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I did a call the other night about  blogging, and one of the questions I was asked was, “How can I tell if someone else has already used the material I bought from an outsourcer?”  I didn’t have a good web software or other source for that, and it bothered me. I’m known for having the answers, and when I’m asked a question I can’t answer fuly, well… I can’t rest until I find an answer and provide it.

What I’ve done to track down dupe content in the past is just to grab a unique phrase from whatever it is, and Google it. You’d be surprised at how Google can catch stuff like that. But, it’ s certainly not a foolproof solution.

Today, I found a site called “CopyScape,” and it’s not a hidden resource. In fact, Google partners with them to find dupe content on the Web. You can run a free search there for any web page, or you can pay $0.05 per search for content pieces. That means, you can do lots of searches very inexpensively. You can also monitor your content for folks, who might be pulling it right from your site.  That’s pretty sweet, if you worry about that sort of thing.

It’s happened to me. Someone decided to rip off my blog verbatim, and put it on his own blog without proper attribution. Grr. As a professional writer, that really pisses me off!

But I’m lucky with outsource content. I have two really great outsource people that I trust.

But if I were buying a lot of articles from Elance.com, or one of the other outsource sites, from people that I didn’t know, you can betcha I’d be using CopyScape to check every piece before I paid good money for recycled articles. You should, too.

I’m so excited to have a friend of mine take the time to make a great video for my blog. His name is Wayne Sharer, and he’s done a great job of explaining the basics of keyword research, and I know that if you’re just starting out and aren’t sure of the process… Wayne will clear things up for you, so pay attention!

Learn something? Well… I hope you have and that you’ll visit Wayne at http://YourTrafficStarterBlog.com. He’s got some great traffic videos for you there, and I know they’ll be helpful, especially if you’re just starting out.

I’ll be back atcha with another post on Wednesday. I’m actually on my way to New York City today. You see, Overcome Everything is nominated as one of the fastest growing companies in the country for the American Business Awards. I’m really excited because I was lucky enough to get to write the entry that landed us the nomination.

So, Tellman is taking a bunch of us to the dinner and the ceremony. Pretty cool. Wish us luck! That would be one of the coolest things that’s ever happened and it wouldn’t be too bad for business, either. Ha!

So many folks are unaware of how devastating a domain name change can be… if it’s not handled properly. The search robots will freak out when they go looking for your website or blog and POOF! It’s gone. (At least to them.)

There is a way to handle a domain name change so that it doesn’t affect your rankings, and it’s known as a “Mod Rewrite.” For example, if you change the permalink structure in your WordPress blog, the blog automatically writes a small file to explain to robots what happened and where they can find the content presently.

This concept isn’t an easy one, but I found a great description and “how to” today in the Search Engine Journal blog by Sherice Jacob, entitled appropriately, “How to Change Your Domain While Keeping Your Search Engine Ranking.” This article explains .htaccess and what you need to do to appease the spiders. Very good explanation that is bound to help you if you’re planning to take this step.

Do you know what the “Open Directory Project” is? If you don’t, and you’re interested in getting a really top notch backlink, you should. The directory belongs to Google.

DMOZ.org (AKA ODP) is an Internet Directory that is human edited, and the listing is free. And though it’s an awesome backlink to have, the listing is very difficult to acquire. In fact, one of the only ways that gives you an edge is to become a DMOZ editor. That means you have to select, describe and organize websites to increase the size of the directory, and it’s not easy to become an editor, either.

You have to apply. You have to select a few sites in the category you want to edit and supply descriptions for them. And you have to remain active. Any editor who hasn’t been active in four months will be expired. So, it’s not a “do it now and then” sort of thing.

So, what should you do?

Find the appropriate category for your site, submit, and keep your fingers crossed. You MIGHT get into the directory. However, it’s not certain. I entered Tellman’s Instant ADD Success site in there almost three years ago, and there is still no listing for that.

What’s the bottom line?

Don’t worry too much about getting a DMOZ listing. It’s great to have, but not critical. I’d still submit my site, but make perfectly sure that I’m in the correct category and that my site is quality enough to add. Who knows? You could get lucky and some smart editor will be happy to enter your site.

But don’t hold your breath.

And don’t try to get crappy AdSense sites, squeeze pages, or other sites into the directory that don’t contain good, solid content. That’s just bogging the editors down and not providing good content for the Web. Your site will probably never be listed, anyway. Use good judgment when submitting and follow the instructions carefully. Then, you at least have a fighting chance.

The other day, I was over at SmartPageRank.com checking on this blog because I heard that Google had updated PR rankings again, and was curious. I had recovered from the paid links drop to PR0 back up to PR3 again, and was hoping maybe I could see a PR4 (where the blog was before the nasty debacle). I really shouldn’t care, and I’ll tell you why in a minute. But… I was totally surprised when…

I saw a PR0 again! Wow! That really pissed me off. And sure enough… days later, the PR0 appeared in my Search Status (see yesterday’s post) toolbar again.

I’m sorry but I won’t stop selling links. So, there, Google! My links have been there a long time, and so, people are obviously finding value in having them there. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to take that away from them. They were loyal to me before Google decided to penalize people for having paid links, and I seriously doubt that those links continue because the folks who are buying them wants to get some link juice. They didn’t leave me when I was a PR0. They just get clicks on the links or they wouldn’t keep paying for them, right? I mean, if Google took my PR away before…

I’m guessing that’s why they did it again.

So be it.

Does it hurt me? Well, if I was trying for some reciprocal linking, I’d say yes. But I’m still ranking #2, right under Matt Cutts (the Google spokesperson), for “seo canonical” for my post on canonical linking. And I’m ranking #3 for “WordPress marketing,” and #5 for “twitter nofollow,” and various other terms on page 1 that are pretty competitive. My page rank, though now bupkiss, hasn’t hurt me at all.

I was on the phone with Brad Fallon one time, when Tellman wanted me to find out why a site I’d been working on for a few months still had no page rank, and he told me that page rank means nothing. We all still worry over it and think about it, but the proof is in the pudding, people! PR means zip, zilch, zero.

What matters is where you land in the results.

So, I’ll keep selling links. It’s a matter of principle.

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I think Jeff Johnson is a pretty smart guy. He’s got some smooth tactics going with SEO, selling affiliate products from Amazon, and using blogs to run the whole shebang. I know. I’ve been through just about all of his free videos, and let me tell you… they’re KILLER.

But there are pieces missing. Jeff ascribes to the old Jimmy D. Brown adage: “Give them incomplete information,” apparently, and good advice that is. Jeff really knows how to whet your appetite for learning his systems. I wouldn’t say they’re for newbies, but…

I think that with his help, people could get this all together pretty quickly, even if they knew very little of Internet marketing and how it all fits. Don’t get me wrong. Jeff’s stuff is advanced strategies, but as a member of his Underground Lab, I’m sure anyone could pick it up and run with it.

You may want to check it out: http://easyseotricks.com/jj.

There’s lots of money to be made.

I won’t kid you, the price tag isn’t puny, but the potential is HUGE.

Yesterday, I advocated the idea that you should always use a sitemap on your blog to be sure that all your permalink pages are indexed.  But what is a sitemap and why is it so important?

A sitemap gives search spiders information about your website. It tells the bots what pages are on your site, when they were last changed and when it’s likely that they’ll change again. Search bots love information that updates frequently, and it’s part of the reason why spiders love blogs. If you’re blogging consistently, and using keywords associated with your niche you’ll find yourself in the results pages pretty easily, providing you’re not competing for terms that are uber competitive.

Sitemaps also give spiders information about pages that they might not discover otherwise, which is great, and sitemaps allow you to prioritize your pages, if you want to do that.

The bottom line is that they just provide more information and make it easier for spiders to crawl your site. The easier you make it the more likely it is that they’ll discover everything that you want them to. If you’re using flash, or Ajax for example, having a sitemap is mandatory. Otherwise, you might lose the opportunity of having your page crawled at all because spiders find information in those formats hard to parse.

Having a sitemap doesn’t totally guarantee that your page will be indexed, it just increases the likelihood.

Sitemaps are easy to create, whether for a blog (get Google XML Sitemaps plugin) or a website.  Just go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ where you can set priorities, and the dates/rates of change for your website. Then, take the file and upload it to your root directory via FTP. It’s really simple.

To make this more powerful, you should have a Google Webmaster account. It’s free to set up, and when you do, you give it the URL of your sitemap and you’re all set.  XML-Sitemaps.com will index up to 500 pages for you for free. It’s a great deal. Totally take advantage of it.

Remember a long time ago, I told you about a product that I created with Tellman, called Spider Language? Well, we’ve been working on it and tweaking it and making things all come together. It’s been a long five months as we went back and forth with the format and the set up and whatever…

We tried it a few weeks ago with a smaller list, and things have been going well, so we launched it to the whole list this weekend! I can’t tell you how excited I am that so many folks decided to take us up on the trial. (You can see what’s happening at http://SpiderLanguage.com)

I want to teach everyone that SEO isn’t as hard as they think. Oh sure, there are some very technical aspects that you can get into that are difficult to learn, but if you’re a webmaster and not a professional SEO that spends 24/7 on optimizing for the search engines, you really need the basics and you need them presented to you in a way that’s easy to grasp and retain. I think we’ve done that.

The course is presented in weekly installments with a video or two to back up the written learning. There are checklists that you can use to just fly through this stuff when you’re ready to pursue a task. And there’s homework. You need to learn this stuff with a hands-on mentality. I never learn something entirely until I do it myself, so I think that’s a very important component.

The other thing I want to teach folks is that SEO should permeate every single activity you do online–blogging, articles, press releases, videos, even Twitter… everything!

And so we’ll be talking about each of those areas, too, as the weeks roll on.

I’m really excited about this, and hope that everyone who signs up will be, too. SEO is something I totally love, and I don’t want folks to fear it because it’s too hard to learn. Come with me… I’ll make it easy for you, and you’ll be amazed at how you can really put this to work and get some of that free, targeted traffic that people are always talking about.  Isn’t that what you really want? I’ll show you how it’s done.

Do you love social media as much as I do? I mean, you have to know I enjoy Twitter. I write about it often enough. But I also love Ning, where I have set up various sites, HubPages, and MyBlogLog, just to name a few. Why do I love them? Primarily because to me, they’re the FUN part of the Web. The friend making, and content adding and finding out what people like instead of just what search bots find interesting is really important to me, and I love it.

You may love it, too. Or, you may be one of those Luddite types who see social media as a waste of time. I got that comment about Twitter once. The person who commented on one of my status updates about Twitter said that it was nothing more than a time waster.

Duh.

I agree that playing around with social media CAN be a time sink, but not if you’re doing it properly.

Everyone who wants to be noticed online needs to remember something very, very important… it’s ALL about the keywords. The more you use keywords associated with your niche, whether that niche be ROI- or personal-centric, the more people will find you online. It’s just that simple.

Go to a keyword discovery tool like SEOBook or WordTracker and do some frickin’ research, dammit! People usually skip this step and don’t even realize how vitally important to online success using the right keywords in everything you do is. They think it’s boring. Or, they think it’s hard. But it’s not! And worst, they may think they don’t have to do it at all. That’s really dopey thinking.

If you don’t use the right keywords in everything you do, you’re destined to be just another 1 of the 8 gazillion pages online and NOBODY will ever find you. You’re a cyber-ghost. POOF!

So, find the keywords that apply to your niche and use them in every social site you use. Eventually, the search engines will put it all together and say, hey! This guy is a writer or hey! This gal is a super-smart SEO or whatever…

Otherwise, get out the sheet… You’re just another grain of sand in the Sahara.

Wow! I just found an incredibly awesome and potentially valuable site today called “eKstreme.com” that has a whole section of SEO tools.

One of them is called, “What’s the Buzz?” and when you a keyword into the search box, it comes back with:

• popularity of the term on Technorati
• a Google Trends report
• blog posts tagged with the term
• blog posts with the term in their titles
• bookmarks for the term.

Just for the heck of it, I typed in “Twitter,” and was amazed to find that the popularity at Technorati has dipped dramatically over the past month. Not as many posts about Twitter as there once was.

Yet Google Trends says it’s more popular than ever.  But here’s news… it’s most popular in Ireland! Who knew?

Anyway, this is a quick and easy way to figure out whether there’s any interest in a niche, or just a good way to get more information from all the blog posts this returns. And if you read my blog, you’ll know it’s also a great way to get ideas about what to write.

Cool,  non?

SEO is a huge consideration in everything you do for your business. Using a blog? Obviously, SEO is important. Creating a squeeze page? SEO… Writing a sales letter… SEO… Twitter… SEO. Everything you do online is about you and your keywords.

And yes, even Twitter.

I’m all about blogging and SEO and people are beginning to know that because of all the stuff I have out there in regard to blogging and SEO. As a joke, I bought the domain BlogQueenoftheUniverse.com, which redirects to this blog. It was a joke, and my friends thought it was pretty funny. But…

I actually saw someone refer to me that way on Twitter the other day. How cool is that? I obviously know that I’m NOT the be all and end all of blogging. Nobody is, but becoming a presence and “branding” yourself as one thing or another is a huge part of making yourself successful.

So, who do you want to be? What’s your niche? Are you the “Hunting King?” or how about “The JV Queen,” like Gina Gaudio-Graves? Or the “Niche Prof,” like Ron Capps? Try to position yourself as the expert in whatever field you want to conquer and then, back it up.

If I knew nothing about blogging or SEO, it would be stupid for me to try and be the queen of those fields. People would guffaw, and I’m certain that the people who DO know more than me in those areas most certainly are already.

But I don’t care.

Those aren’t the people I’m trying to impress and help along the way. My target audience are new bloggers and people who are new to SEO and this whole Internet marketing world. To them, I am the Blogging Queen of the Universe because I totally know a LOT! Certainly not everything, but enough that I do seem like an expert to people learning this whole confusing world of IM.

So, who are you? Who’s your target audience and who do you want to be to them? That’s what you should be striving to establish. Learn all you can about your niche topic and then, use the appropriate keywords surrounding that area in everything you do.

You’ll be amazed at how people respond to your expertise. It won’t happen overnight. I’ve been at this 5+ years and only now are people starting to know who I am and what I do, and it’s pretty sweet. I love working with folks, and so coming to them with some credibility is very, very important. I never want to disappoint them — evah.

I was at a conference for Stomper Net where Leslie Rohde was saying that there were Black Hats, White Hats, and Grey Hats when it comes to SEO.  And that’s true. There are definite lines between white and black, but sometimes, the black and even grey areas can pay off in a big way.

But for how long? How long will spammy tactics work?

Only until Google figures out what’s going on and then, slams the hammer down on you.

They’re doing it again. (Check out Jason Lee Miller’s article in Web Pro News today here.) And you know, for once, I’m saying, “You go, Google!”

Really.

I mean, I look at things people do around the Web to try and yank Google’s chain and I can’t really blame the search giant for being pissed off. This time, it’s “gangs” who are using Web 2.0 sites to send tons of bogus links back to their sites, where malware and scareware is showing up. And, the sites are showing at the top of web pages, not with one link, but several of them.

This reminds me of Howie Schwartz. I don’t mean that he has malicious sites. He’s just a marketer trying to make a buck. But his tactics are to use all these Web 2.0 sites to send tons and tons of links to Google so that he’s showing up in the first several spots on a page for his keywords. At first glance, it’s all pretty slick and he’s making a lot of money. So, you’re thinking, Wow! I could do that, right?

But think about this: Google catches on to what you’re doing and guess what? All that work is down the tubes. Not only that, but if Google catches on to who you are, you could find yourself on the Google hit list. Who needs that? I’d hate to be banned from the search results for.ever.

Well, forever is a long time and it’s not really that tough to change spots, but I just can’t see doing a ton of work that eventually doesn’t pay off. I’m in this for the long haul, so to me, getting things done naturally within Google’s guidelines is the way to go. It’s just more efficient, right? I’d rather do the work once, and have it last. If you’re smart, you’ll avoid all the schemes and go for the steady on, too.

You may have been distraught to notice that I haven’t been as regular with posting for the past couple of weeks as I normally am. Or… You didn’t notice a hoot. Whichever is perfectly OK.

But…

The reason that I haven’t been as consistent as usual is because I’ve been working on a new product! It’s called “Spider Language,” and Tellman Knudson is my partner, mentor, boss, and really good friend.  We actually got the product into ClickBank last week, and already we’re making sales.  I’m thrilled!

Spider Language is for folks who want to begin to learn SEO, and for some folks maybe not so new to SEO, but want to learn more. We’ll talk about everything from how search engine spiders work to site construction to linking and the whole shebang… What I call the SEO “Matrix,” which inclues blogging, article marketing, press releases, video, and more.

The course will be presented weekly in Jimmy D. Brown “Membernaire” style, which is a totally awesome model, by the way. It will include a weekly .pdf, at least one video, and a homework assignment that you’ll need to complete to move on to the next lesson. (Just so you’re getting it.) Usually, it won’t take more than an hour to complete the whole deal, so you don’t have to worry about not having the time. We’re dishing it out in small bites to make it easy to learn.

Anyone who is already SEO savvy is welcome to promote this. It’s a great money maker and steady income for you. Just search “Spider Language” in the Marketplace, under the category Business to Business.

This is gonna rock!

Want to check it out? Go to http://SpiderLanguage.com We are going to rock your SEO world and your traffic!

Ha!

I’ve been saying it for a while now…

Social media is becoming so important that I can see the day when Web 2.0 might overtake traditional search.

Today, I read an article by Jodan McCollum over at SearchNewz: “Google Doesn’t Care About Social Media?” (3-19-09)

She’s quoting Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield in this:

“The reason the company — Google — doesn’t care is that the basic functionality of social platforms like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter is diminishing the importance of search. He points to users growing inclination to search for specific information by tapping into friends and colleagues knowledge through platforms like Twitter’s own search product, as well Facebook’s status update tool.”

Ha!

Apparently, I’m not the only one wondering if search will become less relevant over time.  I mean, if you want to check out the lunar space station, you wouldn’t go to Facebook, right? (Or maybe it has a Facebook account now, too, I’m not sure)

But if you want to know if a piece of software works, who would you ask? Someone who has used it, or several someones who have used it and get their opinions before you buy, right? Or, where would you go to get contact lenses online? Google will tell you where, but not how good the service is.

Years back, we Netizens just accepted what was served up to us. There was only interaction on Usenet or in IRC (Internet Relay Chat), but only a small segment of the population used those vehicles to communicate with peers. I loved it back in the mid-90’s and was often found in my Usenet home first thing in the morning to check up with friends.

But now EVERYbody is on Facebook or Twitter or MySpace or whatever, and I can communicate with them. I mean, I finally got my 71-year-old sister to sign up for a Facebook account, and she’s no slouch when it comes to computers. She just didn’t see the benefit. Guess what? Her attitude has changed because Facebook is just plain fun.

Although I think Google will still be around for a very long time to come, I also think that Google’s heyday of preaching to us what we can and can’t do online so that we’re its “good graces” will pass. The fact that Google seems to be kicking and screaming and NOT fully entering the social end of Web 2.0 just shows us how scary it is for them to think about.

I think that’s a good thing. Although Google is indeed a great free service and has tons of incredible features, I just think we’ve given the search engine too much power. It’s time that online, we at least get this slogan going again: “Power to the people!”

“SEO is [not] a set-it-and-forget-it item you tick off a to-do list,” remarked author Rebecca Lieb. In an article by David Berkowitz in Media Post’s Search Insider, entitled “You Can Still Handle These SEO Truths,” Lieb answered a few questions about SEO and her new book.

Whoa. What she said is so totally true, and I say the same all the time. To me, SEO is like a living, breathing matrix that constantly has to be monitored and adjusted with the changes in the environment. Search is always changing, and so, SEOs and anyone who wants good search engine ranking has to change with it.

Lieb is a woman after my own heart, and I plan to check out her new book,  The Truth about Search Engine Optimization, for sure. I’m guessing there will be many more, “Right on sistah!s” in there, too.

Here’s another quote from the article: “And if you’ll indulge me a second, there’s another myth I’d like to bust: that search is for geeks and techno-nerds. I’m not a developer; I’m a writer and editor, but search turns me on.”  Whoa. She could BE me. LOL

What about search turns me on? The fact that it’s an inexact science. It is never static (as aforementioned) and it’s totally exciting. What new curve will the Google ghods throw at us today, folks? And about that, here’s something I never understood. Google does the “dance,” but they should revise that term. We’re the ones whose feet are being shot at all the time!

And that keeps it really exciting. Are you up on the latest stuff? How valid is what you learned last year? What changes have to be made because of this zig or that zag? Are you sick of constantly having to learn new stuff? Oh, man… That’s what turns me on! I love learning!

And SEO always keeps you guessing.

And why many of the top gurus, including my own boss, don’t see extremely high value in SEO.

Of course, they’re wrrr… wrrrong. Eh!

What’s better than getting streams of traffic you never have to pay for?  Not much. And the funny part for me is that I study it all the time, but rarely get to put this stuff into practice. There’s never enough time at Overcome Everything, and because I’m working for that company, my own company is like the shoemaker’s children. It never has shoes.

Ah well…

In a perfect world, Google wouldn’t make us crazy by trying to outsmart us outsmarters, and I’d have time to prove that SEO is the most important (not the least important) part of your business.

If you don’t have time for all the ins and outs of SEO, just take enough time to do proper keyword research, and use keywords in everything you do. That’s the least you can do, and over time, it will help your business. You may not get to the top of Google for a keyword like “golf,” but you might be surprised at terms you are ranking for and getting some of that cool search engine goodness after all.

So, thanks to Rebecca Lieb and people like here that are out there laying down interesting stuff about SEO. To me, it’s the best!

One of the ways that SEOs stop page rank bleed from one page to another is by using the “no follow” tag in URLs.

For example, on your home page, it does you no good whatsoever to have search engine spiders follow links to your terms of service or privacy policy pages. Do you really want those ranked in Google? No. So, rather than allow your home page to distribute some of its page rank to those pages, you add a “no follow” tag to the URLs, like this:

<a href=”http://yourdomain.com” rel=”nofollow”>Privacy Policy</a>

This way, the spider sees the nofollow and stops right there and your home page PR is more concentrated. That means that important links to other pages in your site get greater benefit.

No follow is also used on websites to prevent spiders from following the links to other websites. For example, if you look at Wikipedia, all of the outbound links from there are “no follow” links. They pass no PR goodness on, and so, it prevents spammers from bothering with the site. Good idea, right?

Yes and no.

“No follow” also prevents comments on your blog. If you use the standard WordPress configuration, it makes every comment link no follow by default. You need a plugin like “Do Follow” to change that. I have “Do Follow” because I think that anyone who comments should get the benefit of that comment, and have good spam checkers in place so that I don’t get spammed too radically.

So, it’s up to you. My advice is to definitely use no follow tags for any pages on your home page that you don’t want indexed in the search engines, and to leave all others alone. Unless you get as big as Wikipedia, anyway.

Sounds weird, huh? Are you valid? Well, of course, I’m not talking about YOU, you… I’m talking about your web pages.

What is validation?

There are several places where you can go to have the code on your web page validated. The one I use, and the standard is http://validator.w3.org/

When you run your code through there, using your URL, via file upload, or by direct input, you’ll be amazed to find all the things that can make a spider stop or run.

Just for the heck of it, I ran http://EasyBlogTricks.com through and came back with 72 errors! Hmm… I might be fixing code this weekend.

Here are some of the issues:

• there is no attribute “name”
• there is no attribute “src”
• there is no attribute “width”
• there is no attribute “height”

And so on… I won’t bore you with all of them. But you can see how little things like leaving off a tag can make your HTML invalid.  Crap. This is a mess!

And why is that important? Well… the cleaner your code is, the easier it is for the spiders to navigate. Still, it’s not critical. Search engines really care that you have good, unique content, and though they may not get through every bit of your page, they’re pretty smart. They can figure out what the page is about and index and rank it, anyway.

Yet, if you really want the spiders to crawl all the way to the bottom… Let’s say you have important stuff after all the messy code, then, you may want to rethink and retool. Use W3C to see what your errors are and whether or not they’re important enough to spend time fixing.

Just don’t lose any sleep over it.

I have to say that I’ve never seen such a definitive, easy-to-follow guide to WordPress SEO than I found today at: http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/ from Joost deValk. Wow. Very comprehensive, and well done.

Joost starts with the proper structure of permalinks and carries through to Titles, Descriptions, all the way to using Twitter. Very sweet!  It’s especially useful for non-SEO types as it gives pretty explicit instructions on how to make this all work for your WP blog. I would advise anyone who isn’t up on all the latest stuff when it comes to SEO for blogging to go to the site and check it out.

There’s also a great new post about Facebook at Mashable today: http://mashable.com/2009/03/04/new-facebook-pages/ Go here to get some “opportunities” and learn the drawbacks from Curtis Hougland. Great article about Facebook’s changing landscape. If you use Facebook as a marketer or just as a social networker, you need to check this out.

And finally, check out “Don’t Make These Mistakes When Blogging” by Mert Erkal’s blog. He’s a Twitter pal and I couldn’t agree with what he has to say in this post more.  There are no “get rich quick” schemes that work and link exchanges are lame. Just saying.

These are a few of the sites that I found useful today. Hope your day was as productive!

When you ask a group what a landing page is, you might come back with many different ideas. Some will say it’s a squeeze page. Some, a sales letter, while others have no freakin’ clue whatsoever and are still scratching their heads.

It’s simple…

A landing page is where you LAND after clicking on a link. It can be any of the above, or it can be totally unrelated to commercial enterprise. It’s just where you end up, no matter what the link says or what the page includes.

You can make mistakes when setting up a landing page, though, so you should keep some things in mind:

• The anchor text in your link must match the page. If you hyperlink the phrase “dog training,” then the page that people land on when they click that link best be about training your dog.

• The keywords on your page must  match your link.  When you’re link says, “used golf balls,” your page should have words like “used golf balls,” “used bridgestone golf balls,” or “cheap used golf balls.” The page should be not just about “golf,” but indeed, “used golf balls.”

• If you have an online store, and you’re selling video cameras, when your anchor text says, “Mino Flip video Camera,” then that specific product had better appear on the page after a person clicks on that link. It’s best when it’s the only thing on the page, but worst when it’s not on the page at all.

There are a couple of reasons that you want to be heed these warnings.

First, especially if you’re using pay-per-click to advertise your link, you’ll have a huge tiff with the Google ghods. Your page quality will be “poor” unless your link actually matches what’s on your page.

Secondly, have you ever gone shopping online and clicked a link and didn’t find what you thought you would when you got to the landing page? Did it tick you off? How likely are you to go back to that page or even that company again?

Remember that anchor text delivers page reputation.  Don’t advertise what you don’t intend to deliver.

It’s like a chihuahua growling at a pit bull. Could mean trouble.

So, I’ve mentioned this before. The title and description are the most important parts of any web page when it comes to SEO.

They’re also the most important part of any blog post, if you want to get your posts ranked in the search engines. But did you know that there are two different ways you need to think about this when blogging?

When we’re talking about your blog as a whole, the title should be your keywords, linked together by dashes. This is how you want your general blog title to be, which you set up in the “Settings” tab.

You’ll notice that my blog title is “OVBlogger: SEO News – WordPress – Marketing Blog” These are the three keywords I’m working on getting ranked for now, and the title is 48 characters in length.

Did you know that search engine spiders will only read 65 characters of your title? Yep. Be sure that you’re using your three most important keyword phrases in your blog’s title and that they don’t go over the 65 character limit. Use your most important keyword first, the second most important keyword second, and so on.

Then also in the settings tab, write a good keyword rich description (tagline) for your blog. What’s it about? Write it naturally, but try to avoid using stop words like a, the, an, for, etc.  Mine is: “SEO news, WordPress, marketing blog from Pat Marcello” I’m the least important part of that description, but I want me to show up on the front of my blog, right? The spiders are seeing what I want them to see but people know what my blog is about and that I’m the one writing it.

But with a blog, you also need to think about the title of every post.

Each post is like a page in your site. (Not to be confused with blog pages, which are also pages in your site, but have a different purpose from posts.) But, you also want people to be interested enough in your title to want to read them, so linked keyword phrases won’t work.

What I do is to put the most relevant keyword into my title first.  In this case, it’s SEO because my post is about having a search engine friendly title and description. But, I follow that keyword with a title that might entice readers.

As with any web page, the title and description are crucial to search engine ranking for your posts.  Be sure to use the plugin All-in-One SEO Pack so that you can add specific title and description to every post you make and then, write post titles and descriptions that are keyword rich and will work for spiders and people alike.

When in doubt, always please your reader first. If folks don’t enjoy reading what you write, no ranking in the search engines will help you.

I just got done watching the video for PPC Web Spy, and downloaded the free version immediately. You can get it here:

http://easyseotricks.com/ppc-obv

It’s a Firefox plugin that allows you to see the keywords for any AdWords advertiser. You can also have extra keywords suggested, and it’s totally awesome. I went through the whole video, expecting to pay. I mean, Brad Callen is the SEO Elite guy, right? It’s a great tool and I’ve used it a lot.

But I get to the end of the video, wondering how much it was, and it’s FREE!

You really should watch this video: http://easyseotricks.com/ppc-obv

Then, you get inside, and of course, there’s an OTO (one-time offer for the newest marketers). So, I’m thinking, hmm… how can this be better?

How would you like your Clickbank, Amazon, or PayDotCom IDs showing up whenever your referrals search for something and ultimately buy the product? I thought that was pretty sweet, so now, Joel Comm made some money from sending me to the site. You go, Joel.

Go download the free version and see how awesome it is, or at least watch the video. Rocks!

Great article today over at SEOMoz blog by randfish, the site’s CEO and co-founder, entitled: Do the Little Things in SEO Make a Big Difference?

In the post, randfish muses that the little details that all SEOs know are often overlooked because of site devs not really wanting to do the work. Hmm…

I hear that.

I’m my own site dev and rarely pay attention to this stuff on my own websites because I just don’t have the time. I’m so busy working on stuff for other people that if I were to choose one “little” thing to do, it would be to get my primary keyword to the front of my title.

Works for many of the SEOs commenting, too. That’s huge! If you wrap an <h1> tag around that, well… total SEO blessings be to ye.

Easy to do, huh? I mean, you can just select the text and ping the <h1> in most HTML editors.

But <h2>s and <h3>s… Well… great if you want to use them, and maybe, just maybe they will give you an edge, but I’m thinking I don’t have time for those. And I probably won’t bother with bolds, worry about content to code ratio, or ever put a hyphen in a URL in place of the underscore. I’d never buy a domain with a hyphen or an underscore in it to begin with.

Yet, I will do some pretty down and dirty keyword research, and I will make those keyword phrases the title of my page, and I will come up with a kick-ass description.

Those three things alone are pretty powerful. So, what’s the moral of the story?

If you’re going to be a too-busy SEO like me, you won’t worry about all the details, but… there are just SOME details that you can’t do without.

I just read a good article by Chris Crum over at WebPro News, entitled “The Blogger SEO Burden,” (Friday, Jan. 9, 2009)

In it, he includes a video with Stephan Spencer, Founder & President Netconcepts, who says that Blogger isn’t the way to go. Go over and watch the video.  But here’s the thing…

If you have a Blogger blog, you’re building a blog that you can’t control! If you’re in business, that’s just plain dumb. Sorry. I had to say it.

It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to newbies. I started with a Blogger blog, way back when, too, and that was even before I knew what SEO was!  I think Blogger had just opened. In fact, I know I learned some of the PHP stuff at Blogger. It was a good “trainer blog” for me, and it can be for you.

But when you get serious about your business, it’s time to move to a blog on your own hosting account. WordPress is more user-friendly than ever now, and Google loves the platform. It’s not quite SEO ready when you get it. You need to add “All in One SEO,” “DoFollow,” and “Google Sitemaps” for example. But really, unless you want to get super SEO, you’re probaly pretty good to go right there. I mean, you want to go with Analyticator, and some other stuff when you get into the stats. But if you’re just learning, the three plugins above are crucial.

Installing plugins in WordPress 2.7 is a breeze, and installing WordPress 2.7 is push-button when you use cPanel with Fantastico installer, or Elephante installer works the same way. These are services that just do all the work for you.

But if you don’t have cPanel or any of the installer programs, and you have MySQL databases available in your hosting plan, it’s really not all that difficult to install a WordPress blog from scratch. If you need help with that, it’s all laid out in step-by-step video over at my WordPress tech site: EasyBlogTricks.com. All you need do is register. (A Fantastico installation video is there, as well.)

Anyway, back to the article.

Chris goes on to muse that if Blogger is owned by Google, why isn’t Blogger like… the best?

So, he contacted Spencer who said, “”Believe it or not, the search engines are not expert at SEO.  They are expert at search algorithms, which is a very different thing. that search engines don’t understand SEO.”

Interesting. I mean, Spenser is at a much higher level of SEO experience than I am, so it’s probably true. But, I can’t imagine that Google doesn’t have some of its own SEOs on board. I mean, like a casino hires cheats to watch the floor, right? Why wouldn’t Google hire SEOs? Just makes sense.

But regardless of whether this is the case, I hate to break it to all you blogspot.com people out there, but for SEO, getting page rank, and for rising in the SERPs and getting all that cool free organic traffic, Blogger sucks.

Why build your business on a platform you can’t control? Makes no sense to me. Spend the $10 a month on hosting over at Host Gator and throw up a blog in 5 minutes. Be the commander of your own destiny. I mean, if you can’t afford the $10 for hosting, you’re just playing at business, you aren’t a serious business person. Stop thinking that “free” will accomplish anything.

It totally won’t.

I’ve mentioned SEODigger.com in this blog before, and I always thought it was a totally cool site. I had a free account, and even at that got some totally cool information. It was that you just plugged in the URL and SEODigger would show you wherever you ranked for search terms. Granted, some of them were totally bizarre and not traffic heavy terms, but it was neat to see where your page was appearing in Google.

So, now we have SEMRush.com to replace SEODigger. Same company, and some other cool stats.

In this version, you plug in your domain and find “Organic Keywords,” “Competitors in Organic Search,” “Potential Ad/Traffic Buyers,” AdWords Keywords,” “Competitors in AdWords,” and “Potential Ad/Traffic Sellers.” All valuable information.

You can’t get the AdWords information without becoming a paying member, and you get far more results with a membership, which is only like $19.80 to $38.80/mo. for a professional account.

If you’re heavily into AdWords, it might be a smart investment. But then, I’m a stats and info junkie. I like to know as much as I can about my visitors and what they like/don’t like on my site.

But even if you’re just the curious type, check this site out.  It’s worth the time and effort.

When you have lots of content, you really need a CMS or Content Management System. You already know what that is, too — if you’ve ever been to Wikipedia. It’s a wiki (of course), but there are many types of wiki and I’ve studied them all. Blogs are CMS, too, but let’s talk about wikis.

A wiki is a great way to put everything you have into one place. You can make them editable, like Wikipedia, or you can keep them private. These are generally referred to as “Enterprise” wikis, where a company uses the service to update employees on the goings on in the company and to house different types of company information.

Overcome Everything uses a CMS called Base Camp, which keeps everything from daily to-do lists that we make up to copy requests, meeting notes, etc. Base Camp really comes in handy for stuff like that. We have a meeting and when Base Camp is kept up to date, it’s easy to go back to earlier meetings to see exactly what was discussed, approved/disapproved, etc.

You can have your own wiki pretty easily. Some of them are free. In fact, if you have hosting with Fantastico, you can install a wiki very easily with the push of a button on your own server. TikiWiki is an example. There aren’t many frills and ruffles, but it’s a good wiki if you don’t want to get terribly formal.

The best paid version I found is BizWiki, which is a product of Customer Vision, and it’s run by Cindy Rockwell, who’s very helpful and nice. The customer service there is just fabulous, and it’s not an expensive solution, but it is quite customizable. If I were the one to pick an enterprise wiki or just a wiki to wow the ‘Net with, I’d choose BizWiki. This isn’t just because of the wiki itself, which has great features, but because of the outstanding customer service.

Anyway, there are lots of choices out there. If you just want to play around with a wiki before getting into a long-term contract, you can join PBWiki for free, and the content is hosted on their server. I have a wiki set up there for my cats niche and Tellman has one set up there for Hot Sauces. It’s a hoot.

Anyway, if you want to get into wikiing… there’s lots to think about. You can compare them all at a place called “WikiMatrix,” and it will allow you to choose the features you want, and then it spits back a bunch of wikis to check out. Very cool.

Wikis are great for SEO, if they’re meant for the public. Just take a look at the listings on Google for practically anything you type in. What’s first? Wikipedia, usually, eh? So, check into wikis, if you’re prolific or you have a ton of content and don’t know what to do with it. You won’t regret it.