The SEO News Blog from Pat Marcello

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 | Posted by Pat Marcello | Categories: Internet Marketing Information | Tagged: ask campaigns, internet marketing, online marketing strategy, survey |

So, I’ve tried the Facebook ads. They’re pretty cool in terms of placement and presentation, but they produced no results. So, I abandoned them. I’m wondering if any of you have had success. I’d love to hear about it. Leave me a comment and tell me what you think made that happen.

The prediction from eMarketer Daily is that Web 2.0 advertising will rise from $1.175M in 2008 to $1,295M in 2009. Not a huge jump, but it shows how people are getting more excited about placing ads on Web 2.0, but they’re predicting $1.64M in 2013, so a constant rise in advertising in Web 2.0.

But who’s doing it?

On MySpace.com, it’s the big boys. There’s a huge flash ad for the new blockbuster movieTwilight spread across the entire screen. There’s another smaller banner at the bottom for that movie, too. And we have Ashton Kutcher, Don Cheadle, and the World Poker Tour. Not one Internet marketer from our circles. Not one. Inside, we have ads all over the page. I really think that MySpace is getting just the tad spammy, and because it annoys me so, I rarely go back to visit.

I like Facebook 100 times better. The only ads there are the pay-per-click ads and they’re unobtrusive. They don’t smack you in the eyeballs like the MySpace ads do. I mean, it makes you wonder whether you’re at MySpace to socialize or be in a virtual mall lined with nothing but billboards. But MySpace is kind of for the younger generation. Maybe they’re so inured to all of the ads they see day after day that they just don’t notice.

HubPages.com has a couple of banner ads on the front page. Not really annoying because I’m banner blind, I guess. I just don’t see them.  They’re there when you sign in, too, and from companies like AT&T, so I’m guessing that the HubPages owner is making a tidy sum from those banners. I don’t mind. They should be making some money for their service.

Squidoo? No ads at all on the home page. Very classy. We have some advertising on the lenses themselves, but again, not annoying at all. The banners blend in and well… again from big companies. I’d expect nothing less from Seth Godin.

But, what’s the deal with Twitter? I mean, it’s HOT, hot HOT! And they have NO monetization for that service whatsoever. I mean, how many of us could jump right in and give them a pointer or two? Have any of you guru types contacted the people? You’re missing a huge opportunity there!

Anyway, I’m seeing these numbers and they’re looking pretty good, but we’re talking major companies coming in and making money with Web 2.0. I’m really hoping they won’t come in and overwhelm the sites and make a carnival-like atmosphere like they did at MySpace.

Of course, I’m into advertising and all things marketing, but there’s a delicate balance, isn’t there? We all hate email spammers, so there’s a line that we all, marketer and non-marketer alike don’t like crossed.

When the ads come in to pollute the sociability of Web 2.0 — bad news, and the predictions for big ad revenues? Out the window.

I say keep Web 2.0 sociable. Keep too many ads out and people reaching out to people in. That’s the part that makes Web 2.0 special.

Yep, so Tellman’s gone nuts again and is giving stuff away like crazy.

Have you seen the Secret Stocking yet? Even I don’t know what’s inside entirely, but it’s good. I’m 100% sure of that.

But even if there were NOTHING inside, you’re still getting the Ultra Marketing Marathon, a $97 product as a bonus! That’s an awesome product in and of itself.

If you want to get in on this, you’d better hurry: http://easyseotricks.com/secret The price goes up every time someone buys and last I looked it was at $19.42… UNDER $20!

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a few days off around the holidays and I plan to use it to make me smarter. This is a perfect opportunity for you to curl up with your iPod or laptop and just make your brain bigger.

Knowledge is power!

OK, I’m going to give you a cool way to bring life back into your blog. This site has been around a while because I’ve been using it for at least six months or more, but it’s a site where you can get people to do anything you want them to do, anything that requires a human set of eyes and action.

The site is called “Mechanical Turk,” and it’s an Amazon.com site. You can get there by going to http://requester.mturk.com and you can use it to get readers for your blog, and here’s how:

You set up what’s called a “HIT,” which stands for something like human interactive task. To create the HIT, you simply fill out some very specific instructions. “Go to http://OVBLogger.com and read a post or two. If you find something of interest that you enjoyed, please leave a comment. The comments can be positive or negative. Just write what you feel.”  But you can make up your own, and then, pay people to do this.

The great part is that you don’t pay very much. Different tasks go for different amounts of change. For example, you can get someone to vote for your posts on social bookmarking sites for 1 – 3 cents. I pay ten times that for a good comment, but you can see how it’s still inexpensive. I just put about $10 a month into my account at Mechanical Turk and it lasts, though comments have been coming by the boatload lately. Still, I can double that and… please. It’s el cheapo.

One of the by-products of this, of course, is that you’re getting traffic. Usually when people read the blog but it makes no sense to them, they just return the HIT and go on their way. So, I’m getting qualified, targeted readers, too, which is cool.

There are two caveats. One is that you have to explicitly put in your HIT that you won’t pay for drive-by commenting, such as “nice post.” That’s just unacceptable. You want your commenter to have at least read the post and agree or disagree with what you’ve said. Also be sure that the commenter is able to comment in the language of the blog. I made that a spec of my HIT, as well.

The second warning is that I’m not sure Google likes this, but they don’t like my paid links, either. The dropped me back to a PR2 because of one or the other. But do I care?

No.

I want readers, and it would also be nice for Google to see things my way, but that may not happen. I figure that paying for readers is something that is working extremely well for me. It’s no different than paying for traffic, right? That’s basically what I’m doing. I’m getting people to come and see my blog that would probably have never found it in a bazillion years. And I’m getting new fans, too.

That totally works for me!

Also, you can put other HITs up, if you’re really creative. Get people to evaluate your copy, or to compare one page against another. Ask if they like an image you want to use. Ask them to complete a survey. You can get answers to many of your marketing questions this way and it’s dirt cheap.

My advice is to start slowly. I wouldn’t recommend getting posts Dugg or Stumbled Upon. It’s just not that effective. But, getting people to read your blog surely is. Try it.

Oh, and if you need a way to make a little extra cash… try Mechanical Turk from the other side of the coin. Because it’s an Amazon.com site, it’s totally on the up and up and there’s no need to worry whether you’ll be paid or not. You won’t earn much, but you will make some cash over time.