Keyword Variation - mk

Keyword Variation

Optimizing a website is a technique. First step is to lists the keywords or phrases that relate to the product or service being promoted on the website.

Once You have created list of keyword , this is not enough. Expand the keyword a number of different ways. Expanding keywords will allow you to capture additional targeted web traffic. The more you expand keyword., the wider the audience attracts.

Tips to help expand your list of keywords and phrases -

Alternative – Combination - Permutation

Combination can include multi-word phrases, which will exponentially increase the number of phrases in the keyword list.

i. e., color shoe, shoe color 

Twig – Stick – Stem

Stemming of word is the process of changing the tense and format of the keyword. Stemming uses the root of the word, and makes a number of variations.

i. e., color, colored, coloring 

Modifiers -Transform - Amend

Using Geographical or Superlative modifiers is an easy way to expand a keyword list... 

Geographical Modifiers

Location-based modifiers to modify the keyword phrase. This is important when a business primarily sells to a localized audience.

i. e., Washington DC pizza

Superlative Modifiers – Excellent – Outstanding - Exceptional

Superlatives can also be used as modifiers to further expand the keyword.

i. e., best pizza, cheap pizza, inexpensive pizza, 

Regional Dialects

Proper spelling may vary based on geographical location, be sure to optimize and make spelling variations from region to region.

i. e., colour vs color. 

Misspellings 

Fast typing on keyboards still results in misspellings, be sure to consider common misspellings and may occur when creating a keyword list. Factors matter in misspellings into your keyword advertising and SEO strategy.

i. e.,  fat fngers 

Brand 

Don't neglect your brand! People search on brand names to find products or companies. You should of your own, for your brand in the search engines and advertising. This way, you should optimize for your brand.

i. e., product brand, company brand, 

Develop a robust list of keywords and phrases for optimization and bidding. 

Some keyword Tools -

Web Based Keyword Tool

Google Trends
Free Word Tracker
Keyword Suggest
Keyword Analysis Tool
Keyword List Generator

How to Optimize for Organic Search

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On Page

On Page Search Engine Optimization

Keyword

In text editing and database management systems, a keyword is an index entry that identifies a specific record or document.

In programming, a keyword is a word that is reserved by a program because the word has a special meaning. Keywords can be commands or parameters. Every programming language has a set of keywords that cannot be used as variable names. Keywords are sometimes called reserved names .


A word used by a search engine in its search for relevant Web pages. 

For understanding keyword -  

1. How a server different from a desktop?
2. How do you know when you need a server ?
3. How much memory and disk space will it need?
4. What are storage area networks?
5. Can I use a high -end desktop in place of a server?
6. Do I need more than one server?
7. Will I have to replace it is six months?
8. How much will a server cost

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Off Page Optimization - mkmca

Off Page Optimization - mkmca

Off Page Optimization is a technique that we made our site rank better in search engine. 

Then again, we ask what is off Page Optimization and what is the importance of this ?

Almost every search engine which is rank better in the basis of -

1. Contents
2. Keywords
3. Design
4. Quality of links in the website
5. Liked by the visitors 

Here, quality of link is the important factor which rank our site better in the search engines.

Importance  of Off Page Opti -

An incoming link means additional value for your site.
When somebody visit your site, they are linked with your site and that increase traffic.

The downside with off site optim -

The downfall of the site is that when buy link for website and then discovered that this is waste of time and money. So avoid this downfall in Off Page Opti. and select the website which you linked with. Opti. for the site that is related to your site and avail the information as much as possible.

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7 - Unlimited Traffic to Your Site

Getting Unlimited Traffic to Your Site

Community Participating Through Blogs

Participating in online communities such as blogs is an effective strategy for building links and generating traffic. Blogs allow you to provide comments and feedback on each blog entry posted by the author of the blog.

Because blog comments tend to be moderated, you should provide useful and constructive responses to avoid being labeled as spam. Adding value to the community increases the likelihood that your link and comment are posted.

Comment on blogs that are as closely related to the theme of your web site as possible. Also, try to find blogs that have a PageRank higher than 4 and possess a large number of relevant incoming links. You can find these blogs by searching for a keyword related to your site in a blog directory such as BlogSearch.Google.com or BlogCatalog.com.

Once you find blogs that you would like to participate in, perform an evaluation as you would for any other potential linking partner as shown in 3 – Understanding the Roles of Links & Linking – Evaluate Potential Linking Partners. Do not waste your time submitting comments to blogs that are unrelated to the content on your site.

Acquiring links through blog participation works especially well to achieve rankings in the Yahoo and MSN search engines, but is not as effective a strategy to use in Google. This is due to most blogs attaching by default, the nofollow attribute to links in blog comments. This tag is supposed to prevent the search engines from following and taking into account that link in their ranking algorithm. Google appears to follow this rule more strictly than the Yahoo and MSN search engines. I have written an article about the nofollow attribute, you will also find the link at the end of this lesson.

Directly below is an awesome code that you can implement into Google.com to narrow your blog search with ease, but before you use this code, you should download the SEO Quake Firefox Toolbar extension which will help you tremendously. If you don’t use Firefox as your browser, maybe now is the time to change, because this special code is more than worth its weight in gold, and the Firefox Toolbar extension compliments the code, and will also be beneficial for much more down the road with your SEO. Here is the Firefox SEO Quake extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036/

site:.com inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “Add Keywords”

The code above is designed to locate blogs that allow for commenting. Copy then paste the code into the Google search box, change the words Add Keywords, to the keywords you would like to search for. Typing your keywords related to your site ensures that the blogs you comment on will be at least somewhat related to your site.

You can also change the “.com ” to .gov, .org, .edu, etc. to search for blogs with those extensions. Once you receive the results page, the first step is to sort your results based on PageRank.

SEOQuake has appeared to have made some changes… you used to be able to click on the “down arrow” without doing anything else first. Now you need to click on the “Request Parameters” button, then click on the small “down arrow” next to the “PR” in the top “Sort” column as shown below.

QUICK TIP: If your search returns zero results, broaden your keyword phrase a bit (i.e. go from “dog walking” to “dog”).

SIDE NOTE: PageRank is not as vital with .edu and .gov sites because they already carry so much authority. Don’t worry if you don’t find too many of these sites that you can comment on… a link is a link, and a link from a PR1 is still better than no link at all.

If you don’t find any relevant sites on page 1 of the search results, check out page 2 and page 3. Often times you’ll find just as many high PR sites on page 3 as on page 1 of the search results.

If you do a little digging, you should easily be able to locate a handful of relevant sites that allow commenting and are worth posting to.

Community Participation through Forums

Participating in online communities like forums is also an effective strategy for building links and generating traffic. Forums are internet message boards that allow you to start new discussions or participate in ongoing discussions about a variety of topics. Most forums allow you to participate by simply signing up for a free account with your e-mail address and very little personal information.

Forums tend to be moderated, but unlike blogs, your forum posts are often posted for public viewing without having to go through a review process. Adding value to the community increases the likelihood that your link and comment stay posted and that your site will be visited by other forum participants. As mentioned before, participate in forums that are closely related to the theme of your web site, and try and find forums with a PageRank higher than 4, have high traffic, and possess a large number of relevant incoming links.

Don’t waste your time submitting posts to forums that are unrelated to the content of your site. Acquiring links through forum participation works well to increase your rankings in all the major search engines as well as your overall site traffic from the forums themselves.

You can find these forums by using the search box in Google, Yahoo, etc., by searching for a keyword or keyword phrase related to your site and adding the word “forums” at the end of your keywords.

GOOD NEWS: You can also use the same code from above that you used for blogs, just change the word “blog” to “forum”, next to the ‘inurl:’.

Article Directory Submissions

Article directory submission sites are a great way to generate a large number of relevant links to your site. You can write unique articles then submit them to these directories to where they can be picked up by other webmasters and placed on their site. Article directories are public content depositories to where owners of other sites can select content to place on their own site. When a person chooses your article from one of these depositories, they must leave the link back to your site intact.

Try to write articles between 400 and 750 words in length as mentioned in 5 – Content Writing & SEO – Article Length. Make the articles unique, and also make sure they have proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and sentence structure in order to have the best chance at being accepted.

There are hundreds if not thousands of article directories scattered throughout the internet, but you should focus your submission efforts on only those that have a large visitor base to give yourself the best chance at exposure.

For example, Ezinearticles.com is one of the largest article directories on the Internet. Your article will be reviewed by a human before it is selected and placed into the Ezinearticles directory. The directory is visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors every day, so you should make submitting your articles to this directory a priority.

I recently wrote an article – “7 DoFollow High PageRank Backlink Submission Sites!” in which these are article directory submission sites that do not contain the “nofollow” attribute for their outbound links. For more information, follow the link above!

Other examples of high-quality article directories include Goarticles.com, ArticleDashboard.com and Isnare.com. At the end of this lesson you will find a link that has the 4 mentioned article directories, plus 46 others.

Offer RSS/Email Delivery Technology to Your Blog Readers

If you would like people to have an easy way to frequently follow your blog, then you need to offer your content through Really Simple Syndication, or RSS. RSS is an XML-based protocol which among other things offers simple website summaries and syndication. RSS allows your readers to keep up with your blog in an automated manner and is easier for them than checking your blog randomly for new content. I have recently read an article that stated, “studies confirm that only a small percentage of the Internet users know about or use RSS feeds. It is said that this number is below 10% around the world.”

Right now, the most popular blog feed management provider is Feedburner.com. Once you join Feedburner and add a Feedburner icon to your web site, your readers can easily join your RSS feed or email. For example, via the Feedburner blog feed management system, your readers can elect to receive an email notification every time you write new blog content.

Once you sign up, you will need to activate your subscription. Go to the tab “Publicize” then click “Email Subscriptions”, then “Subscription Management”… click on the activate button at the bottom of the page, to activate your subscription.

If you would like to, you can offer a ‘Join Newsletter’ page, as shown in the photo below:

All you need to do is to copy and paste the code from your Google Feedburner Subscription Management box into a page on your blog (make sure you add the code to a “Page” [I.E. WordPress Dashboard > Pages], not a post). To find the code, navigate to the same location that you activated your subscription… click the “Publicize” tab, then “Subscription Management” under “Email Subscriptions”.

After you have added the code to your Join Newsletter page, your subscription form will be automatically inserted each time the page is loaded. From there, readers can subscribe to receive emails with your newest content.

Another form of getting people to subscribe to your blog posts is a box that you can add to the top or bottom of your posts page, that encourages people to sign up for your Newsletter or RSS feed… I chose to add this box to the top of my post pages, see photo below.

This box is provided by a plug-in called What Would Seth Godin Do… once you upload and activate this plug-in, click on the link ‘WWSGD’ under your Dashboard > Settings. You will come to a box ‘Message to New Visitors:’ with your information already in box, as shown below.

If you’ve created a “Join Newsletter” page as described above, then you will want to change the word “feed” directly after the web site address (as shown in the photo above), to “join-newsletter”, or whatever your URL file name is. You can then change the words “RSS Feed” to “Free Newsletter, or whatever you choose.

This plug-in also provides a box marked “Message to Return Visitors” which works well by providing a different message for those that frequently return to your site… you just put a number in the box marked “Repetition” for how many times you want the first message to show to your visitors before showing them the message marked for return visitors. To make it easy, just copy and paste the message from your New Visitor’s box to the Returning Visitor’s box, then change the wording around to your liking.

HELPFUL HINT: if you are testing to see your finished message and your “Returning Visitor’s” message continues to show up, just put a larger number in the “Repetition” box, click save, then look at your message. When you are satisfied with your first message, reset the number in the repetition box back to 5 or whatever you have chosen.

Press Release

Press releases are the mainstays of any marketing program. What’s so powerful about a press release? It’s just the facts, including benefits, and it’s sent out to publications and organizations that might publish all or part of the press release. Use press releases to send out new items of all types, and send them as widely as you can. News organizations, publications, newsletters, and even some forums, will post press releases. When you write the release, be sure to include a link back to your site.

Aside from letting the world know about what’s going on at your company, press releases also help your company’s website build and maintain high search engine rankings. In the past, press releases were only for journalists who may be interested in your company or industry.

Press releases need to written and formatted with the search engines in mind as well. Follow the link for more information: http://service.prweb.com/learning/article/quality-online-press-releases/

At the end of this lesson, there is also a web site included that shows 50 Free Press Release Submission web sites.

Participate on Social Media Web Sites

A proven effective approach to marketing your blog is through participation on social media web sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and others. You can use these social media web sites to generate traffic and buzz, and build backlinks to your web site. Social networks allow you to build large lists of contacts and supporters that can help to spread the word about your business and web site. Social news services provide a platform for others to vote on your content and share your story with others. Video sharing web sites allow you to upload, view and share video clips with millions of potential visitors.

Network with Facebook

Facebook, located at http://www.facebook.com/, is a poplular social networking web site that enables you to build lists of contacts and interact with people all over the world through profile pages, pictures, videos, message boards, and various technology applications. Facebook is one of the top ten most trafficked web sites in the United States and boasts over 500 million active members for the U.S. according to Mashable.com. You can use Facebook to interact with current and prospective business associates while generating considerable traffic to your web site and buzz about your business.

Network with MySpace

MySpace is a leading social networking community that enables you to build lists of contacts and interact with people all over the world through profile pages, pictures, videos, and blogs. According to Alexa, MySpace is one of the top five most popular web sites in the United Statees. The MySpace community has over 200 million members and includes people of all ages and demographics. Despite the common misconception that MySace is used only by teenagers, millions of adults and businesses use MySpace as a vehicle to manage reputation, build brand recognition, promote products, and generate buzz.

The first step to becoming a member of the MySpace community is to open a free account and create a profile page. The name of your profile page serves as your URL extension on the www.myspace.com domain. For example, if I were to use a profile name “SEOBlogOptimizer”, then my public MySpace profile address would be www.myspace.com/seoblogoptimizer. 

Therefore, when you use MySpace for business purposes, you should try to name your profile page after your business, or you can name your profile page using keywords that describe the products or services you sell.

Maximize Exposure with StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a peer and social networking technology that includes a toolbar that you install in your web browser; you can use this toolbar to discover and rate web pages, videos, photos, and news articles. The StumbleUpon service also allows you to submit your own web pages, videos, photos, and news articles, all of which can help you generate buzz and traffic, and build backlinks to your web site.

The key to generating buzz, traffic, and links from StumbleUpon is to make sure that your content is submitted and available to other StumbleUpon users. You may want to have other people submit your content so that you can vote positively on it and not come across to other StumbleUpon users as partial. The best kind of content to submit to StumbleUpon is entertaining, informative, or unique.

To join StumbleUpon, navigate to http://www.stumbleupon.com/, click Join StumbleUpon, fill in the required information, click Join and Download Now… when prompted, install the StumbleUpon toolbar.

After installing the StumbleUpon toolbar, visit your web site, then click the “I Like it” button. The review window will appear, then add a short review of your web site and choose an appropriate topic, and adult classification. Click Submit This Site. Your web site is now available to other users when they “Stumble”.

Micro-Blog with Twitter

A very powerful and increasingly popular way to communicate with friends and clients, build buzz, and generate prospective business leads is through micro-blogging. Micro-blogging is a form of social networking that enables you to keep your followers up-to-date with what you are doing at any given time of the day.

The most widely used micro-blogging network is Twitter. Twitter, located at http://twitter.com/, is a free social networking service that allows you to micro-blog by sending short “updates” of 140 characters or less to others via a text message from your mobile phone, or by typing a message.

One of the ways you can use Twitter to generate Web site traffic and buzz is by sharing daily deals, special offers, or exciting product news with your readers. If you have an e-commerce web site, you may want to send out a message each morning announcing your top-selling products. For example, “Yesterday we sold over 1000 red widgets. We have less than that left in inventory, so order now to guarantee shipment.”

Connect with LinkedIn

LinkedIn, located at http://www.linkedin.com/, is a popular business-oriented social networking site that enables you to build a professional network of contacts. The primary purpose of this social network site is to allow you to maintain a list of contact details of people you know and trust in business. The people in your LinkedIn contact list are referred to as connections. You can invite anyone, regardless of whether or not the person is a LinkedIn user, to become one of your connections.

Each time you add a new connection to your LinkedIn network you gain access to that person’s connections. For example, by adding a new connection, you gain indirect access to that person’s direct connections (your second-degree connections) and also the connections of your second-degree connections (called third-degree connections). Every time you create new connections, you are, in turn, tapping into a potentially large network of business leads that you can use to help grow your business.

Share Videos with YouTube

Video Web sites such as YouTube provide one of the most powerful forms of communication for you to attract potential visitors and get them interested in your products, services, and web site. YouTube, located at http://www.youtube.com/, is a video sharing web site that allows users to upload, view, and share video clips. Posting videos on YouTube is easy and requires minimal time and investment on your part.

Users of all kinds, including small and large businesses, amateur videographers, and everyday people, have successfully posted videos to YouTube. You can create videos that both inform and entertain your viewers… videos that entertain tend to create more buzz and result in more viewers than information videos. Regardless of whether your goal is to inform, entertain, or both inform and entertain, try to make your videos interesting so that people will want to share your video with friends.

Take Advantage of Digg Traffic

Digg is a popular social news web site located at: http://digg.com/, allow users to post and vote on user-submitted content. News stories and Web sites are submitted by users and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. Stories and web sites that make the front page of Digg.com can lead to thousands of unique visitors within a very short period of time and can lead other web site, typically blogs and news web sites, to link to your web site.

You can significantly increase your chances of getting users to vote your content or news story to the front page of Digg by following several basic strategies. Do not submit your own web site or story to Digg. Content submitted by the content creator rarely makes the front page of Digg.

As a member of Digg, you can add friends to your member account. Adding lots of friends is a good idea because your friends will often vote on the same stories that you do. Story titles that capture users’ attention are more likely to get voted on and make the front page of Digg. Title with sensational, compelling headlines and interesting summaries tend to work best.

Network with Sphinn

Sphinn, located at http://sphinn.com/, is a social news web site that allows you to read, submit, and vote on content; read and take part in online discussions; and network with others. 

The Sphinn web site is an extension of the popular search-engine marketing web site SearchEngineLand.com. The Sphinn community consists primarily of search-engine and interactive marketing professional interested in a broad range of topics in the technology field.

Closing Comments about Social Networking

One thing to keep in mind… Submitting your own content may appear to readers as an attempt to spam or self-promote, which is typically frowned upon with-in the social networking space. Instead, have a friend, preferably an active member of the social network to which you would like the story to be sent to, vote on or submit your story. Once the story is submitted, you can comment or vote on your own story.

SEO Boot Camp Comments:

If you want the most from your online business, plus receive the highest volumes of organic traffic possible that some of your most successful competitors already have, then you need to take SEO seriously.

SEO is a comprehensive approach to improving your search engine rankings. As such, it requires attention to your whole site. It does little good to optimize portions of your site and leave other areas lacking the same attention to detail. If you feel that your site is in need of optimizing, do it right and make sure you hit all of the elements as you go.

You Have the Blueprints at Your Disposal… Now Put One Foot in Front of the Other, and Take One Baby Step at a Time!

When I come across additional or updated information, I will be sure to add it to my lessons, then pass it on to you through the information you provided while signing up for these lessons.

Below are the links from this lesson in order of appearance (each link will open a new window or tab to allow you to easily return to this page for more link navigation.)

Blog Directories

Here is Google’s Blog Directory: http://blogsearch.google.com/

Here is the link for BlogCatalog: http://www.blogcatalog.com/

Reminder from 3 – Evaluate Potential Linking Partners

Lesson 3 Reminder – Evaluate Potential Linking Partners

My “NoFollow” Article

Here is the link for the NoFollow attribute article I wrote: http://seoblogoptimizer.com/nofollow-tag-exposed/

SEOQuake Firefox Extension

Here is the Firefox SEO Quake extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036/

My Dofollow Article & Top 50 Directory Submission Sites!

My DoFollow Article Directory Submission Sites
http://seoblogoptimizer.com/dofollow-article-submission-sites/

The Top 50 Article Directories link: http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php

Google FeedBurner RSS/Email Delivery Technology

Google FeedBurner http://feedburner.com/

What Would Seth Godin Do Plug-in http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/what-would-seth-godin-do/

Press Release Info

Press Release information with search engines in mind:
http://service.prweb.com/learning/article/quality-online-press-releases/

50 Free Press Release Submission Web sites:
http://www.avangate.com/articles/press-release-distribution_69.htm

Social Media Web Sites:

Facebook, located at http://www.facebook.com/

The Link for MySpace www.myspace.com

To join StumbleUpon, navigate to http://www.stumbleupon.com/

MyBlogLog, located at http://www.mybloglog.com/

Twitter, located at http://twitter.com/

LinkedIn, located at http://www.linkedin.com/

YouTube, located at http://www.youtube.com/

Digg is a popular social news web site located at http://digg.com/

Sphinn, located at http://sphinn.com/

 

6 - Search Engine & Directory Submissions

Search Engine & Directory Submissions

Search Engine Submissions

Listed in Google and the other popular search engines is one of the most effective ways of directing free, targeted traffic to your website.

There are a handful of search engines out there that bring traffic, but the reality is a very large percentage of search engine traffic comes from Google, Yahoo and MSN. 

So in other words, once you start getting traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing (formerly MSN Live), you’ll rank well in the others automatically.

Free Submission

You can submit to all of the major search engines for free, but that won’t guarantee that your site will be picked up, or appear on any searches. Free submission only guarantees that the search engine knows the site exists. 

To go the route of free submissions, look for a “Submit Your Site” link on the search engine site and fill out a submission form. Not to discourage you, but it can take up to 12 weeks for your site to be indexed.

Below you will find the 3 big search engine links for submitting your site… Google, Yahoo and Bing. You will also find these links at the end of this lesson.

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Submitting Your Site to Directories

Directories offer a way of collecting and categorizing links to other web sites. They are not search engines and behave nothing like search engines. For example, whereas a search engine collects entries using a search crawler or robot, search directories are populated by people. You enter your web site in a directory, and then the entry is reviewed by a real person before the site is included in the directory listings.

You must complete a submission process in order to have your site included in most directories. When you submit the information about your site, there is an art to doing it. How you list your site can mean the difference between the site being included in the directory or not. Before you even begin to create your listing, it’s usually a good idea to navigate through the directory to which you’re submitting your site. Look at other listing and take note of what works in them.

Keywords are of little importance when you’re creating your directory listing. Instead, what will make the difference is the content on your web site. Therefore, if you’re faced with listing in a directory that’s strict about reviewing sites before they are listed, make sure you have fresh content on your site.

Links can also be important when your site is being reviewed for inclusion in a directory, so be sure you keep your links updated. Broken links are typically detrimental to your site, and links that lead to unrelated pages won’t reflect well either.

Other elements that editors evaluate include the following:

• Appropriate categorization
• Accurate titles and descriptions
• Title and descriptions relevant to the subject of the web site
• Domain names that match site titles
• Contact information that’s easily accessible
• Links to privacy policies, return policies, and product or service guarantees
• Working and appropriate links to other sites and resources

Increasingly, both search engines and directories are taking the actual code used to build the site into consideration when determining search results. It’s always a good idea to run your code through an HTML validator to ensure that it is free of errors and unnecessary elements. Clean code simply renders better and makes it easier for crawlers to navigate your web site. 

More about HTML Validation below

In addition to these requirements, most directories have a long list of criteria that are reviewed before a site is actually added to the directory. That’s why it can sometimes take weeks or months for your site to be listed. Depending on the volume of submissions to the directory, it can be a slow process for editors to review each web site.

When you’re ready to submit your web site to a directory, take the time to completely read the directions provided by the directory. If you don’t follow these directions closely, it’s far more likely that your site will be rejected from the listings.

One other important submission guideline to remember is to submit only your site’s main page. When directories include sites that have been reviewed, they usually list the whole site as a single entry, rather than list each page separately, as search engines do.

Major Online Directories

One of the most well-known directories on the Internet is the Open Directory Project (ODP) managed by dmoz.org. This general directory is edited by a team of volunteers.

It is a representative of the various types of directories that are available for you to list your site with. Although there might be some slight differences, the directions of listing your site with ODP are very similar to those you would find when listing with other directories.

To list your Web site in the ODP directory, take these steps:

1. Navigate to the Open Directory Project web site at: http://www.dmoz.org/

2. Navigate to the category and subcategory where it would be appropriate for your site to appear. Then, in the top-right corner of the page, click Suggest URL.

3. You are taken to the submission site. Read all the instructions carefully and fill in the submission form completely.

4. When you’re finished filling out the form, click the Submit button. You’re taken to a thank-you page, and your submission process is complete.

5. Now you just have to wait for the editorial committee to complete its review. When the review is complete, you should receive notification indicating whether or not the site has been accepted and listed.

Like search engines, there are hundreds of different directories online. Some are general directories, whereas others are very specific and associated with only one industry or organization. When you’re selecting the directories to which you’d like to submit your site, be choosy. Don’t try to list your site in a directory that’s inappropriate, it will be a waste of your time and will most likely be rejected.

Here are some of the most well-known directories on the Web:

GoGuides.org at: http://www.goguides.org/addurl.html. This directory’s purpose is to be completely spam-free. It’s comprehensive search directory that even has image-searching capabilities. This directory has a one-time process fee of $69.95 and comes with a money back guarantee if your submission is declined.

SearchSight located at: http://searchsight.com/submit.htm is another general directory. SearchSight is one of the lesser-known directories, but it’s quickly gaining traction in the search market.

Paid vs. Free Directories

Many experts will argue that free directory listings have nothing of value listed in them. This is simply not true. Some free directories are actually very strict about the listings that are included in their results. Similarly, most users believer that paid directories automatically equate to better-quality sites. Again, not true.

Paid directories can be just as lax about the review process as any other directory. In both cases, whether free or paid is better for you, turns out to depend on your specific needs.

Submitting to RSS Syndication Directory Sites

This subject ‘RSS’ is two-fold… having an available RSS/Email feed for your followers, and submitting your site to RSS syndication directory sites! Having an available RSS/Email feed for your followers, will be covered in your final Lesson # 7 – “Getting Unlimited Traffic to Your Site!”

As for the other… an RSS feed directory is a location to where people can seek out content that they can use for their site or they can subscribe to. In order for people to find your site, you can submit your RSS feed to a place that will syndicate your blog content and give you more exposure.

Your RSS feed is usually your full URL with the word “feed” directly after the address. Example, mine would be http://seoblogoptimizer.com/feed/. When you submit your RSS feed to these sites, you will usually need to submit the URL of your RSS feed, plus a category that describes your site. Here is a fantastic listing of RSS feed sites. http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm

Using Site Submission Tools

Submission tools are automated software programs and applications that remember the repetitive information that must be provided in order to get your web site listed in a search engine or directory. They sound like a great idea… some are, but not all of them.

Many submission tools try to scam web site owners by promising to submit their site to thousands of search engines and directories for one low fee. The problem with that claim is that most of those search engines are either non-existent or mostly worthless to your site.

Therefore, when considering web site submission tools, look closely at the claims the programs make. Then apply that well-known rule: if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is. You can ask for a list of the search engines and directories to which the program will submit your site. After requesting the list, take the time to research the sites before you invest in the tool.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to know whether the submission tool you select will be the right one, so it is always the best practice to manually submit your site and URL’s to directories.

HTML Site Validation

Valid, properly written HTML allows search engines to easily read your web page content and underlying HTML code. Much like the English language, there is a right way and a wrong way to write the code that structures your web pages. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and international group that works to develop protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web, has developed standards for HTML development. Web browser developers like Mozilla and Microsoft adhere to these standards to guarantee cross-browser uniformity when displaying web pages.

Search Engines read web sites line by line, and errors in your HTML syntax can trigger a penalty if the invalid code prevents the search-engine spider from reading the content. Invalid code can cause web sites to look different from browser to browser.

Use the W3C Markup Validation tool at: http://validator.w3.org/ to test your web page code for standard compliance. Just enter your web site URL in to the location bar, and the validation tool shows you any errors that your code contains and also gives suggestions to help you fix any problems.

You should make your best attempt to pass the validation test, but do not spend a great deal of time if it appears to be impossible. Many sites do not pass, including Google, Yahoo, and most other heavily visited Internet hot spots.

Search engines are unlikely to penalize your site for including invalid code unless it significantly hinders the capability of the search-engine spiders to read your web pages. W3C Markup Validation is primarily in place to ensure compatibility with all current and future technologies, and adhering to the W3C standards is likely to become more and more necessary if you want your web site to display properly on these devices.

Although it has not been proven to increase search-engine rankings, writing valid HTML is another weapon in an arsenal of best-practice techniques that are likely to have a cumulative effect on overall search-engine approval.

SEO Browser Tools & Plug-Ins

XML Site Map for WordPress Plug-in & Its Purpose

Considering that these lessons are based around the WordPress supported web site, I will cover the easiest way to get an XML site map for your site…. first, its purpose.

In 2005, Google introduced the XML sitemap format, and in 2006 it was adopted by Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. This gave publishers a standard format to follow for creating one sitemap that the top search engines could use. You can find specifics about the protocol at: http://www.sitemaps.org/.

Because blogs can become very large, a sitemap is often needed to ensure that the major search engines can locate, crawl, and index each individual web page. However, creating a sitemap by hand every time you make a new blog post gets very boring and redundant. Thankfully, there is a WordPress plug-in called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress that takes all the work out of maintaining an up-to-date sitemap.

Once the plug-in is correctly installed, your sitemap is automatically rebuilt each time you make a new post. Not only that, the plug-in also pings the major search engines to alert them that you have updated your sitemap and added new content. This should bring them to your newly added web page(s).

This plug-in makes getting your web site fully indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask incredibly easy. The more pages you have indexed, the more chances you have of being returned in the search results. This plug-in is free, and has consistently been updated to match each WordPress blogging software update. However, the developer does accept donation for his time and effort.

The Google XML SiteMap Generator is located at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/. Once you upload and activate the XML SiteMap Generator, click on the link “XML-Sitemap” under your Settings menu in your back office Dashboard. Once this page opens you will see that your sitemap has not been created yet.

Click on the link to create the sitemap, when it completes, navigate down the page adding or removing the information you would like, then click on the Update options button at the bottom… you are done! This will now rebuild your sitemap and ping the search engines that you have check marked, each time you create new content.

SEO for Firefox Browser Plug-in

One of the most popular SEO browser extensions is SEO for Firefox, which was created by SEO expert Aaron Wall. SEO for Firefox gathers multiple pieces of marketing data about a web site and displays that data within your browser along side the search results from the Google or Yahoo search engine.

To install this awesome Firefox extension, navigate to http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html.

A word of WARNING… if you have the SEO for Firefox toolbar on all the time, some of the search engines might start blocking some of your queries because they may think that you are scraping (scraping is the process, through computer software technique, of automatically collecting web information) them too much, because it pulls in a large amount of data from the different search engines.

To turn the SEO for Firefox toolbar off/on, single click the SEOBOOK name in the upper left corner of your browser window, then click the “Turn SEO Toolbar Off/On” link.

For additional information, please visit the article that I wrote about this SEO for Firefox plug-in found at http://seoblogoptimizer.com/seo-firefox-plugin/

The Google Toolbar Available for IE & Firefox

The Google toolbar is an add-on for both the Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers. The Google Toolbar includes several features that should prove useful during the various stages of SEO. These features include the Google PageRank of a web page, a tool to highlight a given keyword within a page (my favorite), and an auto fill option to cut down on the time spent typing the same information over and over again.

The Google Toolbar will allow you to highlight any word on a web page. You can insert a keyword or phrase into the Google Toolbar to quickly see where and how the keyword is used throughout the web page. The toolbar highlights the keyword wherever it appears, whether it’s in the headline, subheading, body copy, or internal links. It’s a great tool… I have used it on many occasions.

The Alexa Toolbar for Firefox

The Alexa Toolbar allows you to perform competitive analysis and community research throughout your SEO campaigns. The Alexa Toolbar offers a shortcut to the information that is provided on the Alexa.com web site; you can effectively monitor your competitor’s web site and marketing campaigns by carefully evaluating an Alexa traffic graph provided through the Alexa Toolbar.

If you want to compete with other web sites for top rankings, you need to stay on top of what your competition is doing. You can also use the Alexa Toolbar to help you ask questions about traffic-generation strategies that may prove successful for your web site. The Alexa Toolbar offers data on related links, a list of sites that Alexa has grouped together as being related. Another tool worth its weight in gold.

The Big 3 Search Engine Submission Sites:

Google’s search engine submission link: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Bing’s (MSN’s) search engine submission link: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

Yahoo’s search engine submission link: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Online Directories

Open Directory Project Web site at: http://www.dmoz.org/

GoGuides.Org at: http://www.goguides.org/addurl.html

SearchSight located at: http://searchsight.com/submit.htm

HTML Validation

Use the W3C Markup Validation tool at: http://validator.w3.org/

WordPress XML SiteMap Plug-in

The specifics about the XML Sitemap protocol at: http://www.sitemaps.org/

The Google XML SiteMap Generator is located at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

SEO Browser Tools & Plug-Ins

To install the Firefox browser extension, navigate to http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

Here is the article I wrote about this SEO for Firefox plug-in http://seoblogoptimizer.com/seo-firefox-plugin/

The Google Toolbar http://www.google.com/toolbar/ff/index.html

The Alexa Toolbar http://www.alexa.com/toolbar/

UA-37443639-1

5 - Making Your Content Writing Search Engine Friendly

Making Your Content Writing Search Engine Friendly

Write for People, Not Search Engines

The ultimate goal of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is to achieve long-standing, organic rankings with popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Although content is not the only thing that search-engine algorithms take into consideration when ranking a web site, content is arguably the most important. Therefore, if your goal is to obtain high organic rankings for your web site, you must produce high-quality, original content that contains the keywords that you want to rank for.

Write Original, Persuasive, and Natural Content

If your content is original, persuasive, and has a natural tone, search engines tend to recognize it as worthwhile and therefore rank it positively. Conversely, if your content is overly stuffed with keywords and the only purpose of the content is to manipulate search-engine results, search engines will eventually remove your content from their index, in which case it will no longer appear in the search results. Packing too many keywords into your content creates an awkward tone and unnatural flow.

Structure Your Content with Your Reader in Mind

It is enormously important to outline and structure your content to be as helpful and informative as possible. Your content must address the gamut of possible questions and concerns your readers may have regarding your product, service or message.

Writing distinctly helpful and user-friendly content makes your page appealing to humans and search engines alike. Before writing any content, ask yourself some questions: What are the benefits of the product, message or service? What concerns would I have as a consumer or reader? What is truly exceptional about this product? By answering these types of questions, you alleviate any confusion or apprehensions your reader may have regarding your product, increasing your chances of conversion. People and search engines alike value comprehensive, useful information, not slogans and vague appraisals.

Avoid Poor Grammar

The search-engine spiders are aware that clumsy sentences and poor grammar are displeasing to human readers; therefore, your grammar should be of the highest caliber. Search engines tend to devalue any content containing awkward sentences, clichés, erroneous grammar, or writing considered aesthetically abrasive to a reader. By keeping your story elegant and distinctive, you increase your web site’s chance of attainting high search-engine rankings. It is also important to keep your content accessible to the average reader.

Do not alienate the average reader by writing in a style more befitting to a doctoral dissertation than a web page. However, content that comes across as elementary is going to generate minimal excitement and make your site look unprofessional. The key to writing accessible yet impressive content is determining the level at which your target audience reads.

Write Useful and Informative Content

It is important that your content be informative, concise, and easy to navigate. Readers on the web are said to have an exceptionally short attention span. For this reason, write in a concise manner and use headings, subheadings, bold type, and similar formatting that illustrate the information contained in each subsequent section of your page.

Start all subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words or action phrases that users can notice while scanning down your content. Keep in mind that users visit your web site with a specific objective in mind. Readily accessible information increases the reader’s chances of achieving an objective in a timely fashion. Readers are more likely to purchase or subscribe to your product or service if you make it easy for them.

Write a Compelling Headline

As I wrote in my article “10 Indispensable SEO Content Writing Tips!”, the headlines to the articles you write are crucial… you have less than 10 seconds to attract the user’s attention. Your headline is around “90 percent of the reason anyone will read your ad copy,” so make sure your title will interest the reader enough to pull them in immediately, while clearly explaining the content. Placing a keyword into the headline is also a great idea.

Use Bold-Type Headings

Provide bold-type headings that inform on the nature of each subsection, affording the reader on overview of the site’s benefits at a glance. Furnishing readers with easily accessible, detailed information is the best way to keep them reading.

Many inexperienced copywriters make the mistake of writing their material in one large block of content without headings that grab the reader’s attention. Some readers are looking for specific information, and consider the task of reading the giant blocks of content to be too time consuming.

Write with an Original Voice

The process of becoming a skilled writer includes paying special attention to the originality of the writing. Originality requires you to make certain that your voice is the most powerful component of the content. Even if you are writing content that is technical in nature, you need to spend time to understand the material well enough to explain to the reader with your own voice.
Writing with an original voice makes your content valuable to search engines and naturally compelling to readers. Writing in a manner natural to you translates as natural to your audience.

Write Interesting Content in a Friendly Tone

Use the tone of your writing to capture your readers’ attention and keep them interested in your work. Employing a friendly tone in your writing will result in a positive response from virtually all your readers. You can use a friendly tone and humor in your copy to make your web site more personal and engaging. One of your main goals is to keep readers engaged long enough for them to read all the facts; the best way to accomplish this goal is to entertain while informing.
Keep your content interesting and persuasive, and you will be pleased to find that not only people but also search engines will enjoy it. It is a fact that the vast majority of content that is ranked on the front page of major search engines tends to be the content that is deemed most valuable and interesting to readers. Therefore, write quality content that people like, and search engines will rank it accordingly.

Content Writing Length

There are many opinions out there about the length of content that search engines like. I don’t believe that there is any magical number, but I personally believe that the ideal length would be anywhere from 300 to 1200 words. As an example, this lesson has a little over 2500 words according to the ‘word count’.

If you are writing for article submissions to directories such as EzineArticles.com, they will suggest that an ideal article size is 400-750 words, but no more than 5,000 words, as stated in their editorial guidelines. Many of these article submission sites will give guidelines to what they would like to see from you.

While you are writing your article, make sure to use keyword anchor text leading to other articles on your site as described in 4 – Optimizing Your Site with Tags! – Anchor Text

What’s the Right Keyword Density for Your Article?

The exact keyword density is hard to specify. It’s a measurement of the number of times that your keywords appear on the page versus the number of words on a page… a ratio, in other words.
A rule of thumb about keyword density would be to make sure your keyword or keyword phrase is in the title tag, the description and the H1 tag at minimum. Make sure you sprinkle a few variations of your keyword(s) throughout your site where it looks natural and makes sense as we spoke about in 2 – Keywords and Your Web Site!”- LSI keyword research.
Make sure you don’t abuse the system by keyword stuffing, which are too many keywords or a large amount of keyword phrases in your site’s text. Google will penalize you for this because it represents SPAM!
I have written an article about keyword density, in which I will leave the link at the end of this lesson. Make sure you read this article, because it will go into greater depth about keyword density, and ways of pleasing the search engines that others don’t know about, which will set you apart from the competition.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Another subject to touch on about content writing is duplicate content and the consequences for the identical content. Instead of getting in-depth about how to avoid duplicate content issues and their penalties, it would be much easier for you to read the article that I have written about the subject.
Once you have read the article about duplicate content, make sure you follow the link to Canonical Issues which is a whole other story about duplicate content. In my article, I will show you ways to avoid this issue for your blog.

Keeping Your Content Fresh

Content is also an element of SEO that needs to be maintained over time. Your content should change regularly… in some cases, that means every day; in others it means once a week or once a month. Even more important than the schedule with which you change your content is the content itself.
Over time you should be adding to your collection of relevant, useful content. If what you have on the site isn’t relevant or useful, then replace it… and don’t put any piece of content on your site that doesn’t give your visitors something useful. When adding new pages, you should also be adding internal page anchor text links making your site user-friendly.

Keyword-Enriched Web Site Makeover with Permalinks & the 301 Redirect!

STEP 1 – If you happen to be using the original WordPress ‘Default’ permalink as shown below, I would recommend that you change your permalink setting to the Custom Structure with the following word /%postname%/ in the box. What this will do for you is put your title wording into the URL instead of numbers. If your existing title (the title from the first time you saved the post) to your page has keywords in them, they will now show in the URL address bar, giving you an SEO advantage. When you make the change, your site links should continue to work, but it is always a good idea to check your links to make sure.

Once you have made this change and checked to make sure your links work correctly, it’s time to move on to the next step.

STEP 2 – If you would like to make changes to the URL file name (the string of words which are beyond the last forward slash “/” of your web site address) of any or all pages because they don’t contain your keywords, then you will have to do what is called a ‘301 redirect’ for each page that you decide to change.

Here’s an example of this page’s file name from the address bar above: /making-content-writing-search-engine-friendly-lesson-5/. This file name is purposely long for descriptive purposes during these lessons… if you look at any of my other pages that are not part of these lessons, they will contain only keywords or keyword phrases in the URL file name.
The reason that you will need to do a 301 redirect for any pages you decide to change are: most likely you have links out there in cyberspace that lead to your existing page(s), so you will need to re-direct those old pages to the new page.

Here is the 301 Redirect Plug-in for WordPress that I would recommend:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/ .

Once you install the plug-in and active it, you can find the 301 editor screen under Settings > 301 Redirects in the WordPress admin dashboard. You must be an administrator to edit your list of new redirects.

IMPORTANT: Before you make the change to a page’s file name, be sure to document the Top-Level part of the URL to place into the 301 redirect ‘Request’ box as shown below. The top-level part of the URL is the forward slash “/” along with the words that directly follow the domain name.

Example: If my domain URL shows “http://seoblogtips.com/seo-blog-tips/”, then the top level part of the URL would be the “/seo-blog-tips/”. If your URL has the WordPress blog installed into a folder (with the name “blog”, or any other folder name), example: http://seoblogtips.com/blog/seo-blog-tips/, then the top level would be “/blog/seo-blog-tips/”.

I know I’m repeating myself, but I can’t stress the importance enough… make sure you copy the top-level of the wording exactly as it appears in the address bar, including the forward slash “/” directly after the .com, .net. or .org, etc. to put into the ‘Request’ box… then put the new keyword-enriched complete URL into the ‘Destination’ box as shown and click Save Changes.


If you would like to learn more about a 301 Redirect, you can read my article on the subject:
http://seoblogoptimizer.com/301-redirect/ .

Below is a photo which shows the location to do the URL changes in your Edit Post box, if you choose to take on Step 2. All you need to do is click on the ‘Edit’ button, delete the old words, then add your main keyword or keyword phrase only, separating each word with a hyphen.

NOTE: When you do this step to create a newly keyword-enriched URL, do not add any additional words other than your keyword or keyword phrase… it will actually help your SEO efforts to leave out non-relevant words.

Here is a Plug-in to Compliment Step 2 (the 301 Redirect)

If you plan to do this work in step 2, then consider the following WordPress plug-in called SEO Slugs, located at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/!

What the SEO Slugs WordPress plugin does for you is remove the common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs (in a nutshell, the URL that I am talking about in Step 2) to improve search engine optimization.

For example, when you publish a post with a title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings”, WordPress automatically assigns a long filename to your post, called a post slug: /what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings/.

SEO Slugs plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. With SEO Slugs plug-in activated, the slug for our example blog post would look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings/

The slug is generated on automatic saving of draft (so you get a chance to look at it before publishing, and change it), or on publish.

One last NOTE about this plug-in: This plug-in has been tested compatible up to WordPress: 2.1.2, yet I am using it currently with my 3.0.1 version with no problems at all. I have been using this plug-in for a while now, so I thought I’d try it out on my Test Blog to see if it would automatically change the URL on an existing article to the shorter version as described above, and it did not.

What I am saying is that you will need to change the URL manually for existing articles, as I mentioned above. After the plug-in has been installed and activated, it will shorten your URL for any new articles that you write.

You’re on a Roll… Don’t Stop: If you know that changing the URL structure in Step 2 is of great SEO importance, then you need to consider setting aside some time to redo all of your highly important ‘Title tags’ using the All in One SEO Pack plug-in as described in 4 – Optimizing Your Site with Tags! – All in One SEO Pack – tags solution. While you are at it, you might as well fill in the description and the keywords section too.

Ping Your Blog When You Have Added Content or Updated Your Blog

Ping services allow you to automatically notify blog directories and search engines that your blog has been updated.

There are a few reasons that you should ping your blog… whenever a blog pings, many background processes happen which will get your blog quickly indexed by search engines as well as bring traffic from many other sources.

WordPress is known to ping your site by default each and every time you click on the Update button. This can cause a red flag for the search engines as spam, and possibly get your site banned. The solution to this issue is to add the plug-in MaxBlogPress, that will allow you to update your page within a period of time that you specify, without your site being pinged each time you click the Update button.

With this plug-in, you can add a large amount of ping sites to the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer box. I personally have only added the “Update Services” Codex list to the Ping Optimizer (this link is available on your WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Writing, then at the bottom of the page where it says Update Services), the remainder I go to each web site and manually ping by putting my URL in the box.

Keep in mind that the bigger your ping list, the greater the chances of receiving traffic from those sources. Below you will find a list of web sites that I recommend to manually ping your updated blog.

6 – Search Engine & Directory Submissions; SEO Tools & Plug-ins

6 Will be covering search engine submissions, submitting your site to directories, maximizing your exposure with RSS Submissions, HTML site validation and SEO browser tools & plug-ins.

Below are the links from this lesson in order of appearance (each link will open a new window or tab to allow you to easily return to this page for more link navigation.)

Here are the Links to My Articles:

10 Indispensable Content Writing Tips article http://seoblogoptimizer.com/seo-content-writing-tips/
Keyword Density http://seoblogoptimizer.com/keyword-density/
Duplicate Content http://seoblogoptimizer.com/avoiding-duplicate-content/
Canonical Issues http://seoblogoptimizer.com/url-canonicalization-wordpress/

301 Redirect Article & WordPress Plug-ins

Here is the 301 Redirect Plug-in for WordPress that I would recommend:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/

Here is the 301 Redirect article that I wrote: http://seoblogoptimizer.com/301-redirect/.
WordPress plug-in SEO Slugs: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/!

Ping Plug-in & Ping Web Sites

The MaxBlogPress plug-in: http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/mpo/

Here is the list of web sites to manually ping your updated blog:

http://blogbuzzer.com/
http://www.pingler.com/
http://pingomatic.com/
http://www.pingoat.com/
http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/