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So you spend a lot of time working on great content but do not get too much love from the search engines? Maybe you should balance the number of hours you spend on writing content and the time you spend promoting your blog. In a perfect world, your blog posts would promote themselves, saving you time in the process. While those who have a large community can somewhat expect their visitors to do this job for them, not everybody is that lucky. Would knowing advanced SEO tactics help you promote your blog posts much more effectively? That may be true, but every little step you take counts. Even if you are not too experienced in the field of SEO, there are simple things you can do to push your blog over the top.

Here are just 5 things you can do to make your blog more search engine friendly:

• Submit your website to directories: it’s the oldest trick in the book. Getting a few links to your website from top directories may not guarantee you the number 1 spot on Google, but it does help you outperform those who are not paying too much attention to link building.
• Don’t forget social media: there are hundreds of yes-follow social media websites around that you can take advantage of to build links to your website and give it a better chance to get ranked higher on Google. Every little link could help in the end. (more…)

In a perfect world, you’d go about your life writing and tweeting without having to optimize anything for the search engines. Unfortunately, things do not work that way in real life. If you want to get the most out of your efforts on your blog, Twitter account, and even Facebook, you’ll need make some adjustments to things you tweet and display on your profile. There is such a thing as Twitter SEO. Who would have thought a few years ago that it’d be possible to dominate the search engines for a highly competitive keyword with just a Twitter account.

You won’t do any dominating unless you spend some time optimizing your Twitter profile for on and off page factors. We’ll discuss the off-page factors (e.g. link-building) in a separate posts, but here are 5 on-page things you can do right now to optimize your profile for the search engines.

User ID: the name you choose for your Twitter account matters. It is one of the most important decisions you make before committing to your Twitter strategy. When your account become more popular, you’ll have an easier time dominating the search engines for the term you used in your Twitter profile. It won’t be the only thing you need to worry about but you’d be surprised how having the right name can help you in the long run

Twitter Bio: it’s nice to have a chance to tell the world about yourself and your business. But don’t forget about your SEO efforts when doing it. Your Twitter bio gives you the chance to add your top keywords to your Twitter account and give yourself a better chance to show up high for those terms (relevant keywords are key). (more…)

A wise man once told me that if something was easy, everybody would be doing it. That really applies to all aspects of life. Most people are not willing to step out of their comfort zone and endure hardships to achieve their goals. After all, why do that when you can take short-cuts. Unfortunately, short-cuts are going to get you only so far. To pick up a cause (whatever it is) and truly push it, you need to be creative and willing to go places where others have not been or won’t go to. That’s what Nick Newcomen has done. He is the individual behind the World’s Biggest Writing. Nick used a GPS data logger to travel around the U.S. and send a message to the world.

Credit: worldsbiggestwriting.com

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Sites such as Mashable and TechCrunch are great case studies to go through and learn things from. These folks have made content promotion an art. Each article posted on those sites gets hundreds of retweets and tens of likes. It does come down to their audience and writers, but both sites have done a magnificent job making their websites more social friendly. Of course, these guys don’t do everything.

Targeting Twitter, Facebook, and Digg is a no brainer move. A site such as Mashable gets millions of visitors on a monthly basis, which explains why their articles get so many tweets and retweets. The content posted on these sites shows exactly why content is king. Quality still matters and most of these sites have quality posts each and everyday (multiple times).

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PostRank is one of the most exciting research services available to bloggers and content publishers. PostRank can be used to find the top contents on the Internet, determine the level of social engagement per each post, and even track the performance of an RSS feed. The service does have a paid plan for those who want to add another layer of analytics to their existing platform. While I do suggest publishers giving this feature a try, you really do not have to come up with new content ideas.

There are plenty of lazy SEOs that complain about having to come up with fresh content all the time. Let’s face it. In a perfect world, you’d do what you want to do and Google will find your content and rank it high in the SERPs. In reality, you will have to come up with new ways to expand your target keyword list and produce content relevant to your new keywords. Thanks to PostRank, you’ll never be out of ideas.

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I don’t know about you, but there have been plenty of times that I have had to find ways to get around my mental blocks to expand my existing keyword lists. You play with those top keyword tools long enough, you start getting comfortable. Sometimes, one has to go outside-the-box to find new ways to expand a SEO keyword list. Primal is an innovative keyword tool that lets its users do just that. It’s a great tool to brainstorm and develop new ideas.

If you are planning a new SEO project or just want to come up with new ideas for your existing campaigns, Primal can give you some ideas. Under “Think” page, you can enter a group of keywords and let the tool dig up related keywords for you.

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A lot of newbies to SEO ignore their internal link structure and only focus on getting juicy links from other websites. While that can help you a lot over the long run, linking out to your own pages can help you too. At the very least, it can help flow your traffic to more of your pages. Internal links do allow you to redirect your link juice to the right locations on your website. If you have created a monster of a website with WordPress and did not pay too much attention to your internal link structure, you don’t want to go through each post and find places you can link to from it. That’s what Where did they go from here? plugin is useful for. It keeps track of the pages your visitors go through on your website and links out from referring URLs to referred URLs on your site. Its functionality is essentially similar to what Amazon does on its site.

This plugin is pretty easy to deploy. Just add it to your WordPress site, define what you want it to display as your headline, and you are all set. It keeps track of pages that people have visited and links to them from their referring locations. This is significant for two reasons. It not only automates the internal link building process for you, but it also help your visitors find out what other stories they may need to visit on your WordPress website.

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If you have developed a somewhat static portal in the past, you have probably realized the challenges of keeping your ranking intact on Google. Sure. You can keep building links, optimize your keyword, and so on. But if your content does not change much, you could get a slap by Google. It has happened to a few of our portals in the past, no matter how many links we pointed to it or how great the content of the portal was. Thankfully, there is an easy way to make sure your portal stays relevant in the eyes of Google: blogging. Adding a blog to your portal and pumping killer content into it can open new doors for your website and help you reach and retain ranking positions that would not be possible without your blog.

Let’s say you have a comparison website about laptops. If your comparison table does not change too often, you are going to have to find ways to keep your content fresh from time to time. You can always play with the text before and after your comparison table. Getting fresh links can help you with your efforts too. But in some cases, it may not be enough to help you retain your rankings.

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Google Knol is one of those underrated communities that many SEO beginners forget to take advantage of. Knol may have not been as successful as some predicted, but it’s still an outpost for you to push your website and provide value to your community. Starting a knol is not that difficult as long as you know your way around the topic you intend to write about. Since your work can get reviewed by your community, you certainly don’t want to cut corners.

Writing a knol is much different than writing a random blog post. You do need to pay attention to your work’s organization and focus. Your knol can be huge or just a few hundred words long. The length should not matter as long as you cover what you promise to cover in your knol.

If you want to write a killer knol, you want to pay attention to these factors:

• Quality: if you want to get the attention you desire with your Knol, your work needs to be of high quality. You can’t cut corners or miss important things about the topic you are covering. Those who hope to just spam Knol are going to be dealt with by the community. Throwing a page up is not going to do it here. (more…)

EzineArticles.com is still one of those article directories that is worth going after. While many article directories have seen their traffic go down, webmasters can still get a decent flow of traffic by writing magnetic content for EzineArticles. One way to add your content to EzineArticles without writing articles from scratch is re-purposing your old blog posts. Optimize them for a certain keyword, define the right keyword in your author box, and you should be good to go. If you decide to go in that route, EzineArticles WordPress plugin can save you time and make the process a whole lot easier.

In order to get the most out of EzineArticles, you need articles that have decent titles, tags, and summaries. This plugin lets you define those easily.You can choose how you want the plugin to behave and what it needs to pick up as for your article summary and keywords. (more…)