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Believe it or not, new people join the search marketing world every day.  Frankly, that scares me a little bit.  It’s not the competition or the potential loss of business that scares me, but the sources people are relying on to give them the “right” information.  That said, here are the top 6 most classic SEO articles that I suggest anyone new to the industry read.  And then read again.  Some things in SEO/SEM world haven’t changed much…and a refresher is always a good idea. (more…)

There is no quick and easy way to build links.  If something is quick and easy, it’s almost guaranteed to be worthless.  Building links is no different.  Before going any further, you should understand the difference between FOLLOW and NOFOLLOW links.  If you’re unsure, “What are DoFollow links?  What is NoFollow?  Remove the mystery” should help you understand.

Unless you are using a Firefox plugin – such as SearchStatus or SEO For Firefox, you would never know that many of the links you click on during your time online are NOFOLLOW links.  Just because a link is NOFOLLOW doesn’t mean it holds no value.  NOFOLLOW links from sources like StumbleUpon, Digg and Twitter still hold a great deal of value due to their potential to drive traffic.  They aren’t, however, useful for increasing a site’s inbound link count. (more…)

There are more and more bloggers all the time and usually they want to do it well.  What characterizes a good blog post?  It is not as easy a question as you might think.  Here we will explore what is involved.

The single blog post

Any exploration of the quality of a blog post must start with the content.  Just imagine the blog post printed out on a sheet of paper.  It probably will not appeal to everyone.  What counts is its intended audience.  How does this blog post appeal to a typical reader from the target audience?  Unless this much simpler replica of the blog post works for this reader, it is unlikely to be effective when it goes live on the Web.

Considering this replica, we can understand that the headings and layout of the page and the images, if any, will all be important in determining the reader’s liking for or dislike of the blog post.  The copywriter’s skills are important here in crafting appealing content.  So it must work at this level but there are other factors involved once it goes live online. (more…)

Imagine that you were about to embark on a cross country drive from New York to Los Angeles.  Now imagine that you have no GPS, no map and no idea where you’re going.  That is exactly what trying to optimize a site without doing keyword research is like.  Nothing is more important to your initial SEO strategy than keyword research. Many small business owners don’t even know where to begin, so the effort put into optimizing a site to perform well in organic search results is often wasted and the ultimate result is a great deal of frustration. (more…)

He’s making a list

And checking it twice;

Gonna find out

Who’s naughty and nice

Santa Claus has come and gone.  However that list making he gets involved in seems to be infectious.  Making a list seems to be the rule rather than the exception as we move from 2008 into 2009.

As people look to the future and remember the past, they so often end up preparing a list.   That can either be of things past that they remember with affection or awe, or it may be of the future with things that will delight them. (more…)

I definitely don’t envy newcomers in today’s SEO arena. Back in the day, there were only a handful of “authorities” on the subject and they were all teaching identical techniques and tactics because it was what worked. Today, the rules have changed and there is now a myriad of blogs, sites, forums, feeds, articles, ebooks and “experts” peddling SEO advice. And with so much information to now weed through, I’m guessing that the problem for newbies has shifted from finding things to read and learn, to deciphering which advice to absorb and which to tune out. (more…)

There is a lot of talk online about earning money by promoting affiliate programs, but most people have no clue how to go about it. Promotion involves bringing the product or service in front of people and explaining the benefits. There are two ways of doing this; adwords and article marketing.

While adwords involves advertising on Google and spending money, article marketing is free and this is the reason it is hugely popular, especially with people who are starting out and do not wish to invest any money. There are also many experienced marketers who do article marketing successfully.

The concept of article marketing is to get as many interesting articles as possible out there for people to read. The idea is to make them want more and entice them to visit the website concerned. This is possible only when the article provides something of value to the reader.

The length of the articles does not matter as long as they are between 300 – 500 words and informative. A complete beginner can start making money easily with article marketing.

Speed Writing

Articles don’t have to be masterpieces of literature but they have to be meaningful and provide useful reading. Speed is crucial as the success of article marketing depends on the number of articles that you can get to circulate out there. This helps get plenty of traffic to the website. Never use article spinners and auto generated content. Every article should be unique and add value to the article directories they are submitted to and be informative for the readers.

There are several people that churn out around 25 articles or more in a day and if one does it for 5 days a week, it is 125 articles in a week. The more articles, the better the edge one has. Doing this for six months to an year will ensure a steady income for a long time to come. Many top article marketers continue to receive checks for work done years ago. Speed matters. (more…)

Internet opens the doors to a worldwide audience; if they can find the website. People search for all sort of things on the search engines, such as Google. This is the search engine traffic that visits the web pages on the websites or blogs in search of information.

What are people looking for? How do they find it? These become the two most crucial questions that need to be asked when trying to direct traffic to a website.

Let us first understand that this search-engine based traffic is free traffic and to gain access to this traffic, a webmaster has to work at two levels; the setting up of a perfect content management system and at the article level. Both become very important.

Here let us see from a writer’s perspective, at how a good article needs to be written to attract quality search engine traffic.

Out of the three sources for traffic; friends of the webmaster who come directly to the website; people who come to the site by following links at other sites; the traffic that is directed by the search engines to a particular article becomes very important. A decent website is said to be one that can attract search engine traffic, which is at least half of all the traffic.

Search engine traffic comes to different pages within the website and it solely depends on the content within the web pages. It thus becomes important that every article on a site draws some traffic to the site. (more…)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is now considered a highly specialized field and is slowly emerging out of the dark shadows of spammers. It has a bright future with a growing number of online businesses depending on traffic from various sources.

Although, the major chunk of the traffic to the websites still comes from search engine users; the social media sites, such as StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and Digg provide highly targeted and relevant traffic.

Experts are of the opinion that it is highly possible that organic optimization and social media optimization are going to play a major role in the future of search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the greatest tool that helps get targeted traffic to the websites.

Organic optimization means getting a high rank solely based on the merits of the website itself; such as the way a website is created, unique content that is placed on the website and high quality inbound links obtained without having to pay for the affection. It makes the search engines develop a liking towards the site and they show off the site to its users by taking it up on the rankings. Although organic SEO takes time and effort to achieve results, it is considered to be very lucrative in the long run. (more…)

There are certain rules and guidelines to SEO. Black hat and white hat aside, much of SEO is done through keyword optimization on the site as well as generating links back to the site from other sources. But according to some, there can be too much of a good thing. If you are so focused on producing pages of keyword rich content that your site becomes repetitive or pattern based, you might be throwing up a flare to Google and other search engines that your site is essentially spam.

Spam Sites
Google penalizes spam sites when it finds them (and feels like it.) If Google feels like your site follows the pattern of spam sites, you will most likely find your site and all your hard work booted off results pages. Characteristics of spam sites include highly repetitive pages often created as duplicates of a template to increase the amount of content on the site. Content is keyword laden gibberish, and the overall offerings of the site contain little or no value to visitors. Why create a spam site? To have visitors click away from it, preferably onto your Adsense or other ads cluttering up the perimeter of the page. Or to sell paid links – many paid links. (more…)