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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.
• Add social media buttons to your blog: as a blogger, you spend a lot of time writing content that your visitors want to consume. You build your community and provide value, so why not use your community to help your posts go viral. Adding social buttons (Facebook, Twitter, and …) can give your visitors the call to action they need to share your stories with the world.
• Start guest posting: guest posting is the best way to grow your blog and get links from highly popular websites. If you hit the jack-pot and manage to get your post on one of those super popular sites, you are going to be golden. Such links are worth way more than anything you can get from directories or your social media profiles.
• Leave comments on other blogs: as a part of your blogging process, you should spend time leaving comments on other blogs in your niche (linking back to your own). You can always visit CommentLuv enabled blogs or just use Google to find related blogs in your niche. Even if you are getting no-follow links, there is still a lot of merit to this tactic.

These 5 tactics won’t guarantee you the #1 spot on Google or other search engines. But they do help you get the word out about your posts and gain the recognition you deserve for your work in the long run.

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.

There are multiple ways you can go about finding new ideas for your articles with PostRank. For starters, you can just keep track of the hot content in those popular categories. Let’s say you are interested in topic x. All you have to do to track it is by using the following URL:

postrank.com/topic/x

That will give you a list of top websites about your topic of choosing. You can also see which sites have moved and down in the rankings recently. Best of all, you can analyze top posts per site to find out what is working for your competitors.

The temptation is always there for SEOs to use the same old content formula to optimize their sites for the search engines. That could still work but the times are changing. Articles and posts that actually provide a unique value to your readers will be winners in the long run.

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.
• Throw Giveaways: let’s face it. If you start a giveaway on iPhone 4, you can get a lot of people to join in and link back to you. You want to make sure to reward those who link to your giveaway page.
• Create a free product: free products can increase the number of your links dramatically. Of course, your product needs to be decent. A free e-book or a cheat-sheet can certainly help.
• Create a post around your visitors: getting your visitors involved in your community is a great way to build links. If you use your visitors’ feedback or content on your blog, there is a good chance they will link to you. Let’s not forget those “top user” type posts. How many people would love to show up on “best people to follow on twitter” or “people you need to follow” lists? Some actually would link to those types of posts.

There you have it. These tactics are pretty easy to implement and can get your blog a few links. Can’t get easier than that.

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.
5. Check market trends: has something happened to your industry or niche recently? If you have been paying attention, you probably haven’t missed it. If your market is becoming more competitive, it’s only normal to see many more competitors in it. Not everyone is going to stay on the first page when there are too many sites going for it.
6. Check out your competitors: going back to the previous point, you should always check to see who’s replaced you in the rankings. Going through their sites and analyzing their strengths should give you ideas.
7. Go back to basics: just because you have experienced a drop in the rankings does not mean that you should take drastic measures. Links and good content still matter.
8. Diversify your traffic sources: relying on Google, Yahoo, and Bing for your traffic is too risky. That’s why you should focus on multiple sources to drive traffic to your website. Twitter, StumbleUpon, and PPC ads can all help you make up your lost traffic.

These 8 steps will not guarantee you’ll get your rankings back. Nevertheless, you don’t want to lose it after every drop in your rankings.

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. 
6. Embeds: some YouTubers do not allow people to embed their videos into their websites and blogs. That’s a big mistake if you are hoping to get lots of views and go viral (# of views do matter too!). If you take the time to brand your videos, there is no reason not to enable this feature.
7. Age of video: your video’s age does matter as well. From my experience, you have a good chance of showing up in recent videos as long as your videos are less than 3-4 months old. Of course, the more active you are, the more traffic you get. As you gather more thumbs ups and positive comments and your videos get more views, you are going to climb the rankings.
8. Activity: your activity on YouTube matters as well. Don’t forget about the social aspect of YouTube. Rate other people’s videos, and they may return the favor. Also, upload videos on a consistent basis and you have a better chance of increasing your videos.
9. Views: a very important factor that depends on everything you do in previous steps mentioned above. Network with other YouTubers, push your videos as hard as you can, and use viral video ideas to gain a gigantic number of views on YouTube. Growing your number of subscribers matter as well.
10. Inbound links: getting links to your YouTube videos should be on the top of your agenda. You can add your videos to StumbleUpon, Delicious, and other social networking sites. You can also push your videos on Twitter, Facebook, and other top sites. Don’t forget to link to your videos from your blog. It’s a no brainer.

There you have it. 10 simple ways you can get your videos to rank higher on YouTube. Video search engine optimization does take a bit of time and effort, but it’s worth it as you get to dominate Google. For now anyway.

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.

There is no question that you can game the search engines with links and other black and gray hat tactics. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If you have the exact keyword people are searching for in your domain, you have a decent chance of getting ranked high on top search engines, even if your content is not top notch. Don’t get me wrong. Your ranking is not going to last forever if you just purchase a domain and don’t a decent effort forward. But your domain matters. Even if you can’t register every domain in your niche, you should always register domains that have your very top keywords. It’s not as if domains are expensive. That would not only give you options, it would also keep spammers from getting high rankings just by owning those domains. So don’t underestimate the power of your domain.

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.

Keyword Spy: one of the most powerful keyword spying tools on the market. If you intend to promote affiliate products on your site or just want to find out what keywords people are bidding on, this tool comes in handy. It can also come in handy when you are ready to expand your keyword set.

KeyCompete: another interesting competitive intelligence tool that not only lets you dig up your competitors’ keywords, but it lets you spy on their paid advertising campaigns as well. Useful for long-tail keywords as well.

What’s your favorite SEO spying tool?

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.

Having said that, I don’t believe Amazon disregarding affiliate sales generated through free search is such a good idea. First of all, there are many ways affiliate could feel left out by such a policy. And that’s assuming that Amazon is actually capable of tracking all the sales generated through free search results. I am not even sure if it’s good for business. Think about it. Affiliates may be making money off of Amazon, but they do help bring in customers as well. This move to reduce affiliate payments doesn’t bode well on Amazon’s image.

Affiliate marketing is still going strong, but I have to admit the industry could be on its last legs as economy continues to struggle. Our lawmakers are still talking about the possibility of introducing more taxes (possibly Internet tax) all around the nation. So far the idea has not been successful. The FTC is expected to start cracking down on some affiliates as well. Things are certainly not looking good for affiliates who haven’t mastered the game.

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.

Everyday thousands of new websites make their way to the Web. But only a few of them actually provide real value to their visitors. I would say the 1 – 99 rule applies here. In essence, less than 1% of websites on the web are responsible for 99% of fresh, valuable content on the Internet. This is of course a subjective number, but there are a ton of people who make a living by writing useless copy and slapping them on their pages. Of course, these folks are good at spamming blogs (to gain backlinks) and go out of their way to get their pages climb search engine rankings. But is that really helping the visitors’ experience on the World Wide Web?

SEO is all about providing more value to your visitors, in essence helping them find what they need on your website. But in order to do that, you need to have SOMETHING on your website. Just copying what others are writing on their websites or slapping press releases on your site does not exactly enhance the overall web experience for your visitors. You may get away with ranking high on Google. You may even make a killing with Google Adsense. But if you are not providing value with your content and don’t mind stealing other people’s content for your own gains, you are not exactly doing the field of SEO any favor. Parasitic business models are one of the reasons the World Wide Web is such a mess. Ethical SEOs are hoping to change all that.

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.

Google’s real time search may be exciting, but Google Goggles is what has set the industry abuzz. Google Goggles truly reminds of some of those SciFi movies of the past. It has a huge potential and indicates Google’s major effort to go beyond keywords and try to make sense of images and other types of content.

The future is still about content. I am sure that Google will find a way to bring all these services together. But as a publisher, your goal should be to focus on as many channels as possible to get the word out about your goods and services. People will have more ways to find your content, so the standard for better content will be much higher (when you add the social aspect of search). Are we really that surprised that after all these years content is still king?