SEO – the holy grail.  Something that’s so difficult to accomplish that only a select few can do it and they charge tens of thousands of dollars to optimize your site.

Wrong.

SEO is not mysterious.  Search Engine Optimization is not difficult, nor is search engine optimization relagated to the elite.  Anyone can do it – you don’t have to go to a search engine optimization service to get the most out of search engine optimization marketing – but it’s how well it is done that makes the difference.

Example – on one of my blogs, in a very competetive niche I am easily able to get into the first page through organic search results by using easy search engine optimization techniques.  Some of my pages are indexed almost immediately after I’ve made the blog post and within 1-2 days maximum I see them on the first page of results.

The keywords are not uncommon either – they are popular keywords and there is a lot of competition for them plus there are AdSense postings for those keywords.

I think that I am doing something right.

When you’re working towards search engine optimization, there are a few key things.

First off if you’re SEO’ing your blog – make use of the plugin called All In One SEO Pack – well worth it!  You can find it here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/.

I won’t go into how to set-up All In One SEO Pack (remember SEO = Search Engine Optimization) there are a lot of tutorials out there for this plugin.

Some of the things you do have control over are on-page optimization – this is a very simple and successful SEO strategy.  But even before we head down that path lets look at what you want your SEO goals to be.  This will really define what you want out of your SEO efforts and will guide among other things keyword research to help you find the long-tail keywords or low-hanging fruit.

Lets pick a product – acai berry.

As you research your product, you will look at finding relavent keywords and you will prioritize those keywords.  For example if you come up with 50 keywords you want to prioritize those keywords and work around those keywords.  You DO NOT want to stuff your page with all 50 keywords, that won’t work and may get your site banned.

Next up is your domain name.  It is always beneficial to use the keywords as part of the domain.  So you could use something like:

• acai berry scam
• benefits of acai berry
• Oprah acai berry
• acai berry side effects
• acai berry juice
• acai berries

I highly recommend putting the research of a $60 billion company behind you (Google) by making use of this site https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal – but do other research as well.  For example, visit the top 10 sites for the various keywords and see what makes them tick.

Those keywords above – from the link above also.

Don’t limit yourself to Google (though it is the largest SE out there) use their results for various keywords and examine those sites META tags (more on meta tags later on).  You could even use their meta tags.

Do they have articles?  What are they writing about?  I hope you know where I am going with this…  It’s called MARKET RESEARCH.

Part of your SEO strategy will also be linking.  We’re talking about internal linking to other pages on your site using good keywords.  For example if you were writing about acai berries you could link to another article on your site about acai berry juice with the term acai berry juice as the text of the link.  This adds some juice (excuse the pun) to the linked page.

You also want to try and get inbound links – this is a topic that is a post all by itself and something I will post in the next day or so.

On page factors are next.  You always want to limit stuff like Flash/JavaScript and other types of technologies.  The acronym KISS (keep it simple stupid) wasn’t created for the hell of it.  Remember it, and remember it well KISS.  KISS.  KISS.  There – now I just may show up in the results when someone is searching for KISS the rock band.  :-)

There are off-page factors to consider as well, such as buying links and technology to consider such as the hosts reliability and how well they tackle SPAM.  If the site is known to send SPAM they could be blocked and any SEO efforts are wasted.

This post is getting towards 800 words so I’ll stop here and over the next few days we will go into a couple of topics:

1. On-page search engine optimization
2. Internal linking
3. Link building

Tomorrow or the next day I’ll go into on-page search engine optimization and we’ll delve into the other topics over the next week.

Stay tuned!

Mohamed

Technorati Tags: acai berries, acai berry, easy search engine optimization techniques, on page optimization, search engine optimization, search engine optimization marketing, search engine optimzation services, SEO, simple succssful seo strategy

From time to time, as I surf the web looking for new ways to optimize my own websites or blogs, I come across tools that are too good to be kept to myself.

Here is one such tool.

This is developed by a company called Hubspot.

They run a blog also, and have some great post but this one caught my eye because you can win $100.00 Amazon Gift Card – Top 10 Ways NOT To Spend $12 Million on Marketing.

Why $12 million, you may ask?  Well they recently raised $12 Million in additional funding for their company.

What is HubSpot all about?  Here it is, direct from their About page:

HubSpot’s vision is to provide a (killer) marketing application and provide great advice to small businesses enabling them to leverage these disruptive effects of the internet to “get found” by more prospects shopping in their niche and to convert a higher percentage of prospects into customers.

HubSpot is an inbound marketing system to help your small or medium sized business to get found on the Internet by the right prospects and convert more of them into leads and customers.  HubSpot inbound marketing helps your company get found by the qualified prospects that are looking for the products or services that you sell in search engines, blogs and the blogosphere, and social media.  Once these qualified visitors are on your website, HubSpot helps you convert more of them into leads and paying customers through landing pages, lead intelligence and marketing analytics.

HubSpot is web-based, does not require any IT staff, and is designed to be used by a marketing person, not a techie.  Our company, our blog and our products have been featured in the Wall Street Journal Online, MarketingSherpa, PC Magazine, AdAge, and MarketingProfs.

Not much more I could say about them.  But I’m not here to talk about HubSpot, but about a freaking awesome tool that they provide FOR FREE.  It’s called Website Grader and you need to use it. 

BUT wait until you’re done reading this post and then DIGG this post, STUMBLE this post, and SPHINN this post.

First I ran my site, http://www.oibo.org through the Website Grader and this is where I scored out of 100…

Not bad.  According to HubSpot they have assessed over 300,000 websites and your score on the 1-100 scale represents the percentage of those sites that your site tops (kind of like the SAT).

So this means that my site is better than 92% of the sites that they have analyzed or assessed.

Here is the summary that is provided by Website Grader…

Not bad, I’d say.

So where can you access this FREAKING AWESOME TOOL?

Look no further.  You can run your site – or your competitions – in the Website Grader by HubSpot.

The tool doesn’t give you any new information – meaning it provides some general information about where your site has been found.  For example, it told me that I don’t have a presence on de.licio.us, but have a presence on DIGG – but what about the gazillion other social media sites?

One of the items noted was goofy – the H1 tag.  The report said that there is more than 1 H1 tag — there would be on a blog.

Using the tool is super easy…

Enter some information in a few fields and click the “Generate Report” button and within a few minutes your report will be ready and a copy e-mailed to you.

Website Grader is a great general tool to let you know how well your site is doing and how it scores.  As with any tool, no one tool is perfect and you need to stay on top of SEO techniques and practice ongoing SEO to ensure that your site ranks well for the terms that it has targetted.

Before you check out their tool – could ya DIGG this post, STUMBLE this post, and SPHINN this post?

Technorati Tags: hubspot, SEO, seo reports, website grader, website grader seo report

Hi,

What do images, Flickr and SEO have in common?  More than you would think.  By now you’re probably well aware why exactly you should be adding images to your blog posts — especially if you are new and are looking at gaining a large base of readers.

Visit my flickr photostream – http://www.flickr.com/photos/25687320@N05/ - not much happening there right now, but as I continue to add images to my posts, the stream will start to flesh out.

Here is something cool – http://www.flickr.com/photos/25687320@N05/2417349177/ - when you click on the link make note of the comment and the link to OIBO.ORG.  Although flickr sets all links to NOFOLLOW — the link being there is still beneficial.  Remember the NOFOLLOW does not stop the SE’s from indexing the site – it only prevents them from passing any pagerank to sites that are being linked to.  Not a big deal.

Adding images to your posts, and then using descriptive tags for the image is beneficial in several ways.  First off, if someone is looking for an image of say credit cards and keys in the term “credit card” into Google, what do they see if they do an image search?

They get back only 6,000,000 images versus 273,000,000 indexed results.  How hard do you think it is to get into the TOP 10 for credit card when there are 273,000,000 other results there?  It won’t be easy unless you employ some, say, questionable tactics.

But it might be easier to get into 6,000,000 results for the term credit card.

You get a double-whammy when adding images.  Not only does your post get indexed, but the images ALSO get indexed.

When using Flickr for SEO, there are some simple steps needed to optimize your images (you can read the full post at http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2006/09/24/using-flickr-for-image-search-optimization/):

• When you upload your photos, ALWAYS add tags. The “tags” or keywords that you associate with your photo will make it findable to users when they are searching, and lend keyword weight to the photo’s page. Enter as many tags that accurately should be keywords associated with your photo as possible. Note! When entering multi-word tags you must put them within quotation marks. Ex: “pickup truck”
• This should be obvious, but have your photos publicly viewable — not just restricted to viewing by your friends and family.
• Create a descriptive title for the image. This adds yet more keyword weight to the photo’s page within Flickr.
• Enter a description under the photo, or write something about the picture.
• Sometimes, add a note or two directly onto the photo, particularly humorous ones. Flickr allows you to select a rectangular area, and associate some text with it that will appear as tooltips when users mouse over it. Adding a humorous note or two may encourage users to participate on your photo’s page.
• If the photo is location specific, go into Flickr’s tools and geotag the picture. To do this, go into the Flickr set tools, and locate the location on the Yahoo! Map, then drag the picture onto the map to pinpoint its location. (see my posting about Flickr’s new geotagging)
• Create thematic Sets for your photos, and add each pic to the set(s) appropriate for it. This provides yet more contextual clues to search engines about the content of the photo’s page, and it will allow a user arriving at the page a way to easily look at other similar pix you’ve taken.
• Browse through Flickr’s Groups for groups that are dedicated to pix that would be related to your photo. Sometimes it helps to search for photos using keywords you used in your tags, and then see what Groups other’s photos are members of. Join those groups, and then add your photos apropos to the group’s theme. The more links to your photo page, the more important your photo will be considered, so add it to a number of groups. Ideally, add it to groups which have a lot of members — the number of members indicates the popularity and traffic of the group.
• Link each of your Flickr photo pages to your website, or to related pages on your website. You can add hyperlinks into the Description field below the photo. Use link text that has a call to action, or which tells the user what to expect if they click on the link. Ex: “We sell this product at our website.”, “This view from tables at our Restaurant.”, “This room is available at our Bed & Breakfast“. It’s best to link to specific pages of related content as a richer indicator for pagerank transfer.
• Link to your Flickr photo pages from your website. You could use text links back to Flickr, but even better, post the Flickr photos directly on your site’s pages, using the HTML code Flickr provides under the “All Sizes” tool. The HTML code they provide hyperlinks the photo back to it’s Flickr page. Why is this important? It provides a bit more link weight to the photo’s page, and allows users of your site to go through and browse your other related photos easily.
• Finally, post as many optimized pix as possible. This is mostly a game of many small fractions adding up to large, cumulative results. The many pages of pix, linking back to your site will help build your overall PageRank. The more pages you have, the more likely it is that other Flickr users will find your content, and link to your content. It also expands your chances of having a lucky picture or two find its way onto a viral popularity wave which spurs many users to send links of your pic to their friends, or a reporter might find that one of your pix is ideal for their news story.

Here are a few more resources on flickr and SEO (search engine optimization):

• http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/flickr-seo-in-action-google-crawling-photo-tags-and-more/853/
• Inspiration for this post – http://www.tyleringram.com/blog/save-monthly-bandwidth-by-using-flickr - Tyler Ingram as actually talking about how you can save your monthly bandwidth by using flickr to host your images instead of using your own host account
• http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014067.html
• http://jameseo.com/ - a pretty good site that presents SEO techniques and uses video to show you how they work.  There are posts on Link Tunneling, along with other SEO topics.  Some of the information might be old news but nevertheless there is some good stuff there.

Here is a YouTube video showing you how to optimize your flickr account for search engine optimization purposes:

If you know of other, more recent resources please do share them with others here.

Technorati Tags: flickr, flickr seo, image, images on blog posts, photostream, pictures, pix, SEO, using flickr for search engine optimization

Hi,

Here is another traffic/writing technique to help you gain more traffic to your site, and it doesn’t rely on black hat traffic techniques.

I’ve mentioned many times in the past to look at your web stats.  There is a very good reason for it.

Your traffic stats reveal something VERY important – and that is keywords used to find your site.  I’ve gotta be careful here not to reveal some hot keywords for you – but for example you go through your log files and you notice that there are xx hits to your website for the term “internet businness oppurtunity” – what will you do?

Well most people would (and probably do) ignore their stats.  Too bad, so sad – you loose.

What you should be doing is examining your stats and writing posts with those keywords.  Think about it.  Maybe 50, 500 or 5,000 people have to your site with those keywords – you should probably be working on using those keywords in other articles, perhaps as anchor text in your link exchange.

Rather than 5,000 why not get 50,000 people visiting your site?

Whatever you do, you should not be turning a blind eye to your stats.  They provide very useful insight into the people that are finding your site.

Regards,

Technorati Tags: Internet Business, internet business blog, internet marketing, SEO

Hi,

A couple of posts ago (8 WordPress Plugins You Must Have For Your WordPress Blog) I mentioned a plugin called Related Posts.  I have since installed that plug-in, in addition to a few others so that I can track how far and deep the BIG 3 search engines scour the site.

I use another plugin called Crawl Rate Tracker written by Patrick Altoft to see how far the SE’s are scanning the site.

I discovered two things:

1. Prior to installing Related Posts, eventhough I was getting SEs indexing the site they were dependent on links found through tags and via posts that refer back to other posts.  I had installed Crawl Rate Tracker prior to installing Related Posts plugin and noticed that the SEs were not hitting the deep links on the blog on posts from Day 1.  I tried one SEO technique, that is to refer to previous posts when applicable and that helped — but you need to be consistent.
2. I installed Related Posts only a few days ago and noticed via Crawl Rate Tracker that more pages are getting indexed (or atleast visited) by the search engines!

I also noticed this:

That is the URL to my feed – did you notice that the relates posts also show up there?

When I checked my Crawl Rate Tracker stats, this url http://www.oibo.org/feed was the second most visited url on the site.  The first, of course, being http://www.oibo.org.  So this tells me that as the SE’s crawl my site and they hit the FEED they will be able to crawl even more and get down and deep within all the posts instead of what is on the front page only.

Related posts only show up on single post pages, they will not show up on the main blog page.

I am going to continue to watch Crawl Rate Tracker to see how well the SEs respond to the Related Posts and will report back my findings.

Regards,

Mohamed

Technorati Tags: Internet Business, internet marketing, SEO

Hi,

Have you ever been over at SEO BOOK?  No?  Well you gotta go there!  I used this site in the past to get insight into the world of SEO and my blackhat days.  But recently I was poking around and came across this great mind map – check it out!

Think the stuff there is not worth anything?  Consider this – many gurus will take this information; but their own unique twist on it and sell it for A LOT of money.

There – I’ve just dropped a BIG HINT for your next information product.

…man, I can’t believe I’m giving away all this information, for free!!

Regards,

Mohamed

Technorati Tags: Internet Business, internet marketing, search engine optimization, SEO