Everybody wants to find short-cuts to dominate the search engines and increase the amount of free traffic he/she receives for free. After all, the pay per click market is not exactly cheap. You could end up spending thousands of dollars optimizing your campaigns. I have read too many reports that just dismiss the idea of having core keyword phrases in your domain. Some claim that it’s not that important of the factor, and you may be better off going with a made up word. There is nothing wrong with going with a brandable domain name for your startup. But if you are trying to dominate a market, you are better off registering all those top keyword heavy domains. You don’t have to be a genius to realize the importance of having your keywords in your domain. Take “make money online.” It’s one of the most competitive terms around these days. Everybody wants to make money these days, which is why this keyword gets lot of searches. And there are even more pages on the topic on the Internet. A look at the first page of the SERPs for that keyword phrase proves my point.

MakeMoneyOnline.com is sitting in the middle of the first page of the results on Google. Now you may tell me that this site has so much great content on how one can make money online that it’s ranking is justified. You be the judge.

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When it comes to researching keywords for your next big project, you shouldn’t just focus on tools such as WordTracker. Times have changed, you see. A few years ago, you’d have to work hard to find keywords and content people were searching for. Not anymore with sites such as Twitter and Facebook making it so easy. Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot of value in using those premium tools to get your SEO campaigns going. At the same time, you can rely on services such as Twitter to find out what people are talking about at the moment. It’s like getting instant feedback and seeing what people desire and need in real time.

There are plenty of Twitter tools that you can take advantage of to do all kinds of things with Twitter. At some point, you are better off picking and choosing a few tools and use them to improve the quality of your keyword lists. Considering that a lot of these tools are for free, they are well worth a try. In fact, here are 3 Twitter research tools that come handy for your SEO research:

Topsy: in the past few months, I have started moving away from Google search and use Topsy as my main research tool. If I want a story on let’s say “iPhone,” Topsy makes finding those hot juicy story easy. It also can help you find influential users on Twitter and track trends. (more…)

So you want to get more traffic to your WordPress blog? One way to do that is by optimizing each and every post for your blog. Your content always going to be play a big role on how your visitors perceive your website and your business as a whole. However, if you have spent a lot of time developing killer content for your blog, you want to make sure you put the effort forward to optimize your posts to get more exposure for your blog. When optimizing your pages, you want to focus on both on-page and off-page tactics. There is so much you can achieve by playing with your website’s code. In order to dominate the search, you need both on-page and off-page optimization.

WordPress is a powerful content management system and certainly makes it easy to manage lots of content with less effort. It is not perfect however. So you need to do some tweaking to get your posts optimized for search engines. Of course, you need to think about getting links to your blog as well. With that in mind, here are 10 ways you can optimize your blog posts for SEO:

1. Competitive Analysis: make sure you go after keywords and topics that are not too competitive. At some point, banging your head against other heavyweights in a niche becomes less than ideal. There are plenty of keyword research tools, analytics, and competitive intelligence tools that you can use to optimize your keyword lists and go after the ones that are worth your effort.
2. Title Tags: the most important ranking factor, even in 2010. You want to make sure your titles are optimized and target “one” main keyword per page. It’s OK to let your pages compete for spots, but if you want to get the best results, you are better off focusing on one main keyword phrase per page. Use plugins such as All In One SEO to make the process easier.
3. Page URL: I can tell you from experience that using keywords in your domain or page URL can help make a big difference. Have you ever noticed those under construction blogs that are ranking high on Google due to the keywords used in their domain names?
4. Header Tags: using your keywords in your header tag makes a difference as well. You do want to watch the number of times you use your keyword on your pages, but if there is one place that you should use your keywords in, it should be your header tags.
5. Alt Tags: not as important as they used to be, but it still is a best practice to provide alt tags for all your images. You don’t want to spam the search engines here, so don’t put all your hopes in your alt tags.
6. Internal Links: link to your other content on your blog and link often. Using keywords in your anchor text does help a lot as well. If you are using WordPress, there are plenty of scripts you can install on your blog to automatically link to your other stories on your blog. (more…)

Those of you who have been around the field of SEO have probably seen the rise and fall of blog spamming. There was a time when people would go to other people’s blogs and get Yes-Follow links back all the time. In fact, a few online marketers were touting this as a must-do technique to get high rankings on Google and other top website. If you managed to get your comments on highly popular blogs, you can almost guarantee yourself a decent stream of traffic for a while. Those days have come and gone, and people are still spamming blogs for traffic and attention. And they are not getting any smarter.

Spammers know that bloggers have become more alert about the challenge of spam comments. That’s why they are changing their comments to make them look as if they are legitimate. Take a look at the following:

I have recently changed browsers from Chrome to Microsoft IE 6. After the change I seem to have a problem with loading JavaScript. Every-time I go on a site that requires Javascript, my computer doesn’t load…

As you can tell, the message is designed to encourage bloggers to allow it to go on. But when you get the same message over multiple blogs, you know you are dealing with a spammer who’s using a dumb strategy. (more…)