Saturday 5 December 2009

Using Articles To Gain TOP Search Engine Ranking

My Secret Formula For Using Articles To Gain TOP Search Engine Ranking
Copyright 2009 by Willie Crawford

I use articles, videos, podcasts and press releases extensively in my marketing. I use them to build my lists, gain search engine ranking, and drive traffic to targeted pages where that traffic often converts directly into sales.

I've been using article marketing VERY effectively since 1996 and find it an excellent method for generating long-term traffic.

My biggest secret is probably that I begin my article writing by doing keyword research. I doubt that most article marketers do this. I have a target product, niche or website, and I focus on what keywords would bring traffic to them. You can do the same. Here's how.

First of all you want to target the right keywords. It does no good to bring in traffic that is not buyers, so you want to ask what terms buyers are typing into the search engines. Make a list. The list should include "long tail" 3-5 word phrases.

Next use the Google's External Keyword Tool at:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
to research your keywords.

Enter the keywords that you brainstormed into the form at the url above, one keyword phrase per line. The software will suggest other popular keywords and also show you search volume. It will show you not only how many times a given term is search on per month, but also how much competition you have for that term.

Download the results of that search as a spreadsheet in "csv for Excel" to analyze data easier. The link to do that is at the bottom of your search results page. This will let you sort the data based upon a number of criteria.

Outline a dozen articles based upon your keyword research. This can initially be just a rough outline containing a few main points. You will flesh it out later creating articles ranging from 500 - 1200 words.

Write the articles, one at a time, not stressing over them. Write a little, and then if your creativity is waning, take a break. I can often write 4-6 articles before needing a break.

Since the articles are all on a related topic, it's ok to repeat the same thoughts or concepts in multiple articles. Most of your readers won't read all of your articles and those who read the same thoughts in more than one article will
only have those concepts reinforced.

Use your target keywords in your titles. You know that these keywords are appropriate, and are being searched on, so put them in your titles, where they will attract the most attention.

Your title is the most important part of any article, because it's what entices your reader to stop and read the rest of the article. If it doesn't grab their attention, the rest of the article will never be seen.

Use target keywords in the body of your articles several times.

Use target keywords in anchor text of links when posting to your blogs, webpages, or article directories that allow using anchor text in articles. Not all directories allow this.

Submit to the top article directories using Easy Push Button Traffic. This will save you from having to manually visit each of the top article directories for each article. Instead,you upload the article to the Easy Push Button Traffic server,
and then select which directories you want to automatically submit to. This works beautifully for me.

Consider turning some of these articles into podcasts or videos. Also submit that re-purposed content, using Easy Push Button Traffic, to dozens of different video and podcast sharing sites.

Watch your target site or project quickly rise in rank in the search engines, and watch your sales take off.

After you've cranked out as much content as you can based upon a given set of keywords, go back to the Google External Keyword Tool and do it with another set of keywords.

This simply formula works like magic. Since most of your competitors write articles without ever considering keywords, you'll run circles around them. Use the simple formula that I just outlined above. There is absolutely no need to complicate
the keyword research. This simple, easy system works ;-)

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Willie Crawford is a website traffic generation expert. He often distributes content (articles, videos, podcasts and press releases) to generate highly targeted website traffic. To do that efficiently he uses the automated
submission service at http://EasyPushButtonTraffic.com

Visit Earn Money From Your Computer and Affiliate Marketing Success Online

Tuesday 22 September 2009

The Idiot’s Guide To Google Page Rank

Article by Duncan Carver:

In this article I’m going to try and provide an “idiot proof guide” to explain how Google “Page Rank” works in layman’s terms.

It’s best done through an analogy so imagine that your website’s home page is a bucket.

To gain and/or increase your Page Rank you need to fill up your bucket.

This is done by getting as many incoming links pointing to your website’s home page as possible.

The amount of Page Rank those links are going to fill your bucket with (your resulting PR value) is directly related to the Page Rank of the pages those links are on (and how many other links those pages also contain).

So for example if you have a link on a page that has a PR value of 6 – that link is going to pass less than 6 measures of page rank value into your home page.

It’s not going to pass exactly 6 measures because…

1) Chances are there are many other internal and external links on that same page where by the page rank value 6 is being shared amongst and distributed to all of the links in varying amounts.

2) Every time page rank flows out of one of those links Google actually “evaporates” a small proportion of that value. As a result, even if you have the only link on the page, you’re not going to have exactly 6 measures of PR value passed through to your home page. There is a specific reason why Google does this but it’s not really important in the context of this article.

So now that you’re filling your bucket with Page Rank value by continually building incoming links, let’s look at what happens when that collective Page Rank is distributed through your entire website.

Imagine that for every page in your website (that you link to internally), you’re essentially adding a brand new hole in your bucket.

The page rank value then starts dissipating through that hole and a certain proportion of the total value that your home page holds is now being passed down to that page (and the total value that your home page retains is slightly lessened). This is fine because it happens naturally – it’s entirely normal to link to other pages in your website.

However, the more pages you have in your website, the more holes you now have in your bucket and the less PR value your home page will retain. Further, this also means that each of those pages is going to receive less page rank unto themselves as your home page PR value is now being spread amongst all those pages.

Let’s say you have 1,000 incoming links to a websites home page and that home page has a PR value of 5. Let’s also say you have 10 additional pages in your website that you’re linking to via your internal linking structure. If you have a “strong PR5″ then it’s possible some of those other internal pages would also become a PR 5, but more likely than not, most will become PR4 or less.

Let’s take the same website, with the exact same number (and quality) of incoming links. This time we’ll add 100 pages.

Now that PR 5 value is flowing down your internal linking structure and being shared amongst 100 other pages. It’s possible that your home page might now become a PR4 (because you have more holes in your bucket) and those internal pages achieve PR values of 3 or less (because each one is receiving less share of the total available inflow of page rank).

The above is not a bad thing either, and the flow of Page Rank through your website is not linear. That is most people link back to their home page from every other page in their website. That means that although you are passing Page Rank down to all of your internal pages, a small proportion of the value is being actually passed back to your home page via those home page links. This is also why the home pages of websites tend to have the larger PR values rather than internal pages.

Similarly, most websites are setup to have a major category structure that contain a few key areas of organized content. More often that not, those links are also placed on most internal pages via the standard navigational linking structure.

The end result is that those pages will have greater PR values – rather than a page that is found 3 links removed from your home page. For example the home page might be a PR5, the category page might be a PR4, and the page linked to from that category page might be a PR3 or less.

That basically means that the pages you link to most often from within your entire website are going to receive the highest PR values.

Knowing this – if you want to increase Page Rank and have a lot of pages in your website you have 2 options.

Increase the number of incoming links to your website and focus on incoming links from pages that already have high PR values.

Decrease the amount of internal pages of your website. Of course this isn’t really an option. I just mention this because often people wonder why they start loosing page rank for no apparent reason and they don’t realize it will happen if they continually add more pages without increasing the amount of (or quality of) incoming links to the website.

To take things one step further, now imagine that for every external link you include on your website (that means linking out to another independent website) you’re also adding more holes in your Page Rank bucket. The flow of PR is now being shared amongst your internal pages and a proportion is now being lost through those external links. So the more external links you include on your website – the more page rank you’re website is going to “leak” out to other websites.

Again this is not really a bad thing – it’s also entirely natural to link out to other websites and you shouldn’t be scared to do so.

You can also mitigate the impact of leaking page rank to other website by using the “nofollow” attribute on those external links if possible.

So that is the basic “jist” of how Page Rank is gained, passed around, and lost through your website. If you’re interested there are pleanty of rather technical and specific explinations of Page Rank out there online, but hey this is the “idiots guide” and the above sums it up quite nicely if I do say so myself.

What’s most important to realise here is that having high Page Rank is not the be all and end all of obtaining high search engine rankings.

In fact, there is no direct correlation between having high PR valued pages and having high search engine rankings.

You can read more about that here.

Ultimately, all having a high Page Rank value does is to ensure Google visits your website more often to look for new pages and for any updates made to older pages. Not only that but it will also “crawl deeper” into your internal linking structure and index more pages faster, and more often.

So it can help if you want to see your websites changes become reflected in the search engine faster and speed up the end result of making any internal search engine optimization tweaks…

“We crawl (the internet) roughly in order of page rank. The higher your Page Rank the faster you will be found, the deeper you will be crawled and the more often visited…” ~ Matt Cutts.

I hope that was easy enough to follow ;-0

Duncan Carver - http://www.onlinemarketingtoday.com

Wednesday 9 September 2009

Google and Back Links

Useful info from Duncan Carver
"Hey Duncan, Why does Google not show any back links while yahoo and others do? Secondly, I have news releases, YouTube videos and quality articles with reputable ezine distributors and Google has not picked up any of those links either? The site is relatively new and it got hacked last month and was off line for about a week so there might be done issues there. Cheers," ~ Keith Rispin

Hi Keith,

Google only ever shows a "random sample" of incoming links to individual websites.

They did used to show all links but back in about 2004/05 they stopped doing this because it was too transparent to webmasters vying for the same rankings.

Anyone could see exactly what they would need to replicate in their own link building campaigns, in order to achieve similar search engine rankings as the existing top ranked website/s for the respective keyword terms they were targeting.

All other factors remaining equal (a similarly well "on-site" optimized website) a competitor could simply get the exact same linking structure completed and stand a very good chance of ranking in the same (or very close) position of the website whose link campaign they were "reverse engineering".

Obviously this was not in the interest of Google as it allows webmasters to manipulate their search engine results - so they stopped doing this and went the "random sample" way.

So now if you use the... link:yourdomainhere.com ...search command in Google you're only ever going to see a very random sample.

If you're not seeing any links showing in the results, it doesn't mean Google doesn't know about them (and isn't taking them into account when determining where your website ultimately ranks in the index), it just means it's not showing them to you.

As to how they determine this "random sample" I'm not 100% sure.

Generally they tend to show slightly more of the links from "authority websites" (but not all), mixed in with other random links you've managed to secure.

What I do know is if you know you have several thousand unique incoming links to a website, Google is only going to show a few hundred of those.

Another way to get a better idea as to what Google knows about is to use the search command of your own domain name (without the www. prefix). This will not show backlinks as such, but every reference to your website. For example; someone might have
written your domain name on their page but it might not actually be a hyperlink.

In doing this now on a website I operate (that I know as fact has more than 5,000 unique incoming links pointing to it - the majority from unique 3rd party websites), when using the link:search command, Google is telling me there are "about 213"
incoming links.

When I simply search on the domain name itself (without the www.prefix) it shows there are "about 143,000" individual references to that domain within Google's index. Again not all of those are going to be links - but it gives you a better idea as to how
deeply referenced your website actually is within Google.

Obviously you cannot use either of those search commands to get benchmark statistics of competitor's websites anymore - it's become hard to reverse engineer other link building campaigns simply using Google's standard search capabilities. It used to be
nice to be able to see that a website holding a top ranking for a specific term had 1,000 incoming links pointing to it because it gave you an estimate to work towards.

MSN.com (the new bing.com) stopped showing backlinks altogether (not even showing a random sample) back in 2007. Their public reasoning was that there was no need to use extra resources to deliver the results of such search queries because it was not the
"general internet population" searching on them. Of course "privately" this was due to the same reason Google stopped showing all incoming link results as well (webmasters doing competitive SEO analysis).

Yahoo.com has always been more accurate in doing this and generally showed all incoming links making it the best benchmark for comparisons. However just a few weeks ago they announced they would be using the new Bing.com (old MSN) search results in a
partnership deal. Only time will tell if this means they will no longer show backlinks and simply serve up an exact replica of bing.com results and functionality.

So all in all, if you're not seeing any backlinks in Google, but you know you have incoming links pointing to your website, don't worry too much about it. Just get out there and focus on building more incoming links to improve search engine rankings.

As to your website being offline for a week - that's never a good thing but wouldn't be the likely cause - and your incoming links from other sources not showing, well that's explained above.

Chances are you just don't have enough volume at present.
~ | ~

If you're looking to purchase text link advertising, and have a minimum budget of $1,000 p/m please contact me right now...

Duncan Carver - admin@onlinemarketingtoday.com

Friday 16 January 2009

Marketing tactics to think about for 2009

As we enter into more uncertain times, marketers need all the help they can get.

Tactics should, of course, slot into an overall strategy: nevertheless, with online tools changing so quickly, you might appreciate a checklist of cost-effective, online techniques which, if you haven’t tried, might be part of your 2009 armoury.

1. Search engine keywords. Revise your master list of keywords and long-tail items and integrate some value-related adjectives into phrases. All buyers are looking for value-for-money and will be using these phrases in searches.

2. Website: the customer ‘journey’. Focus on your prospect and customer journey through your website and, wherever possible, make the path to buying as smooth and easy as possible. Check your website analytics for buyers who give up along the way and redesign the journey, making the drop-off stages simpler.

3. Social media. Spend time on an assessment of social media which will return a tangible benefit for your company and marketplace. Remember that involvement and links produce a matrix of references for search engines and the digital benefits may even outweigh the value of the human relationships you make. If you are a consumer marketeer, get your team together and use their brainpower and social media experience to brainstorm some widgets to engage an online audience with.

4. Email marketing. Re-examine all your assumptions about your programme. Take a closer look at your statistics and see if you draw some conclusions about what is going well and not so well. Ensure that you have a checklist of the main components that should be in place so that you can check them off (click here to download one from Juice Digital). Run an online survey among an audience sample to see if you can improve your content (most email service providers offer a survey option).

5. Website: develop rapidly-changing content. Our experience tells us that, despite being in possession of sophisticated content management tools, organisations have difficulty in finding the time or inspiration to develop relevant changing content which will boost search engine ratings. We have a number of solutions and a team to help you with this.

6. Twitter. Like many social media platforms, Twitter can get spectacular results if you catch the zeitgeist and use etiquette that adds value to your Followers’ experience. We have a solid checklist to help you: just ask.

7. Interactive voice messaging (IVM). Bluetooth, text (SMS) and IVM all use the most common technology platform of all, the mobile phone. There is a place, and successful tactics, for each of these tools. For B2B marketers, your audience will have a far proportion of touchscreen phones like the Blackberry Storm and Apple’s iPhone. How are you engaging your prospects and customers?

8. Social media press releases (SMPR). This is the tip of the PR 2.0 iceberg. Ensure that you grasp where PR is going and what it means online. Have you grasped the significance of semantic mark-up and how you can build an automated SMPR platform?

9. Blogs. That old chestnut! Blogs are very useful, fast-changing barometers of your thinking and marketing messages. They can be built as an adjunct to your website but have a more personal, informal flavour and allow customer interaction. And, of course, the links back to your website can produce Google-juice.

10. Buzz monitoring. Use freely-available tools to keep track of your company reputation or even spy on your competition. Larger organisations use agencies like Juice Digital to do this professionally but we have compiled a list of over 25 buzz monitoring tools to track news, blogs, patents, video, job listings, conference calls, events, keywords, websites, bespoke RSS tracking. See the list here [link].

11. Podcasts. Consider communicating through short audio or videocasts and embed them in your website or blog.

Article by Jeremy Dent at
http://blog.juicedigital.co.uk/2009/01/marketing-tactics-to-think-about-for-2009/

Thursday 8 January 2009

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1 - Leave comments on other people's blogs and include a link to your site.

2 - Find joint venture partners who are willing to do a traffic exchange.

3 - Regularly add content to your site so people come back and visit.

4 - Pass out business cards with your domain on them wherever you go.

5 - Once you have a product, set up an affiliate program and let your affiliates send you traffic.

6 - Start profiles on social networking sites such as MySpace.com

7 - Track everything, find out where your visitors are coming from and replicate it.

8 - Review other websites on Alexa.com and include a link to your site.

9 - Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.

10 - Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a back link to your site.

All these traffic tips work and they WILL send traffic to your website if, you take action and implement them. The amount of traffic will vary between each tactic but use enough of them and I'm positive you will see a big difference in the number of visitors to your site. Remember, traffic is the life-blood of your online business.

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Thursday 1 January 2009

Search Engines Love Blogs

Blogs are short for 'web blogs'. Some are online diaries, others are dedicated to specific themes however vague.

We, however, want to blog for another reason...to make money!

Let me explain...

Search engines loves blogs. They contain good, relevant content and they often can have loads of links back to them.

The good news is that anyone can set up a blog without any website experience whatsoever. If you go to www.blogger.com you can set up your own blog within five minutes. Once you have a blog, you can start talking about your subject and promoting your own products and/or other people's products which will earn you a commission if anyone clicks through and buys something.

If you add new content to a website, it usually involves creating a new web page which will cost time and sometimes more money. On blogs, each new blog posting constitutes a new web page as far as search engines are concerned. You can add a new blog post really quickly so you can see how blogging helps you to attract the attention of search engines.

So how do you go about blogging for profit? Well here's a simple five step approach you can use to go and start earning today:

1) Go to blogger.com and set up a blog. Use your main keyword as the title of your blog. If it is not available, add world or planet to the keyword. For example "rose gardening world", "rose gardening planet"

2) Hire a writer, write your own optimised articles or search for free or reasonably priced Public Label Rights (PLR) articles on your niche subject that specifically focus on one set of keywords. The more articles, the better.

3) Post an article a day to your blog.

4) Write a press release about your blog and submit it to prweb.com

5) Use the blogger search function and find blogs related to yours. Make genuine comments on their blog and link back to yours.

Using this simple formula you can do very well in the search engines with minimal effort or technical know how.

This is just the first post on my new blog showing you how to build traffic to your site. I suggest you subscribe now to ensure you do not miss any advice because I am going to show you how to build traffic = build lists = build income.

Antonia Harrison from Build Traffic To Your Site.