Saturday, July 10th, 2010
The Simple Guide To Internet Marketing Basics will be released later this week. With over 11,000 words, it’s full of great information that will help you easily discover the secrets of making money on the Internet.
It’s written in the same style as the Simple Guide to SEO, so you’ll be able to understand every word.
Discount Pricing!
If you want to get discount pricing on it, subscribe to the Advanced Notice Mailing List. I’ll be sending out a notice telling you how to get special pricing that will be available for a limited time.
The special pricing is only available for members of the Advanced Notice Mailing List. Please subscribe now. Thanks!
Posted in marketing |
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010
Here’s an article about the idea that search engines like “fresh” content, which is true. Some people react to that by making changes to content on existing pages. Changing an existing page doesn’t help. It confuses the search engine at best. They explain what “fresh” content really means for SEO.
The real opportunity with “fresh” content concerns adding new content (new pages) on a regular basis. Adding new pages provides a number of benefits: Each new web page added to the website creates a new entry point and a new destination for links from other websites. Creating topically specific pages with text, images, video or other media provide a better user experience and gives other websites interesting content to link to. Of course a quantity of quality links from other relevant websites increases direct traffic and can positively influence search engine visibility, sending even more qualified visitors.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/07/seo-telephone-game-fresh-content/
Posted in SEO |
Monday, June 28th, 2010
The 10 for 10 Challenge
The easiest and fastest way to build traffic to your site is to post comments on other sites, using your web address.
This does two things. First, it builds inbound links to your site, boosting your SEO and ultimately getting more traffic from search engines. Second, there’s an immediate effect of having the site owner, other readers, and commenters become aware of you, which might lead them to check out your site, using the link in the comment.
This works for both other blogs and for forums. It also works on Facebook and Twitter, but I’m not convinced that it works as effectively there. Maybe you can prove me wrong on that point. There are a lot of people who read this site that have Etsy shops. Their forums are a great place to post.
I want to help you out, my precious readers. I want you to have a direct benefit from reading this blog. So, here’s what I’m going to do.
The Challenge
I’m announcing the “10 for 10 Challenge”.
Post at least 10 comments on other people’s sites for 10 days in a row. That’s a total of at least 100 comments.
Document the number of visitors to your site on the day you start and at the end of the 10th day. That’s 10 full days of visitors.
The Prize
Whoever has the greatest increase in those 10 days will get a promotional article on my site, including an interview with you, a review of your site and your products, and a link in the sidebar on walton.com, (which is great for your SEO.)
The Rules
You need to have Google Analytics installed on your site, or another statistics program that can be verified.
The 10th and final day must be on or before July 12, which is 2 weeks from the day this article is published. That will give you a couple days to get the statistics program installed if you don’t have it already and you can do a little research for where you want to leave comments. If you want to start now and pick the best 10 days to get your maximum number, you can do that too.
Send me a screenshot of the statistics program, show the number of visits for each of 10 days in a row. The site with the greatest increase in the number of visits between the first day and the tenth day will win.
That’s not a percentage, it’s the number. It’s not the number of page views, it’s the number of visits. It’s not just the 10th day either. It’s the first day compared to any other day within 10 days. If you have a bump on the 7th day, then it declines, take the number on the 7th day. We’re looking for the greatest increase.
The actual comments that you leave are not verified. The only thing we’re counting to win is the increase in the number of visits.
Email me with your results. Show me a screenshot. The winner will be determined based solely on my judgement and my decision is final.
The Strategy
The way to make this work is to know your market. Research where they hang out. Search Google for your keyword and the term “forums” to find forums related to your product. Use your keyword and try searching for “best keyword blogs”. You can search for just your keyword, note the top 10 results, and see which are blogs or places that accept comments.
Once you have a good list of places to leave comments, hit them all, every day. See what people are talking about first. Don’t just jumps in with “Please visit my site”. No one cares about that. You need to be helpful. Answer questions. Be an authority. Give solid information. Ask great questions. Be that interesting person at the party that everyone wants to talk to.
The Benefits
If you are not using a stats application now, you should be, and this challenge might push you into doing that. Going through the process of looking for sites to leave comments, then actually leaving them, will get you into a great habit that will SEO your site for the long run.
If you leave 10 comments a day for 10 days, you WILL have more traffic, regardless of this challenge. You may not win this, but you will have more traffic. Everyone who attempts this challenge will have more traffic.
At the end of the day, isn’t that what it’s all about?
Posted in web traffic |
Saturday, June 19th, 2010
I explain how to pick the best keywords for you to focus your efforts on.
The trick is to balance the number of searches for a keyword each month with the number of other pages on the Internet that contain those keywords, your competition. This is straight up SEO training, right out of the Simple Guide to SEO, only explained in a video.
I got carried away with video effects this time. I hope you enjoy the extra touches as much as I enjoyed doing them.
This is a new file format and size. Let me know if it’s any better for you.
Watch the video on YouTube instead. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9hguIH-jMc
What did you think of the video? Did it help or confuse? Did you have more questions when you were done? Tell me anything that you didn’t understand or ask any questions you have in the comments below.
Thanks for taking the time to watch this. I appreciate it.
Here’s the link I reference in the video:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Posted in SEO |
Saturday, June 12th, 2010
I’ve used an SEO tool for a couple years now, that I haven’t told you about. It’s called Market Samurai.
It costs money. I figured you weren’t interested.
The methods that I’ve taught are free and they work fine, but they take a lot of time to do the research. This tool saves the time and gives you more, better information.
They just opened up an affiliate program, so I’ll make a little money if you ever decide to buy it. You can download a free trial and play with it before you buy it. I think they do that because if you see how it works and use it a bit, you’ll want to buy it. It’s that good. If you only want to do research on a couple keywords, download it, use it for free and never touch it again.
I’m pretty cynical about this kind of stuff, and I will not promote anything that I don’t personally believe in, but this tool is really useful and does very cool things in a couple minutes, things that would take you hours to do manually.
The primary things that it does are:
- Keyword Research is amazing. Worth the price alone.
- Track the rank of your site over time.
- SEO competition finds out what you are up against.
- Domain name research.
- Monetization – ways to make money.
- Finding content for your site.
- And more, plus more in the future.
There’s a discount!
The cost is $149, BUT, if you download the free trial first, they will sell it to you for $97, if you buy it within the first week. That’s the sweet deal because you save almost a third off the price. Do not just go buy it without downloading the free trial.
If you’re serious about finding the right keywords and doing research on your market, this tool is really good and it keeps getting better. Every time I open it up, it seems like there’s an upgrade. They keep adding features to it. There’s stuff in there that I haven’t even used yet.
Here’s where you get your FREE copy: http://marketsamurai.com
Here’s the high pressure email they want me to send you:
Hi {!firstname_fix}
After hearing about a bunch of first-time internet marketing “newbies” using this TOP SECRET Market Samurai software to easily capture front-page rankings, traffic and sales in their first few weeks online, I had to check it out.
I was so impressed by the software that I even worked out a deal to give you INSTANT ACCESS to download it at NO COST to see for yourself just how powerful it is.
http://marketsamurai.com
If you want the secret to quick, profitable, high traffic Google rankings – the secret is finding the “right” keywords…
And this tool will help you achieve just that:
http://marketsamurai.com
Thanks,
Conrad Walton
P.S. – There are over 147552 other results-driven internet marketers using it already just in its first few months online.
Don’t get left behind – get free access to this software, and try out its advanced features here:
http://marketsamurai.com
Posted in SEO |
Friday, June 11th, 2010
The second video in one day. (I’m officially addicted to video now.) This is another interesting background and this video has visual aids (and not just me waving my hands.)
I tell a story of how I got beat and what beat me. You can use this tip on your web site to beat your competition.
The trick is using:
<h2>”heading tags”</h2>
You don’t know what a heading tag is? Watch the video and find out!
You can watch it here on YouTube.
Posted in SEO |
Monday, May 10th, 2010
This is a great way to post your articles to ezinearticles.com, which is a great way to get links to your site, which is a great way to build your SEO, which is a great way to get more traffic, which is… OK I’ll quit now.
If you have an account with ezinearticles.com, and you are using WordPress, then you should be using this plug in to create more content. Good stuff here!
With the introduction of our new EzineArticles WordPress Plugin, experienced WordPress users will be able to submit their WordPress posts and blog entries right to EzineArticles.com!
Read the entire article at:
http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2010/03/articles-directly-from-wordpress.html
Posted in SEO |
Friday, May 7th, 2010
(Note: I wrote this rant after reading Seth Godin’s first “linchpin” session. It’s worth the read. )
The Problem
Let me be honest with you. When I wrote my book, The Care and Feeding of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO, I was hoping that people would read it, apply it to their web sites and become fabulously wealthy. They would be so happy with what I had to say, and they would love my advice so much, that they would pay a lot of money for my next books.
That didn’t happen.
I got a ton of feedback from people that said this is the most amazing book ever, that this is the first time that they understood SEO, that now they are in control of their SEO.
A few told me that they got the book and maybe read most of it, and they intend to get around to applying it real soon now.
Only a couple people actually ever applied the advice to their sites. The ones that did were successful.
NO ONE has told me that they tried anything in the book and it didn’t work.
The advice in the book is true, but not many people have applied it.
I've got the map. You drive.
The Fear
There’s a fear, deep inside the back of your mind, that causes you to hesitate before you do something that might fail. That fear is the obstacle to being successful. It’s the fear of failure.
In spite of that fear, you need to do what you need to do. Do it even if that voice in the back of your mind is telling you that you will fail and that you will be humiliated. Do it even if it hurts. Do it even if that voice is telling you that you are not good enough. Make a rational choice and don’t listen to the voice.
The Key To Success
The key to success is failure.
If you don’t try, you’ll never fail. The more times you try stuff, the more times you’ll fail. The more times you try stuff, the better chance that you’ll succeed. The key to success is failure.
The real message here is that you need to get off your butt and go out there and make it happen.
I don’t want to give advice or write books for people who are too afraid to do something about it. I want to be with a group of people who want to do what it takes to win, do what it takes to make things happen and achieve the goal.
Is that you?
I can give you the map, but you have to drive the car.
It’s time for a road trip.
Posted in business |
Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Posted in other |
Saturday, April 24th, 2010
Click Here
For The ''walton.com''
Facebook Fan Page!
Like everyone else, I’ve used Facebook to friend people from High School that I never liked and find relatives that I’ve never met. Not that it hasn’t been fun, but it was a black hole of witty comments and annoying Farmville requests.
I listened to a seminar recently about the advantages of having a Facebook fan page for your business. It’s a place to interact with people and allow them to interact with each other. You can build your own little community around your business.
It allows you to update every one who “likes” you. You can send messages to everyone, which you cannot do as with a personal profile. Because it’s based on your business, people who join it have essentially raised their hand and said “I’m interested in your business. Tell me more.”, so you don’t have to feel funny about trying to sell stuff to your friends.
It should be a party, not an Amway meeting. People should feel free to hang out and talk to each other. You should have chips out and some music playing to make it more comfortable for everyone. Be a good host.
That’s what I am trying to do.
Please check out out my Fan Page for “walton.com” at www.facebook.com/waltoncom. I have a bunch of my personal friends there now, but if more SEO, small business, and Etsy people show up, that will make things more interesting for all of us.
If you’re not sure about Facebook fan pages, or how they could help your business, you can play with this one and see what they do.
I hope that by seeing there are other people just like you, dealing with the same questions and issues, that we can work together to help make us all more successful. If you feel like you’re out in the cold, all alone, come on in and meet some interesting people.
I’d love for you to stop by and see what’s happening. Leave a comment. Meet a new friend. Hang out.
Please click here or on the icon, then click the “like” button when you get there.
I’ll see you there! Thanks for stopping by.
Posted in marketing |
Saturday, April 10th, 2010
Do you like to talk with people and build relationships?
Have you ever told someone how you feel about their blog post?
Have you ever left a comment on a web site?
If you have never written a comment on a web site, on a blog post, then you are missing the easiest way to get inbound links to your Etsy site and increasing your SEO.
The biggest factor in SEO is “inbound links”. The more, the merrier. You want as many links pointing at your site as you can get.
Almost every time you leave a comment on another web site, it will give you the opportunity to link back to your site. This works for your Etsy site. This works for your own web site.
I know you like to lurk, to read and not get involved. Most people do. It’s easier. It’s safer. No one will disagree with you if you don’t say anything. No one will make fun.
Remember being 13 and going to a school dance? It was scary. I stood against the wall and wished I had the nerve to ask someone to dance. When I finally did risk humiliation, I found out that it was kind of fun. It didn’t hurt at all. I actually liked it.
As you grow up, you find out that having friendships, talking to strangers, just any communication, it’s all pretty good. There are the occasional awkward moments, but you get through them. There’s much more benefit to talking than to staying silent.
In the Internet, the same is true. If you leave comments for people on their sites, they might check out your site and leave you a comment. They might start a conversation on their site.
Every comment you make links back to your site.
Now, if you talk too much, you can get a little overbearing, so don’t get carried away and make your self a pest. Be natural, like you would in real life. You know how to talk to people in real life, so do that same thing on web sites.
Also, not every web site offers the link. If you talk to someone, but they don’t want to talk back, then find someone else to talk to. Comment on the sites that allow you to input a link to your site.
Imagine improving your SEO, just by talking. How easy is that?
Posted in SEO, featured |
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010
I recently received a comment that asked:
I had heard that one way links to your site are better. That mutual linking decreases the Googlishiness of your site. I would like to hear more on your thinking about this.
There are 3 factors involved here. First, there’s a concept of “Google Juice”. This is probably the largest impact on your SEO.
The idea is that each page has some amount of value, called page rank. The rank is actually a value from zero to ten, with the highest being a higher rank. Let’s say that the page rank is the amount of Google Juice that page has.
Be very clear that this is not exact, but I’m describing concepts and relationships, not mathematical algorithms. It’s the relationships and proportions that we’re dealing with.
Google Juice, since 1996
Each link from that page to an external page, a page on someone else’s site, sends off a little Google Juice with it. It’s like a vote of confidence for that other page. The amount of juice it sends (WARNING! Math ahead!) is equal to the total amount of juice divided by the number of links.
Imagine a bucket (your page) and it has a bunch of tubes coming out of the bottom of it (your links). They fill up other buckets (other sites). The more tubes you have, the less juice each one gets. The more tubes from other buckets filling up your bucket, the more juice you have.
If you imagine a bucket that is filling another bucket, but that other bucket is then filling your bucket, your head might explode, so don’t think about that image.
If you have a page rank worth 5 and you have 5 external links, each links is worth 1. If you also have a menu with 5 internal links, then each link is worth a half. Those 5 internal links are to yourself, so you’re passing yourself 2.5 and you’re passing the external sites 2.5, each link getting a half and there’s 5 of them, so 5 times a half is 2.5. Still with me?
Let’s take a quick TV break. I interviewed Coach from Survivor today. He’s a great interview. He likes Jerri, thinks she’s a great girl, but he can’t talk to her by contract, until the actual finale of the show when the winner is revealed. He’s planning on talking to her then and when asked about a relationship, said “we’ll see”.
And we’re back, our minds cleared from all that math.
Considering only Google juice, yes, it’s best to have all the links in the world pointing at your site and no links from your site to anywhere else.
There’s another factor they consider along with Google juice. They consider the pages that you link to. You actually get credit for linking to high page rank, related pages. If you set up a brand new site, with no page rank, and linked to a bunch of sites that all related to your keyword, they figure that your site must be about that keyword. This won’t get you as much credit as Google juice, but it counts.
Considering that factor, it is good to link to related sites. With this factor, I’d say that it’s good to link back and forth between (related keyword) sites.
The last factor to consider is that they are looking for artificial “link farms”. If you just set up sites for the purpose of driving traffic, creating links, trying to push the limits of decency, they’ll ban you and you’ll drop out of the index faster than something that goes really fast.
With all three of these factors considered, it looks like it’s OK to link back and forth between sites, but not too much. As always, if you are natural about it, it works fine. If you go over the top, it’s not good.
Posted in SEO |
Saturday, March 27th, 2010
I’m sure that you’ve downloaded and read my free book on SEO, The Care And Feeding Of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO. In it, I discuss a strategy to beat your competition by looking at who links to them and getting those same links yourself.
I’d like to explain how it works.
The basic steps are:
- Find out who is beating you in the search engines now.
- Find out who is linking to those sites.
- Find out how to get those same links to your own site.
Step One
I’m going to assume that you know what your keywords are. You can repeat this step for each of your keywords if you have multiples, but I’ll describe the process for only one keyword in this article.
Do a search for your keyword. Note the top 10 results. Write down (or copy and paste) each URL in the top 10 results. These are your competitors that you will try to beat.
Step Two
Go to Yahoo’s Site Explorer at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. You don’t have to log in unless you are working on your own sites. Up at the top of the page, there’s an input field with a button to “Explore URL”. Don’t put it in the “My Sites” input.
You have a list of 10 URLs from step one. Put in the first URL and hit the “Explore URL” button. This will return a list of all of the pages of the site you are exploring.
Remember that this is just what Yahoo has in it’s index and may or may not be accurate. It seems to be more accurate than the information that Google gives you, but it’s not perfect. It is not absolute truth, only a reasonable facsimile.
The first response is a list of all of the pages that exist on the site you are exploring. Keep in mind that this is according to Yahoo, not absolute truth.
Click on the button to the right of pages that says “inlinks”. This will display all links, from all places, to only the URL you are exploring.
I prefer to limit the number of links displayed to “Except from this domain”. That will not show you any links from any page at the domain name of the site you are exploring.
There’s some nuance here because technically, “www.walton.com” is a different site than “shops.walton.com”. Same domain name, but different sites. I really want to know how well the entire domain is doing, so I don’t care about what subdomain, (that’s the “www” vs. “shops” in my example) that links are pointing at. I want to exclude them all. I only want to see links from other people’s sites, not links from the site I’m exploring.
I also want to know how many links go to the “Entire Site”. There may be links to specific pages or blog posts or special pages. Most links go to the home page, but not all. I want to see all links to any page on this entire site.
You should have changed the first drop down menu to “Except from this domain” and the second drop down to “Entire site.” When you make those changes, it should refresh and display according to the new settings.
This will give you a list of up to 1,000 places that link to the site at the URL you put in.
Step Three
Look at them. Ponder them. Click through to the next page and the next page. Click on some of the links.
This is the hard part. You’ll have to be part Sherlock Holmes to figure this out. Your goal is to figure out who is linking to this site and then find out how you can get them to link to you to.
Some questions you might ask while reviewing this list are:
- Are there a lot of links from the same site?
- Are the sites that link here related to the same keyword?
- Are there links from sites that obviously have nothing to do with the keyword?
- Are there any blogs that you can leave comments on?
- Are their any forums that you can leave comments on?
- Is the owner of this site (your competition) leaving comments on other’s sites?
- Are there links from directories or places that you can formally request links from?
- Are their links from article sites?
- Are there links that you can easily reproduce?
If you see a bunch of links from comments on other sites, then you know that you have to target those sites for your own comments.
If there are directories, you need to ask to be added to those directories too.
If there are links from article sites, then you need to write some articles.
A good, healthy set of links should be from random sites that are related to the keyword, but are just genuinely honest links because the other person liked what this site had to say.
If you write good content and people read it, they will link to your site too. Leave a comment on their site and build a relationship with them. They’ll check out your site and probably link to it.
If you are doing the social media thing, people should be twittering and facebooking your content. If this site is doing that, has great content and is social, then you’re even, because you have great content and you’re social too, right?
If that’s the case, get to know the sites that are linking to your competitors. Leave comments and get to know the people behind those sites. Reach out, be nice, be helpful, and get to know people, specifically the people that are linking to your competitors.
The Balance
The balance that you have to strike here is between being completely nice and goodhearted, innocently out to help make the world be a better place, and on the other hand, being a money grubbing, greedy pig.
You need to help make the world be a better place. I’m going to assume that when you sell your product to someone that makes the world a better place, or why are you selling it?
Leading with the kind heart and the helpful hand, you need to keep in the back of your mind the target of your competition. Yes, you should be nice, but you should also target those specific people that are helping your competition.
Rinse. Repeat.
Once you review the lists of links for each of the 10 URLs for this keyword, you should spend time, (every day!), working on getting links from each of those places. You have up to a thousand URLs for each of 10 keywords, so you have ten thousand places to get links from.
Start at the top and work your way down. When you get to the bottom, repeat.
Do that until you have so many quality links that your site is listed above your competition in the search engine results pages. Build the links, then build more links.
By that time, the world will be a much better place, because they’ve been buying your products instead of your competition’s, and you will have more money to increase your business even more.
What could be better than that?
If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Thanks!
Posted in SEO |
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
The strategy behind SEO is that you optimize your web site and other’s web sites to that the search engines put your site at the top of the search engine results pages. Being at the top of the page means that more people will probably click through to your site.
That’s all well and good, but technically, you don’t really care about getting people to come to your web site. You really care about getting people to buy your stuff.
The Goodyear blimp in Los Angeles is based a few miles from where I live. We see it all the time. On today’s bike ride, it came out from over the city and turned South to cruise down the coast. It flew almost over my head before I could stop and get a camera out.
On sunny days, they fly airplanes over the water, parallel to the beach, with big banners flying behind them, advertising beer or some event. They fly up and down while surfers surf and sunbathers sunbathe, uninterested in them.
They blast out their message to everyone within sight. Does everyone run out and buy Goodyear tires? or buy Coors Lite? If they’re lucky, they get a small percentage of sales.
Is that what you are doing? Are you optimized for a keyword that brings a lot of people, but not the people that want to buy your products?
SEO traffic is great, but you should target people who love your products. Aim for the fans, not for the crowds. Work on relationships, not on quantity. It’s better to have people who are interested and stick around and read your stuff than the people who are clicking through and bouncing out within 8 seconds.
A practical step step to do that is to figure out who is coming to your site now. Where do they come from? What are they looking for? Who stays around? Who bounces quickly?
Google Analytics has a few ways to dig a little more information out of all that data. There’s a button named “Advanced Segments” above the chart on the main stats page. If you click on that, you can look at segments of the traffic, like new visitors or sources. In the right hand sidebar, there’s a link to “Custom Reports”.
Try to find out who these people are that come to your site and why they are coming there. Look at keywords. They might not be what you expect.
Those tools will give you hours of fun, sorting through data.
When you think you have a better idea of who all these people are, you can focus your site on giving them what they want. Then maybe, you can make a few more sales.
Posted in SEO |
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Read the post below about SEO before you read the rest of this post.
Repeat these steps for each of your competitors. At this point, you should have a bunch of list with names and numbers on them. You should have:
* List of keywords
* List of top 10 results for each keyword – name and URL
* List of competitors – Name and URL
* Number of total pages on each competitor’s site
* Number of total inbound links to each competitor’s site
Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/2010/02/17/sell-handmade-stuff-on-the-internet-seo-part-two.html
So, you have your lists. The strategy is to get links from sites that already link to your competitors. You found that list of links in the last step. Now we’re going to do something about it.
Review the links that you found. There will be a few different kinds of links.
1. Comments
If the link is from a comment, you should immediately go leave a comment on that site also. Some times, comments get posted in a sidebar under “recent comments”. If that’s the case here, then you might see one comment generate as many links as the site has pages. You need to comment on that site. These “recent” areas will roll off as newer comments are posted. You should make a schedule and come back and comment on that site once a week or so, whatever seems reasonable.
2. Blogroll
You want to sell them your stuff because you love them and want them to be happy.
This is a list of sites that the site owner likes or wants to promote. Usually found in a sidebar also, it will be a list of links. These will also be on every page on the site, which is a good thing. These links are placed there manually by the owner, so you need to have them like you enough to add your link to their blogroll. You might offer an “link exchange” where you link to them in return.
Be careful about being too pushy here. They will link because they want to, not because you asked. You can be seen as “spammy” if you ask without any kind of relationship with them. It’s best to comment a few times first, then maybe strike up an email exchange and become their friend, their real friend, not their car salesman friend. Blogroll will follow.
3. Blog Posts
They may have written something in a blog post about your competitor and linked to them in the post. This is a wonderful kind of link to get. Even though you do get the number of links like you would in a blogroll or a recent comment section, you get a huge gift of authority. They thought enough about you to link to you. Readers of their site will probably follow that link more often than they would the other kinds of links. This drives more real traffic than it does build SEO, but it’s very valuable. It’s also hard to get. If you comment and become friends, and mention your own site, they might just though out the random link for you in a post.
4. Guest posts and Articles
I’m going to group a couple things together here. A guest post is one that you write for someone else’s blog. This will have a link back to your site in it and that’s good stuff. You get authority because they trusted you enough to write something for them. The other thing I want to group that with is the “article”. You can write articles for article directories, which will publish that article with a link back to your site. This also has some authority behind it and will get you some traffic and that link. Each of these are similar because you are writing content and publishing it somewhere other than your site. Seems counterintuitive to give away free content, but it gives you authority, people read it and want to check out your site, and you get a free link out of it. www.ezinearticles.com is a good place to start.
You’ll notice that all of these methods have to do with connection and communication. You need to connect with other people and have them notice you.
This isn’t sales. This isn’t marketing. It is real, human interaction, the kind we all want. If you do this for money, it won’t work. You have to do it for love.
You have to communicate with people who like the same stuff you do. You want to sell them your stuff because you love them and want them to be happy. If you are selling it only to make money, selling drugs on a street corner is faster and easier.
Make the world a better place by connecting and communicating with real people in a real way. You make cool stuff. Share it with us.
Posted in sell on internet |
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
If you’ve read the book, you know the basics. I can tell you to work on getting more inbound links, but until you actually make a plan and then work that plan, your efforts will be haphazard and not as effective.
I suggest that you spend a set period of time, every day, to do some activity that will build more inbound links for your site. Leave comments on other blogs, post in forums, guest blog, submit articles to directories, the choice is yours, but the key is having a plan and doing it on a schedule.
Link building has, classically, been a tactic slapped on to a marketing campaign or website post-launch. I believe that those companies/sites that treat link acquisition as an afterthought, rather than building it into the product, will always lose out to those who treat link building strategically.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/strategic-link-building-how-to-productize-link-acquisition-and-dominate-your-niche
Posted in SEO |
Monday, March 1st, 2010
I LOVE getting comments on my blog posts. It makes me feel validated as a human being. They love me. They really love me! (I need to get out more.)
When I got the comment below on one of the last posts, I realized, “Oh, yeah… I need to explain this stuff, huh?” I keep forgetting that.
All of the five would have been wonderfully informative IF I knew the DEFINITION OF EACH TERM. For those as dumb as me, what is an H1 Headline Tag? How about Internal Link Anchor Text? I was so excited to be led to the most important five and then I dropped from the cliff when I couldn’t understand what you were telling me. Eeeek~
Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/2010/02/25/search-engine-ranking-factors-seomoz.html#comments
So here’s what those mean, and more importantly, what they mean to you.
Flowers on cactus in my backyard
The number one says “Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag”. This one is easy and important. The title is a technical bit of information on a web page. It’s displayed in the browser window, up there at the top.
You can see where it actually is on a web page by doing the “view source” in your browser to look at the code behind the page. Look at all that gibberish. Look towards the top of the gibberish. There will be a bit of information that says “<title>This Text Is Whatever Your Title Is And Where Your Keywords Should Be</title>”. That’s the title and what this says is that your keywords should be inside of those “title tags”.
You can control the title in many different ways in many different systems. In WordPress, the title of your page or post becomes the title, following the name of your site. In Etsy, the title of your product becomes the title, followed by your shop name. You’ll have to look at your own site and figure out how this works.
What you should do is make sure that your keywords are in that title. If that means adding it to the name of your product or your post, then do it. Experiment until you know how to make it work.
2. Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
The second most important factor is having those keywords as the FIRST words in the title. I’ve actually heard the they should be after the initial word, but I can’t prove that. The trick is to get them in the title towards the beginning of the title.
Since Etsy seller Warmth left the comment, let’s look at one of her products on Etsy.
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=22247701
The title of the page is “Jilly-from the Easter Mice Felt Mouse Collection by Warmth”. I’m guessing her keywords are “felt mice”, so I would reword this product, so the title changes, to “Felt Mice Collection: Jilly, from the Easter Mice by Warmth.” See how the keywords are first now and it still make sense to real people?
3. Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name
Third factor is having your keyword in your domain name. If you have a domain name, then it counts to have the keyword in it. If you’re on Etsy, the domain name is “etsy.com”, so unless you are targeting “etsy guide” or something, you’re out of luck on that one.
4.Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag
Fourth refers to an “H1 headline”. The H1 tag is one of 5 levels of headline. They are named H1, H2, H3, H4, and H5. They correspond to levels of importance and usually have some formatting attached to them, like they are larger and bolder. If you don’t know what these are or you can’t actually touch the content of your page to put them in, you’re out of luck on that too. If you’re using WordPress, you can actually put in <h1>the text you want to highlight</h1> into the HTML edit field on your post.
5. Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page
“Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page” means that when you link from one page to another on your site, which is an “internal link,” you should use your keywords in the link. If you link to other web sites, those are “external links”. The “Anchor text” is the actual text that you use in to link with. So if your keywords are “felt mice”, then you should use the words “felt mice” to link to other pages on your site.
If you are using Etsy, this is difficult. About all you have for links are the ones from your shop page to your product pages. If you have your keywords in your product names, these links will already have your keywords in them.
Posted in SEO |
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Here are the top 5 factors, out of 24, that are important for SEO on a page. These were ranked by their panel of experts (people smarter than me.) Click through to read the whole list. The whole site is filled with great information.
1. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance
8% moderate consensus
2. Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
63% high importance
11.3% light consensus
3. Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com)
60% high importance
11.2% light consensus
4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag
49% moderate importance
10.2% light consensus
5. Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page
47% moderate importance
13% moderate contention
One tip to take away from this is when you are using WordPress and the “All in one SEO” plug in, the default for all of the titles is: “%blog_title% | %post_title%”. Change that to “%post_title% | %blog_title%” to get those keywords closer to the beginning of the title.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#on-page-keyword-specific-ranking-factors
Posted in SEO |
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
To sell stuff on the Internet effectively, you need a web site.
The web site is the truck of the tree, the thing that holds it all together, the thing that you hang everything else on, the things that everything else grows out of. Which metaphor do you like the best there?
After you get your keywords, before all that other stuff I wrote about for SEO, you need to get a domain name and build yourself a web site. This is not a definitive post on how to do this, but more of an overview of the process.
Here’s what I wrote:
This will all boil down to “keywords”. You need to decide what keywords you want to be found for. The more general the keyword, the more results will match it, which means more competition for that keyword. You want to be as specific as you possibly can, to narrow the results enough that you can beat your competition, but wide enough that you can actually get some traffic. It’s a balancing act.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/2010/02/14/sell-handmade-stuff-on-the-internet-seo-part-one.html
The web site is the trunk of the tree, the thing that holds it all together, the thing that you hang everything else on, the things that everything else grows out of. Which metaphor do you like the best there?
You need to have, or should try to have, your best keyword in the domain name. For Deborah, she original had “mermaid’s purse”, but I added “sea glass” to it, because that’s what she’s selling. Her domain name is “mermaidspurseseaglass.com”.
Don’t use dashes. I’m not sure why, but no one likes them and Google will give you points off for them. I guess that spammers liked using them and they got a bad reputation.
There’s a link in my right sidebar that will take you to a page that will allow you to check if a domain name is available or not.
Domain Name Look Up
The steps to building a web site are:
1. Register a domain name.
I suggest GoDaddy for domain name registration. (NOT for web hosting!) Check on to make sure the domain name you want is available at the page above, then go here to register it. You have to point the domain name at the web host server to make it all work. Again, the details of how to do this are beyond the scope of this article.
2. Rent some web hosting space.
This is the subject of much debate, but I like PowWeb. There are many web hosts out there and they have pretty much become a commodity. I also host sites and if you want us to host your site, we have better customer support than the big guys.
3. Install your web site.
Under that number 3, I’m going to tell you that using WordPress is the absolute best way to build a web site today. I’ve been building them since 1994, for large companies and small. Today, I only use WordPress.
Steps to using WordPress:
1. Install WordPress.
Usually the web host has an option to do this for you with a click of a button. There are many “how to” guides out there for this. If you read this post and ask me to do it for you, I’ll do it for free. No strings. Just mention the secret word “penguins” in your email. (My personal addiction.)
2. Pick a “Theme”.
There are a bunch of free themes and some “premium” themes that cost money. If you want a custom theme, I can build you one. This topic has more depth to it than I can address here, but pick a theme and install it.
3. Write pages.
Create the static pages that you want on your web site. These will be the normal “contact us”, “about us”, and other stuff that stays the same.
4. Write posts.
You need to blog. Yes, you do. I’ll talk more about what to say and why later, but for now, make sure this is set up.
That is a quick overview of how to set up a web site. I have 15 years of experience to pour out into a long, rambling post about the details of each step, but I’ll save that for another day. Today, you should just know that this is the overview of steps you need to take.
Posted in sell on internet |
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
We need to talk about how a search engine works. It sends a robot out to read each page on your site. As it reads the page, it will evaluate it and try to figure out what it’s about. It won’t keep a copy of the page in the search index. It will only keep a score of specific words and phrases that it finds and deems important.
It’s not a human, so it can only guess, using calculations based on what it finds. What does it find and what is important? How would you determine what a page is about?
Tip Number One - Just say it!
I just looked at a potential client’s site. They wanted to know how much it would cost to SEO their site. As I looked at the front page, I wasn’t quite sure what the site was really about. I knew the general industry they were in, but not where they were located and this was a very location specific business.
How many time have you looked at a web page and not quite known what it was about? There were a lot of sales talk mumbo jumbo, but they didn’t tell you exactly what the product or service was.
Tip Number One – Just say it!
If people don’t know what your page is about, how do you expect search engines to know? You need to indicate, with no doubt, no ambiguity, what this page is about. You need to tell people and you need to tell search engines with focus and clarity.
You know what people take their cues from, because you a people. What do search engines take their cues from, not being as smart and nuanced as us humans?
Here are some ways they decide what the page is about:
This is not keyword density.
There’s a term, “keyword density”, that refers to how may times you use the keyword in relationship to how many other words there are on the page. It’s not really as valuable as it once was, but you need to keep it in mind. It does make sense that if you want to be found for a keyword that it should be on the page.
Something that matters a bit more is the use of heading tags. Those <h1> and <h2> tags that are usually used to make copy bigger and bolder. Google sees them in a different way. They are seen as giving the page organization. A heading defines a section of a page, so they must be important. If the heading has the keyword, then the page must be about that keyword. The trick here is that the style for the heading is usually way too big. Change the style sheet to make them look normal or at least reasonable, then use headings to control what’s important on the page.
“Anchor Text” is the actual text that you click on on a web page to take you to another place. You can click on images or text, but the text that you actually click on is called “anchor text”. I said that twice because it’s important. Think about this. When you click on a link that says “bicycle seats”, what do you expect to find at the target page? That’s right. So search engines, being stupider than a normal human, figure that the anchor text used somewhere else to link to YOUR page, must indicate what your page is about. That seems to be a pretty good indicator of what your site should be ranked for in the search engines.
It now becomes critical what anchor text people use to link to your site from their site. All you have to do is change the anchor text on their sites. Oh, wait. You can’t do that. It’s on THEIR site, not yours. You have no control over their site. You might be screwed.
This is where the post on Building Links comes in handy. There are ways to get links to your site and control what the anchor text says.
The next thing that a search engine will use to figure out what to rank your site for is the number of links to your site, to your page. They actually score each page, but they know that those pages are on your site, so your site might, probably will, get ranked higher than an individual page for a keyword. If you can just blast out a huge number of links to your site, that will help.
If you can just blast out a huge number of links to your site, that will help.
Unless it hurts. If you get 5 new links a week, that’s normal and reasonable. If you then get 4,597 links in one week, that’s a little odd. We need to look into that a little closely. You must be gaming the system somehow, so those links won’t count. You need to sit in the corner and take a time out while we figure this out. Now you’re crying like a little girl. There, there, now now.
The last factor that I want to cover here is the page rank of those pages that do link to you. Google is putting more weight into what they are calling “authority”. A few links from a high authority site is worth a lot more than a ton of links from a low authority site. I’m not sure how to tell which is which, but larger, established, long term sites will be higher on the authority spectrum. Try to get links from these kinds of sites.
All of these factors get thrown into a big ‘ol bucket of numbers and they score your page for different keywords or phrases. When someone searches on a specific keyword or phrase, the look at all of the pages that have scores for those keywords and compare them. Whatever page has the highest score at the moment gets the top ranking. Some keywords get thousands, or millions, of searches a day. Some keywords have thousands, or millions, of pages that mention them. How does your site compare?
If you search for “does wordpress cost money” or “how much does wordpress cost” or even “wordpress cost” and you will find a page on my site ranked number one. That is primarily because one site out there put a link to my page in their blogroll, so they link to my page on my site from every page on their site. This is great if I wanted the world to know that WordPress is free, which I guess I do. I just want them to know that I’m awesome at SEO and web design also.
People do find me and I’m thankful for that. As long as I have enough stuff in the sidebars to get their attention and tell them that I do web development and SEO also, then I’m happy.
Anchor text is king. Long live the king.
Posted in sell on internet |
