OVBlogger: Blogging and SEO

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So, here we go…

Tellman & Shawn won a Ferrari from Eben Pagan’s Altitude JV Contest. But it lives with Shawn in Atlanta, and they’ve decided to give it away! I asked Tellman why, and he said, “Think about it, Pat. I live in Vermont!” Well, yeah. I guess there aren’t too many Ferrari’s in rural Vermont.

And Shawn, well… he’d rather get you excited about making it big online.

True.

Get into the contest and you can not just win a Ferrari, but you can be Overcome Everything’s spokesperson! How powerful is that?

And in the bargain, all you have to do is be the best at following the step-by-step instructions inside The ListBuilding Club.

Wow.

Anyone can win this, and you can get in for just $1. Yep. One, slim dollar.

http://easyseotricks.com/lbc2

Check it out. Get excited! This is going to be enormous! We’ve been working really hard to make this the coolest contest on the Web. I mean, come on. Russell gave away a Corvette. That was cool. But THIS is a Ferrari.

Even if you just sell it, you’re a huge winner.

At least check it out. Everyone will come away a winner in this one.

Popularity: 5% [?]

You know, it sucks when things go wrong in cyberspace. And they always do.

Last month, the autoresponder I use in connection with a List Builder Pro account had a DOS attack. We got no notice of this, and the only way to find out was to put in a ticket to their support desk, which of course, they never answered.

But here’s the dumbest thing of all: I didn’t have my list backed up! That was really, really stupid on my part. So, remember this story.

I was assured by the List Builder Pro people that all the leads had been saved and would be restored. So, I waited. And waited.

Two weeks later, I got just over 2,500 of my leads back. I figured it might take a while to get everything re-loaded, so I waited some more. But nada. So, I wrote to the help desk again, asking where the rest of my list was.  We’re talking about 6,500 people. Not a huge amount, but a lot to me. My list was just over 12,000, and I was making good affiliate commissions in everything I promoted.

No response.

No nothing from List Builder Pro — Erik James’s program, to be exact.

Finally, I get this message like, “These things happen.”

No apology.

No offer to assuage my anger and frustration with their lack of responsivness — NOTHING.

So, by this time, I’m hurting and really, really pissed off.

It was definitely MY own fault that I hadn’t backed up my list since July. My fault. My loss.

But then, I couldn’t use the autoresponder, which is integrated right in with List Builder Pro, for a month. They charged me!

OK… no offer to reimburse for time lost — STILL nothing from them.

So, now, I’m like really frickin’ fried. I told them to cancel my account AFTER they delivered the leads that I had paid for. None of them had gone into my autoresponder, but they said they delivered the leads, right? I mean, I basically paid for leads that went into the crapper.

I’ve been with them for 2 years. This was the second time that their system just crapped out and they are totally irresponsible in the way they handle customers! I mean, you wait for weeks to even get a response to their help desk.

So, what did they do? They immediately cancelled my accounts — THAT I’VE ALREADY PAID FOR!

Basically, they totally suck. I was an affiliate for them, and told my people that the fastest way to build a list was with co-registration. This was a great service, and yadda,  yadda.

Now, they’ve totally made me lose all confidence in their system. Had they been concilliatory — sympathetic even, kind… NO. They’re arrogant about everything that happened.

What’s my recommendation?

If you have List Builder Pro,  back up your leads every day. You never know when this could happen again. If you’re using their autoresponder, stop.  I’ve found another one that seems pretty powerful called “ByReply” at http://byreply.com. Check that one out.

I contacted Get Response, but they won’t allow you to import co-reg leads, though they have a co-reg service. Makes me laugh. You can only use their service, if you buy their co-reg leads, which are overpriced. Kiss it.

iContact is totally too expensive.

I wish AWeber would change their policy re: coregistration. They’re still the best autoresponder, hands down. But I have to say that ByReply is much more sophisticated. Many more options and easy to navigate. I’ll let you know how it goes.

But the re-confirm thing  just sucks.

Moral: Don’t be dumb like me. Back everything up. Grr.

Popularity: 5% [?]

So, have you taken the plunge and upgraded to WP 2.7 yet? I waited a while because of the complete overhaul. I decided I didn’t have time for any hassles in that moment.

But I had to install a new blog for work, and Wow! It’s pretty slick, eh? I think it will be much easier for new bloggers to find things. You know that Posts means you can write, edit, and create categories.

Media means pictures and videos, though I was never able to get that feature to work in 2.6.3. Maybe it will work now. One can hope.

Links… Simple. Blogroll and links of any kind.

Pages and Comments are self-explanatory.

And then, there’s Appearance. How much clearer is that than Design? I mean, we cyber-ninjas know what design means, but new people could get confused, no? Appearance relates to Windows  desktop “Appearance” and it seems to click right in. Great!

Then, there’s Plugins, Users, Tools, and Settings. All pretty straightforward, and all in ONE place! That’s what always griped me. I love the new interface, how it’s all organized intelligently on the left side of the screen.

I also like the “Quick Edit” option for posts. What used to be the “Manage” tab, with posts and pages is now just “Pages,” and then”edit.” When you go there and rest your mouse on the post you want to change, a menu comes up, and you can edit, quick edit, delete, and view. If you just need to change a category or add tags, “Quick Edit” is neat.  You just change it/them quickly without needing to go to another screen, save, and go.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with WordPress 2.7, but I really am tired of ugrading and I just read a post that they’re already working on WordPress 2.8. Ah well… Long as you guys keep making WP better and better… It’s a fabulous software, and hard to believe that it’s still free.

All you WP devs rock!

Oh, and I upgraded today. Glad I did. Mike Paetzold told me it was great. That’s not to say I didn’t believe him, ‘course. There was just a lag between when he told me it was cool and when I had time to make the change.

Thanks, Mike! You’re 110% right, as usual.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Are you afraid of your blog?

I mean, does the idea of getting into the guts of it kind of freak you out?

Well… don’t let it.

I have learned EVERYTHING I know by fooling around with stuff. Seriously. I never had a computer class in my life. But… I can do techy stuff, and often surprise myself by figuring out stuff that people much smarter than me can’t.

So, play with the blog. Get into it and learn every part of it. You can’t kill it, not really. As long as you back everything up before doing things like upgrading, you’ll be fine.

And playing with the themes seems daunting, I know. Did to me, too, and I still don’t really know PHP. But, I can get in and make changes to it so that it does the things I want it to do.

Usually…

I make mistakes. Of course, I do! Everyone does. Even people who think they know what they’re doing.

But you always have the original files to fall back on. If you screw up your main index in the template, no big deal… just go into your FTP program, delete the one you messed up and replace it with the original that you have sitting on your hard drive, right?

And if you’re so new that you’re still using the Kubrick theme or the other default theme in WordPress, no problem. You can just go over to http://WordPress.org and download a new copy of WordPress. In the wp-content folder, you’ll find the theme with all fresh pages.

Playing around with codes and stuff can be scary, and it was to me at first, too. But if you don’t get your hands dirty, you’ll never learn.

My hands and fingernails are perfectly black. I do this stuff every single day.

And I’m still alive.

Popularity: 8% [?]

So, I’m reading the Alexa newsletter today, which I enjoy every week. They make IBP (IBusiness Promoter), which is an SEO tool that’s pretty powerful.

Anyway, there was an article about how to get high rankings from Google.

It’s pretty simple, really.

1. They want great content. And, they want you to use appropriate keywords so that the spiders can tell what your site is about. This is first and foremost. If you’re not giving great content, don’t even bother to think that Google will ever be impressed because it won’t.

1. Google also wants links from other websites in the same niche as your website or blog. This also helps them to see what your website/blog is about and rather gives it validation. And they want the links to be “natural,” not all occurring at a certain point in time, as in miraculously overnight. This happens when you buy site-wide links from a link broker. Very bad idea. So, don’t ever do that.

Simple, eh?

Don’t try to fool Google. Keep your site clean. Keep its history clean, and provide great stuff.  When you do that, you have a much better chance of ranking than with tactics like paid links. Google doesn’t like to think that you’re trying to scam the system.

It’s more work, no? Why bother?

Popularity: 8% [?]

I hope everyone is in the midst of a wonderful holiday week. Though today was “back to work” for me, I was actually anxious to get back to it. I can’t take more than 5 days away from the action!

So, what did I do? I spent the entire day after Christmas listening to SEO stuff. Exciting for me, boring for some, but I really enjoy learning and knowing more about search every day.

One thing that I realized is that I’ve never written about in this blog is proper linking. Oh, we talk about the incoming links or backlinks plenty, but did you ever consider the links pointing out to other places on your page and what about the pages you choose to link to? Are they worth bothering with or just a waste of your time?

One big no-no is to have unrelated links on your website. So, if you’re in the golfing niche, your links should be all about golf, and you shouldn’t include a link about knitting for a friend. It’s bad Internet business.

And did you also know that you’re passing some page rank to all of those pages? Let’s say you have 5 links on your page, each of them gets 1/5 the page rank link juice that your page has. So, the more links on a page, the less likely it should be for you to want to link there.

Think about it: If a page has 200 links, and you’re one of them, 1/200th is a lot smaller than 1/5, not to mention that the page is a probable link farm, which Google disallows. This could put you into a “bad” neighborhood, and will not help your page rank or your reputation with the grand Pooh-Bah search giant.

So, be careful when choosing links, and when choosing pages to link to. It’s just good SEO and good business.

Popularity: 9% [?]

So, I’m working on a top secret project that I’m very excited about. As part of it, I took on the onus of defining what a search engine spider does.

People who aren’t into SEO probably don’t really know. They probably have a general idea, but it may not be what you think.

Spiders don’t decide where your page will rank in Google, the algorithm does that.

Spiders don’t need to be alerted, they’ll just show up.

Spiders aren’t always good spiders.

Spiders do crawl the web. They go into every nook and cranny where they’re allowed and they gather pages. They take the data on those pages and condense it, then send it back to the search engine so that the algorithm can be applied. That’s what determines where your page will show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

You don’t need to do anything special for them to show up. Submitting your website to all the search engines is a waste of time, and paying a service to do that for you is a waste of money. Spiders will come.

How well you prepare your pages by having the right META tags and keywords on your page, and perhaps a robots.txt, to tell them which pages to notice and which to ignore, will help you when it comes time for the algorithm to be applied.

But that’s if the spider is sending your page to a search engine. Some spiders are black widows. Some of them go around gathering pages that have email addresses so that creepy spammers can harvest those addresses and spam you with abandon.

Yet, most of the spiders that frequent your page are the good kind, and without them, there would be no search engines.

The nicest thing you can do for a spider, kind of like leaving cookies out for Santa, is to give them the information they need to send to the search engine. It’s the nicest thing for you, too, because unlike Santa, they are real, and they mean the difference between you showing up in the search indexes or being an orphan.

If you do nothing else, learn what META tags are and include a title and description for every page. Remember, too, that each page is different and requires a different title and description. And don’t be lazy!

Remember, search engine traffic is free. The better you prepare your pages for the spiders, the better your website will do.

Popularity: 15% [?]

So, have you gotten IT yet?

We have been selling this program for $3,995… I kid you not.

And now, Tellman has lost it.

Totally gone bonkers.

But, he’s a pretty nice guy and decided that he wanted to do something cool for people. So, he’s just giving this whole Perpetual Marketing Machine program…

AWAY!

I still can’t believe it.

It’s not going to last much longer, though, so if you want THE definitive guide on how to make money and build a humongous list for nada, it’s time to visit http://easyseotricks.com/13th

I did this earlier this year, and it’s increased the size of my list dramatically, plus I’ve tripled my income.

What’s to lose? Get over there and grab it before it’s too late.

Popularity: 14% [?]

You know, there is no better search engine spider bait than good content. It’s like their sustenance, their mana, their raison d’etre.

But I’m talking good, relevant content, not crap that you throw together, swipe elsewhere, or buy rights to. I mean good, unique content that teaches, explores, reviews, or entertains. You need to learn either how to make this or how to acquire it, if you want to rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Blogging is awesome, of course, or I wouldn’t do it almost every day. It’s a great way to communicate with the people in your niche. Hopefully, some of them are on your list or even better, if they aren’t, you have a lovely big optin box in the topmost widget of sidebar.

But there are other cool places to put content that can give you great spider juice because you’re making incoming links from high-ranking websites.

We all know about article directories, right? The premiere directories are, of course, Chris Knight’s Ezine Articles. It’s just the best. And then, there is Go Articles, also good, and if you want to distribute, just to get traffic (because dupe content won’t really help your SEO cause), there’s iSnare.com, where you can pay $2 and have your article distributed all over the Web.

But what about the Web 2.0 content sites? Do you know how many of them there are, and how awesome they can be?

We’re talking…

Scribd: With a page rank of 7, it’s a heavy hitter. Just never, ever put a link in there or your entire IP address will be banned. I’m back in their good graces as an author, and that pleases moi.

HubPages: What a cool site. You can be commercial there all you want, even add modules from Amazon and eBay.  Page rank: 5

Zimbio: You can upload your blog feed articles and have them distributed to different Wikis. I would allow the spiders to find the content on my blog first, though. You’re serving dupe content. So, check the cache date of your blog first, then Zimbio the stuff. Or, better, just write something new. Page rank: 6

PBWiki: Create your own Wiki free. You can add articles, videos, press releases, or whatever. You can link pages together. Like if you’re writing an article about Web 2.0 content sites, you could link the Zimbio and HubPages pages together. You can categorize posts. And anyone who want to can add to your wiki.

Ning: Create your own social network around your Niche. Very neat. You can add video, audio, pictures, make blog posts, and so on. Nifty.  Ning is a PR 7, but you’d have to build your own page rank there by building up your membership. Not hard to do when you’re offering cool, free information.

Tumblr: Much like Ning in its composition and what you can add. Yet, this is strictly NON-commercial. If you put a link to an affiliate site into Tumblr, they’ll just suspend your account without warning, and all your hard work will be for naught. So, instead, link to another of your Web 2.0 properties, right?

Squidoo: This was probably one of the first, if not THE first Web 2.0 content site. Squidoo is tons of fun and they have plenty of different modules you can add from RSS feeds to polls to pull quotes. It’s a blast.

Gather: This is a great site and it promotes the group atmosphere. Each time you submit something there’s the ability to send it to whatever groups you belong to. Pretty sweet. Of all the sites, this is definitely one of my favorites.

But there are many more content sites in the Web 2.0 arena, and they’re all great. The only thing you need to remember, if you’re a marketer, is to read the terms of service first and see what each site will and won’t allow. There’s nothing worse than having your site yanked from under you, especially when you’ve spent time building it up.

I try to add something to each of my content sites every week. Over time, you’re really building a body of work. If it’s good stuff, it’s not only the search engines that will notice, but people in your niche will notice, as well.  When they like your stuff, they’ll join your list and the bigger your list, the more you’ll make from it.

There are all kinds of reasons for wanting to put as much cool, unique content out there as possible.  The most important of them is that you’ll start to be noticed. With all of the gazillion bloggers, article writers, and Twitterers there are online, you need something solid to give you a leg up.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Here’s the value of creating an ask campaign… don’t let it slip by you!

Popularity: 17% [?]

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