Free PDF Report You Can Rebrand and Share

If you are using either Twitter or WordPress or both, this new short report will help you to get the most out of both. Whether you are looking to drive more traffic to your WordPress powered sites or to your affiliate marketing offers, the tips and tools in this concise guide will help.

The report is 18 pages in length and introduces some of my own tried and tested methods but will hopefully inspire you to do some creative thinking yourself.

You can download a copy of the Twitter and WordPress marketing report, rebranded with your own affiliate links (See the form below) and you are free to use your branded copy in your own promotional and marketing efforts. Rebranding is a simple case of adding your own affiliate links in the boxes filling out the captcha and downloading your PDF.

When you give away your branded copy containing your links, you can pass on the same rebranding rights to your visitors, subscribers, readers and customers.

Such rebrandable PDF books and reports can be a great draw and the simplicity of the brand new server side branding method we have installed makes the whole process far less painful than the more traditional branders that made people jump through so many hoops that they often lost heart and never rebranded anything.

With a few mouse clicks this report can be personalized and downloaded ready to be shared. No complicated brander software to download to your machine and no learning curve. This will encourage your visitors to rebrand and pass along the report and heightens interest in your own blogs and sites by virtue of the fact that you offer something of perceived value.

Try it for yourself and see how simple it is.

You can then use the report in a variety of ways – add it to your blog as a gift, share i with your subscriber list, add it to giveaway events, use it as an opt-in reward to build your own list, write a post about it and link to the download. Those are just a few of the things you can do to increase the viral effect of your report and how you can achieve a viral effect for your affiliate links. Think creatively!

We will be offering more ebooks and reports as time goes by so please subscribe and be the first to know – the early bird catches the  worm!

(IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do not have a Clickbank affiliate link you can get one here and you can get a free SocialOomph account here

If you leave any of the boxes empty the links in your PDF will not work correctly)

video Review Of  This Excellent video Marketing Software

Traffic Player review – A WordPress plugin that enhances videos from YouTube and any other video sources watch the video now for full details of this excellent video marketing software and how it can increase traffic and sales to any videos.

WP Social Lock is a WordPress plugin that was originally sold, I believe, as a WSO through the Warrior Forum but we came across it more recently when trying to solve the problem of locking specific content on a WordPress site until the visitor took a specific action – we wanted to make content available only after the visitor shared a specific page or post either via Facebook, twitter or Google +1.

This is not a new concept and marketers have been employing such “social content locking” methods for some time now but despite the fact that there are a variety of options on offer we constantly found that either the solutions didn’t work or were capable of only fulfilling part of our requirements.

We’ve listed most of the things we tried at the end of this review so that you won’t have to search as hard as we did!

The good news is that we found a winner in WP Social Lock, a neat little plugin now owned and distributed by Marc Hennes who has proved to be a very helpful and responsive plugin developer.

The video below sums up WP Social Lock in a nutshell if you don’t wish to read our entire post.

As you can see from the above demo, the idea behind WP Social Lock is to restrict certain areas of your site from public view, much as you would do with the various content locking plugins available as stand alone scripts or features of membership plugins, whereby only registered or logged in members can see certain content on your site. There are plenty of free plugins that can do this in the WordPress plugin repository. However, what this plugin allows you to do is restrict your selected content to only those who share your selected URL via one of the three main social networking sites and at present there are not any free plugins that do this as far as we know.

The benefits of this are obvious. First and foremost it will generate traffic from all three of the social networks as people Tweet, Like and +1 your page/post and give it exposure to potentially unlimited new visitors. It has excellent viral potential and used wisely can gain you a lot of visitors and perhaps a lot of customers or subscribers, whatever you are looking for in essence.

The claim that you will generate huge numbers of backlinks is perhaps true in part, although how much weight Facebook and Twitter links really carry is anyone’s guess to be honest and as for Google +1 it’s perhaps too early to tell how much an increased number of likes is going to impact your ranking or SERPS results. Ultimately though, none of these increases will do your sites any harm and you will get more traffic.

WP Social Lock has been around for a while now but its usage is still not as widespread as you might expect for such a neat little WordPress plugin. As we’ve already said, there are several others around, most more expensive and invariably incapable of offering shares on the big three networks. There are several Facebook only plugins but despite Facebook‘s massive reach there are still plenty of people who don’t use it. Restricting content based on a Facebook “Like” is a little tough on those folks, as indeed is restricting it to just Twitter. By using the three options in WP Social Lock you probably have the majority of internet users covered.

The plugin is easy to install and use – entering a simple shortcode before the content you wish to lock is all there is to it really.

So what about problems? Well, like many WordPress plugins, conflicts can arise with themes, other plugins you may be running etc. but Marc is helpful and responsive with his support so if you do encounter any issues they should be resolved fairly quickly. When you run other plugins that rely on the API’s of sites like Facebook and Twitter it’s not always the plugin’s fault when odd behaviour strikes.

One question that was raised frequently when the plugin was first launched and only offered Facebook and Twitter options was whether it would affect the spidering of your content by search engines. The answer to this is no – even though human visitors cannot see the content until they complete the required action, the spiders are granted full access to read and crawl the entire post or page so there should be no detrimental effects on the SERPS performance.

We had one minor issue with another plugin we were using on the site where we first tested WP Social Lock but after a quick process of elimination we isolated the conflict and informed Marc, who immediately set to work in the quest for a solution. We found our own fix in the end but our emails were all answered promptly and helpfully.

(If you would like to see a real world example of a page on which we deployed WP Social Lock here is one you can check out).

Overall, we love this plugin and recommend it to anyone who is looking for ways to boost their traffic. All we would add is that it isn’t something you should use indiscriminately. Selective restriction of your best/most valuable content is quite reasonable but overdoing it could be a real turnoff for a lot of people if you demand they share too much before allowing them access and they will be more likely to move on if you get too heavy handed.

If you would like to try WP Social Lock for free you can download WP Social Lock Lite free from here. (The Lite version allows you to lock content subject to a tweet on Twitter).

We hunted high and low for both free and paid solutions to social content locking on WordPress and came up with quite a few but in terms of value for money, user experience, layout, ease of use and features, WP Social Lock was a clear winner. Here are just a few others that we looked at, tried or rejected. All have their pros and cons, and as you will see, most are not quite as simple or well featured. We are going to be looking at a free plugin in the course of the next few weeks which although not really a competitor to WP Social Lock is pretty cool in its own right so watch this space for that one.

Other Social Content Locking plugin options for WordPress users:

WP Like Lockout – we haven’t personally tested this one but the sales page itself employs the lockout which seems a bit counter productive if you ask us. It would appear to be an OK plugin if you want to use Facebook likes alone but it uses popups which are a lot more intrusive and potentially frustrating for visitors than WP Social Lock’s interface. Much will depend on the settings you elect to use on the popup. It is also more expensive by around ten bucks so in terms of value for money it’s in last place here on that basis alone – there are better and cheaper choices as you can see. If you want to see it in action there is a video at this link WP Like Lockout

Google +1 Content Locker – simple, easy to use and cheap at just $7.00. If you’re going to go for a single content locking option Google might be the best bet as opposed to Facebook. Only time will tell. You can get Google +1 Content Locker here.

WordPress Like Locker – from the same author as the above and also cheap at $7.00. We have used this in the past and it’s effective enough, not overly intrusive and simple to use. If all you care about is Facebook likes it’s a good enough choice. See the details at WordPress Like Locker

Social Traffic Pop  – the third option from the same stable as the previous two plugins. Works on all three major networks – Google +1, Facebook and Twitter. Comes in at $18.00. We like this one and have used it in the past but still prefer the non pop up approach to content locking overall. Having said that, this is the cheapest of the plugins that support all three networks and represents good value for money. Read more about Social Traffic Pop.

This list is not exhaustive and there are other products out there which may or may not float your boat but if you want an easy professional looking social content locking plugin, our recommendation for WP Social Lock is one we are happy to make.

Please let us know what you think in the comments section. Have you ever used WP Social Lock? What do you think about social content locking in general? Would you ever try it or do you think it would  put off your visitors? Do you have any experience of other WordPress solutions that we haven’t mentioned?

WordPress SEO tips are everywhere nowadays and discussions of the subject invariably leave me cold. Frequently, the people giving the advice seem to be doing so from very insecure positions, often having sites that rank nowhere in the SERPS and have very little traffic.

For this reason I thought I’d not only help to dispel a few myths but to tell you exactly what I do when I want to rank for a particular keyword. This is not rocket science but instead of giving you a load of waffle and hypothetical fluff I will tell you exactly what I do and give you a quick case study too.

Before I go on, remember that not all WordPress sites are equal when it comes to optimization, but if you follow these  simple guidelines you should find that your rankings in the SERPS will improve in a lot of cases.

If you have a free theme that is not SEO optimized, use a plugin like All In One SEO or Yoast’s excellent SEO plugin to give you the basics for your site and the options to tweak your posts and pages. If you’re already familiar with these SEO plugins or have your own favourite installed, great, and if you have a decent theme with built in SEO options even better. There is still more you can do so read on…….

When you write a post on a WordPress site, decide what keyword you want to optimize for. In the example I give below we were writing a review of a product so we wanted to target the keyword/phrase “Virtual Sports Cash Review”.

Simple enough so far? I didn’t need to do a whole heap of research on competition etc. for this one, it’s not exactly something for which multitudes of people will be searching. The point is, it is a review and therefore we only need to think about what people who already know about the product are likely to search for when they are thinking of buying it – most people will go and seek out reviews and we want them to find ours. Unlike the thousands of lame posts out there that talk about optimizing for the term “weight loss” we’re going to show you how to tweak your SEO for real world results on realistic keywords and phrases.

The obvious title of the post is going to be our keywords or, if you prefer, keyphrase. You can add more to the title if it’s needed to make a coherent heading but your keywords should come first. For example, we could title our post “Virtual Sports Cash Review – A Customer’s Experience. You get the idea. Having entered that it’s time to write the post itself. There is no need to pepper the article with your keyword – write naturally, for human visitors. You can add some refinements later as you will see, without the need to sound like a broken record.

A few more basics to remember:Your permalink structure – get it right from the outset. Don’t use defaults. I prefer just postname but some lean towards category | postname. Either is OK, your choice, just be sure when you set up a WP site that it’s one of the first things you do as changing them later has detrimental effects even if only short term.

If you are including any images, be sure to name them with your keyphrase too – in the title and, if you like in the “alt” attribute of the image as well. I tend to vary the “alt” slightly but it’s up to you, just be sure to use them both and don’t leave them empty or filled with meaningless characters.

As we will be linking to a product we will choose our anchor text for any links carefully “Virtual Sports Cash” will suffice in this case.

When you’re done writing, use the additional fields offered by your SEO plugin of choice to refine your keywords and meta tags and in the excerpt or description field (as in All In One SEO), use your keyword first. The keyword field provided by many SEO plugins isn’t all that important any more, particularly to Google but fill it in anyway, using your main keyword first and add as many related and variations on your theme as you see fit. Then copy all those keywords and paste them into the “tags” section on the right hand side of your WordPress dashboard. Tags are important, don’t neglect them.

By now you might well be thinking; “Is that it? I read this post for that?” Well, yes and no, that’s the basics and you may well be doing most or all of that already but here is where I give you that extra something that will improve your rankings much further.

You will need to install a copy of the SEO software I use regularly it’s a free download from this link: Download Free S-E-O Software – it will open in a new window for you. Just hit the free download button and then install it once you’re done.

Once you have written and proofed your post, publish it to the web. When you’ve done so, open up your new free software and click on the “Page Analysis” button in the left hand menu. You will then be presented with a screen like the one below:

Enter the full URL of your post and then your chosen keywords/phrase in the keyword box alongside it. Hit the “analyze page” button at top right. After a few seconds the job is done and you need to click on the “Report Summary” tab. You will then be presented with the results and recommendations by the software and your page will have been given a “grade” “- just like school A being higher than F

What you want is an A or even an A+ so follow the advice given in the summary – if your post does not meet the criteria the software tells you it should, then change it so that it does. Normally, with WordPress, you will need to add things like an additional H1 tag to your post and probably tweak your meta keywords and description – just do what the software recommends and with each change you make according to its suggestions your grade will increase. Run the URL through the software again each time you make a change and you will see your grade improving with each little tweak. When you get an A or better you’re done.

You can see from the screenshots above that we made these simple minor changes to our post , and we achieved our A rating. Even though our initial post was written with a keyword in mind, those little extra tweaks make all the difference, even in a WordPress installation already built on a well optimized theme framework.

Here is a quick video overview of the very latest version of the software. The Pro version contains a whole lot more tools for analysis but the free version will let you do all the basics and you can always upgrade later if you find it helpful and want even more SEO features:

If you check Google for our keyword you will find the page in question in first place, on Yahoo and Bing we have the number two spot.

Did we do anything else? Well, I tend to go over to Pingler and ping certain new posts even though I have a good list of sites already loaded into WordPress. We did a bit of tweeting and sharing on Facebook and added a few select social bookmarks but other than that, no, nothing in particular. The SEO was taken care of and there’s no need to get hung up on all the other stuff when you could better use the time to write some more quality optimized content.

You can see the post and exactly how it is laid out at Virtual Sports Cash Review. For the record, the site does not use any SEO plugins as it is built on the excellent Catalyst Theme Framework which is optimized extremely well in its own right. The link will take you to our review of Catalyst and at the time of writing offers a massive 25% discount coupon – it’s one of the best WordPress investments you will ever make, guaranteed.

OK, this may not be a keyword for which there is much competition, we concede that, but the point is we achieved our aim of good rankings on all three major search platforms and as Google offers up over 2.2M results for that particular search, it shows what can be done with just a little extra planning and implementation.

Bear in mind too that the domain in question is virtually brand new and has practically zero backlinks so don’t let the SEO “experts” tell you how much more complicated than this it needs to be. Write good original content, make sure you have sitemaps submitted to Google, Bing and Yahoo – get the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin if you haven’t already and use Google and Bing webmaster tools to monitor your sites. Google indexes far faster than the other two but put in a little extra effort via Bing’s webmaster tools and you’ll soon get any decent site indexed pretty smartly. I’m not telling you that this will work on a hugely competitive term with thousands of searches every five minutes and that it will be your key to earning mountains of easy cash – I’ll leave that to the marketers, SEO experts and snake oil salesmen whom you can choose to believe or not.

If you write your posts this way you will improve your rankings – the more competitive your keywords the harder it will be to get on the front page but you will definitely do better than if you rely on complete randomness. It’s worth that little bit of extra work I reckon. There are actually a lot more things you can do but we’ve covered enough in this one post, enough to give anyone SEO brain freeze so we’ll talk more about some other clever stuff another day.

You don’t need to spend a ton of money on SEO, you don’t need to worry about building massive numbers of links, just concentrate on the simple stuff. Write good content and people will read it and link to it voluntarily. Monitor your sites regularly using the webmaster tools offered by the search engines and be patient. In all the years I’ve been online I’ve learned that tearing out your hair over algorithms, sandboxes, slaps, link building and all the other nonsense is invariably a fruitless exercise destined to end only in exasperation.

One last thing worth mentioning about SEO in this post – the speed of a site is now taken into consideration by Google at least. If you’re concerned about that or have no idea what it might mean for your site head over to our recent post titled “WordPress Speed | Faster Load Times” for more information.

Need More Quality Backlinks? Try Our Backlinks Search Engine

WordPress speed and load times have become increasingly important, particularly since Google decided that the speed of a website would be included in their search ranking algorithm. If your site is very slow to load, not only will this now put off a percentage of your visitors, it might conceivably affect your ability to achieve certain ranking levels in the SERPS for your chosen keywords. It’s just one more thing to consider if you run WordPress powered sites.

WordPress is a great dynamic platform but it is easy to forget that as time goes by, the more content and features you add, edit and remove, the more you need to keep on top of your sites’ performance. Housekeeping is a boring and tedious task but we’ve put together some resources designed to make the chores a little easier.

So, how do you know if your sites are running too slowly in the first place? The first thing we recommend you do is open a Google Webmastertools account if you don’t have one already.  This is something that everyone running any kind of website should have for the wealth of important information and diagnostics it provides you with.

Next, add both the Firebug and Page Speed extensions to your Firefox. (Also available for Chrome if you prefer Google’s browser).

You can now go ahead and load your page and test it with the extensions you have just added. If the results are horrible and don’t mean a thing to you, never fear, read on to discover a number of ways to bring your website up to speed.

WordPress Plugins for Performance

The following WordPress plugins can all be useful in your quest for greater performance and are listed in no particular order aside from the first one which we highly recommend all WordPress users should install on all sites.

W3 Total Cache Plugin – download and install W3 Total Cache and follow the instructions carefully. It is probably the most complete and stable caching plugin currently available but, it needs to be set up carefully because some settings may actually make your site perform worse in certain areas. This will depend on several factors including your hosting arrangements and everything that is running on your site, themes plugins etc.

The good news is that there is plenty of help available if you need it. As you tweak the settings, check the effects it has on your page speed performance using Firebug or the Google Page Speed option that W3 Total Cache can install on your WP-admin dashboard if you select that option. W3TC can be tweaked for shared hosting, VPS users and dedicated servers. It places a new set of options in the left hand menu of your WP-admin panel.

Also check to make sure that all the features of your page are still displaying correctly and if you are using any kind of pop ups check that they are working – often the minify settings can mess with such things.

It is a great cache plugin but the options available also make it easy to end up with conflicts or even slowing down your site – there is a great guide already published on Zemalf.com and we highly recommend you read it and follow the set up instructions provided at their site – W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin Setup Guide

IF things go wrong the important thing is not to panic! We have had a situation where all we got after configuring the plugin was the dreaded white screen = no admin dashboard and no site. If this happens the simple fix can be found at HackTrix – How To Fix The Blank Page Or Blank Screen In WordPress

If you find yourself having major problems with the plugin – and some sites do seem to have them, so be warned, there are alternatives. We installed and configured W3TC on one site and it seemed to be performing fine until we saw the error logs on cpanel which had grown to over 2GB!We can’t tell you what happened but the site was throwing up 500 internal server errors and that was enough for us to uninstall the plugin. We did try messing with the settings but all was to no avail, so it had to go. After deleting the plugin there were several display problems and only after much frustration and head scratching did we get things working normally again. If you have this problem it might be worth waiting a while to see if your site returns to normal after uninstalling W3TC because in our case it seemed to fix itself  after a couple of hours so maybe there was some residual caching going on – we really don’t know.

If you do have issues we would recommend you give  Hyper Cache for WordPress a try instead. This is a far less intimidating plugin to install and works straight out of the box in our experience. When we installed it on the aforementioned site the page speed ratings were within one or two points of those achieved with W3TC  and we didn’t have to spend ages carefully configuring it. We will monitor it carefully but so far it’s looking very capable indeed and isn’t causing any obvious problems at all. Top marks for Hyper Cache. This is the plugin that we use on this site and although it is not as effective as W3 Total Cache, it gave us far less issues. With W3TC, if you are using manual settings to minify javascript and CSS, you will have to keep those settings up to date each time you add/remove plugins etc. and to be honest, the speed advantage over Hypercache wasn’t worth the hassle but that is just a personal preference, and, as the saying goes, your mileage may vary!

In addition to W3 Total Cache, or Hyper Cache or even in isolation the following plugins can also be helpful in speeding up your WordPress page speed.

Clean Options WordPress Plugin – If your blog has been around for some time you’ve probably added and removed all kinds of plugins, themes etc. This plugin Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_options table. You could have hundreds of orphaned options and this will help you clean house in that area. Be careful and make sure you are definitely only removing genuinely orphaned items though. You might be well advised to back up before you make any changes just as a precaution but on the whole the plugin is reliable and does a good job.

Better Delete Revisions WordPress Plugin – use this plugin to delete the revisions that WordPress automatically creates and stores every time you create ot alter posts and pages. These files can build up over time and take up space and impact on performance. This plugin makes it simple to find a delete all the revisions clogging up your WordPress. If you want to prevent revisions being stored in future you could install the Revision Control plugin to make the job easy. If you do this, you can remove the Better Delete plugin once you have set Revision Control to not save revisions in future.

If you have access to PHPMyAdmin through your hosting account you can then optimize your MySQL database. It’s easy to do – just click on the db name (WDRP1 or similar) highlight all the tables and select optimize from the drop down box at the bottom. That’s it, done. This can make a surprising difference to your site’s performance all by itself.

If you prefer not to mess with your databases in this way, try installing the TentBlogger Optimize WordPress Database plugin and do it from your WordPress admin with one click. The plugin will always tell you when your database is optimized and if not how much space you can shave off by optimizing. Couldn’t be simpler. It works on most sites although we did have a poblem with it on one WP site but to be fair, it’s an old site and the theme conflicts with a fair number of plugins so that was probably the culprit as opposed to the plugin itself.

Another useful plugin is WP Smush.it, basically an image compression plugin that will reduce the size of all the images in your WordPress media library and consequently improve load times. The quality of the images is not adversely affected and once installed it will automatically compress any images you add to your pages and posts. You can also apply it to all existing images in your library. Worth looking at if you have an image intensive site.

As you implement these things you should find your performance rating in Page Speed / Firebug starting to improve after each step. Take note too of the other recommendations that Firebug offers in respect of optimization. You may not be able to achieve a green check mark against every item, but the more you can get, the better.

There are various online services that will test the load time of any webpage although the disparity in the results that you will get prove that in reality they can only give a vague indication of how quickly your visitors will see your page load. This is because there are so many factors that affect that load time – their physical location, their equipment, their connection to the web, their browser type and version etc. etc. If you want to try some of them however there is a list available at PCDrome.com – 10+ Best Web Tools to Check Website Loading Time

While you’re doing all this housekeeping and tweaking, it is also a good idea to check for broken links on your site, particularly if you’ve never done so or haven’t had a clean up in a long time. We use Xenu’s Link Sleuth  for this (which can be downloaded for free) but there is also a WordPress plugin (isn’t there always?) that can check your WordPress sites for links that are  no longer functioning. It may not be compatible with the latest version of WordPress yet you can give it a try and see if it works for you. WordPress Plugin Broken Link Checker.

If you those results spend a lot of time tweaking your on page SEO, don’t let the results of your hard work be negatively impacted by ignoring the performance factors of your site(s)

If you are seeking an easy way to incorporate attractive and effective links to all your social networking and bookmarking sites in your email signature, this Firefox extension is going to be right up your alley.

Wisestamp is a free add on for your Firefox browser which enables you to easily create a professional looking email signature that features links and icons to not only your twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts but will also let you display links to your latest blog posts and sites you have recently bookmarked on a wide range of social bookmarking services.

As you can see from the screen shot to your left, (click it for a larger view) once you install and configure the add on, all your social networking and bookmarking links will be automatically displayed in your signature whenever you compose a new email. In this case it is a Yahoo mail account but the extension will do exactly the same for Gmail, Hotmail and AOL mail.

If that wasn’t enough it will also allow you to add your signature to just about any webpage (as long as it supports HTML), such as Google Docs, Zoho Docs and similar.

Setting up the service is as easy as 1-2-3 and once you’ve spent a couple of minutes configuring the options you can forget about it. If you want different signatures for personal and business emails, no problem, it can do that too.

Once again Firefox gives us another great way to improve the browsing experience and a surefire method of spreading the word about your social networking activity, be it business related or not.

To get the extension and start socializing your email signatures just head over to WiseStamp and get started.

For some people it is and if you are one of those people, the aim of this hub is to give you a very quick and bare bones guide on the subject along with the tools you’ll need to get the job done.

Keyword research is important if you are involved in niche marketing or article marketing, pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, or even if you are an Adsense publisher.

The problem with the whole keyword research topic is that although quite a bit has been written about it and how important it is, there are not many really good explanations about what you should actually be doing. Sure there are plenty of links to keyword tools and software, but very little on how to use them to your advantage.

I’m going to try and give you a concise explanation that was given to me by someone who has a lot of experience in niche marketing and Adsense. Don’t worry, you are not going to need to be an SEO expert to follow these methods and neither will you need any expensive tools.

Photo Credit : Practicalowl

When doing your keyword research you are basically looking for two things:

1) Search Volume

2) Competition

This is vitally important and what a lot of people misunderstand and unless you research both properly, your results are likely to be mediocre a lot of the time. So, here is the quick down and dirty way to find your keywords and rank well for them.

Keyword Tools & Keyword Software

Go to SpyFu.com and type in a broad keyword covering your chosen topic and it will give you an idea of how much advertisers are paying for clicks in that given market. If you are an Adsense publisher for example, it’s a good way to see roughly what you might expect to earn for clicks on your ads. It’s a rough guide, but it will sort out the wheat from the chaff and help you avoid those five cent clicks and help you find the bigger green

Firstly you are going to need a keyword research tool. Google’s Keyword Tool is about as good as anything else, although I sometimes use the SEO Book Keyword Tool too. Both are free.

(No keyword research tool is 100% accurate by the way, they are guides that work on past data and that data is an ever shifting sea, but they are the best you’ve got).

Now you need to type in some keywords that broadly match the subject you are researching. Google will find you all the keywords it feels are relevant and make additional suggestions too. What you are looking for are those with good search volume – “good” will depend on how narrow and focused your niche is. For niche sites and articles, anything with a daily search volume of a hundred or more is worth looking at. For less long tail phrases you will probably raise that number. It’s something that you will learn with experience, but it’s not hard to pick out keywords that are getting high volume searches.

Add every one of your selected phrases to a text or csv file – you can do this easily in Google’s tool by clicking on the download links at the right hand side of the page.

Next comes the fun part. This method is not claimed to be laser targeted in terms of accuracy, it’s a bit rough really, but it works reasonably well most of the time.

Go to Google and search for each keyword you have saved to your text file. Look at the top ten results and work out the average page rank. If it is below three, keep the phrase but if it’s above four, don’t pay it any more attention. (Hint, use Firefox and download the SEOQuake add on which will then display PR and a lot more besides for each search result in Google, otherwise your research will take forever and a day).

I told you it was rough, but this competition analysis works well enough a lot of the time although there will be misses as well as hits. After you’ve narrowed down your keyword list in this way you will be working with terms that have high search volume and less competition.

By taking these steps, you will stand more chance of good SERPS results for your niche sites or articles, you will probably enjoy better Adsense revenue, and at this point you will be smiling!

That, in a nutshell, is all you need. However I’ve added some further resources that may be of interest to those who want to get even more serious with the whole keyword and SEO aspects of their site building and marketing efforts. I will probably add to these as I think of them.

Before you go there though, here are a couple of final thoughts on the whole keyword circus.

Keywords are important, that is accepted wisdom. However, there is a lot of misunderstanding about how to use them and this results in a lot of problems. Most people online are not SEO focused and therefore, you see a lot of uninformed, although sometimes justified, complaints about the whole subject of keywords. This usually arises because equally uninformed people completely misuse keywords by producing writing that they believe is aimed at search engine robots but is basically awful to read for humans.

Constructing an article or web page around keywords can often result in a mangled mess. It’s usually a result of mixing a little knowledge of basic SEO with someone who can’t write very well, with or without keywords.

Don’t overdo or “stuff” any piece of writing with so many targeted phrases that the work becomes unreadable. Repeating the same term over and over would have got you an English language fail in high school and it will return the same result from your online audience.

Oh and don’t ever write about one subject and try and keyword optimize it for something completely different. Just because you find that your proposed article generates low paying PPC ads for example. It won’t work. If someone comes looking for tips on recipes, that’s what they hope to find. Even if you could persuade Adsense that ads from ambulance chasing lawyers were relevant to your content about making the perfect rock cake, your visitors are hardly likely to click on them.

All you have to do is write a well constructed piece with a few targeted keywords thrown in, and you will get more targeted Adsense ads on your pages, better search engine ranking, and hopefully more targeted visitors.

Keyword Tools & Resources

Keyword Elite Software | Commercial Keyword Research Tool

MSN Commercial Intent Tool

Free Search Based Keyword Tool From Google

Free GTrends Tool From Wordtracker

NicheBOT | Keywords | Keyword Phrases From Wordtracker

SEMRush FREE SEO Tool For Adwords & Keyword Research

Free Report For Niche Marketers & Adsense Publishers

Catalyst Theme For WordPress Review

The Catalyst Theme is really a lot more than a traditional bolt on WordPress theme – it’s actually a framework that enables you to do some pretty amazing things when it comes to designing and building WordPress driven sites, whether they are blogs, static or dynamic sites or a combination of all three.

There are no longer any coupon codes published by Catalyst – sorry. However, they are currently having a one year anniversary sale and you can grab a lifetime Personal Edition membership for just $77.00 if you order during this special offer.

With Catalyst Theme, you are not limited to a single layout, one, two or three sidebars, one widget area or all the other restrictions that come with a single WordPress theme. With the Catalyst theme framework you can basically build unlimited custom page layouts, custom widgets, custom hook boxes and more, enabling you to design and construct every page and post template on your site exactly as you want them. You can have an individual header or footer for every single page if you so desire!  The real beauty of it though is not just the almost limitless customization available to you, but the ease with which you can implement them all.

Catalyst Theme - Order Your Copy Now

Firstly, Catalyst comes with 22 custom skins, which in and of itself might not sound like much, but with the Dynamik Child Theme that comes as part of the Catalyst bundle you then have over 600 No-Coding Design Options, meaning that combined with the base skins, you have at your fingertips an absolutely huge range of design options. Whether you are a beginner or an accomplished WordPress user, customizing your WordPress sites has never been easier or more efficient.

Once you have installed the Catalyst theme and the Dynamik Child Theme you can start to explore the power and flexibility of the framework using any of the Dynamik child themes as starting points, using those from the marketplace or just creating your own. Catalyst makes design very straightforward and intuitive.

At this point it might be prudent to show you an example of what Catalyst can do, and bear in mind this site was built over the course of a couple of days, starting completely from scratch after a request for a redesign of an existing WordPress website – Catalyst Theme Powered Site – Arteccentrix

You can even create your own custom child themes with a single mouse click, something you will not find anywhere else, not even with the mighty Thesis.

All the following features come with the Catalyst WordPress theme:

22 Custom Skins on which to base site design.

600+ Dynamik design options to tweak your site’s design to perfection. (no manual coding or CSS required)

Add any Custom CSS you likeBuilt-In Image Uploader to add the images that make your site shine.

Fill in a few fields, click a single button and download the themes you build. Use them for anything you want – your own sites, client’s sites etc. You can even sell them for profit if you wish.

Huge range of  Custom Widgets including Excerpt Widget, Author Bio Widget, Ad Widget a PHP  Widget and lots more!

Catalyst works with WordPress and WordPress MU (Multi-User)

Receive Free Updates for Life ( with automatic update feature)

You will also have access to the new “MarketPlace” where you will find more custom themes, skins and other add ons for your Catalyst powered sites that have been created by the Catalyst members themselves. Many of these are free but there are also premium products available within the store.

All this sounds impressive but if it’s also a little overwhelming don’t worry. Installing the theme is pretty much the same as you would follow for any other theme,the only real difference is that you actually install it in two steps, first the Catalyst Theme Framework followed by the Dynamik Child Theme.

Once you’ve done that you will be able to access all the theme‘s options from within your WP-Admin area. There is a lot to explore, and the more you look the more you find but you will also find an excellent support forum and some pretty comprehensive video demos and members support area that answers all the most common questions and shows you exactly how to use the powerful features.

Once you start to play around with the options you’ll soon feel comfortable and it’ all accomplished from within the theme itself so if you’re not CSS savvy, don’t worry. Things that can be a huge headache when working with regular WordPress themes are amazingly easy to achieve with Catalyst’s user friendly and clearly laid out interface.

I should add that when it comes to SEO, Catalyst has been fitted out with a pretty decent set of options that will ensure every post and page you write can be quickly and simply optimized for the search engines at the time of writing and can be easily tweaked at a later stage. Since using Catalyst I have, for the first time in my WordPress career, not bothered to use any SEO plugin and judging by the results, Catalyst does a very nice job at optimizing for targeted keywords.

A lot of thought has gone into the entire package and the developers have delivered a clean, logical and well laid out admin interface which is very intuitive to use and the tutorial videos are all anyone will need to understand and use the multiple options available.

For a good overview take a look at the following video while you’re here:

To sum up, I am so happy with my own purchase of Catalyst that I intend to eventually move the majority of my WordPress sites across to the platform. It is really that good and will make tweaking my sites in the future a whole lot easier. The latest release which came out a couple of days ago includes even more goodies that I have yet to explore.

Don’t think that this all comes at a premium price either – an unlimited site license for the Catalyst Theme comes in at just $77.00 (Basic Edition) or $127.00 (Personal Edition) and this includes lifetime updates. In that sense alone it is a genuine bargain. There are other frameworks out there but Catalyst is not only powerful and extremely flexible it is also fantastic value for money. Visit the site to understand the differences between the aforementioned license options which are extremely generous.

For those who need or want even more there is a developer edition ($197) which gives you access to an exclusive forum and more special features that are not available to regular members. Full details can be found at the site, so we’ll leave you to decide if the developer license is something you need.

Order now and take advantage of the special anniversary pricing options.

You Can Find Our More and Download Catalyst WordPress Theme Framework here

If you would like to see some of the sites built using Catalyst have a browse through the Catalyst Showcase

Image via Wikipedia

The announcement of Google’s latest algorithm changes designed to weed out poor quality content from what have commonly become known as “content farms” poses some interesting questions.

Early figures suggest that a number of well known and long established sites have been hit quite hard in the SERPS.  Some early indications of sites affected by Google’s content farm algorithm changes have already been published.

Certainly, the knock on effects of the change will take some time to become apparent but certainly, those who use article marketing are going to have to up their game when it comes to producing content.

Over two years ago I wrote a post entitled “article directories must raise standards” because it was only ever going to be a matter of time before the chickens came home to roost over the absolute garbage that was being passed off as content by authors, publishers, and the article directories and their editors.

It would seem that this is exactly what the latest algorithm updates are targeting – not by domain per se, but by individual pages on  those domains. With Ezinearticles marked as one of the heavy losers in the SERPS, my complaints about the decline in editorial quality control at what was once the  market leader in its field and loved by the search engines, is getting a slap for falling asleep at the wheel.

Based on early results though, if you are using article marketing as an SEO tool, there isn’t any reason to panic as long as you are submitting quality, well written articles. If on the other hand you spin crap into more crap, use rehashed PLR drivel that thousands of others have mangled before you, well, don’t expect your results to be much to write home about any longer. The abuse of what was once a wonderful system for all concerned, has, as predicted not only by me but many others, finally been tackled by Google.

It’s probably going to upset a lot of people. It will mean a lot of changes for some and hopefully it will allow article directories who publish only solid content a fair chance to rank well against the big boys who have been so dominant in the past. Good editorial practice should be rewarded, good content writing should be rewarded, and the tons of spammy, useless, marketing driven nonsense will be consigned to irrelevancy as it should have been a long time ago.

Article directory owners will need to get their act together, marketers will need to totally re-evaluate their content writing and syndication. The message is nothing new from Google – write good content for human readers and you will have no problems – we (Google) are all about producing the best, most relevant search results for our users.

I had a quick look at a couple of recent articles I had published at a few article directories, particularly those mentioned as big losers in the article linked to above. I’m pleased to say that they still appear to be ranking in the top three results for my chosen keywords which seems to endorse the view and the intention not to penalize domains in a blanket slap, only to penalize poor content published on those domains to improve the search experience.

Update: March 1st 2011

I carried out a small experiment over the last few days which seems to indicate that although most article directories are likely to be affected, some do seem to have been hit much harder than others, and although some people are claiming to understand the reasons and to predict the long term impact, things like this serve to prove that none of them are doing any more than guessing – probably a fruitless exercise,

Anyway, I wrote an article a few days ago, just before the algorithm changes hit, and submitted it to a handful of some of the top directories. The first of these was GoArticles and, as is often the case, it was published there first, literally within a few minutes. The next to approve it were ArticlesBase and Amazines, on the same day but several hours after GoArticles. Most of the others have not yet approved it.

That same day, the article was appearing high on the page one results for the targeted keyword from both ArticlesBase and GoArticles (this keyword was not particularly long tail, but was in a very particular niche with little competition or real search volume).

Today however, the GoArticles version had disappeared completely. The article was completely original and unique, and was written by myself, it was over 1000 words and, if I say so myself, very well written in terms of spelling, grammar and punctuation and not stuffed with keywords but written very much with human readers in mind.

The ArticlesBase copy is holding at number four on page one of the Google SERPS.  There are absolutely no differences from the article that was published first at GoArticles – they were identical throughout.

The Amazines version has also slipped out of the first 100 results having originally been indexed on page three.

The screen shots from Alexa’s data on GoArticles are inconclusive this early after the Google changes, but although they show some notable percentage losses a day or so in in terms of reach and page views they indicate an increase in terms of their percentage of visitors from search engines since the algorithm was implemented. Looking over the longer term though, the ups and downs don’t appear to be drastically abnormal.

Fig1 -

Fig 2

Fig 3

To add even more interest to the experiment, I bookmarked the articles in a few places too and republished the article at a limited number of third party sites (content farms if you wish).

At Thoughts.com, only submitted today (several days after the article directory submissions) the post is being ranked fifth, right below the ArticlesBase item.

The Goarticles URL, bookmarked at Faves is showing up at the top of the third page of results i.e 21st position.

I didn’t post the article on the WordPress site to which the article was linking – this site already performs extremely strongly in all three major search engines and I’m sure, if I did republish it on that site it would outperform the content farms, and, if I intended to post it on the main site prior to syndicating and bookmarking it would still do so. I’m hoping that this is really what Google is trying to ensure happens going forward so that original authors and their domains rank first for their content.

So, the algorithm is definitely making its mark but is it really rather a case of  over exuberance or clumsy heavy handedness? This particular article was in the fine art niche and was a fairly in depth look at the intricacies of the fine art market in a specific country and region. I’m all for getting rid of the crappy, spun a million times dross that is the staple of many article directories and distribution services but in this case, a good and very relevant piece has been lost to Google’s visitors. To add insult to injury, the bulk of the results now showing on page after page are for sites selling posters – literally hundreds of them. This is not really a balanced search result and probably not at all what searchers would be looking for if they used the keywords/keyphrase targeted in my article.

Overall, it does seem apparent that those involved in article marketing will have to make some adjustments. My guess is that article marketing does have a future, but not for those who are not prepared to write their own quality content and restrain themselves from submitting to hundreds of directories. The article directories themselves will almost certainly have to undergo some serious quality control changes too, and doubtless, a good many will go the way of the dodo if they do not adapt. As for the countless marketers who have spent time building backlinks and traffic via rubbish articles whether or not they are about to see their efforts come unraveled only time will tell.

Do I agree with Google’s stance? In part yes, if it genuinely improves the search results and enables decently written useful content from individual bloggers as well as the big boys to beat out the shotgun approach of some of the directories and associated spammers but to be honest I’m reserving judgment until a little more time has allowed the dust to settle.

Related articles

• Google Kills eHow Competitors, eHow Rankings Up (seobook.com)
• Google Aims To Take Out Content Farms (technologyreview.com)
• Google Rolls Out Search Algorithm, Targets Content Farms (ghacks.net)
• What Google’s Crackdown on Content Farms Means for Bloggers (blogworld.com)

The Indexing Tool plugin for WordPress is something that will interest anyone seeking ways to improve their website traffic and backlinks and uses some simple but clever methods to increase your website’s visibility. If you are using article marketing in your promotional efforts, sit up and take notice of this plugin because you are going to like what it can do for you and your position in the search engine results pages or SERPS.

(You can check the plugin homepage here – WordPress Indexing Tool – it will open in a new window for you).

Why? Well, whilst there is no denying that articles and content syndication are still one of the best ways to build quality backlinks to your site, there is still one fly in the ointment and it’s a very frustrating one. The fact is, while you are busy writing away and submitting all that quality content and inserting those all important backlinks, often the search engines simply won’t index those links. When that happens, whilst they are not worthless, they are not doing much to help your rankings either.

Getting Your Links Indexed Is The Most Powerful Way To Boost Your Traffic!

Your first reaction might be  be to say “yes, they already are” but then you might start to think about the “what if” scenario.. What if you have 100 articles and only half of them are actually working to push your pages up the SERPs?

Sure you will be getting some direct traffic from them, and who doesn’t like an extra 5 or so visitors a day direct from your article? But are you missing out on the 1000 visitors a day you could be getting if that link was pushing your site up to the number 1 spot in Google?

Google Does Not Index Every Page It Finds

Article sites are huge. They all have thousands of pages added to them every day.. there are hundreds of Squidoo lenses and Hubpages created every day, I hate to think how many new profiles are created everyday on various sites. Google will not index them all.

So, what can you do? Well, here’s where this simple plugin can help – if you want a more thorough explanation of the whys and hows of it all head over to the plugin homepage which sets things out very concisely.

In very simple terms, this plugin leverages the power of RSS feeds in combination with your WordPress site(s) to virtually guarantee that they get indexed. It takes your feeds, any feed, checks if the pages in it are indexed and if they are not it posts them as links on your pages. Then when Google spiders your site, it finds the links and follows them to your un-indexed pages. Google will then index those pages. It’s really that easy.

Once you install it and set up your RSS feed you can forget it. The plugin checks periodically on a timescale you select, to see if the links are indexed and if they are it removes them from your site and replaces them with new ones that still need indexing. It’s a sweet little operator. You can easily mash up several feeds to make one too and the owners of the Indexing Tool Plugin cover all of this in the accompanying video and PDF documentation.

As an added bonus you’ll also get an additional Trackback Feed plugin that creates a feed of all the trackbacks to your WordPress sites and can be used in some ingenious ways in combination with the main product.

The authors of this plugin provide some great instructional PDF’s and video, offering a lot of good ideas on how to make this plugin combination work best for you and your sites. Installation is a snap and provided you are running WordPress version 2.8 or later it will install and function without a glitch.

This is a very useful plugin and if you already understand the potential of RSS feeds you will know that this is a powerful, simple and effective method and you’re probably already on their sales page!! When choosing premium WordPress plugins it pays to select them wisely but this one really is worth your consideration. Users of all the big article directories and places such as HubPages and Squidoo along with countless other content syndication sites should really put this one on their shopping list.

Indexing Tool WordPress Plugin Can Be Found Here

404 Error Pages are a commonly overlooked issue on the majority of websites and yet with just a few minutes work they can be tuned to your advantage.

Custom 404 error pages are basically a way to alter the standard page returned when someone clicks on a link on your domain that is broken or missing. The standard 404 error page basically tells your site visitor nothing other than the fact that what they were looking for could not be found. The most common reaction is for that person to click away from your site and head off to look for the information elsewhere.

It is therefore far more beneficial to you as a site owner, to try and keep that visitor on your site and to encourage them to search a little further for the information. This is where custom 404 error pages come into their own. There are numerous ways you can leverage that error page into something other than an immediate bounce from your website or blog and how you set up your custom 404 error pages will depend a great deal on the kind of site you have.

A simple custom 404 error page could simply redirect your visitor to the home page of your site which in itself could encourage them to explore further – to most eyes, an error of any kind means little to them other than “error” and suggests that what they seek cannot be found on your site, thus the normally high bounce rate for people who land on a standard 404 page.

The following video explains how, using cpanel, you can quickly and easily send people to a URL of your choosing whenever their click or input generates a 404 page not found error.

Of course, 404 errors are not the only errors that have a standard response attached to them and if you would like to alter those, you can also do it from within cpanel.

If you have an internet or affiliate marketing related website or blog, there is a free service that enables you to make great use of all your error pages and will redirect all standard error pages to special offers and sales pages and in use it has proved to be quite profitable – often turning those visitors you might have previously lost, into customers.

IMPORTANT NOTE – Remember that if you are using WordPress or any other site with it’s own 404 error page template, simply setting up a different one on your server via cpanel will not alter the site itself. In these cases, you will need to alter the code of the 404 page template to ensure it is delivered to visitors. In other words, the cpanel method is a domain wide change, UNLESS a site contains its own code which will take precedence over the setting in cpanel.

How to create a custom 404 error page for your website using cpanel.

Personally I’ve never been a fan of them, and I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on a link in one on any site and have always judged their usefulness based on my own behavior. Anyway, love them or hate them, here is the lowdown from Google on just how useful or harmful they might be – the general gist would seem to be, as with so many things, everything in moderation

Do tag clouds help or hinder SEO? (or do they have no effect)? sppro, New York

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WordPress SEO Secrets revealed is a series of 40 videos that walk you through the process of optimizing any WordPress site for the major search engines.

Whilst SEO is not complicated, in the sense that nothing is if you know what you are doing, the fact that around 90% of WordPress users do absolutely nothing to optimize their blogs or other WordPress sites, means that they are missing out on a huge amount of potential traffic.

This is good for various reasons – the market for the kind of helpful, easy to implement and straightforward information contained in the WordPress SEO Secrets videos is massive. There are millions of WordPress users all over the world and you can bet that most of them want to know how to get more traffic and increase their visibility in the SERPS. This makes the videos very popular, particularly outside the IM and SEO niches – let’s face it, most people who are active in these market segments are already reasonably well informed.

This moves us onto more good news because I’ve made the course available at an amazingly low price point, making it very easy to promote and convert.

If you don’t want the course yourself (I wouldn’t recommend it for accomplished bloggers who know their SEO already) but think your audience would benefit from the kind of information it contains, you can now promote it and earn yourself 100% commissions on every three out of four sales – commissions paid directly to your PayPal account. To elaborate, all you have to do is register for the free affiliate program at the site, and start promoting your personal referral link. Your first three sales are paid 100% directly to you. The fourth sale goes to me and then it’s back to square one. Simple.

At the amazingly low price of just $7.00 this can soon add up as the product converts very well and as a quality package, you can be comfortable promoting it, even if you’ve never used it yourself (honestly). In addition to the videos there is an accompanying ebook which supplements the tutorials nicely.

If you buy the product you will get Master Resale Rights, so you can sell it yourself if you have the know-how or you can simply promote your affiliate link and I’ll take care of the rest.

For full details on the content of the video series and what you can expect, visit the WordPress SEO Secrets Revealed sales page. The information is going to be a boon to beginners as well as more established WordPress users who have some knowledge of SEO but want a step by step blueprint. As I said earlier, for experienced SEO‘ers, it probably won’t be as much of a benefit.

TCH

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SEO is a vital part of driving traffic to your websites and blogs and there are plenty of resources on the internet that can help you improve your SEO knowledge and skills.

As far as websites go, no-one should be without a bookmark in their browser to Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.com. This is one of my favorites and it’s well worth subscribing for useful tips and advice on getting the best results in terms of rankings. However, even if you prefer not to add another email subscription to your inbox, an RSS subscription or at least a bookmark in your browser should be considered.

This post is about SEO software however, and you will find some great free tools at the SEOBook site but in this post I wanted to mention three software suites that have all been around for some time and offer free versions for everyone.

Over the years I have used all three but I have to confess that I don’t like SEO and find it tedious, even though I know full well that the potential increased rewards are undeniable. The following three software packages all offer a range of analytical tools and will offer suggested improvements that can be made to any site in order to achieve higher SERPS positions for given keywords. In all honesty, which you prefer will probably depend on a variety of factors but suffice to say, all are very good tools.

1) S.E.O Power Suite – I love the look and feel of this software and it delivers information in a clear and easy to understand manner. Of the three software suites listed here I have to say it is my favorite. The free version is fully functional but you are unable to save your projects and other data. This does not make it any less useful but if you are intending to engage in long term SEO work, the upgrade is worth it. Try the free version and I think you will be convinced if you are serious about your SEO.The company also offers a range of other SEO Tools geared towards specific tasks such as link building.

2) IBP (Internet Business Promoter) – This software has been around for many years and I have used both the free and paid versions in the past. Again. very comprehensive reporting and analysis on offer, even in the free version but naturally, paying for a licence gives you access to even greater power.

3) WebCEO - I have not used WebCEO for a number of years but you will find the free version an extremely useful and revealing piece of software that can offer analysis and suggested improvement steps for your websites and blogs.

My preference for SEO Power Suite is purely personal – my recommendation would be to download all three of these programs and have a play around with each – you will soon come to a decision regarding your own favorite.

You might also like to consider Traffic Travis whose free version offers some easy to understand and implement checks on your sites to improve your position for given keywords etc. It may not be as comprehensive as some of the other offerings, but it is pretty good and, as they say, sometimes less is more. You can grab the free or pro version by clicking the ad below.

If you are a WordPress user and want to learn the best way to optimize your WordPress installations our 40 video series and accompanying book WordPress-SEO-Secrets will give you everything you need to know and all the free tools you will require to put yourself ahead of the vast number of WordPress users.

TCH

SEO Elite reviews can be found all over the web nowadays and this alone means that you may have considered using it yourself at some point. SEO Elite from Brad Callen has been around for several years now and in its latest incarnation, SEO Elite 4, is still performing well for many webmasters, even though it has had and continues to have its critics. All webmasters know that search engine optimization and keyword research are vitally important aspects of running a website or blog; at least if you want traffic to your sites.

Never an exact science, SEO has spawned a huge industry and not a little controversy over the years. The only thing that most people agree on is that the whole business is an ever changing sea of methodology and that what is a great SEO technique today, may be next to useless tomorrow. With search engines forever tweaking their algorithms and ranking factors, it is almost impossible for anyone other than those working on those factors, to know what exactly needs to be done to get a decent position in the search engine results pages and keep it.

Naturally, developers have come up with numerous software tools and packages to try and crack the business of achieving a top ranking, with varying degrees of success.

SEO Elite has been around for several years and has somehow continued to prove its effectiveness and worth, despite all the changes that are seemingly constantly being brought to the attention of webmasters. Whilst it is not cheap, if you have the budget and want to improve your results in the organic search listings of the major search engines, SEO Elite is one tool you should definitely consider.

Even though there are many alternatives out there, a great deal of them are not worth the purchase price and some are, sad to say, a complete waste of time and money. With SEO Elite you know that you are getting a regularly updated and powerful SEO optimization tool with reliable help and support. The features are comprehensive and we have posted three videos below so that you can see the sort of thing SEO Elite can help you with.

This only really scratches the surface but gives you a good idea of the interface and how quickly the software can help you with the detailed tasks involved in optimizing your website. To achieve manually what SEO Elite can provide in terms of research and suggested improvements would patently take a totally unrealistic amount of time.

You can find out more about SEO Elite or buy the software at the company’s website www.seoelite.com

If you are seriously considering working on your own on site optimization a tool like SEO Elite will do most of the heavy lifting for you and when used correctly will certainly see your sites improve in the SERPS.

The company also produces the excellent Keyword Elite and Affiliate Elite products and have established themselves as a trusted source of reliable and effective tools for webmasters, marketers and affiliates alike.

We hope you found the videos a useful insight into at least some of the the workings of SEO Elite.

If you prefer the idea of free SEO software there are plenty of options too and I’ve discussed several of the best collections elsewhere. For WordPress SEO advice our WordPress SEO Secrets videos are a very good place to start.

In this sort video Michael Gray tackles structural advice and the hotly debated duplication issues – you will note his comments at the beginning of the video regarding Google’s statements about duplicate content and his own experiences. Ultimately, how much of a problem this may be is often argued in SEO circles and there seems to be varying opinions. Nonetheless it is a fact that WordPress does store the same content in various places such as the archives, the main page of the blog, the individual post pages etc. If all this is new and confusing to you, you might want to learn more about setting up a robots.txt file for your WordPress installation and use a plugin like Google XML sitemaps in conjunction with All In One SEO as a starting point.

Ultimately, if you can make the Googlebot’s life easier it certainly won’t do you any harm.

Tips on how to avoid duplicate content and set up theming or siloing on your wordpress blog installation.

Recently, my posting frequency on this blog has been a lot lower than normal because I have been involved in setting up an offline business as well as building a new site for that business. I don’t have the facilities to outsource all these things so it’s been a lot of hours of hard work.

Additionally, if you read my recent post about the DDOS attack on this domain you will know that it caused havoc for far longer than it really should have been allowed to. This is just the background to the events that led to me deciding to write this post because it was a combination of all these things that led me to some important discoveries that will hopefully spare others a lot of frustration should they encounter similar problems.

When dealing with SEO and blogs and WordPress there are all sorts of things to consider, and anyone who knows me will be aware that I’m no great techie, SEO or code expert. Very far from it but I know enough to get by. This serves to warn you however that you really do need to be careful and keep a close eye on matters involving your sites and the search engines.

Following the DDOS attack, I was not surprised to see TheCaymanHost.com disappear from the SERPS. The crawlers will eventually stop visiting if they keep butting up against errors. I was not too concerned as I knew once the site was live again the bots would return and find me and restore my listings. I kept an eye on things and noticed that although some results were appearing in Google, quite a few previously well performing pages were not there at all. I figured I just needed to be patient which, as it turns out was a mistake.

I was then occupied with building a new WordPress site and giving it a kickstart in the traffic stakes so I didn’t pay much mind to TheCaymanHost.com for a couple of weeks. I got the new site ready, added some content, installed all the plugins I needed and begun with some basic SEO – social bookmarking, directory submissions and other link building efforts. Sure enough I soon started appearing in the SERPS through those link building efforts, but the site itself didn’t seem to be getting indexed. After two weeks I realized that something was definitely not right – Google will normally spider you far more quickly if you follow the techniques I had implemented already, often within hours or at least days.

I headed over to Google’s webmaster tools to see if I could find a problem and very quickly I found several.

I will make a very embarassing admission first to get it out of the way. It’s been a while since I set up a new WP blog but I had made a very rookie mistake. WordPress has a privacy settings option and, you guessed it, I had left it at the default setting, thus preventing the search engines from visiting!! Thinking that was my problem, I changed the setting and went to bed rather red faced. If you set up a WordPress blog, make sure one of the first things you do is change that privacy setting if you want your site to be indexed!!

However, although this discovery was definitely one reason for the crawlers’ lack of interest in my site, it was far from the only issue. The next day I realized that things were no better as my sitemaps still had big red X’s next to them in the Webmaster tools area.

Initially I thought the culprit might be the Google XML Sitemaps plugin so I went in and tweaked the settings a little and rebuilt my sitemaps before submitting them to Google again. Nothing I tried had any effect – Google was still saying that it could not access my robots.txt file and could not therefore read my sitemaps. I tried removing my robots.txt file completely and turned off the plugin as it generates a dynamic robots.txt from within WordPress. This also failed to sove the sitemaps issue.

I then decided to check my sitemaps for thecaymanhost.com and found exactly the same issues.

It dawned on me that there were probably only two possible culprits – something in my htaccess file or a server side issue. I had made some htaccess changes on thecaymanhost.com but the new blog did not have the same htaccess file, so I was pretty sure it had to be something I needed to talk to my host about.

Before doing so I ran some tests using the tools at Web-Sniffer.net and SEOConsultants.com and sure enough, with all the user agents for the major search engines my sites were throwing up 500 internal server errors. I checked some of the other sites with whom I share server space and sure enough, they were all delivering up the same results! If you are on a shared hosting plan you can see who your close neighbors are using the service at Find_IP-Address.org

So, I had some indications that after tightening up server security, my hosts had inadvertently shut the door on the good guys as well as the bad ones.

However, checking .htaccess was my final port of call before contacting them and I discovered some very odd lines in both of my .htaccess files. They were puzzling because they were not lines I had added manually and I had no idea where they had come from. I have to assume it was a plugin although I still haven’t figured out which one unfortunately. I removed all the lines (four in total examples in the link at the foot of this post) and tried to submit my sitemaps to Google again.

Had I not been in the process of building a new site and trying to rank well for my keywords, it probably would have been a lot longer before I noticed all this. The drop in traffic on this domain I just put down to a recovery period following all the downtime. Instead of stats showing a few thousand different keyphrase searches for a month I was showing only a few hundred. Some of this was down to the closure of the article directory for sure, but the real problem was more serious than I thought.

I am now able to see the robots all crawling again and will hopefully see a full recovery and start getting traffic back to the way it was and a lot more activity on the new WordPress blog!!

The moral of the story is that you really must keep an eye on your stats and investigate unusual behavior immediately. There are so many possible causes but by following the steps I did you will be able to find a solution by a process of elimination. Google webmaster tools are your friend, so you really should be familiar with them whatever kind of site you are running.

There is no doubt that if you want to improve your WordPress site’s SEO performance you need to do a little work. Using sitemaps and a good robots.txt file are just part of that process, but even if you’ve done everything right in those areas it can all be for nothing if you don’t check periodically to make sure all is working as it should be.

The solution to my problem has been posted on the WordPress.org forums and you can read the relevant thread at WordPress .htaccess and robots.txt problems

TCH

SEO isn’t nearly as hard as it’s made out to be. A good majority of the so-called “SEO Experts” are out to get your money. They run services, so they want you to believe SEO is some kind of a science.

In the past several years, I’ve been creating and marketing Websites. For the longest time I believed all the hype of mumbo-jumbo that’s constantly floating around out there about how you need to study search engines and stay on top of them 24/7 if you want to see good rankings.

During that time I continued to do all of the basic things we know we should be doing in order to rank well:

- Work on a lot of quality incoming links.

- Research your keywords and target relevant keywords

- Compose a good META title and description

I worked on those few things as well as a few other basic SEO techniques and over time I found myself competing for the first page of Google for some very competitive keywords!

I’m not talking about baby keywords either. I’m talking about those like “make money online,” “article directory” etc.

The fact is; there are loads of myths involved in the education of SEO online. Many of these myths come from those who are looking for customers for their SEO consulting firms and services.

It wasn’t until I stopped worrying about the latest search engine changes etc. that I started to see some extremely impressive results.

If you’ve been running a Website for a few months and you think SEO is hard, think again! Just learn the basics because that’s really all it takes.

Do your basic on-page optimization and build a lot of quality links! The rest will fall into place naturally and you won’t be paying ungodly rates to “SEO consultants” who nine times out of ten don’t know what they’re doing anyway!

To see the exact SEO Strategy that I use to conquer loads of extremely competitive search terms, visit http://www.theeasyseoreport.com/ where I offer the best SEO Report on the market FREE of Charge!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?SEO-Experts-Are-Full-of-It—SEO-is-Easy&id=1007888

Unfortunately, the pressure to perform and the financial rewards for doing so, was bound to bring forth the shadier side of some people, and, fairly or unfairly, the world of SEO has often been tarred with the fallout caused by some of the sharp practices that have been employed. Depending on your point of view, this is either an inevitable result of intense competition, or nothing but a damaging trend that does little but taint the overall understanding of SEO and the impression it makes upon the internet community at large.

There are of course plenty of practitioners of ‘ethical’ SEO techniques and conversely, there are plenty of others who take the approach that the end always justifies the means.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of SEO, and the majority of people probably still are, what do you need to know and how do you ensure that either you, or your SEO advisers, stay within the bounds of acceptable and ‘ethical’ methods? There are some simple guidelines that will help you to achieve better rankings without stepping into the murkier side of SEO, and which will hopefully help you to avoid the cowboys whose only real concern is to relieve you of your money.

The whole point of looking at SEO, is of course to improve your position in the SERPS or search engine results pages, in relation to competing websites. Internet users invariably use a search engine to find information online, and your goal is to try and ensure they find you if you are providing what they are looking for. It is no simple task, particularly if the field in which you operate is very competitive. It is usually webmasters who are struggling to rank well, who are eventually tempted by ‘the dark side’ in an attempt to raise their profile. As search engine technology has has improved however, many shady tactics from the past have ceased to be effective and usually end up being more harmful than helpful.

So, where do you begin with a clean SEO campaign? If you are not intending to try and optimize your pages yourself and prefer to use a third party to do the work for you, it is always wise to try and find out a little about them first. Look for testimonials and word of mouth recommendations if you can. Beware of big promises – it has to be said that at the pace things move with the major search engines such as Google, nobody can really guarantee anything and many will tell you that SEO is as much an art as it is a science. Grandiose promises of a guaranteed number one spot on Google are often little more than hot air, or trickery – what search term are you being promised the top spot for?

It’s not difficult to get a top ranking for something so obscure that virtually nobody is going to search for it after all – the simple fact that so few people are ever likely to type in a search query makes it all but useless, so don’t be fooled by slick talking sharks.

You need to decide what search terms you wish to do well with and this in itself is an uphill task if you’re new to the game. There is plenty of advice and tips available online to help you with keyword research so this will be your starting point. If you are using the services of someone else to help with your SEO strategy, it is of course vital that you are both on the same page on this matter.

The techniques employed in SEO and the opinions on which are effective would probably fill a complete series of books so we’re not going to cover them in any great detail in this short article, but a few pointers should help you to start on the right path.

Websites are, first and foremost, for human visitors. You should never lose sight of this while you are delving into the finer points of SEO.

Make sure that your content is relevant, well written, and regularly updated. You need to make your visitor’s experience a pleasant one. Poorly written and poorly organized pages will not encourage people to stay, or to return, so quality is vitally important. It is therefore pointless to exaggerate or manipulate the content of your site purely for SEO purposes. Attempting to mislead, will basically achieve little. Improving your rankings by distorting the actual content of your site may result in a short term improvement in the SERPS, but disappointed humans won’t stick around for long! Ethical SEO practitioners do not encourage such tactics – they are effectively self destructive, nothing more.

When people talk about “black hat SEO” (referring to the practitioners of trickery and deceit to garner search engine rankings) don’t be fooled by the catchy title. Black Hat tactics cannot be dismissed as useless, because in the past, some of the ideas have been extremely effective, but things move rapidly and a lot of so called “black hatters” are still trying to use techniques that have long since been recognized by the likes of Google and therefore rendered ineffective. Even if you are tempted by a black hat shortcut, if you don’t know much about SEO, the chances are you will find yourself in trouble with the search engines and possibly excluded from their results entirely. It’s simply not worth it for most business owners and webmasters.

Ethical and clean SEO is really the only way to go – it may not get you a spectacular overnight result, but if your long term goals are to be fulfilled it is still the wisest course of action. The advocates of Black Hat techniques will of course laugh at the whole concept of ‘ethics’ in relation to SEO and claim theirs is the only path to success. Maybe they are right in some cases, until they are caught or snitched on by other webmasters for using underhand methods – that’s fine if it is their own site(s) that are ostracized by Google and other major engines, but do you really want your painstakingly built pages to suffer the same fate?

I guess you could safely say; “It’s not big and it’s not clever”. Play by the rules and if your site is good and sensibly optimized it will do well enough in time.

If you wish to learn more about SEO there are plenty of blogs and experts in the field who publish up to date and detailed information. A quick search will return plenty of results on what is a very complex subject, but now, at least, you will be a little more aware of how to go about optimizing your sites correctly and not run into any nasty surprises along the way.

The beauty of these is that if you are a webmaster you can use them yourself and also display them on your website or blog for the convenience of your readers. The first is the Keyword Research Tool and the second a Link Analysis Tool, and we have shown both of them below so that you can see just how they will look if you decide to add them to your site.

Thanks are due to both Andy Beard for his recent post highlighting these new tools and explaining how to display them on your chosen sites and to the author, Aaron at SEO Book for making them available. They have a lot more free SEO tools for your use, so pay them a visit too and enjoy.

Having built your website you are probably waiting for that flood of visitors to start arriving but this won’t happen overnight. There is a great deal you can do to improve your chances of good search engine rankings but the whole field of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be very complicated and is rarely an exact science. The information is out there if you are prepared to do your research but for many people, time is the biggest limiting factor when it comes to SEO and there is a lot of information to wade through.

There are however a couple of very simple steps that anyone can take to help the Search engines find and index your site correctly. Both will take only a couple of minutes to implement and will repay you well if you take the trouble to complete them.

Firstly, you should ensure that you have a robots.txt file in the root of your domain (the place where your site’s homepage resides) and that it is valid and functioning correctly. The simplest way to do this is to go to one of the many online robots.txt generator and validator sites, where all you will have to do is type in your website address and a couple of options and they will generate the appropriate file for you. We recommend Yellowpipe Robots.txt Generator which will also enable you to choose to banish the robots you don’t want visiting your site, such as known email harvesting bots. There are plenty of other online services available if you search for them. This method ensures an error free robots.txt file which you can then upload to your server. It’s that simple and the search engine spiders will then be aware of exactly where to visit on your site.

The next task on your list is to set up sitemaps, which have become steadily more important in recent times. You may well already have a Google sitemap on your site and if you do, it will probably be called sitemap.xml. Sitemaps also reside in the root of your domain and make it much easier for engines to find and index your content.

There are plenty of ways to set up a Google sitemap and it’s probably the most important one, but it won’t hurt you to have more sitemaps either. The easiest way for you to do this is to use the excellent services at AutoMapIt Automatic Sitemap Service who will not only create six sitemaps automatically for you, but upload them to your server too if you wish. If you prefer to upload the files yourself, you can do so. This is a free service, although you can upgrade at very reasonable cost and benefit from some even more valuable services. Setting up the free sitemap generation is simple and quick and will give you a far greater chance of being fully and properly indexed. Certainly worth a few minutes of your time.

As we said at the outset, these are very basic SEO steps, but nonetheless a good starting point for any webmaster.

Technorati Tags: Free sitemap generator , Sitemaps , Google sitemap , Robots.txt validator , Robots.txt generator , SEO , Building sitemaps , How to build sitemaps , Making a sitemap , Webmaster tools

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All WordPress users are aware that there is a veritable gaggle of plugins available to enhance your WordPress blogging experience. I decided that I’d publish the ones currently in use on this blog, along with links to the dedicated authors of WordPress plugins everywhere who make so much available to the community for free. If you find one you like, say thank you to the person who made it, and, if you can and they accept donations, help them out.

Of course, these are not necessarily THE best WP plugins, just the ones we use and think are great. I’m sure you all have your own favorites and if you think there is one we just shouldn’t be without, do please tell us.

WordPress Automated Upgrade Plugin – this one is new and promises to save a lot of people a lot of worry and heartache when it comes time to perform an upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. If you start biting your nails at the thought of performing an upgrade, this could be your salvation! Thanks to BloggingTips.com for the low down.

aLinks WordPress Plugin – another great idea that allows users to turn any word or phrase of your content into hyperlinks, they can be Amazon links, Clickbank, E-Bay, Wikipedia, links to other areas of your blog. A very cool plugin indeed, simple, effective and gives users total control. Author: Sean Hickey

All In One SEO WordPress Plugin – A Plugin that allows you to tweak your WordPress blog’s SEO friendliness. Now, who doesn’t want that? Author : Uberdose

Amazon Context Link Ads WordPress Plugin – Another Amazon plugin. This one will find phrases and keywords within your text that are relevant to Amazon products, and will insert a hyperlink for you. Just install the plugin, tell it your Amazon Associates ID and you’re done. Author : Patrick Chia

CAPCC WordPress Plugin – Installs Captcha for comment and registration forms. Excellent spam protection. Author : Coice

Do Follow WordPress Plugin - Join the movement of bloggers against the rel=nofollow tag. Removes the nofollow attribute from your comments. Author : Denis de Bernardy

Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin – Forward all WordPress feed traffic to your Feedburner feed. Original author : Steve Smith

Feed Footer Plugin – Allows the insertion of custom footer fields to your RSS Feed. Author : Sherief Mursyidi

First RSS Plugin – A Good Choice for easy insertion of RSS Feeds. Author : Chris Hatcher (website no longer online)

Google Sitemaps Plugin – Add a Google sitemap to your WordPress blog and help that Googlebot! Author : Arne Brachhold

Gregarious Plugin – Add Social Bookmarks To Your Blog. Author : Ankur Kothari

InlineRSS Plugin – Another option for those wishing to use syndicated feeds. Author : Cal Demaine

KB Advanced RSS Widget – Widget that gives much greater control over how feeds are displayed. Author : Adam R Brown

My Page Order Plugin – Gives you complete control over page order. Author : Froman118

Kontera ContentLinks MIVA Plugin – The simple way to get your ads working. Author : Rodney Shupe

Share This Plugin – Neat tidy social bookmarking function. Author : Alex King

Simple Trackback Validation – Additional simple spam defence. Works well. Author : Michael Woehrer

Subscribe Me Plugin – The neatest solution for your RSS subscription offers. Author : Denis de Bernardy

Footnote – The CAPCC plugin mentioned above may conflict with WP’s forced moderation options if you are using latest version of WP (2.2) resulting in all comments bypassing moderation. You may want to consider an alternative captcha plugin in this case.

It’s quite a list and there are several more plugins not currently in use. These are all simple to install/configure and use for bloggers of all abilities. Do you think we’ve missed any good ones? By all means let us know your own plugin preferences and why you like them so much.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Web Design, WordPress Plugins, Best WordPress Plugins, RSS Plugins, Anti Spam Plugins, Social Bookmarking Plugins, Useful WordPress Plugins

One of the mistakes that Web business owners often commit is that they spend too much time on the design of their website, and not enough time on the content. Keep in mind that the content of your website is more important than the design, which is why people who invest too much money on site designs primarily instead of focusing on its content will only end up wasting it since this will only bring in a few people to visit their website. Instead, try to invest in copywriting initially, and only spend money on the site design later on.

Web business owners sometimes forget the importance of great content, and how they should create fresh content. Doing so will greatly benefit their online business since search engines will reward websites that offer fresh content to their visitors, regardless of its format. Some Web business owners tend to overlook this aspect, and they do not implement this in their websites, causing their website to not generate the desired amount of traffic. However, online business owners should not do this if they are only aiming to improve their search engine ranking. One way that they can improve their SEO ranking is by posting blogs or forums that its visitors can use and interact with other users, making them come back for more later on, thereby increasing the generated traffic. This is only possible, however, if the owners add a blog that contains something that can interest their site’s visitors.

This is where our third mistake comes in. There are some Web business owners who do not bother to offer something unique, especially in their site’s content. If you are able to properly optimize your site by offering something unique and interesting to your targeted market, then your site can greatly benefit from the improvement in search engine results since people will be linking to your site through different mediums such as blogs and forums, creating more inbound links later on.

Another mistake that online business owners commit is their use of inappropriate keyword phrases. It is important to remember that in order to be able to optimize the search engine result of your website, you need to make sure that you pick the appropriate keyword phrases, especially if you are only a small or mid-sized company. You should use the keywords that your potential customers may use in their search in the Web, and such keywords should be used in specific areas of your webpage.

Lastly, Web business owners sometimes do not label their links and images descriptively, making it very difficult for their visitors to know what they are being directed to. Being descriptive as possible not only helps visitors, but it can also help online businesses, especially those trying to market a particular product since Web business owners can use their main keywords and phrases in their link and image labeling, making it easier for them to direct potential customers to their site.

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Vanessa Arellano Doctor
http://jump2top.com
Source: http://www.a1articles.com/article_174088_62.html

Sitemaps are another fairly easy way to make it obvious where all your pages are. Combined with the use of robots.txt you can let search engines also learn what’s best left un-indexed. Sitemaps are often presented as a summary page (or pages) within the site displaying links to everything that’s worthy of listing. Google also offers a means to upload XML formatted files whereby you can push the list at Google instead of waiting for the next scheduled visit.

It’s always worth considering how your site actually appears to search engines. To give you something of a feel for how well your pages perform it’s perhaps worth setting yourself up with Mozilla Firefox (if you haven’t already) as this nifty little browser allows you to easily turn off both images and JavaScript. If you find your pages are pretty messed up (as is sometimes the case) it may be that you should consider a design that has a better textual structure with less dependency upon graphics and JavaScript. While it’s not the greatest sin in web design, overuse of graphics as a means of navigation can prove deadly for search engines and full site indexing. As a minimum, a text only set of links mirroring your main structure can be nestled at the bottom of the page. This will at least give search engines something to work with. A good alternative is to use CSS as a method to retain a classy design while also offering linking text. Where images are used it’s always a good idea to remember to use ALT tags. As search engines effectively ignore images, so the ALT tag offers a little bit of something they can latch onto.

Flash animation is another area similar to graphics that offers nothing to search engines. To the user however, they can be massively attractive and provide an area from where a stream of information can be delivered. The best is to use flash in moderation, striking a balance between engaging the user while satisfying the engines. Just like graphical navigation anything important communicated to the user through flash should perhaps be subtly repeated in the regular text somewhere.

It’s often said but nevertheless it’s amazing how many people still ignore the basic meta tags. There’s plenty of information around which will help anyone get a quick understanding of how best to fill out the title, description and keyword meta tags. While meta tags are important they are only a minor aspect of any one page. It’s imperative that meta tags properly mirror the content of a page but of greater importance is that the content has an array of words and phrases that are relevant to the niche in which you are trying to compete. Don’t go searching Google for words you think you should be listed under if your pages doesn’t have them within the content.

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Paul Coupe is lead designer / developer with Zoom Online.
Zoom Online – Providing total online solutions. www.zoom-online.co.uk/
Contact: paul@zoom-online.co.uk

Source: http://www.a1articles.com/article_174634_62.html