ovblogger : SEO News – WordPress – Marketing Blog

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.

The question that gets asked most by new Internet marketers is, “What niche should I be in?” I think. They have ideas about what they’d like to do, but are concerned about whether or not it will be a “good” niche, and rightly so. Selling clothes for racoons probably isn’t a great idea.

What to do?

Research.

The first thing to do is to think about what you really like to do and what you can work on for hours and hours without becoming tired or bored. What’s your passion? That’s really important. If your heart isn’t in it, guess what, neither will your mind be.

So, your first step is to sit down and to make a list of things you really enjoy doing, no matter what those things might be. It’s amazing that there are markets online for some things you’d think will never sell. And then again, things you think are a sure fit might totally suck. Or, they might be seasonal. Or, they might be so over.

Once you have your list, take your search for a niche over to http://SEOBook.com. Plug each word into the search bar and see how many searches a day are happening in Google. If you find that 3,000 to 10,000 searches are being performed each month, you’re on the right track. But that’s just the first step.

Move over to the column that says “G Trends,” and see whether the trend for whatever you’re searching is rising, falling or consistent. Rising and consistent is good. Falling isn’t.

Then, move over again to “Google TE” and see how much people are playing for clicks at Google AdWords. Anything over $1 is promising.  Anything under that is iffy.

So, there are some general rules of thumb. SEOBook, also has a great blog. Peter D, who  wrote “How to Spot Keyword Trends,”  pulls Twitter into the mix, and some other factors that you can track to decide on a good niche to be in.

The whole idea is… do it! Why waste a lot of time working on things that nobody is interested in? You’ll lose time and money chasing something that just won’t work.

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!

I was over at SEO Book, reading Aaron Wall’s post from June 16, entitled “Expert SEO Testing: Usually Worthless,” and was surprised to learn that rel=”nofollow” no longer works. Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesperson, admitted that was true at the recent SMX Conference.

So, Wall linked to Danny Sullivan’s post “Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting,” which made me curious. So I went over to Danny’s blog, which explains the situation in much clearer detail.

Page rank sculpting is the practice of adding “no follow” to links going to your overhead pages, like your privacy page, your terms of service, or other pages that you don’t want ranked in the search results. It used to be that if you had 10 units of page rank and each link on your page was worth 1, when you added “no follow” to 5 of those links, they would transfer their page rank to the remaining links, right? So, then, each of the bare links would be worth 2.

What Matt Cutts is telling everyone now is that “no follow” no longer transfers page rank to the bare links. So, basically, by using no follow, you’re merely wasting PR. The “no follow” links will be worth zero, but the bare links will still only be worth 1.

I should say, “Is,” because apparently, this has been true for about a year and nobody noticed.

Great.

If you’re using “no follow,” don’t run around trying to change the links back to bare links. It’s not worth the time and effort. Just understand that you don’t need to do that anymore. It’s a waste of time.

Why did Google decide to institute the practice in the first place? Basically, to stop blog comment spamming, and yet, it didn’t really stop anything, so it “no follow” means “bupkiss.” It’s like the keywords META tag. Another useless convention.

Put your time into more important things like developing good, unique content and solid keyword research. Those should always pay off. I say, “should,” because there’s just no accounting for the whim of the Google ghods.

Keep your eyes and ears open to what’s happening, and try not to get caught up in the fads or fancies. Nobody truly knows the algorithm but Google, and they’re changing it all the time. Even the few people who claim to know it probably have no 100% clear idea.

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.

I have a few cool plugins for Firefox, but one of my favorites is “Search Status.” Here are some things it does:

• It provides not just Google Page Rank, like the Google Toolbar does, but Alexa ranking of any page you land on as well. And these ranks sit in your lower toolbar and you can see it automatically. You can also see a compete rank and an mozRank, which measures the link juice coming into that site, as well.

When you right click on the Search Status symbol (an @, but with a q in the middle), it will show you the following about any site you visit:

• Highlights “no follow” links. Want to see if a blog is allowing spiders to follow links? Turn this option on and all “no follow” links appear in little pink boxes. You may want to use this when considering the site’s link potential.

• Gives you a link report on. How many are coming in/going out? How many of them are follow links?

• Shows the META tags and description

• Shows what the site looked like historically.

• Gives you robots.txt, whois, and sitemap

• Provides the keyword density and highlights any keyword you choose

• Shows all pages indexed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now bing.com)

• Shows the sites linking back in Google, Yahoo, and MSN

So, you can learn much of the SEO data just from this little plugin. Of course, some of it overlaps with the data you get from SEO Quake, but I think you really need both plugins to have a fully functional SEO browser. I mean, there are other SEO add-ons for Firefox, but these are 2 I couldn’t do without.

And if you want a firm foundation in SEO, visit http://SpiderLanguage.com

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.

Have you been to Google lately? (Who hasn’t, right?) Everyone seems to be talking about the new search item they call the “Wonder Wheel.” It puts me in mind of a couple of tools online. One is Personal Brain, which is mind-mapping software, and the other is Visual Thesaurus that will help you to brainstorm keywords or really just find synonyms if you’re a writer. Pretty neat, both have limited free versions that are worth checking out.

But what does Wonder Wheel do? It helps you to expand your horizons. When you do any search in Google, you’ll see a link above the horizontal paid ads, just under the Google search box, on the left-hand side of the screen that says “Show Options.” When you click on that, a right-hand sidebar opens.

You’ll notice that you can choose videos search, forum posts, or reviews. You can also decide how old you want the listings to be.

But the links at the bottom are the ones you want to pay closest attention to. The first link is for related searches, but the second is for the Google Wonder Wheel, which when clicked, opens just to the right beside the search results. You’ll see that circling the center search (what you typed into the search box,) are related terms.

For example, if you search for “search engine optimization,” you’ll see terms like “search engine submission,” “meta tags,” “search engine optimization pricing,” and so on for other terms related to SEO. When you click on “search engine optimization for dummies,” another wheel opens that’s linked to the original wheel, and you get new stuff to think about, like “google universal search,” “major search engines,” and “xml sitemaps.”

Pretty sweet. This can help you develop a pretty broad keyword base for any niche that you’re pursuing. That’s great for SEOs and Internet marketers, but it’s great for just plain searchers because it helps them to really get where they want to go. For example, if you click on XML Sitemaps, it takes you to places where you can learn what they are and to generators that will prepare them for you.

Anyway, it’s a cool new tool and you should check it out. It can be very valuable for your business or help you to search a whole lot smarter.

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.

I can tell you what the wrong choice in terms of SEO is and that’s keeping the “http://yourblogdomain.com/?postnumber” that is the WordPress default. It doesn’t tell folks or search spiders anything about the post, except what number the post is.

Your SEO-friendly permalink will include your keyword rich title as well as the post number, and it should look like this:

/%post_id%/%postname%/

You can add the category (/%post_id%/%category%/%postname%/) in addition to or instead of the post ID #, but you should only do that if your categories are set up as your main keywords. A “General” category, for example, won’t help at all.

To change your permalink from your WordPress dashboard, you simply go to Settings, then Permalink.

You’ll see them right at the top of the page. Click on “Custom Setting,” and either fill in what you want or copy and paste the above.

However, this is something that should be considered when you start your blog. Do NOT alter your permalink structure if your blog is old or you’ll lose all SEO goodness that you have built up for ALL of your previous posts.

If your blog is new and you don’t have too many posts, change it now. It will be well worth the effort and help your SEO efforts.

To assure that your permalinks will be crawled and indexed, you should also have an XML Sitemap in place. You can get the XML Sitemaps plugin at http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins.

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.

I’m always looking for interesting sites, and sometimes when I join here or there, I’m asked for a logo.

Well… I don’t have one.

At least I didn’t, until Now!

What d’ya think? It goes with the whole SEO theme, right?   It’s colorful and fun, and oh yeah… it was free to make.

I stumbled on a stie called “Logo Creator” at http://creatr.cc/creatr/

You can choose from 5 different preset designs, add your own colors and styles, and voila! You’re logofied.

But… Maybe you’ll like this one better:

It’s got my blog colors, and a little “wheelie” thingy that indicates a techy feel.

I made this one at SimWebSol Logo Generator and you can find it at http://www.simwebsol.com/ImageTool/Default.aspx

So, now I have too many logos…. What to do?

I’d love your opinion.

Vote!

Tell me which logo I should use, and I’ll give you access to the first lesson of Spider Language. You’ll love it so much that I’m betting you’ll want to stick around.

So, let me hear your comments, even if you only want to say that they both suck.

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?

Wow! Amazing the things you find when you go looking for them.

Andy Bland did a pretty sweet review of my new SEO product “Spider Language” at http://r.ecommended.com/product/10193/spider-language

Thanks, Andy!

Only problem… your price is right, but only for 1 month. It’s introduced to you at $4.95, but to continue monthly lessons it’s $47 a month.

Otherwise, thanks for the 4 stars. What could have made it a 5-Star product for you? Just wondering. Always looking to make things better.

We’re working behind the scenes to improve some things at Spider Language, so sign up now while the first month is so inexpensive. You’ll be glad you did!

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!

If you read this blog, you know that I think what Jeff Johnson does is pretty interesting. I’ve watched scores of his videos, and have always planned to do something with all that knowledge. He’s a powerhouse of an affiliate marketer, and I need the time to find a niche where I can rule. Time is the enemy in my world. Anyway, I think Jeff is a pretty smart guy.

So, today, I got about 6 emails from him. (I think I’ve joined his list at least a dozen times.)

He was advertising this new SEO-friendly plugin for WordPress. Pat is all eyes.

I went over to his blog and read more about it. What it does is find plugins for you that are important to your blog’s SEO profile, and it tweaks the settings to match Jeff’s. I thought, hmm… I need to check this out, just because — SEO and all.

I downloaded it.

I let the blog install it and activate it from the zip file. No problems.

It was pretty happy with me because I already have most of the plugins Jeff recommends, but there were a couple, like the CAPTCHA code plugin for comments, which I had mused about but never installed, and the Google XML sitemaps. I had the plain Google Sitemaps, but hey… If Jeff wants to give me his settings, I’m going to download the right plugin, eh?

Once I had them all, I told Jeff’s plugin to change the settings, and bingo! I’m 99.96% optimized.

I had to go in and change the number of posts to show setting because he had it at 5. It left a bunch of white space at the bottom of the blog, so I changed it back to 10, hence my not perfect 100%. Oh well… Not changing my theme. Sorry.

The drawback?

Well… You have to agree to allow Jeff’s blog feed to sit at the top of your dashboard. To me, this isn’t a big deal. In fact, it’s kind of a blessing. I read his blog anyway, and now, I can come here and read from here. Nifty.

I’d recommend this plugin to you, especially if you don’t know what plugins or what settings to have to make your blog SEO-friendly. Two caveats…

First, you must be using WordPress 2.7. You should be anyway, but don’t use Jeff’s plugin if you don’t have it running now.

Second, not all plugins work with all themes. If you install it and something goes glitchy, just deactivate the plugin. Or worse, if your blog goes away, just rename your plugins folder and it will come back. then, delete the plugin and you should be back to normal again.

With those two things in mind, it’s a great free tool. I’d check it out: http://budurl.com/jeffj

I really like the WordPress plugin HeadSpace2.  It’s easy to use and much quicker than using All-in-One SEO, but let me tell you…

I installed it and have been using it for the past few weeks. I decided that I liked HeadSpace2 a lot better than All-in-One because I have very little time, and it saves me a ton of time. So, I uninstalled All-in-One…

HUGE mistake!

I lost all of the titles and descriptions to every post for the past two years that I’d done with All-in-One. Argh! That’s like 325 posts!

So, I’m going back, and one-by-one adding the titles and descriptions back in. It’s pretty quick because I’m using HeadSpace2, but it will still take me several days to get it all done. GRrrrrr….

Here’s the deal: All-in-One will run with HeadSpace2, so if you want to switch over, just don’t uninstall All-in-One. Don’t use it, but let it sit on your blog so that it won’t lose all your information. You don’t have to see it.

Just go to the upper right-hand corner of WordPress 2.7.1 and click on “Screen Options,” then unselect “All-in-One SEO” and you won’t see it again.

Thanks to Brent over at ListBuildingNexus.com, who pointed this issue out.  Luckily, it is fixable.

Have you ever sat back and wondered how your site was faring in several of the Google Data Centers? Or what about how many links you have coming back to your site from outside? What about mod rewrites… any good at creating those? META tags?

And on and on…

There are metrics that we all like to check out occasionally when it comes to our site. Where do we rank? How do we stack up to the competition?

Of course, if you’re ranking #1 for several keyword phrases at Google, it’s not such a big deal, right? Your SEO plan is working.

But what if you’re not ranking that high or ranking at all? What if your site’s been up a while, but you’re still not seeing your site in the SERPs (search engine results pages)? Where do you need to tweak things to make a difference?

I have a great SEO tools site for you that I just stumbled upon! It’s called “Link Vendor,” and you can visit at: http://linkvendor.com

The Searchmetrics Report there is fascinating. You plug in your URL and it tells you how you’re doing in terms of simple SEO, META data, technoology, social bookmarking, and more. Very cool.

Anyway, if you’re a stats loving strange person like me, this site will totally turn you on. Check it out!

“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!

Do you like the ability to interact with your audience? I do, and about six months ago or more I found a great plugin that allows me to answer questions people have about my niche. Notice the top navigatin panel, which has “Blogging Questions,” “SEO Questions,” etc. Those are the result of using FAQ-tastic.

FAQ-Tastic isn’t hard to use, but don’t try it if you’re a beginner. It does involve adding pages and code to those pages so they pages will interact with the software. I mean, it’s not rocket science, and anyone who knows HTML probably won’t have any problems with it at all.

But what it does is give your readers the opportunity to ask you questions. They can be questions about what you’re posting or anything having to do with the categories you design in FAQ-Tastic. Pretty neat. I love helping folks and answering questions is what I do about 55% of my time, so it’s a no-brainer for me to have this plugin. It’s a way for me to keep in touch with my readers, too.

Another great plugin is Comment Remix (and you can search for either of these plugins right from your blog). This allows you to order the comments the way you want them to be (newest first, rather than the other way around), and the sweetest feature perhaps is that it gives you a “reply” button. You can hit it on any comment and just reply. If you don’t have this, you have to edit the post in most themes, and put your answer into the original comment, which is a pain in the butt.

With Comment Remix, you simple click the reply button, and a write blank opens up. You reply right there and be on your way.

I really like these two plugins and I’ve been using them long enough to recommend them. I hope you’ll love them as much as I do.