Top SEO Plugins for WordPress Every Webmaster Should Have Installed

There are several plugins that I’ve been going with since day one for every WordPress installation I’ve done but their customization could be a bit more painful then you’d think – that’s right. Having SEO plugins is not just installing them and checking your Google Analytics and waiting for results – it takes patience. One of the biggest steps in the ‘SEO Cycle’ is patience, monitoring after all.

I’ve made a collection with a few SEO tips for all WordPress users. Please notice that this takes a bit more then just installation – so webmasters prepare yourself for some hard work :)

My first one on the list is

SEO Title Tag by netconcepts. Title tags is perhaps the most important thing in current web optimization. You should also work very hard on your titles and make sure you include a good juicy keyword and maintaining the 69 characters (note that anything like space, periods, dashes or pipes are considered a character. In my opinion characters like &%$#@ are considered sometimes 5 characters.) This plugin takes a bit of installation and touches HTML and PHP. You will need to re-construct your current “<title>text</title>” command inside your header.php or single.php

See instruction below on how to incorporate SEO Title Tag plugin with your post.

Afterwards you will be able to mass edit the title tag for all of your tags, posts, pages, categories.

After the installation of SEO title tag comes another favorite plugin of mine called Headspace2 by urbangiraffe. This plugin can help you auto-edit all of your posts, pages, categories, 404, search results etc but what’s good about this plugin is if you don’t define a title it will not edit it. This is something All In One SEO plugin does not do. When you activate All In One SEO if you check the box where you’d like to “rewrite titles” it will rewrite it for all. For headspace, it’s only what’s defined. That’s a great addon.

For your site optimization I recommend checking WP-Cleanup made y JortK it’s a simple plugin that helps you manage your MySQL optimization. For example let’s say you’ve installed a plugin last year, set it up and then deactivated it. Most likely the MySQL tables still exist incase you will ever activate the plugin again. These tables grow your MySQL to a monster-size and affect your site speed, it is highly recommended that you will optimize your MySQL and make sure you avoid all unused MySQL data – always. It’s a simple clean up, you check what you want to remove there is no danger involved.

Here’s a screenshot of how to optimize your MySQL database.

Ok, the next one on my list is Simple Tag it is THE perfect tool for mass editing tags, auto-tagging articles (and avoiding stupid tags) some of it’s really cool functions include auto link tags in post content, type-ahead input tags which could be a bit annoying, related tags, you can define it that it will only tag untagged posts and to tag posts with only pre-existing tags if the keyword is found in full. You can also define that anytime a keyword appears in your post that is an existing tag it will auto-hyperlink it to the tag itself eventually creating a beautiful SEO crawl. It also helps mass editing tags, organizing and even getting rid of unused tags.

Automatic SEO Links – that’s a nice tool to have if you understand the concept of anchor texting. It works pretty much the same way Simple Tags works that when ever a keyword is found and appears as a tag it will auto-link to it’s tag however automatic seo links work in a way that when ever a keyword is found (that you select) it will link to a landing page – which you choose. So, define the anchor text, define the link (nofollow dofollow target_blank etc) and it’s landing page.

Redirection – another plugin from urbangiraffe. Redirection plugin for WordPress is a nice tool to carry as it manages all the 301 redirection and keeps track of your 404 errors. I personally don’t like it because it carries a JS file with it and a heavy database which increases my loading time but overall it’s a good plugin to have, don’t get me wrong it’s only a tiny second loading time that bothers me.

{ 0 comments }

Buying Content for Sites May Harm – Learn How Duplicated Content Affects SEO

You must have heard the saying “Cash is King” in the past. It’s a simple expression that is sometimed used in analyzing businesses or investment portfolios. It may refer to the importance of cash flow in the overall fiscal health of a business. For investors it may also describe times when it is advantageous to have a large percentage of cash or short-term debt instruments available either due to falling financial markets or due to the availability of investment opportunities.

In the SEO world, it’s “Content is King” and that is it.

Last year Google has changed about 500 things to it’s search engines, more than one change per a day – which makes our daily SEO research much harder but it’s a daily discovery because we learn new things every single day.

If you are planning to buy content via XML feeds for your site or just wonder how to get more search engine visits to your site you came to the right place and I know that many SEO sites claim “you came to the right place” but trust me, you came to the right place.

The following are the things you should consider for each page or article you submit:

UNIQUE CONTENT – Copying content from other sites, or buying articles which are duplicate content will not only not get you traffic but will hurt you on the long run with penalization of pages and low indexation from search engines.

Don’t ever use copied content on your site. Generate it your own, regardless if your grammar is pretty crappy like mine this is how my pages rank front pages for good keywords, it’s just because I write the content myself.

UNIQUE TITLE TAG: I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again. The biggest aspect of SEO are your title tags. Make sure you do not exceed the 69 characters, ever. Do not repeat exact titles in any of your pages – that said, make sure that each of your pages has it’s own unique title and try to not replicate a title from another site as well – be creative but maintain the SEO keyword which you’d like to rank for even if it’s a high volume keyword. Because you must remember that Google does not read more then 69 characters of title so putting more then 69 characters, it is simply a waste of time.

CONTENT LENGTH: The recommended content length would be 300 + words for each of your articles. If you must copy some one else’s words from another site make sure you are using block-quotes, or italic and mention the source, with a link as well. That’s right!

META’S: Don’t forget to use meta description or ‘excerpt’ for each of your posts. Even try to have a unique excerpt and do not just copy paste a paragraph from the article itself. The time consuming is worth it when you will have 20,000 visitors.

CONTENT PROVIDERS: Over the past year I’ve had the chance to meet with 10s of content providers who offered their services. Their services varied from $4.00 an article to £16,000 a year. I recommend that if you do choose to buy repeated content try to work a solution with your content provider to deliver you the news first – before the rest of his clients. If you’re buying XML feeds check out AutoBlogged plugin for WordPress.

BUYING CONTENT FOR WEBSITES VIA XML FEEDS

Here is a list of my recommended content providers in the entertainment and showbiz, politics and more:

BANG Media International – BANG Showbiz is the premier entertainment news agency providing the most exciting entertainment news all over the world. BANG is the leading supplier of global entertainment news for online, print and broadcast media outlets.

  • PRICE: $$$ Very Affordable
  • ARTICLES PER DAY: 40 – 65
  • STARS: 5 STARS (Best choice)
  • QUALITIES: 300+ words, image licensing. BANG Media is a great choice for starting out and growing with. Great customer support and in-house developers.

Associated Press – RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a popular way to get news and information from across the Internet. RSS software regularly pulls headlines from news sites and Web journals and presents them within e-mail software, Web browsers or standalone programs known as readers. Frequently Asked Questions about RSS. Our FEATURED FEED is changed regularly with new or topical feeds.

  • PRICE: $$$$ Extremely Expensive
  • ARTICLES PER DAY: 10 – 15
  • CONTENT QUALITY: 4 STARS (But as explained, AP has loads of customers so joining AP will get your site to get swallowed
  • BUMMERS: AP requires you to use their logo on every licensed image they produce, as well as “Copyright to AssociatedPress” in each of your articles. If you are buying the video content that also comes with a watermarked AP logo.

Press Association – As home to the national news agency of the UK and Ireland, the Press Association proudly takes its place at the heart of the UK media news providing a continuous feed of text, pictures, video and data into newsrooms around the country.

  • PRICE: $$$$$ Extremely Expensive
  • ARTICLES PER DAY: 10
  • QUALITY: 4 STARS
  • Bummers: Lots of customers, content is repeated and is very pricey. The pricing goes annually but customer service is ok. The content is written in British English which could be a bummer for US sites.

Brafton – Custom News Marketing: Brafton specializes in providing unique and exclusive custom content marketing solutions for businesses and their websites.  Leveraging the power of breaking industry news, Brafton helps businesses engage and convert their target audience through custom news that is published in full and exclusively on a business’ website.

  • PRICE: $$$$ Expensive, but worth a shot.
  • ARTICLES PER DAY: Per request
  • QUALITY: 5 STARS, 100% unique content written for your site. Prices varied for each site.
  • Bummers: Price tag, they are based in the US. Seem like good fellas to reach out to if you’ve got the cash.

{ 0 comments }

Plan Your Link Building Strategy Wisely

What do you do now that you have built your website and optimized each of the pages for the search engines, but still are not getting the traffic you desire? You answer probably lies in your link building strategy or lack thereof.

Here are vital steps to generate a great link building campaign.

1. Submit your website to quality web directories. Links from quality, authority web directories can give you inbound links and traffic. There are many directories to choose from, but to get the best results you should concentrate on those quality directories with authority.

2. Make a plan and designate time for link building. Plan an hour or two into your schedule every day for link building until it becomes a routine, or you could also designate one day per week as your link building day.

3. Carefully choose the websites that you link to as search engines take relevancy into account. If a website is not relevant in some way to yours, you may want to avoid linking to it. If you link to bad domains you may get penalized by the search engines.

4. Find websites that are related to your niche and develop relationships with the webmaster. Send them an email to introduce yourself and make sure they know you are a real person and not automated software. Let them know about your website and what you are hoping to accomplish.

5. Prepare the linking code to your website and give it out. When you do find someone wanting to link to you make it easy for them to do so. This way also enables you to choose the pages on your site that you want to gain additional links to.

6. Many websites may be willing to link to yours if you have something to offer them so learn how to trade. Maybe you can add a link to their website in exchange or swap an article. Offer to promote their website on a forum you are a member of. Any of these may work, but it should be customized to what you can offer of value.

7. Write articles and submit them to article directories. This can be a form of viral link building if your article is good enough as it is published with a link to your website in the resource box. Any other website that republishes your article must keep the link intact.

8. Offer a valuable tool, resource or information on your website as link bait. It would need to be something of value to your niche market that others would want to refer and link there.

If you would like to learn more ways to generate links and build a high traffic website, there are more articles published at the Authority Directory.

{ 2 comments }

August 2010 SEO Guide

I’ve been doing major research on the latest news for SEO and wanted to update everyone that’s been in our little yet superior community.

Let’s go over the facts

  1. In 2009 Google has made 500 changes to it’s search engines that is more then one change every day
  2. It seems that Google might be collaborating with WordPress to fight black hat spam. – Everyone, get ready to do some tweaks.

What do I need to know?

How a search engine works:

  1. More than 100 factors
  2. Information based
  • Exact Phrase: are your keywords found as an exact phrase in any pages?
  • Adjacency: How close are your keywords to each other?
  • Weighting: How many times do keywords appear in the page?

The next one is

  • Popularity

- External links (also known as backlinks, inlinks or inbound links)
- How many links point to the page?

Where do they come from? Why do they link to you?
- Social Buzz, online PR, social bookmarking, Twitter

The Building Block of SEO

Technical SEO

Code Optimization / Site Performance / Usabilty / Site Architecture

Content
Keyword Research and Selection – Keyword Targeting and Allocation / On page Optimization content Development and Distribution

Popularity and Trust
Link Building / Social Media

The SEO Cycle

  1. Keywords
  2. Strategy
  3. Implementation
  4. Monitoring
  5. Diagnostic

What you need to do

Make sure your articles have

  1. Main Heading (H1)
  2. Secondary Headings (H2)
  3. Tertiary headings (H3)
  4. Use of bold
  5. Internal Links – related articles
  6. Pages (products, articles, news)
  7. Images – USAGE OF ALTtRIBUTES

The anatomy of a link

<a href=”yourdomain.com” target=”_blank” title=”your title” alt=”your keyword” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text</a>

  • URL Value 5
  • ANCHOR TEXT Value 5
  • RELATIONSHIP OF A LINK Value 5
  • Title Value 3
  • Alttribute Value 5
  • Target Value 1

(1 lowest 5 highest)

Do not copy articles from other websites and repost – you won’t get any hits even if you are, and especially if you are in Google News. Work on UNIQUE content. Take an article, reword it and submit.

Don’t ever exceed the 69 character title.

Use “link bait”

Press releases, articles submission

http://www.prweb.com
http://www.articlesbasecamp.com
http://www.searchguild.com/redir/o.php?out=http://
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art12838.asp

- Prizes, quizzes, contests, awards
- Widgets, schedules
- Tools – be calculator

and ANALYZE.

Conclusion

What you should do is go into your PHP and all the anchor texts that have ‘Read more, previous or next article’ ‘more information’ ‘privacy policy’ etc make them nofollow. The good juicy articles, titles, make them dofollow. Use ALT for every button you have on your site including and especially your navigation bar.

{ 0 comments }

DIY SEO – Link Building, What you need to know.

Hi guys, I was recently asked a very good question:

“I am THE marketer for my company and wear too many hats. I can’t “do” SEO by myself. Any suggestions on a wallet friendly company that can help with our SEO needs?”

Since my reply was in such greater detail, I decided to share it on my journal.

Whatever it is, examine the links that you are getting yourself. It’s almost like a “I can’t trust anyone, anywhere, no matter what”. Some links may hurt you when link building. A lot of services that offer SEO claim you are in a high ranked directory when it’s actually a auctioned domain with an average PR on it that they’ve installed a ‘Directory Template’ on.

You must always follow the steps, and examine one by one – and that process, costs money. So wallet friendly, I’d have to say you can do a nice link building for a company for approximately $5000 (without labour).

Look closer.

Take your time, spread approximately 200 – 300 directories which are good value, make sure they are indexed and get page rank, make sure you find yourself the exact niche within the directory – don’t be so quick to submit. Remember that if the directory itself, within the niche has pages (1,3,4,5,6,7) go all the way to page#7 which is most likely where you’ll be listed when approved and make sure that page#7 is getting a PageRank, and who else is listed there with you.

In regards to your question Alexander I would like to write this publicly.

Let’s take this domain for example

http://www.skyalliance.net/ – looks like a normal directory right?

Let’s use the ‘WayBackMachine’ and see what this site looked like in 2003.

http://web.archive.org/web/20021114152532/http://www.skyalliance.net/

You see what I mean? This is in some Asian language, nothing related to a directory. Which means the owners of this domain purchased it because it had a nice PR and it was auctioned at the time.

In 2004: http://web.archive.org/web/20030210053650/http://www.skyalliance.net/

In 2005: http://web.archive.org/web/20040210060512/http://www.skyalliance.net/

In 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20050109041248/http://www.skyalliance.net/

In 2010: http://www.skyalliance.net/

Other things you should take a look into when doing link building (if you do it yourself, and trying to search the directories by yourself) I would recommend to use a nice FireFox tool called ‘Flagship’ which declares where the site is hosted, and it’s IP.

Remember that if the site is hosted in Germany, and it is a .com – that might be a bad link for you.

If it’s hosted in Germany, and it’s a .de – that might be a good sign, and will help you rank in Google.de, but not in the .com engine.

If the site is hosted in USA, and it’s a .com – that will help you rank in the .com engines (or USA engines) but then the next directory you choose – make sure it is not hosted at the same place, with the same exact IP – that would not count as two different links.

Be VERY careful using SEO companies that charge under $500 for link building of 30-50 links. This amount does not exist, I saw a company offering $80 for 1000 directory, you will end up hurting yourself, and working double time because you will either get penalized, or have to manually go into these directories and remove the links yourself. And trust me when I say you will be hurt being listed in sites like that.

TIPS:

When a company offers SEO services for directory listing always ask for their excel sheet to see their plan, Examine the links, make sure they are not hosted same place, they are all USA, or European hosts, then carefully choose which ones you want and where you want to be listed. Send it back to them and tell them these are the links you are interested and how much they will charge you for them.

This narrows down their job, and helps you get efficient links, and powerful link building.

NOTE:

There are MANY more aspects when doing link building like making sure that Alexa, Compete and mozRank and PageRank and similar within values, If a website is pagerank #1 and mozrank is 5.8 – something must be wrong (either mozrank did not update it yet) but that page might have gone through penalization.

If the page does not get a PR, and receives Alexa, Compete and Moz – that means it might be penalized. Take the URL, and search it in google like this:

example #1: site: http://www.url.com/
example #2: site: http://www.url.com/subpage

See if the actual domain (not sub pages) come up in search. (or the subpage that is not getting a pagerank).

Let’s do some SEO!

For more information about this thread please go to http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?vi…%2Egmp_2976409

Feel free to find me on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/danielhaim

Read about my progression in Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/businesswire/2010/08/03/businesswire143344209.html

{ 0 comments }

It’s your turn. Start using the MobileMe Calendar beta.

YES! Another Beta acceptance. I’ve been striking with these ones lately. I really can’t wait to start using it, I will review shortly.

Congratulations, you can now start using the MobileMe Calendar
beta. The beta includes a redesigned Calendar web application, calendar
sharing, and easy event invitations.

To get started, sign in to MobileMe Calendar and you’ll be prompted to upgrade. Be sure you’re using iOS 4 or later (iPhone and iPod touch), Mac OS X 10.6.4 and the MobileMe Control Panel 1.6.1 (PC) before upgrading

{ 0 comments }

ValueClick Media CPM Network Review

August 01, 2010

When I first wrote this article, I was a bit upset with ValueClick’s services, but I learned to work with their team and we’ve come a long way since. Some of the stuff I’ve noted in the article still bother me, but I stopped carrying because I only care about one thing and that’s: Getting Paid. I will be going through this post, and commenting in red anything that I think should be updated, or noted but won’t get rid of my original thoughts.

May 4, 2010

Hi everyone, over the next 30 days I will be examining and detailing the top CPA, CPC, and CPM networks including CJ, Linkshare, ADSDAQ, Pulse360, ValueClick Media. I currently have the upper hand: I have is a domain that receives approximately 750,000 – 1.8M unique visits in a 30 day period – it should be a good place to start making money  - right? Well, to my discovery – not really. It’s not easy making money with CPA, or CPM.

My first review is: ValueClick Media a great and friendly CPM network.

ValueClick Media – A company who claims to be a leader in the CPM Network industry.  ‘Voice Ads’ “You have been selected to receive a free iPod” have you ever gotten those? ValueClick Media has them! – It’s dissapointing, but you can filter them out. In my opinion a CPM network should exclude all bad ads, even to those who pay top notch to be in it.

This evening I had a 300×250 CPM for 0.01 cent about Jesus Chris and converting to Christianity. Fantastic.

Day 1 with ValueClick Media was pretty confusing. I couldn’t get my account activated and had contact their customer support which has been on the phone with me for approximately fifteen minutes but waited for approximately 1 hours for the account to mysteriously activate itself until one of their representatives said “Oh, your account has not been confirmed yet – that’s why it’s not working” – Silly me.

Finally, I’m in the backend, I’m ready to make money. First thing I’m headed towards: Filters – because who wants to have voice ads, massive diet pop up ads on their domain – Still following?.. When that was done I was headed to see what’s running on their site – what CPM as well as trying to build an excel of exactly how much money the company would be making every single month.

I selected 728×90 banner to appear on my site, and guess what? I have both 728×90 banners and 468×60 banners appear within the same code. (See image below top right).

I was about to email ValueClick Media once again, and let them see a 2nd screen-shot which I was about to take and as I opened my domain, I loud noise was heard, saying, “You’ve been selected to receive a Walmart Giftcard..” NO! I’ve filtered those..

Below is a screenshot of ValueClick Media’s back end Filtering Panel (2010)

It really didnt take too long to disable that, I just reached out to a representative who quickly had that removed from my domain.

ValueClick’s back-end panel

Media Management is the area where you see the available campaigns, their CPM, CPC and sizes (468×60, 728×90, 300×250 etc). I started going over one by one – some, It is a bit dissapointing that you have to select one by one but their filtering let’s you bulk-select by category (Casino, Pop Ups, Diet, etc).

  • Overall their back end panel is simple, easy to use, quick to understand and gets a 6/10 stars in my review.
  • Overall support and customer service – after being their customer for almost 3 months now I will say the customer service is definitely 10/10 – they are keen to help, they want you to succeed.
  • The ads that are shown in their site are decent, it really depends on the location you are coming from but they manage to do a very good filling rate.

Nowadays I have migrated our domain to being able to advertise 2x 728×90, 3x 160×600/120×600 300×250 and 180×50 thus will ensure a successful revenue model.

To anyone who is interested joining ValueClick Media I truly recommend it. Just be smart, and you will be able to make really good money by reading their targeted ads, and how much CPM they are offering using SEO content.

{ 0 comments }

The New Magic Trackpad Review – ‘Let your fingers do the clickin, scrolling, and swiping.’

I’ve been an Apple user for approximately 8 years now. Can’t stay I’m not-satisfied. With the upkeep of great products that Apple keeps providing me I am very much pleased.

After some downtime this morning on the Apple.com website, Apple has revealed it’s latest product

The Magic Trackpad

The new Magic Trackpad is the first Multi-Touch trackpad designed to work with your Mac desktop computer. It uses the same Multi-Touch technology you love on the MacBook Pro. And it supports a full set of gestures, giving you a whole new way to control and interact with what’s on your screen. Swiping through pages online feels just like flipping through pages in a book or magazine. And inertial scrolling makes moving up and down a page more natural than ever. Magic Trackpad connects to your Mac via Bluetooth wireless technology. Use it in place of a mouse or in conjunction with one.

More control at your fingertips.

Magic Trackpad gives you a whole new way to control what’s on your Mac desktop computer. When you perform gestures, you actually interact with what’s on your screen. You feel closer to your content, and moving around feels completely natural. Swiping through pages on screen is just like flipping through pages in a magazine, and inertial scrolling senses the momentum in your fingers as you move up and down a page.

More to touch, more to love.

Your fingers will fall for the Magic Trackpad. It’s made with smooth, wear-resistant glass that feels great to the touch. And it’s nearly 80 percent larger than the built-in trackpad on the MacBook Pro, giving you plenty of room to perform gestures. Because the entire surface of Magic Trackpad is a button, you can click on objects just as you would using a traditional mouse. And Magic Trackpad sits at the same height and angle as the Apple Wireless Keyboard, so you can go from trackpad to keyboard in one seamless motion.

Bluetooth technology.

Magic Trackpad connects to your Mac via Bluetooth wireless technology. Use it in conjunction with the Apple Wireless Keyboard for a cable-free, uncluttered workspace. And if you feel like venturing away from your desk, Magic Trackpad maintains a reliable and secure connection up to 33 feet away from your Mac.

This bad boy runs for $69 and available for shipping right now.

{ 0 comments }

SEO Tips for Optimization & Architectural ECommerce Based Website.

Every now and then I hop on these freelance jobs that assure me the quality time for SEO research which is described best by my trademarked philosophy tag line

“If you wanted to learn SEO, all you had to do is search“.

This time a year, I’ve been lucky enough to be assigned to a new full-time job in New York City optimizing three very interesting domains that will assure me the continous exploration into Search Engines. Now I know that approximately 75% of my readers are very interested about SEO tips and if the company let me I will even pull hands-on examples to optimization.

The three new projects which I’ve been assigned to optimize are

  1. Retail (E Commerce)
  2. Wholesale (E Commerce with Login)
  3. CMS Website (Hardware)

Very exciting! But before we begin let me summarize these three so you can quickly select which area you are most interested in reading about:

Retail E Commerce SEO – There are many aspects to look into when building a retail E Commerce website, especially with all the niched categories, landing pages and title tags. This post will cover all the necessary tools and tips needed to build a successful SEO optimized E Commerce website. Read more below

Username Protected Wholesale E Commerce SEO – While there might be a debate on which platform to choose for a wholesale, I will always stand by and recommend to create a few landing pages focusing on your wholesale material, and giving an additional back-end user-name and password afterwards. Article coming soon

Hardware Website (CMS) SEO – A regular 5-6 page HTML based website with no PHP or MySQL functions. How to optimize a landing page? Well, that’s a great question. Article coming soon

The journey for Search Engine Optimization for E Commerce site begins.

There are many aspects to look for when building a site, especially a E Commerce site. I’d have to say follow the first moves like I do. I keep a folder which contains 3 different files, they are the site-map validated for the following engines: Yahoo! Bing and Google. Right after I create, I will always generate a site-map, and once the site is completed I will submit it to the following

  1. Yahoo Site Explorer
  2. Google Site-map
  3. Bing Webmaster

(You can also submit to more search engines like Ask.com, but most likely they will find you after you appear in the top three).

Tips for Optimizing E Commerce site

Avoid Manufacturer Product Description – RESIST THE URGE! DO NOT COPY PASTE! Building an online shop might be a pain to generate a lot of content however you should consider it a must. Search engines hold a grudge against Ecommerce based sites. Often times, I agree. Many online stores offer little useful content – if it’s Cellphones, just the main description (weight, color, type) the excerpt which is used includes dry manufacturer product description, poor internal linking and no unique user generated content. Without thinking about it twice Ecommerce sites have unique challenges when it comes to SEO. As much tempting as it is to copy paste – avoid it. Even if you do copy paste, at least write your own unique content around it or change a few words here and there.

Create a SEO Keyword field in Product Database – Sounds confusing? It might just be as well. Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, SKU and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to your Ecommerce site, enter commonly search for keywords (use Google Keyword Tool to search Keyword examples and volumes). Remember: not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.

All products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page – Look, I’ll keep it very simple for you: The homepage is the highest ranked page in your site. It’s the juiciest highest ranked page, and the first page that an engine looks it every time they go into your site. You don’t want the crawler to have to go through 20 different pages to reach an item.  Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source of PageRank. I’ve seen many Ecommerce sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of pages of categories and subcategories and sub subcategories. This can be accomplished by using SEO friendly rollovers or increasing the number of products per page. I recommend, at least 24 products per page if not 50 and try to not exceed 4 pages of products.

Use iframes for Duplicate Content – If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or your product description are not unique, consider placing them inside an iframe with an invisible border. Users will not know that the data technically resides on another page search engines will not penalise you for duplicate content. It’s a win win.

Create a Product RSS Feed: Creating a product feed and submitting it to relevant content aggregators such as Google Base which accepts an XML file like product feed and displays your results for Google Base searches. (‘Shopping’) Product feeds can be a great way of picking up free backlinks directly to your product pages. Including Retweets.

Unique Keyword Meta Tags – Meta tags including keywords and description should be entirely unique on every single product of the page. Though meta content does not directly affect your ranking (yet), unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties.

Product Reviews – A perfect strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user generated content from customers who previously purchased, or just feel like reviewing a product they’ve seen or used before. Allow your customers to review products they’ve purchased.

Avoid Session IDs in URLs: Many Ecommerce software platforms use cookie-less unique session IDs in the site URLs. Unfortunately, this creates an infinite amount of duplicate content for the Search Engines to crawl. There are always ways to prevent this using an ethical type of cloaking which serves URLs to spider without the session ID.

Crawlable Navigation - AVOID JAVASCRIPT based navigation structures that don’t allow spiders through. If you’re stuck with one, at least duplicate your navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks. In addition don’t rely on form based navigation such as drop down lists since the engines can’t follow them.

Don’t stuff Keywords in your navigation bar – This is useless and very tacky. Keywords are placed in navigation bars are not as important as they used to be. Instead use keyword rich anchor text pointing to the landing page which is rich with SEO optimized content for that specific landing page.

Optimize your images – I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again. Don’t upload images to your site that are called ’12498172.jpg’ or ‘iphone3333.jpg’ Be specific! People today are searching Google Images, or other Image search engines like crazy. And if they are looking for a specific Cellphone type, such as Nokia N95 they will Google it, and if you had changed ’12498172.jpg’ to Nokia-N95.jpg you will most likely rank for it. Another tip: only use – and not _, &, ~.

Use Alttributes in Links – If you asked me about link alt 1 year ago I would say avoid it, it’s just a hassle. But today it’s a very important aspect of a link, some might say more then the anchor text itself. Always use the link alt=”description”.

{ 0 comments }

Business Advice in Three Words

  1. Time is money
  2. Learn from mistakes
  3. Don’t act cocky
  4. Learn from others
  5. Nothing is perfect
  6. Stop thinking big
  7. Hire hungry employees
  8. Hire employees slowly
  9. Fire bad employees
  10. Talent isn’t everything
  11. Emotions are bad
  12. Focus your efforts
  13. You’re not smart
  14. Don’t waste money
  15. Listen to customers
  16. Business plans suck
  17. Scrappiness is good
  18. Never stop networking
  19. Don’t be shy
  20. Ask for help
  21. Failure is acceptable
  22. Money isn’t everything
  23. Solve a problem
  24. Be open minded
  25. Motivate your employees
  26. Set realistic goals
  27. Take big risks
  28. Leverage your competitors
  29. Use social media
  30. Business isn’t easy
  31. Work hard everyday
  32. Revenue isn’t profit
  33. Give a lot
  34. Coolness is overrated
  35. Leverage the blogosphere
  36. Press doesn’t matter
  37. Your idea sucks
  38. Attend good conferences
  39. Entrepreneurs aren’t born
  40. Market your company
  41. Agility is important
  42. Don’t be afraid
  43. Diversify your income
  44. Sex always sells
  45. Always use metrics
  46. Don’t give up
  47. Aggressiveness can backfire
  48. Friend rich people
  49. Create a blog
  50. Have smart friends
  51. Hogs get slaughtered
  52. Take a break
  53. Copying is bad
  54. Innovation is good

Thanks to Neil Patel for making this great collection

{ 0 comments }

The Guide To Buy A Japanese Domain (.jp, co.jp, ne.jp)

At the start of 2008 there were over six-and-a-half billion people on the Earth, with just over 1.3-billion of us on the internet. At the same time, there are almost 100,000,000 top-level domains registered, quite a few of which are held by private citizens. What does this mean to the average person? It means that [...]

Read the full article →

Bloginity Networks Names New Executives: Benjamin Tse, Brian Willett.

Bloginity Networks announced today that it has appointed two new executives – Benjamin Tse, as Chief Brand Officer, and Brian Willett, as Chief Communications Officer. In his role as Chief Brand Officer, Tse will be responsible for maintaining consistency across Bloginity Networks in terms of brand image, marketing and design. Tse’s work will focus on [...]

Read the full article →

New MobileMe Beta Version – Good News

Today I received really great news in the mail: Congratulations, you can now start using the MobileMe Mail beta. Enjoy new features such as widescreen view, one-click archiving, and rules that keep your email organized everywhere. You will see the new Mail beta every time you sign in to me.com. To access your other me.com [...]

Read the full article →

You may already be using Email Marketing to grow your business. But did you know it has evolved?

Discover how you can use Email Marketing 2.0, the next generation of email marketing for small business, to get the right message, to the right person, at the right time, easily and automatically. Email Marketing 2.0 is a proven way to increase your response rates and conversions, through smart, automated communication. Watch the Demo now [...]

Read the full article →

How To Change Image Opacity at A: Hover using CSS 3 -Webkit

In your CSS use this for 100% filter: alpha(opacity=100); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=100); -moz-opacity: 1.00; opacity:1; And at a:hover use: filter: alpha(opacity=80); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=80); -moz-opacity: 0.80; opacity:0.8;

Read the full article →

A WordPress Based Q&A That Earns Some CPA Man.

Hey everyone, it’s been quite some time since I last wrote my last article about SEO & SEM. I really base my article on life-events and moments that I have to explain to people certain stuff I better off put it into contextual blog and shoot it out live and have everyone read it as [...]

Read the full article →

A WordPress ‘Related Post’ that displays Thumbnails 70×70, 125×125

After, the longest search of all to find the best ‘Related Posts’ I’ve always ended up with the same plugin: YARRP. Although Mitch (@yarpp) is a great man and developed a text tool that is beyond good. It is not attractive enough. And the guides he provides to Display thumbnails for Related posts in WordPress [...]

Read the full article →

How To Find the POST ID, CATEGORY ID, PAGE ID in WORDPRESS 2.9.2 (2.5 AND UP).

GUIDE: HOW TO FIND THE WORDPRESS PAGE ID / POST ID / CATEGORY ID With WordPress 2.5 being released, the IDs on all admin pages have been removed as it is. Propably due to the fact that the common user dont need them. However, for advanced WordPress Users/ developers those IDs were quite interesting for [...]

Read the full article →

Basic Web Design Tips

Don’t bother with splash pages. A splash page is normally a pointless page people put on their websites as an introduction. The page normally contains some sort of image on with a big click here to enter sign, or sometimes people don’t say anything and just hope you will click on the picture to enter [...]

Read the full article →

The Reason for PHP and MYSQL Popularity

Web site hosting, MySQL and PHP development are like two sides of the same coin. They work in tandem to create dynamic and comprehensive web sites. Having MySQL and PHP programs for our website shall always give a competitive edge to our business. Since, the massive range of flexibility offered by these programming languages assists [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries