OVBlogger: Blogging and SEO

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Hey did you know that there’s a site where you can go and find your website? If it’s not there, the wiki will create a page for it. Then, you just fill in the details. Title, Description, and Related URLs. It’s pretty cool.

The site is AboutUs.org

The Alexa ranking for the site is 1,045, so it never hurts to be listed.

With an Alexa like that, you’d think I’d have seen the site before. Hmm.

Anyway, they probably get a lot of traffic, and as the site becomes more important and gets ranked high in Google… never hurts.

AboutUs also has a link to your site’s Alexa page and Whois at Domain Tools.com, another pretty slick site.

Ever see your SEO score? You can in the DomainTools report. That’s pretty cool. This site gets an 85% rating. Not too bad. I just don’t write with my keywords enough. That’s my issue. I just write.

Bad marketing, eh? I just figure I’ll catch more readers with the real me than the SEO me. She’s really boring. All that META tagging and link gathering and on-page optimization! It’s almost too much to bear!

Naw. It’s totally fun.

Popularity: 45% [?]

Google seems to want to take over the world, and sometimes their ubiquity scares me.They’re into everything, including browsers, as of  last week.

But I have to say that what they give us for zip, zilch, zero is truly impressive. I love most of the stuff that Google puts out, and I’ve been using their search engine since 1998. Ten years, and I rarely use anything else. Gotta love Google.

One of their tools is extremely powerful, and really important if you want to know how to improve your site for search. It’s called Google Webmaster Tools and you can get a free account at http://google.com/webmasters. I signed up early on and have been checking in weekly or so to find out what’s going on with my blog and my websites.

First, you get crawl stats. What pages are working? What pages aren’t? And you get the results for web search and mobile search. Plus, you get information on your pages. Where might you have dupe title tags or descriptions that are too long or too short?

Then, you get some down and dirty stats. What are the top search terms that people plug into Google to find you? How many subscribers do you have? How often does Google crawl, and more. In the Index tab, you can see who links to your homepage, how many pages of your site Google has indexed and other cool stuff.

I like the Links tab because you can see just who links to pages in your site. For a blog, that’s important. You’ll see what posts people like enough to link back to you. Great info to have, eh? I mean, when you know what people like and want, give them more of it!

Just be sure that your site has a sitemap. They’re not hard to make, and if you search, you can find tools that will build one for you. WordPress has a plugin called Google Sitemaps that works great for a blog. You can get it here. (It’s a big ugly link you don’t want to type in; trust me.)

And then, there are tools. You can set your crawl rate (if you want the spiders to use less of your precious bandwidth), they will help you to generate a robots.txt. This is especially important if you have pages in your site that you don’t want spidered. You can stop them from spidering whole directories or single pages.

But I encourage you to check out Google Webmaster Tools. There’s a wealth of information inside, and if you give Google what it wants, guess what? You’ll do better in the search results, too.

And Webmaster Tools is definitely the right price. Can’t do better than free.

Popularity: 27% [?]

clipped from wordpress.org Stefan Esser recently warned developers of the dangers of SQL Column Truncation and the weakness of mt_rand().  With his help we worked around these problems and are now releasing WordPress 2.6.2.  If you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade.  With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password.  The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit.  However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.  Stefan Esser will release details of the complete attack shortly.  The attack is difficult to accomplish,  but its mere possibility means we recommend upgrading to 2.6.2.

Hmm… That means what if you don’t have passwords? Probably not much, but I’ll still upgrade to be safe.

What’s that they say about better safe than sorry? I’ve been hacked before and it’s totally no fun. That’s why it looks as if I just started blogging last year. Not so. I’ve been blogging since Blogger first opened. That was a while back.

But I also lost 2 years of posts from this blog when the (*)(&^(*& hacker did his worst. That totally hurt. It was my own fault for not having regular backups.

If you don’t have the plugin “WordPress Database Backup” go get it now at:
http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup

Can save you from a world of hurt.

Popularity: 36% [?]

So, what’s the very most important part of creating your online business?

Hmm… You know already.

KEYWORD RESEARCH!

Why would you start anything online if nobody is looking for what you want to sell?

Monday evening at 8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Central, 6 p.m. Mountain, and 5 p.m. Pacific, I’m doing my very first slide presentation at Xiosoft and hoping it comes out well.

I’m totally excited! I did this cool Power Point that lays it all out, and I’m rarin’ to go.

So, if keyword research is something you haven’t mastered yet, you absolutely HAVE to come.

But there’s a catch…

Yep.

You have to be a Lifetime Member of Blogging4Boomers.com

If you come on over, you’ll get…

• 40 + Videos to Show you How-to, Step-by-Step
• Nearly 40 Articles About Blogging to Get You Going  in the Right Direction
• Audio Interviews with Some of the Brightest Minds in Internet Marketing
• 10 Mindmaps to Guide You Through Technical Aspects of What You Want to Accomplish
• Pat’s Personal Plugins and Ping List
• A Web 2.0 Directory to Point You to the Hot Sites
• 13 Great Bonuses to Help You Succeed…

And most importantly, you get me. Twice a month I get on the  phone and answer questions about blogging and Internet Marketing for my members. They’re an awesome group that wants to act on things and become successful, and I’m thrilled and honored to be part of their quest.

I think I’m a born teacher, though I never realized it.  My bosses always shoved me into the role from my first job to well… my current job. If you’re a member of Tellman’s ListBuilding Club, you hear me twice a month there answering questions, too. I love it! It’s probably my most favorite part of the job. ‘Course I love it all, but interacting with people is really fun.

But come on over to Blogging4Boomers.com, and check me out. Sign up, and if you absolutely hate everything, there’s a 100% full money-back guarantee. But you won’t. I think you’ll be happily impressed.

Let’s get busy and crack the Internet marketing code together!

Popularity: 27% [?]

I saw a rumor in Facebook that says Google is dancing.

(For the non-SEO folks, that means they’re brewing up a new algorithm.)

Hmm…

That could be good.

That could be bad.

It may have something to do with the social aspects of the web these days, which I think is pretty smart. I’ve said it here before (and elsewhere) that it will one day become more about what the people think is good and want more of than what the spiders think.

Maybe Google will become like a Nielsen’s rating kind of company. You know, it’s a staid marketing tactic, right?

FIGURE OUT WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT AND THEN, GIVE IT TO THEM.

Interesting to speculate on what will happen, but of course, it’s all just speculation. We’ll have to see what Google’s change will bring.

I’m hoping it’s something that leans toward sites that are legitimately involved with social marketing. That would be cool. I love that end of things, and have been working in that milieu for about three years now.

‘course I was late to the game. Web 2.0 was really coined in 2004 by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media. But I remember having a Del.icio.us account wow… about three years ago, I guess.

Anyway, as I’ve been saying, social marketing is going to play a huge roll in search. I can’t wait to see how it all plays out.

Popularity: 22% [?]

I had a call with Erik Stafford, the Faster Webmaster, last night and it totally rocked!

If you want to hear it…

Go to…

http://easyseotricks.com/PatSpillsAll

You’ll get a lot of great content:

• Learn how to get your blog onto the first page of Google!
• Learn how you can have a blog and not write a word.
• Learn all about anchor text and why it’s important.

and lots, lots more.

It’s a gas! We had a blast, and I got a ton of new members into Blogging4Boomers.

I can’t wait to work with them.

Popularity: 23% [?]

In my travels, I’ve become involved with tons and tons of video. I mean, we use video in The ListBuilding Club. I use video in my own site, Blogging4Boomers.com and with various other projects. I really enjoy it and we just bought a Mino Flip Cam. It totally rocks! It’s so simple that anyone can use it. Point and make a video.

Where I find issue is with distribution. I mean I like Tube Mogul a lot. It’s a free distribution service, but it only sends out videos, no podcasts, and no social bookmarks, either. But it has better stats than other services.

We’ve been using Traffic Geyser and when I say “we” I mean, me personally and Overcome Everything. We use it for all of the videos we send out (and that’s a LOT of videos). It’s a great way to submit not just the video but the podcast, a blog entry, and the social bookmarking is included. It’s $97 a month, but you can get a $1 trial.

However, I’m finding that some of my descriptions aren’t getting through, so no option is perfect.

But…

My friend, Cyndi Parker, has just opened a site called Easy Push Button Traffic. It’s the same price as Traffic Geyser, and it not only distributes video and podcasts, it also distributes articles and press releases. How cool is that?

If the software works as well as the affiliate manager does, it’s sweet! It’s probably the best affiliate area I’ve seen. Lots of tools, all well organized, and I know Cyndi. She’s a very cool lady.

Anyway, it’s an alternative to Traffic Geyser, which I also enjoy. I encourage you to check them both out and see which one is right for you.

Popularity: 21% [?]

I love the first Tuesday of the month. That’s when Kyle Battis, Brian Edmondson, and I do the monthly “Marathon” calls. We call them that because they last for three hours! During them, we answer questions about the content for the month in the ListBuilding Club and Internet marketing questions in general.

Why do I love it?

I just love helping folks who are new to this business. If I’d had The ListBuilding Club 5 years ago when I started with Internet Marketing, I’d be so much further ahead than I am now. And the ability to ask experts questions about what I was doing would have been invaluable.

The people on the calls are generally stuck with something. Either they need to focus on a niche, they have a technical issue that is easily solved by someone who’s been around a while, or they need explanations of the who, what, when, where, and why. I totally love being able to part the clouds for them. Some of the simplest things can be so danged frustrating when you start!

That’s what makes the ListBuilding Club so awesome. You can have a business up and running in a very short period of time, if you just watch the videos and take action! That’s the thing most people leave out. They watch and go, “Yeah! I should do that,” but they never do.  What’s cool about the members of the ListBuilding Club is that most of them take the time to DO, and they’re finding varied levels of success.

It’s awesome!

And I have to say that Brian Edmondson is awesome with video. His instruction is simple, but not simplistic. He’s straght-forward and has a good camera presence so that people warm up to him instantly. He makes the learning painless.

I could go on and on, but it’s because I’m kind of high right now. No, not THAT kind of high… The kind that makes feel good about helping people.

Love it!

Popularity: 40% [?]