How to dominate the search engines

[Free-Google's pay-per-clicks now free
How many times since the commercial release of the Worldwide-Web have you seen sudden "breakthroughs" of great fortune-making potential come and go where just a few people were in the right place at the right time to be able to take advantage of them? -- You're right ... very, very few.

How to dominate the search engines, even with a sales letter site

Begin with keyword research. This is the first and most important task. This has to be done, and it has to be done well. You want to compile a list of your primary/tier 1 keywords (these will be the most competitive and you'll only choose a couple) then your tier 2 and possibly tier 3 keywords.

Let's use the ultra competitive term 'lose weight' as an example. ‘Lose weight" would be a tier 1 keyword. Tier 1 keywords are more broad keywords and will typically take a few months up to even a year to rank for, that is what you are building up toward.

Examples of tier 1 keywords:

Lose weight

Baby clothes

Dog health

You'll start by going after long-tail keywords, and ranking highly for as many of those as possible - while also building toward ranking for the broad, tier 1 keywords at the same time. A long-tail keyword is a phrase, usually with 3 words or more that is much more specific and targeted.

Examples:

How to lose weight quickly

Personalized baby clothes

Dog health care questions

The best long tail keywords include the broad Tier 1 keyword in it, because that builds your rankings

toward both simultaneously.

By doing this you will start seeing results and getting traffic from those long-tail keywords fairly quickly, within a few weeks. This helps to keep you motivated because it can be a long time before you'll start seeing any results or traffic from the tier 1 keywords.

While it is possible to get a 1-page site to rank, it's much easier when you add internal pages via a blog or static pages with articles. You can skip this step, however you'll get much better results and faster by adding internal pages that push pagerank toward the home page. Each internal page needs its own

unique title tag that is relevant to the content on the page. The internal pages are where you can target long tail phrases.

Example:

If your tier 1 keyword is "lose weight", and you want to target the long-tail keyword phrase: "how to lose weight quickly", you would write an article and somewhere in the title include the phrase "how to lose weight quickly".

Then, when posting that article on your website, put "how to lose weight quickly" in the title tag and the h1 tag. Next, insert a link pointing back to the homepage of your website and use the anchor text "lose weight". For even better results, write another article with a similar title, and in the author resource box insert a

link pointing to your new webpage (the one where you have posted the first "how to lose weight quickly" article) with the anchor text "how to lose weight quickly." Then, submit the article to other websites that are about weight loss or fitness. (Do a search on Google for "your keyword" + "submit article" or "add article" or even "guest articles" to find related sites that will accept your articles.)

You'll need to decide whether you'll be posting these articles to a blog or adding them as static webpages within your site. A couple of notes about blogs:

- If the blog structure isn't right, all of your posts can wind up in the supplemental index. There is a lot of info in Stompernet to make sure this doesn't happen.

- Only include excerpts of each post on the home page of the blog, so you have to click on the post title to read the entire post.

(see an example on askdavetaylor.com)

- Disable the date archives.

- Add a "no follow" tag to the RSS link.

- If you choose a blog over static internal pages, have it setup as a subdomain rather than a folder. So blog.domain.com rather than domain.com/blog.

How do you choose between a blog or static pages? Which is best?

From an SEO point of view, there's no real difference. But some questions to think about are:

1 - Which will convert the best?

2 - Which will be faster and/or easier to implement?

3 - Which will get you more links and better links faster?

Usually a blog is the answer to these questions. People are much more willing to link to a blog as opposed to a sales letter site. Another great thing about blogs is the user generated content from people posting their own comments.

No matter what you choose, you need to break up your internal pages into categories and keep them as relevant as possible.

So if you have a site about lawn mowing, you would have internal categories/folders with topics such as 'lawn maintenance' and 'grass types', and all of the articles in that category would only be related to that specific topic. This makes it easier for the search engines to know what your site is about and will

get you higher rankings as a result.

Use ezinearticles.com and isnare.com to distribute articles. This isn't necessarily to get a lot of backlinks from article directories, but because webmasters usually pick up articles at these sites to use on their own website or in their newsletter.

Setup a Google alert for the name of each article, so when other sites pick it up - you can sort through them and email the sites with good PageRank and offer them completely unique articles for their site. (A unique article is one that you haven't posted on your own website or in an article directory) This

results in getting you more backlinks that are more valuable and useful as well.

Basic stuff: Always have a title tag and h1 tag on every page. Include only 1 or 2 keywords in your home page title tag. Don't just "keyword stuff" (Keyword stuffing is when you jam a ton of keywords in unnaturally, like this: "Cookies, cookie, big cookies, small cookies, yummy cookies, our site is about cookies!"

Remember that people are going see the title tag when they search for something. A top ranking doesn't always result in increased traffic. To get the maximum amount of traffic, the title tag should use a combination of copywriting skills and search engine optimization. It should be something people would feel compelled to click on.

There are certain pages on your site that you don't want to show up in search engine results - and that you don't want to pass your valuable Pagerank to. Pages such as the privacy policy/disclaimer/about us/etc.

To keep this from happening, you will add a "no follow" to these links.

So your link will look something like this http://www.yoursite.com/privacy

rel="nofollow">privacy policy

If you've gone through the StomperNet training dvd's, then you already know that the link text or "anchor" text you use creates reputation. Links are one of THE most important parts of ranking, if not THE most important. The anchor text that points to your site tells the search engines what your site is about, so choose your anchor text wisely. That is why article marketing is the #1 SEO strategy to use. Especially because your incoming links are most likely to "count" in Google if they are coming from a page with relevant content - i.e. your article.

You should add articles on the blog or create internal articles pages, then have that blog post or webpage link back to the home page with the anchor text you are trying to rank for. Post Titles: You will score higher in the engines if you have your main keyword for your post in the title. Even higher if that keyword is FIRST in the title and not middle or last. Always make use of Latent Semantic Indexing (explained below) when writing any content, whether it's for posting on the site or blog - or whether it's being distributed. Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI is easier understand with pictures and real examples - the below blog post does an excellent job of explaining it so it makes sense:

http://clasione.blogspot.com/2007/05/lsi-what-is-google-looking-for-on-your.html

You can also see the "complex" explanation on this Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing

Wordtracker works well for finding related keywords for writing articles.

Here are some actual examples of keywords that the search engines deem to be related:

Main keyword:

- Lose weight

Related terms:

- diet

- exercise

- nutrition

- health

- overweight

So when writing content for the keyword ‘lose weight', you want to include as many of the related terms as possible.

Another useful tip is to create urls with your keywords in them, including in your internal pages - not just domain name. Not necessarily because the search engines will favor a site with keywords in the domain, because there

is no solid evidence supporting that - but because your keywords will always be in the link regardless of what anchor text that person who links to you chooses.

You can't always control the anchor text people use to link to your site, but by doing this your incoming links will always have the keywords you are targeting in them. In a sales letter type site, you usually want all the attention and traffic going to the home page, not the internal pages. So in this case you'll do what's called a home PageRank push (this is from leslie rhode's link videos that are in the portal)

Your home page will link to your internal article pages, and your internal article pages will link back to the home page, but never to each other. All internal pages point towards home, showing search engines that is the most important page. Watch the video for further clarification on this. When linking internally throughout your website, use only text links for any page that you want ranked.

When linking to the home page through an image, never use image alt tags. Image links don't actually pass any link reputation at all. They basically shout silence. Instead, "hide" a text link underneath the image using this code (also from Leslie's video):

Image overlay code:

keywords describing the home page

 #logo{

}

.logotext{

z-index:-1; position:absolute;

top:20px;left20px;

}  

Watch Leslie's video on the home page linking problem for further information on this.

Have a "link to us" page to either trade links with other sites or just to tell people what anchor text to use when they link to you. You will experience a snowball effect - the higher your rankings get, the more people will request to trade links with you. Sooner or later you'll be getting so many link requests on a daily basis you won't have to solicit link trades with others anymore. - Reciprocal linking is not dead, but it's not as effective as one-way links. When trading links, it's most effective to only trade links with sites that are relevant.

For example, a dog site would trade links with other dog sites. A site about jewelry will trade links with other jewelry sites, but not with sites about dogs. You can mention this on your link to us page to prevent from getting a lot of link requests from websites that aren't relevant.

For the blog, these are some of the best Wordpress plugins to install:

"What Would Seth Godin Do" - Get this plugin at: http://www.richardkmiller.com/blog/wordpressplugin-

what-would-seth-godin-do/ - This plugin will help you to get more RSS feed subscribers. Optimal Title Plugin - http://elasticdog.com/2004/09/optimal-title/ - Optimal Title is a WordPress plugin that mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the 'separator' to after the title rather than before. This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first. Having your page information appear before your blog name in the title is advantageous because it provides more meaningful search engine results and browser bookmark names. Wordpress sitemap plugin - http://www.jackhumphrey.com/fridaytrafficreport/websitepromotion/

blogging/wordpress-sitemap-plugin/

http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/

How to put Adsense into your posts, plus a plugin that does it -

http://www.jackhumphrey.com/fridaytrafficreport/website-promotion/blog-marketing-videos/how-toput-adsense-in-worpress-posts/

Plugin that shows you which posts are most popular. That way you know which topics to write about again - http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/

Allows users to subscribe to comments and get notified when someone replies - a crucial community builder: http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/

This video shows how to put YouTube videos into your blog -

http://www.jackhumphrey.com/fridaytrafficreport/website-promotion/blog-marketing-videos/easyvideo-embedding-trick-for-youtube-and-other-video-embed-codes/

See Dave Taylor's and also Sherman Hu's wordpress videos for more info if you choose to use a blog. Also, this is good to read (Video series highlighting 7 of the most important tweaks and plugins that any WordPress user should know about): http://www.tubetorial.com/7-essential-wordpress-hacks/

Then you'll want to sign up for an account and the following websites and submit each of your posts to gain instant traffic and to have buzz group members vote up your posts, bringing you more traffic and links.

Reddit

Netscape

Digg

Newsvine

Shoutwire

Slashdot

Stumble Upon

You can also sign up at http://www.onlywire.com, where you can use one "Bookmarklet" for all these

services:

Backflip

Bibsonomy

Blinklist

Blogmemes

Blue Dot

de.lirio.us

del.icio.us

Diigo

Furl

Jots

Linkroll

Looklater

ma.gnolia

Markaboo

Rawsugar

Shadows

Simpy

Spurl

Wink

Another good idea is to have a large "ping" list. Ping all the best sites about your article as soon as it is posted. Set this up in the Wordpress admin by going to Options > Writing Then copy and paste the following in the bottom box named "Update Services"

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://ping.bitacoras.com/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.feedburner.com/

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

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