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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…)

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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A lot of people make too much of link building for SEO. It is true that getting links from authority sites can be quite challenging, but it is not impossible. Besides, there are plenty of easy ways to build a large quantity of links to a blog. Link building does require some work. So it’s not for lazy webmasters.

Those of you who want to build a few links to your website and give yourself a better chance of getting ranked higher in the SERPs should try these 5 no brainer link building tactics:

• Write Super Content: if you want to get links to your website, you need to have something worth linking to. A few years ago, you could get away with having a simple list post. These days, you are competing against many other sites that use the same old tactics. By offering your visitors a unique value with each and every post, you can keep them coming back for more and get some links in the process. Tutorials, un-boxing posts, and reports are all great ways to create viral content.
• Participate On Other Blogs: a lot of people underestimate this tactic. After all, most blogs no-follow outgoing comment links. That’s not why you should leave comments on blogs anyway. Comments can bring you new visitors. If you have spent enough time on step 1, there is a good chance you can use those new visitors to help you spread the word about your blog. (more…)

As someone who has been involved in the Internet industry since 2001, I can tell you that no ranking in safe when it comes to Google. You can be the #1 site for a term one day only to find yourself out of the top 30 the very next day. If you have taken time to diversify your traffic sources, you won’t panic when such thing happens to you. But pure SEO businesses can suffer if they lose their rankings. Making rash decisions is not going to help you if you are experiencing issues with your Google rankings. The best way to deal with it is by approaching it step by step:

1. Don’t Panic + Monitor: do not panic. Google changes things around from time to time. Your ranking may drop for a week and then go right back to where it was. You don’t want to go insane and make lots of changes the very minute your ranking drops.
2. Go through changes you may have made: we all make minor changes to our websites on a consistent basis. If you have changed your .htaccess or  robots.txt, you may want to go through those changes to figure out what you may done wrong. Sometimes, adding a wrong line could lead to major issues for your website.
3. Refer to your stats: it’s often tough to figure out when your ranking has dropped unless you have installed an analytics package on your website. Going through your analytics data could give you ideas what may have happened to your website.
4. Check with your web host: websites get hacked left and right all the time. It could be that your web host has been experiencing downtime on a consistent basis. Whichever the case, you should take time to find out. (more…)

YouTube has quickly become one of the best ways to dominate Google rankings. If you are into developing video content and don’t take a month to put out a new video, there is a good chance you can get a whole lot of traffic to your website just from YouTube. Of course, you want your content to add some value to your readers. When you have uploaded your videos, you don’t want to just sit around and leave things to chance. There are things you can do to optimize your videos for better rankings. The more views and eyeballs you get to your videos, the better chance of you have of building a long-lasting stream of traffic to your website from your videos.

If you are looking to optimize your YouTube videos for SEO, here are 10 factors that you should pay attention:

1. Title: make sure your video’s title has your core keyword in it. That’s a no-brainer. If people are searching for a specific keyword, you’ll have a better chance of showing up in the results if you have keywords in your title.
2. Description: very important factor and a great place to use some of your secondary keyword phrases as well. Don’t stuff keywords in your description, but there are creative ways you can fit your keywords here.
3. Tags: your tags do matter as well. So don’t forget to tag your videos properly. And don’t be conservative here. You can have more than one or two tags.
4. Likes: if you have a terrible video up on YouTube, people are going to give your video what it deserves (a lot of thumb downs). So make sure you listen to your audience and learn from what others are doing to upload only your best videos to YouTube.
5. Comments: there are many YouTubers who are just afraid of negative feedback. In my mind, any feedback is positive as long as you are not dealing with trolls. You should have your comments enabled.  (more…)

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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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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Search engine optimization has got quite a reputation among those who don’t know what the business is all about. Some consider SEO as a form of hacking. Others consider search engine professionals as snake oil salesmen. Of course, there are a few people that consider search engine optimization a bad thing for the whole web experience. A lot of bad reputation that search engine optimization has gotten in the past few years is due to SEOs being more obsessed about traffic than improving the experience of web searchers. There are many people that spend more time stuffing keyword, changing their copy to include more keywords that make sense, and even add more text elements to each page to get better rankings in the SERPs. I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t focus on on-page and off-page optimization tactics, but as a SEO, one needs to know why they go about implementing a certain strategy. Your audience may not care about minor changes to your website or a few extra keywords here or there, but it’s tough to know where the boundaries are.

It’s true that search engine optimizers are hired to help websites climb up the rankings and get more free traffic. But if you haven’t spent time to optimize your site to make things more convenient for your readers, you are missing the boat. And I am not talking about adding breadcrumbs or other forms of navigation to your website. It’s about providing value to your readers and giving them what they need. I can’t tell you how many times I have found a page on the first page of Google only to realize it offers no real value other than a page with a bunch of keywords on it. That’s not what the search is about.

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We have all heard of how real time search is the future. It’s actually not that far out if you think about it. Google’s Real Time search is a good indication to where the industry is heading. By integrating services such as Twitter, you can now do your search on Google more effectively, and in real time. I have talked about in the past how portal developers need to focus on videos, images, forums, blogs, and other avenues to maximize their presence on sites such as Google. But with real time search, you’ll have yet another revenue to get the word out about your product and get traffic back from Google in return.

As long as you are on the latest tab, you are going to see real time results on Google. It may seem a bit strange at first, but if you have been on Twitter for a while, it should come naturally to you. You can obviously click on the tags and search based on those.

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