WordPress is one of the most powerful content management systems on the Internet. There used to be a time when people looked at WordPress as a fun platform but not something one would use for a serious portal. That has changed dramatically with all the changes that the platform has gone through in the past few years. Nowadays, many top portals are taking advantage of WordPress. And I have to say those plugins are very addictive to play with.

WordPress may be a powerful content management system, but it is not going to get you to the top of the search engines all by itself. A lot will depend on your content, your keywords, and the optimizations you have done on your website. If you have been a student of SEO, you probably know the basic on-page, off page optimization tactics that you can take advantage of to give your website a better chance at ranking high on Google. What you dont’ want to do is forget about all those plugins that you are installing on your blog. (more…)

As someone who’s been involved in the SEO field for years I can tell you that there are plenty of ways you can mess up your website’s rankings. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can accidentally block crawlers or mess up your title tags or links. But one of the factors that many SEOs don’t pay attention to is their web host’s performance. So you have decided to create lots of content and get it all ranked high on the search engines. If you have gone with a cheap host to get the job done, you better be ready to deal with consequences if your web host happens to be down from time to time.

When you start a business online, you may not have the money to pay $200 to $1000 a month to host your website. You may not even need to. But if you are serious about what you are doing, your website is going to grow. That means, sooner rather than later you are going to be in a position where you will have to increase the amount of money you spend on your web host. Not only that, you are going to need  a web host that provides you with proper support when you are in trouble. (more…)

Search engine optimization is not about putting your heads in the sand and do things your way without looking at what others are doing in your niche. You are not competing against yourself. So if you want to get ahead in this business and get the rankings you feel you deserve, you’d better keep an eye out on what others are doing in your niche. That’s where keyword spy tools come in. They allow you to dig up your competitors keywords and even check their paid campaigns.

You certainly don’t want to copy everything your competitors are doing, but you’d be surprised how much you can learn from studying your competitors’ work. If you are looking to take your SEO game to the next level and beat your competitors in their own game, here are 4 powerful keyword spy SEO tools worth looking at:

SpyFu: one of the most underrated tools on the market. I have seen many talk about this tool, but most people focus on tools such as WordTracker and Keyword Discovery instead of spending some time with this tool. SpyFu gives you access to plenty of tools you can use to spy on your competitors’ organic or paid campaigns.

Compete: Compete is for power players. The information that you get from this service is top notch and can go a long way towards helping you respond to your competitors and match them move by move. Great way to compete your traffic metrics with those of your competitors.

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In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of talks in the affiliate community about the possibility of Amazon dropping affiliate sales generated through search engine results pages in the U.S. Amazon has already indicated that it won’t be paying affiliates in the U.K if their affiliate links get ranked on Google. Here is what Amazon had to say about this issue to its UK affiliates:

In addition, as of February 1, 2010 we will no longer pay referral fees on purchases made by customers who are referred to http://www.amazon.co.uk or http://www.javari.co.uk via Free Search Results. Free Search Results are links containing an Associate’s tag displayed in a search engine’s free, natural, or organic search results in response to a search query which send customers directly to an Amazon site without the customer first being sent to an Associate’s site and the customer clicking on a link to arrive at the Amazon site.

These changes do not prohibit you from purchasing paid search advertisements or submitting links to search engines so long as the links that appear on the search engines send customers to your site.

That of course doesn’t mean that you can’t make money by optimizing your website for search engines and get ranked that way. In some ways it’s understandable for Amazon taking such an action. There are plenty of SEO experts who can get their links up high in the rankings and make money that way. Amazon wants to reduce consumer confusion by making you take people to your own site before bringing them to Amazon.

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