It’s official: Google uses page speed as a ranking factor

[Ed: This is a guest post]

Last Friday, Google announced that they started to use site speed as one of the 200 signals that influence the position of a website in the search results:

“As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. [...]

We’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

Will your website rankings drop?

Google’s Matt Cutts says that the change will affect only some websites:
[Read more]

Link Building and Social Bookmarking – a Powerful 1-2 Punch for SEO

Link building plays a vital role in every organic SEO strategy. And as things stand today, off-page SEO tactics carry the bulk of the weight as compared to on-page optimization techniques of the past. Link building is the primary weapon used in outranking your competition in search engines.

However, not all backlinks or inbound links are created equal. Google and other major search engines no longer consider simple reciprocal links valuable. As a matter of fact, the relevance and quality can significantly affect your page rank. Hang around bad backlink neighborhoods and you could be penalized. Focusing on high-quality and relevant one-way links is the name of the game now.

Link building strategies

There are several methods for one-way link building, they are:

• Directory submissions
• Article marketing and syndication
• Forum posting
• Guest blogging
• Press releases
• Paid links (see my recommendation at the end)
• Social bookmarking

This post focuses on the powerful technique of social bookmarking for link building. [Read more]

Off-Site SEO Tips for Getting Your Site Indexed Quickly

There are two components to optimizing your site for search engines. On-site SEO tactics like the proper use of Title and Description MetaTags, using keywords with appropriate density, adding key phrases in H1, H2 tags and in bulleted text and a whole host of other techniques. The second being off-site SEO tactics. More on this later.

As most people know, on-site SEO takes time to take effect. If you rely solely on these tactics, you may be waiting months before Google and other search engines index your site or blog.

Is there a way faster way to get Google to index your site? You betcha! Using some proven off-site SEO tactics can get your site indexed in a matter of days or less than two weeks. There are documented success stories out there where Google indexed a new site in as little as a few hours after launch.

Let’s define off-site SEO first. It pretty much revolves around building in-coming links to your site. Gone are the days when you could just buy thousands of links from link farms. Search engines have become too smart for that. You need to get high-quality backlinks in order move up in the search engine ranks. That usually means getting links to your site from other sites that have a high PageRank, or sites that are updated often and are crawled frequently by search engine spiders.

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to get these types of quality links to your site without paying a penny. Here are seven off-site SEO tips you can implement today at no cost: [Read more]

Optimize, Promote and Monetize Your Mini-Sites

This is my second article on mini-sites and how to use them effectively in Internet marketing. You can read the first part at Creating DiY Mini-Sites – Spend a Little, Make a Lot!

Assuming you’ve got your mini-site ready and uploaded to your hosting server, it is now time to move onto Phase II. That’s where you’ll optimize your mini-site for your chosen niche to find your page, promote it using methods to attract qualified traffic and finally monetize it to make money.

Search engine optimization (SEO) for mini-sites

At first glance, it may seem like a difficult task to optimize a single web page. It is natural to assume that a website with hundreds of pages or an authority site would have a distinct advantage over a mini-site. After all, a large site can optimize for hundreds of keywords and phrases since it may have thousands of pages.

Sometimes being small can have its advantages. A mini-site targets a specific niche or product. That means it can target keywords/phrases that are very specific to that niche. You can optimize your mini-site for long-tail keywords that may be ignored by those gargantuan sites but are very important to your niche or product.
[Read more]

Create Optimized (SEO) Content for Readers and Spiders

Search engine optimization (SEO) begins with the text or content on your website. However, many webmasters and site owners forget or ignore a key issue in this mad dash to attain top rankings in search engines (read Google).

Search engines do not buy products or subscribe to your newsletters. It is human readers that you want to attract and convert.

Yes, SEO performs the important task of putting your site in front of people who are looking for information that you are selling. However, after you’ve attracted the traffic, your content must now sound natural and appealing to human readers.

Think of a playground seesaw from your childhood. In other words, writing optimized content is a delicate balance between satisfying the secret algorithms of search engine spiders and convincing your readers to take a desired action.
[Read more]

3 Reasons Why Article Marketing Can Be Better Than Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

One keyword rich article can bring you hundreds of visitors for years to come. I admit it is not easy if you are new to Internet marketing, but once you write your first article and get it published, it starts to gain a life of its own. You will see a steady stream of traffic to you site.

Here are three reasons why article marketing can be better than SEO.

1. Articles don’t have mysterious and changing algorithms like search engines

While Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the best method for getting free traffic, you have to be a SEO expert to gain and remain at the top of search rankings. The search engines are constantly changing and updating their algorithm, making it more difficult to maintain top positions.

With article marketing, you don’t have to worry about any algorithms or learning closely guarded secret techniques to gain attention. All you have to focus on is keyword rich content and quality information that readers will be happy to get their hands on.
[Read more]

The 4Ps of Website Domain Name Selection

Your are probably familiar with E. Jerome McCarthy’s classic 4Ps of marketing that he first proposed in 1960. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, here’ a quick recap:

Product — an object or a service that is mass-produced or manufactured on a large scale with a specific volume of units.

Price — the amount a customer pays for the product.

Place — the location where a product can be purchased. It is often referred to as the distribution channel.

Promotion — all of the communications that a marketer may use in the marketplace

When it comes to Internet Marketing, probably one of the first things you have to do is choose a domain name for your online business. This is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make. To help you with this important first step, I’ve come up with the 4Ps of website domain name selection.

Whether you’re creating a blog that will act as the hub for your business or registering a domain for a niche site, you need to take the time to find the right domain because changing domain names after you’ve built up traffic and credibility can do irreparable damage to your business.
[Read more]

3 Google Myths Busted

If you’ve been in Internet marketing for any length of time or are responsible for your site optimization, you know there are a lot of myths and misinformation about Google floating around.

In this post, I’m going to bust three popular myths. I went straight to the source, Google’s Matt Cutts for some answers. Watch the videos to hear him talk about how Google actually handles Keyword Meta tags, duplicate content and paid links.

1. The Keyword Meta tag plays a major role in search ranking
Status: FALSE – Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking

[Read more]

3 Things You Can Do Right Now to Get More Traffic

Getting traffic is the key to survival for every online business. There are many ways of attracting traffic to your site.

In this post, I will show you three simple things that you can do yourself to improve your search engine ranking to get more organic traffic. These are not difficult, they do require basic HTML skills but nothing that will need you to buy expensive software or spend weeks to learn.

1. Title Tags

The <title> tag is the single most important element on any webpage. Here’s an example of my title tag as it shows up in Google:

The reason a title tag is so important is because it tells the search engines what your page is all about. Make sure the content on the page is relevant to the title you have used.

[Read more]

Show Some Love with CommentLuv

As a blog owner, you probably already know the value of getting backlinks for driving traffic to your site or blog. However, link building takes time, patience and some planning to really payoff.

I use CommentLuv – a free WordPress plugin that will retrieve the last post from the comment author’s site and display it at the bottom of the comment. It is a great way to show appreciation to your visitors and encourage more of them to leave comments.

You might consider adding CommentLuv to your blog also. Encouraging comments from other blog owners is a good way to start a two-way conversation your site. Site visitors will be able to leave their thoughts and opinions while helping you build a niche community.

If they feel appreciated while on your blog, they’re far more likely to return to your site and/or subscribe to your ezine or RSS feed. Over time, you’ll build a network of loyal followers.

When you comment on other blogs, try to choose Dofollow blogs with CommentLuv enabled. These blogs encourage high quality comment, and are more likely to welcome your content instead of treating it as spam. Leave a thoughtful comment that’s relevant to the post. It will generate a backlink to your own blog.

Commenting on blogs is a two way street – leaving high quality comments on other people’s blogs will encourage them to leave comments on yours. Most bloggers know the value of a solid backlink, and are more willing to allow backlinks if you show them some love too. Your blog is a great opportunity to show just how valuable backlinking can be for them.

Want to learn more about link building? Get my small report, “Using Dofollow Comments For Link Building.”

Importance of Relevant Landing Pages

A landing page is what is shown when a potential customer clicks on your pay-per-click (PPC) ad or on a link from a search engine results page. It is your main lead capture page. Therefore, it makes sense to make your landing page an extension of your ad or key words or phrases.

A common mistake made by many who are new to PPC, is to drive traffic to their home page or a badly designed landing page that lacks any kind of focus. As a result, they have poor conversions despite having done the hard work of getting the all-important click- through.

Making it relevant to the visitor’s query will greatly improve your chances of getting them to sign up for your offer rather than just clicking away.

Online, people are often searching for something very specific and if your landing page doesn’t make it clear that you have what they are looking for, you are likely to lose those visitors very quickly. All it takes is one click of the back button and you’ve lost that person forever.

Sometimes this could mean creating different landing pages for different offers or keywords. For example, if one of your key phrases is “natural products for weight control,” make sure the page people come to clearly showcases only natural weight control products. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to show off all your other products here.

Create another landing page for products related to “home cooking recipes for weight control.” Use this page for converting customers who are looking for recipes. They may be the same ones who are looking for other weight control products but in this instance, they found you by searching for recipes. Give them exactly that.

It may seem like being picky but do take the time to customize all your landing pages. The payoff in higher conversation rates is well worth the extra effort.

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