[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:

“Fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.

So please don’t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that ‘We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.’

The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change.”

While 1% does not sound much, it can be a problem if your website belongs to the pages whose rankings will drop.

At this time, Google’s new site speed signal only applies to visitors searching in English on Google.com.

How to keep your web pages listed in Google search results

There are several things that you can do to improve the speed of your web pages:

1. Choose a fast and reliable web host with a good connection to the Internet. A “cheap” web host could cause problems.
2. Combine external JavaScript code files into one file. The fewer files the server has to request, the faster your web pages will load.
3. Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.
4. Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files.
5. If your web server supports it, enable gZip compression (your web host can do that for you).
6. Use as few images as possible on your website and compress your images. Most graphic tools enable you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web.
7. Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages.

The faster your web pages load, the more visitors of your website will be able to see the contents of your pages. Web surfers are impatient people. The average web surfer wants immediate results.

Page speed is not Google’s most important ranking signal. The end of Google’s page speed announcement contains a very important sentence: “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.”

It is important to optimize the speed of your web pages but it’s also important to optimize all other elements of your web pages if you want to be listed on Google’s first result page. IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer analyzes all important ranking elements/signals that lead to high rankings on Google, including page speed and many other factors.

“Copyright by Axandra.com. Web site promotion software.”

All product names, copyrights and trademarks mentioned in this newsletter are owned by their respective trademark and copyright holders.

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.

Popular social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz, Reddit, Twitter and a whole bunch of others allow their registered users to add links to sites and blog posts. Such links are great for building quality one-way links and driving targeted traffic.

Obviously, you need to use this powerful 1-2 SEO punch of link building and social bookmarking wisely to get the most out of it. If all you are doing is adding links to hyped up sales pages, you are not going to get much link love.

On the other hand, if you add links to newsworthy posts, they may catch the attention of other like-minded bloggers and they’ll vote your entries up. Imagine the amount of free traffic you can get if you happen to make it to the first page of one of these popular social bookmarking sites.

Let me give you an example to illustrate my point. Let’s say you have a blog on clean and alternative energy, you write an article about generating your own electricity for your home and post a video about the new bloom box. The bloom box has been featured on 60 minutes and the search engines are buzzing with news items about it. You now have a very newsworthy link to bookmark, one that has a good chance of being bookmarked by others and going viral.

Link building game plan

Here are the basic steps involved if you are just starting out with social bookmarking for building links:

1. Drip your links slowly and naturally – don’t go wild at first by adding hundreds of links in one day. You are most likely to be viewed as a spammer and quickly banned from social bookmarking sites. Start by adding 5 to 7 per day, skip a few days and then add some more.
2. Focus on your home page – concentrate on adding links to your home page at the beginning. If you have a blog, so much the better because you probably have the 10 most recent posts excerpted on that page. Later on, you can start adding URLs to inner pages and direct posts.
3. Become part of the community – just like everything else on the Internet, you first have to give before you can take. Remember to bookmark other interesting sites you see that you don’t necessarily own yourself. Build your online credibility and visibility before people will trust you to share your links.
4. Create a good profile – here’s your chance to share a little bit about who you are as a person and your beliefs to connect with others. Do take the time to add a photo instead of using a generic avatar.
5. Start building a friends/ followers/fans list – retweet interesting tweets or bookmark URLs posted by other people, especially if they have a following of their own..
6. Vote on stories – don’t be shy, be heard by voting on stories that you see on the first page of your favorite social bookmarking site.

Follow this simple plan for using social bookmarking and watch your link building go through the roof.

In a hurry to build links? Check out this all-in-one link building package where you get the backlinks, the tools, the know-how and the action plans for a one-time investment. Developed by two highly respected marketers, Lynn and Paul Short.

Have you used other methods that have been successful for you in building links? Share your comments and thoughts here.

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:

1. Pinging: One of the easiest ways to get indexed quickly is to ping your site. Two most popular pinging sites are pingoat.com and pingomatic.com.

Just add your site’s name and URL, and leave the RSS feed link blank. (It’s not necessary.) Sometimes this technique alone can get you indexed in a day or two. Next, you should submit your link to various social bookmarking sites.

If you use Wordpress for your blog, log into your admin panel and go to Settings > Writing. Scroll down until you see Update Services. Add the following to your list:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

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

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

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

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

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

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com/

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

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

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

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

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

2. Social bookmarking: Popular social media sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, del.ico.us, and Slashdot are crawled several times a day. So they can be a very good way to get your own site crawled and indexed quickly. You should get an account at all of the major bookmarking sites. If you use Wordpress, add a plugin like Sociable to bookmark all your posts.

3. Blog commenting: This can be a very good way to get indexed quickly. You’ll need to find blogs that don’t have the “nofollow” tag, because blogs that have “nofollow” won’t let search engines crawl the links anyway. SEO experts are split over this – some say the “nofollow” tag doesn’t matter, since some search engine spiders ignore them anyway. Others claim you may get a small amount of traffic from the blogs themselves, but “nofollow” blogs will do nothing to help you get indexed faster.

4. Forums: Popular forums have had posts on their site show up on Google just minutes after they’re posted. It’s very common for posts on very popular forums to be in Google in less than 24 hours. Posting a small link in your signature on some of these forums can help you get your site indexed quickly. (See my earlier post, “Use Your John Hancock For Free Traffic.”)

5. Link exchange: Exchange links with other webmasters in your niche. Not only is this a great way to build backlinks, but if their sites are crawled often, chances of your site being crawled and indexed quickly go up too. Link exchanges won’t penalize your site, either – unless you build too many, too quickly. Stick with a natural growth pattern (a few a day) and it won’t raise any red flags with the search engines.

6. Press releases (PR): PR can be very helpful in getting your site crawled and indexed quickly. Most of the popular press release sites have very good Page Rank and are crawled often. They can even get your press release posted on a number of different sites that pull news from the PR directories. Sometimes it can be worth submitting a press release simply for the speed and the ease of getting your site indexed. (See Writing Press Releases for Web 2.0.)

7. Article marketing: Not one of the faster ways of getting your site indexed but is another way to get high-quality backlinks. Submitting an article or two can also help you get targeted traffic to your site. Many article directories have very good PageRank, so it definitely has benefits other than just quick indexing.

Try these seven off-site SEO tactics to get your site indexed faster than just using on-site SEO strategies.

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.

Matt Bailey, founder of SiteLogic, wrote on his blog, “Essentially, the long tail is the hundreds to thousands of keywords and key phrases that a site is found for, yet rarely noticed or exploited.” These keywords may not have an astronomical search volume, but they are subject to much less competition. That means that it’s easier to rank highly for them.

There is no surefire formula for a number one ranking, but there are techniques that will give you an edge over the competition. SEO is too a vast subject for me to provide you good information in one blog post. So let me direct you to a couple of previous posts that provide tips and pointers for do-it-yourself SEO.

• Create Optimized (SEO) Content for Readers and Spiders
• SEO Quick Tips
• What Color Hat Should I Wear?
• What Is Search Engine Optimization?

How to promote your mini-site for free

Large websites and big companies have the budgets to promote their sites and drive traffic. As a solopreneur, you have to compete with them by using your marketing ingenuity and flexibility.

Promoting a mini-site on a mini budget is not only feasible, you can actually do it very well without spending a penny. Now, I’m not going to lie here by promising instant hordes of traffic but you can get there soon enough.

You don’t have to spend obscene amounts of money to get the word out about your mini site. With some creativity, you can start getting traffic without spending a dime on advertising and your profit margins are going to be much higher. See I told you being small has its advantages!

Here are some free methods for promoting your mini-site:

• Do-it-yourself SEO: Yes, there’s a learning curve and strategies keep changing but with some practice, you can achieve good search engine rankings, especially for long-tail keywords. Start by reading some books on search engine optimization to grasp the basic concepts. Here are 3 books on search engine optimization from Amazon (NOTE: these are affiliate links):
  1. Search Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint for Effective Internet Marketing
  2. The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
  3. Search Engine Optimization All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies (For Dummies (Computers))
• Article marketing: Submit articles to free reprint sites and article directories. The most popular one is EzineArticles.com. Include a link to your site in the resource box. The article must include the resource box whenever it is reprinted, so you’ll get links from anyone who uses your content. (See 3 Reasons Why Article Marketing Can Be Better Than Search Engine Optimization (SEO)). To learn more about marketing your online business with content, check out my eBook, “Content Marketing Roadmap” or sign up for my FREE special report, “Content Marketing Revealed.”
• Forum marketing: Join forums that appeal to members of your target market. Participate in discussions, and include a link to your site in your signature. (See Use Your John Hancock for Free Traffic.)
• Social Media marketing: Two valuable currencies that you can use in your online business are content and social marketing or networking. If you combine them, you get a powerful one-two punch for generating high quality sales leads. (see social media marketing)
• Blog commenting: Comment on blogs. Most will include a link to your site with your comment. This will help boost your search engine rankings and could result in click-through traffic. (P.S. Leave your comment after this post and you’ll get a link back to your site!)
• Guest blogging: Contact bloggers that reach your target market and ask to write a guest post for them. This is a great way to establish yourself as an expert and create interest in your site.
• Create a small report to give away: Write a small report, making sure to include a link to your site. Then contact others who sell information products and ask them if they would like to give it away as a bonus with their product. (see my Free Reports section)
• Use PR: Write a press release. Submit it to press release websites, online publications and bloggers. (see Writing Press Releases for Web 2.0)

Monetizing your mini-site

Mini-sites can be powerful moneymaking machines. A well-crafted mini site is focused on a specific niche. In order to monetize it, you must offer something that appeals to that niche. There are several ways to accomplish this.

1. Create your own info product

Creating an information product is one of the most lucrative ways to make money with a mini-site. A simple eBook can sell for $20 or more, and an eBook series or online course could net you hundreds of dollars. If you’re good at writing, this could be the perfect moneymaking opportunity for you.

But you don’t necessarily have to be an accomplished writer to sell your own info product. You could purchase some Private Label Rights (PLR) content, do a little rewriting and adding on, and sell it as something unique. If writing is not your thing, maybe you could put together an educational video series. (See Creating Your First eBook)

2. Buy the rights to someone else’s product (MRR)

For those who don’t have the time or the desire to create a new information product, this is a great way to start making money quickly. You can buy master resale rights (MRR) to reports and courses that others have written, sell them, and keep 100% of the profits. There are even packages available that include a sales page and graphics, so all you have to do is upload the files to your server and promote the site. For a one-time investment, you get unlimited moneymaking potential. Just Google MRR eBooks and you’ll find a ton of them.

3. Join an Affiliate Program

If you want to get started with a minimal investment of both time and money, joining an affiliate program is definitely the way to go. You simply promote other people’s products, and when a sale is made, you keep a percentage of the profits. Your only investments are the time and money it takes to set up and promote your mini site. Here’s a good article from FastCompany that clarifies some of the confusion about the new FTC guidelines for affiliate marketing.

There you have it, everything you ever wanted to know about creating, optimizing, promoting and making money from mini-sites.

Now go do it!

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.

In my opinion, it is best to write for your human audience first and let the search engines follow. How can you resolve this dichotomy?

Here are three steps to write your SEO content and still sound natural. (also see SEO Quick Tips).

Step One – Research keywords and phrases

Do your homework instead of guessing. You can use Google’s free Keyword Tool to get ideas on popular searches.

Don’t stop there, you also need to find your competition. Select a few keywords and phrases that are relevant to you and enter them in Google’s search field. Add quotes at the beginning and at the end like this “health and fitness” to find exact matches. The number of pages found is the supply or the competition that you are up against to rise in the rankings.

If you are so inclined, you can take your research up a notch by doing what is commonly referred to as Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). This post would become too long if I got into details of KEI but you can Google and find a ton of information on it.

If all this is too technical for you then sign up for a service like Wordtracker that will help you do comprehensive keyword research. (NOTE: that is an affiliate link).

Step Two – Write content for your readers

Visualize or form a mental picture of your ideal prospect and/or customer. Now, write your text that sounds as if you are addressing him/her directly . Make it conversational and effectively pre-sell them without sounding too salesy (topic of a future article).

Provide quality information that your readers will find useful and will also persuade them to take an action now – sign up for your newsletter, click on an affiliate link or visit your sales page etc.

Don’t worry about keywords or optimization right now, that will come in the next step. Edit your copy until you are satisfied that you’ve removed all unnecessary words and distractions.

Step Three – Optimize for search engines

Go back into your content from step 2 and start adding keywords and phrases where they seem natural. Don’t force fit anything for the sake of stuffing keywords.

Here’s an example of badly written SEO text:
“You can become a free affiliate banner user by registering for free affiliate banner programs that are run by a free affiliate banner network also known as a free affiliate banner network.” (source: The Copywriting Blog)

A better way to rewrite the above is:
“Join our free affiliate network program where you’ll find useful affiliate resources such as banners, solo emails and product reviews that you can use to market to your audience.”

Use variations of your keywords and phrases to make it sound even more natural and interesting.

Here are a few more tips for writing optimized copy:

• Add your keywords and phrases in the title tag of your pages (if possible, write a separate title for each page using different keywords)
  Examples:
  My home page title is — <title>DiY Marketing Coach – Practical, Purposeful and Actionable Do-it-Yourself Internet Marketing Guidance For Earning Money Online</title>
  A post on site traffic uses — <title>3 Things You Can Do Right Now to Get More Traffic | DiY Marketing Coach</title>
• Try to work in your keywords and phrases into your headline and subheads
  Example: What Is Search Engine Optimization?
• Avoid optimizing for more than two keywords per page
• Shoot for a keyword density of about 2 ~ 4% percentage i.e. repeat your keywords or phrases 2 to 4 times for every 100 words on the page.
• Use keywords in the first and last sentence of every paragraph and at least once more in the body (assuming your paragraphs are not one or two sentences long)
• If it makes sense and sounds natural, bold/italicize your keywords and use them in bulleted text
• Stick with White-Hat SEO tactics and avoid Black-Hat SEO tactics (See What Color Hat Should I Wear?)

Once you’ve completed your article, read it aloud to see if it still sounds natural to you. If possible, have someone else proof and critique your content before publishing it. That is one of the best ways to evaluate your content for human readability while satisfying search engine spiders.

Always remember to keep your audience in mind first and then the search engines – it is a strategy that will help you write optimized content that ranks and converts very well.

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.

2. You don’t have to exchange links to increase your ranking

Would you believe me if I told you that your ranking will actually increase with all the back links you get from one top article? Yes, it’s true. If you can get one hot article online, you will be amazed by how many article directories post this article on high PR pages (yes, pages with PR6 or higher). All these links will be pointing back to your site, giving you a boost in your ranking.

For SEO, you will have to come up with a great marketing strategy to get high PR sites to add your link to their sites.

3. A good resource box is all you need

This is often over looked by many new article publishers. You’ve written a great article but your resource box is weak or has no direct link back to your site. Without a good resource box, you may gain fame but will not get the traffic that you want.

Your author’s resource box should contain a compelling reason for people to visit your website. You may talk a little about yourself, but it really has to be more about the reader and his/her wants.

For example, if your website is offering natural cures for people suffering from acne, you need to let them know that you have the answer they are looking for in order to get them to visit your website.

A huge part of creating a great resource box is including one or more links to your website. Different directories have different rules about this, but the general rule of thumb is to allow two links. You want to surround at least one these in what is called “anchor text.” It allows search engines determine the main topic of the web page that this link leads to.

Here is an example of an anchor text within a link:

Grab a copy of my FREE report on natural cures for acne.

If you want the search engines to know this page is about natural cures for acne, the HTML code would like this:

<a href=http://acnesite.com/free_report.htm>natural cures for acne</a>

The anchor text would help to boost your rankings for the keyword phrase “natural cures for acne.”

Studies have shown that sometimes people ignore in context links like the one above. To play it safe, make the second link in your resource box something like this:

Visit my site at http://acnesite.com.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you don’t need SEO. Article marketing and organic SEO do go hand-in-hand. You need both to drive a steady stream of traffic to your website.

You can get more valuable traffic generation tips from my small report “10 Proven Ways To Get More Traffic With Article Marketing.”

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.

Use these 4Ps as guidelines to help you find an ideal domain name for your site.

1. PURPOSE

Determine the primary purpose of your website. Is it to establish you as an expert in a niche? If so, you’ll need to do some keyword research to figure out which phrases would naturally attract traffic.

Are you buying a domain to sell a product? If so, your product name or a variation of the product name should be in your domain name.

Ideally, your website’s domain should describe what the website is about, for example, my domain name is diymarketingcoach.com and it is about providing do-it-yourself marketing guidance to Internet marketers.

You could also use popular keywords in your domain name, for example, quickfatlosshelp.com for a rapid weight loss site.

Determining the primary purpose of you website will help you decide what keywords to use.

2. PRESENCE

Is it critical to have the exact keyword phrase in your domain name? For some websites, you may be able to get by using another similar phrase. However, for others you may need that exact phrase. In such cases, you can try adding hyphens, prefixes or suffixes to your domain name if your exact phrase is not available.

This way you’ll still be able to use the exact phrase and establish your site in your niche. A general rule of thumb is to use no more than two hyphens in a domain name.

3. POTENTIAL

How do you plan to grow your site? By this, I mean are you choosing a domain name for a mini-site or is it a sales letter? Or are you planning to launch a portal for content with hundreds of pages? Look at my main domain name for example. Diymarketingcoach.com is a broad and all encompassing name for a site that includes many pages and posts about various topics on Internet marketing. Whereas for one of my information products, “Upsell Profits Blueprint,” I’ve picked a specific domain name, upsellprofitsblueprint.com.

4. PRICE

You can buy any domain name you want as long as you’re willing to pay the price. In most cases though, you’ll want to register an unused domain name. These domain names cost anywhere between $7 and $12 depending on who you use (I use www.godaddy.com for my domain registration).

However, if you have a very specific business name and you must have that name as your domain name, you can try contacting the domain owner. Do a whois search to get the domain owner’s name and contact information (not always visible to the public).

Try to negotiate a fair price to buy the domain name if the current owner is willing to sell it. There are services available that specialize in buying and selling domain names.

These 4Ps will come into play whenever you are choosing a domain name for your website. Carefully consider how your domain name will be used before you buy one.

Have you heard of domain flipping? If you are looking for a no-risk, no-worry method of making a living online, it just doesn’t get any better than this. With domain flipping, you can literally take a $9 domain name and flip it for $90, $900, even $9,000 quickly and easily!

Grab a copy of my small report “Profitable Domain Flipping” right now and master how to flip domains for large profits, quickly and easily.

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

2. Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content
Status: FALSE – This is not the case. That’s not to say that duplicate content can’t have a negative impact on your rankings, but Google itself will not penalize you for it

3. Google penalizes paid links in JavaScript
Status: FALSE – Google is not currently penalizing paid JavaScript links, but they may start looking down the line

Did this post clear up any confusion in your mind?

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.

Look at the source code of your HTML pages. Somewhere at the top, after the opening <head> tag, you’ll see the code for the <title> tag that looks like this:

<title>Enter Your Title Here</title>

That’s where you need to enter a keyword or phrase that describes your site or that page. Don’t just put your domain or company name unless it happens to be a keyword you are targeting.

If you are using WordPress, you won’t be able to directly edit the title of each page. Download the free plugin, All in One SEO plugin, it allows you to enter the title right on the page where you write your posts.

2. Use Header Tags (h1-h3)

Include your targeted keywords or phrases in your header tags. Use the h1 tag once at the top of the page, that’s your main headline containing your primary keyword(s) and then use h2 and h3 tags as subheads throughout the page. These can be variations of your primary keyword or phrase.

Header tags are useful not just for search engines. Site visitors tend to skip read Web pages. Using powerful headlines and subheads that are related to their search term will help to capture their attention and persuade them to read your copy.

Shown here is a screen shot of a post in WordPress:

3. Create a site map

This is another important element of search engine optimization. A site map helps search engine spiders navigate their way through your site and find inside or sub pages and categories. It is literally a roadmap of your entire site.

Also create an HTML version of the site map and add a link to it from the footer of your site. This is especially helpful for static HTML sites where some visitors may use this option to quickly navigate to a specific page or area within the site.

It is not difficult to create a site map in the correct format. Use a free service like XML-SiteMap.com to quickly generate a site map in XML format that is required by Google. Here’ a screen shot of the process:

Download the file and upload it into your public_html folder.

Next, create a free Google Webmaster account at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview and add your sitemap’s URL. You’ll now be able to monitor traffic statistics for your entire website.

You will want to update your sitemap each time you add new pages to your website, so that it is kept up to date and search engine spiders can re-visit your site to index the new pages.

This post is not meant to be a crash course in do-it-yourself search engine optimization. That would take much more than a few short blog posts. Use these three tips to tweak your site yourself and you’ll see a measurable increase in your traffic.

Many books have been written and you can find several courses that will teach you everything you need to know about traffic generation.

Of course, the one I recommend is my own “The Easy Guide to Unlimited Traffic.”

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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.”