. For best results, use colors of the links that are existing and prominent in your pages. See more Adsense tips on colors that make cents and dollars, here.

Adsense Optimization for Ad Placement

Optimizing ad placement of you Google ads is another key to optimize your Adsense income. Normally, the best ad placement is on the left side next to your post or article. Next best placement is immediately before the page article/post or between the post title and post body. Then, another best placement is after your post body. Please note, however, that the best placement still depends on the content of every page.
Adsense Optimization for Content Targeting

You have to optimize the content targeting of your Adsense to emphasize and de-emphasize the page content which the Adsense based its Google ads to be displayed.

To emphasize the content or section of the page, enclose it with Google ad section HTML tags within the body tags (<body> and </body>), like this:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

Emphasized content or section here

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

To de-emphasize the content or section, add weight=ignore to the Google ad section starting HTML tags, like this:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

De-emphasized content or section here

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

See more Adsense content or section targeting tips here.
Track Adsense Monetization with Adsense Channel

Use Adsense channel to track the monetization of your optimized Google ads. Adsense channel lets you track the performance of each your Adsense ad type, format and placement. Use this to experiment Adsense optimization in your blog or site. In your Adsense account under Adsense Setup, you have to create and assign Adsense channel to each of your Adsense JavaScript. You may use channel label like “336×280 text top” or “250×250 img post bottom”.

You may also track Adsense performance in your URLs by entering the URLs in the Adsense channel. There is no need to change your Adsense script in tracking Adsense in URLs. Adsense will automatically track its performance in the URLs you have entered in your Adsense channel. For more information and tips about Adsense channel Optimization, click here and here.

See more optimization tips from famous bloggers at Digital Inspiration and Problogger.

If you have not yet optimize your Adsense ads, it is time to start it NOW. It is very important task to optimize the Adsense monetization in your blog or web site. Hope you learn from this Adsense optimization tips.