A Guide to SEO

Hey Guys,

Here is another class I saw at the Affiliate Summit. It was young guy, Joshua, and owns FullSpeedSEO.com and really liked what he said. Check it out.

How Do I Increas My Ranking

• Analyzing Your Niche
• Dominating the Niche
• Tracking your Progress

Who Do I need to Optimized for?
Unless you have compelling evidence not to optimize for Google, its best to do what they like to see, and let the other catch on.
Searches

• Google 66%
• Yahoo 16.2%
• Bing 8.8%
• Aol 3%
• the rest 7%

Picking a Domain Name
If you have not bought a domain name, Use Google Keyword tool to try to find highly search versions of your main keyword.  Use the Global Search and Use EXACT match.

If you already have a domain name that you are not willing to change, that's alright. Domain name is only 1 of about 200 ranking factors. Remember sites like, ebay, Aazon, and Zappos all rank for keywords not in their domain.

Don't makeyournametoolong.com

A wellplaced dash is fine, like expert-changes.com but avoid-lots-and-lots-of-dashes.com

If you are geographically centric business, it much easier to rank Houstonfloorpolishers.com than floorpolishers.com

Is your website optimized? (boring)

• Main Keyword in title tag
• H1 . H2 Tags
• Meta Description tag

Do you have a site map?
Keywords in the first 250 words of text.
Pro tip: A CMS (content management system) like wordpress will do almost all of this for you. Wordpress has been known to follow google advice closely. <<<<<

Optimizing Wordpress
Google Sitemap Generator
All in One SEO pack << talk about this before
Popular Posts (for last x days)
Lose the Default theme
Woo Themes ($20 / month)
Page.ly - managed wordpress hosting with premium themes ($15/month), upgraded, patched, and backed up.

Page Optimization

• Use Google Keywords tool for additional terms you might want to rank for. Use the broad match option.
• Use in the Google KeyWord Tool the ~operator before you google queries for related ters. le ~dog, ~collars
• make sure you page loads fast, consult google webmaster tools
• Increase time on page via "related posts" or Additional Products at the end of pages

Off Page Optimization
It is better to have 1 really popular website than 30 "zero" page rank sites.
To become a Authority Site: Relevant Links and Authoritative links coming to your site.
Don't be freaked out about page rank. Its a macro metric. Its better to be "0" PR with lots of visitors.
Focus on building a profile of high quality one way links
Trust your list ranking, not y our page rank.

Where Do I Get Links?
Guest Posting
Social Bookmarking (Digg, Stumbleupon)
Various Profiles (youtube, slashdot,etc)
Twitter aggregators
facebook fan pages
Sites you make (mini nets)
Link Bait >> this is any media that gets people excited, in any capacity, about the content of that media, and inspires them to link back to it so their discourse on the subject is relevant.
Examples >> Contests, Viral Videos, Creative Web Applications (mobile apps), be evocative
From Matt Cutts "Link baiting sounds like a bad thing, but expecially if its interesting information or fun, it doesn't have to have negative connotations. I hereby claim that content can be both white-hat and still be wonderful "bait" for links."

Link baiting is the reason your website needs a blog.
This is reason you should probably have mini net made about your niche.

Link Building
Blog Comments
CommuntLuv - Dofollow plugin for WP
Look for "footprints" if you find something
Social Media
Submit Great Content. Diggers are snobs, rightfully so.
Your twitter followers will want to blog/link great content, give it to them! Don't mislead them with your profile though. I personally hate lots of off topic tweets.
When all else fails.. look where your competition gets their links. Yahoo.com site: theirDomain.com
Sitesnatcher <<<

SEO Tools
Rank Checker - Free from SEOBook
SEO information on SERPS >> great for assessing competition in a niche
DoNotFollow Fire Fox Plugin
CODA Development Software

Thats it for what it is worth. Also, Alex, reported to me you could not post on these blog post and I fixed it. Please post and put your website in the post. As we read, one way links will help and this blog is a tool to help you!!

God bless,
John
Swimming with the Dolphins in Miami

Affiliate Direct Links from Email

Hi Guys,

You may not know this but I thought I would share this with you. I had created an email where I put the affiliates link directly from the email to the affiliate company, Viator.  It was part of my strategy to earn more money. I was wondering way, I only got about 10 sales all last year. We send out 1000s of emails a month. So I was expecting so much more.

When I went to Las Vegas and I talked to the manager of Viator. She told me that in the Viator agreement, I could NOT email direct links to viator. She told me its in their agreement statement with me, but I never read it. I wasted a whole year without any sales from them. So came back and I started to create Activity landing pages for each location so the customer would have to go there first and then click to Viator. Well, I created, Things to Do in Dominican Republic page and it worked. I got my first sale this week. Believe me I was very excited.

But when I was in Vegas I asked the manager of Expedia if it was OK to direct link from emails and she said it was OK.

Just thought I would share this with you because I lost a lot of sales ( i think) because of this mistake.

God Bless,
John
PS Curtis copeland told us at the meeting, to upload photos 960 pixel

Masterblaster Monthly Meeting

We had a good turn out last night, John - Neyrot Photography, Me - Swim with the Dolphins Miami, Rich - Fish Oil Direct, and Curtis - Copeland Photography.

We had a good time talking and eating for a little while, My wife Shakira, from Remax Fort Lauderdale, gave us some good eats and then we moved to the office to discuss the internet and business.

Some points:

John Neyrot.
He showed us his new website, http://neyrotproductions.com/ This is his first website he is building from Dreamweaver. The learning curve was hard for him because he was a MS frontpage user for years and now switching to dreamweaver. Its taken him about 2 weeks of reading and watching videos and now he is getting the hang of using dreamweaver. What do you think of his site? This site is to promote him better and for his salesperson to sell him better.

Also, John showed us a big written and photo spread in Moves Magazine. I looked online for the article but its not there yet. It was a great spread about 10 pages.

John Mac
Asked for some help in Wordpress. Curtis and the guys gave feed back on uploading photos to wordpress. Wow, I have been doing it the hard way a long time.
We also talked about the plug ins for Wordpress. The one everyone needs is Askismet for spam. I showed the Flickr plug in and we discussed about flickr. Flickr is social / photo sharing site and we were discussing the pros and cons of the putting the photos there. We agreed that putting a watermark on your photo was worth it.

Curtis mentioned about Disqus (a social blogging tool he uses). I looked at the site but I really don't understand yet. Hopefully Curtis can explain more in future about his site.

We also talked about setting up a Gravatar for your blog. That is something I would like to do. A Brand for my image. Maybe Curtis can talk about this more too.

Curtis
Discussed about his struggle from switching from his website to a wordpress  and buying a template. We all encouraged him to move forward with wordpress.

I think that is it. If you guys can add anything, please do.
God Bless you all and see you in two weeks.
John