Archive for 'February, 2008'

Today I’m going to show you how to increase blog traffic across all 3 search engines – MSN, Yahoo!, and Google!

This is installment #4 in the “Tracking Your Blog’s Progress” article series. Too many bloggers wonder why they aren’t getting any traffic without doing something about. If you’re not actively working to increase your traffic, then your results are going to be “hit and miss”. If you get dugg or stumbled you’ll get a “spike” and then your traffic will return to normal. There are specific things you need to do behind the scenes to ensure that you are getting the most exposure possible AT ALL TIMES! Why waste your blogging efforts – work smarter not harder! I don’t care how much “blogging” or “webmaster” experience you have – I GUARANTEE you will learn something in this article!

Often times bloggers worry about their posting schedule, but I find that they don’t worry enough about what goes on behind the scenes in their blog. I wrote a post last fall called “I am the most successful blogger in the world” and I stick by the blog success plan I set forth in that article. My blogging plan is simple – it’s 20% setup, 30% content, and 50% promotion. Many people think that I’m nuts for spending time this way, but I find that the people saying this don’t do the same things as me. If you are writing original quality content all the time, then spending 30% of your time on it is more than adequate. It’s all the things behind the scenes nobody sees that bring visitor’s to that content! Is your WordPress install up to date and all your plugins working and up to date? Do you review your stats and incoming keyword searches? Do you do keyword research? Are you monetizing your blog? Do you track what monetizations work and scrap them to try new strategies? Do you network with other bloggers? Are you involved in bumpzee, myBlogLog, entrecard, stumbleupon, or digg? Have you checked your SERP’s? Did you leave comments on other blogs today? Have you guest posted for someone else? Have you reviewed your older content? Checked your sitemap and robots.txt file? How many pages do you own that have pagerank? Have you done any linkbuilding or traffic building today? All these things are what YOU should be doing the 70% of the time your’re not writing content!

Why it’s important to set YOUR blog up for ALL 3 search engines

Today I’m going to focus you on what you should be doing to make sure you have listings in MSN Live Search, Yahoo!, and Google! In some regards you need to be treating your blog(s) more like a business. A brick and mortar business knows their competition and they know their customers. Do you know your customers? Most blogs receive the majority of their traffic from google. Over time you might get more from the other search engines if you’re lucky.

What you need to understand is that while google dominates the search engines, at the end of 2007 google only had a 56% market share! That’s right, just under half of all searches on the Internet are somewhere other than google. Yahoo was 17.7%, and MSN Live Search was 13.8% (up 5% from 2006). So you need to be equally as worried about tracking your SERP’s (search engine result pages) in google, Yahoo!, AND MSN search engines!

Assuming that Your’re Ready…

I’m going to assume that you’ve already read yesterday’s post “Tracking Sitemap Changes for SERP Pages, which would mean that you already have an XML sitemap setup for your site. Also, I lot of my pointers will be for WordPress and those using the XML Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t benefit from this aritcle if you’re using another blogging platform like Drupal, Mambo, Jooma, Blogger, etc.

It’s not like the old days of “submitting your site” to the search engines at all. Now most sites are based on a blogging or content management platform, and you update a “sitemap” file when you post or make changes and “ping” both blogging and search crawlers that you have new content for their spiders to feed on. It’s easy to notify all three major search engines every time you post or modify content – and in some cases your can be indexed in in search results in under a few hours.

MSN Live Search Webmaster Tools

You probably had no idea that this even existed, but MSN Live Search know has their own “webmaster tools” console! It’s setup for you to register your web site or blog, and it’s URL and sitemap URL. Your verify you are the actual site owner by playing an xml file in your site or a meta tag in your homepage file. This is great news – especially if your site was not in the MSN search index before at all! MSN is playing catchup since both google and Yahoo! have had webmaster consoles for quite awhile. The guidelines for indexing at MSN Live Search are pretty much the same as the other 2 search engines. There aren’t a lot of tools at the MSN webmaster console (yet), I’m sure that will improve in the future. For now, it’s important that you get all your sites and blogs registered with MSN today!

Yahoo! Site Explorer Tools

If you’re a Yahooligan, you may already know of the Yahoo Search Site Explorer Tools. The Yahoo! Site Explorer works the same was as MSN Live Search you “add sites” in with your URL and sitemap URL so the Yahoo search crawler knows to index them. The difference with Site Explorer is that you can add in multiple feeds, so if you have a post and a comments RSS feed, you can add them both in. This is also handy if you happen to have a site with say a “blog”, and a “forum” in another directory. You can add as many RSS feeds as you want into the Yahoo Site Explorer. If you click on “explore” for any of your URL’s you can see how many pages you have indexed and how many backlinks you have. Click on “show details” while hovering over any URL in the explore results and you can see the last time your site was indexed. Not a lot of tools here either, but it’s better than what MSN Search has for webmasters, and the important thing is to register all your sites and feeds with Yahoo! so that you know the Yahoo! search crawler is visiting your site.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google is probably already indexing your site, it knows about your site or blog within 30 minutes of registering and paying for the domain name (or sooner!). Even so, make sure that you visit google Webmaster Tools and register all your domains. Google has the most extensive set of webmaster tools and support of all 3 major search engines. Register all your sites and their respective sitemaps. The most handy thing google has the other’s don’t is in your dashboard you have a “status” for every entry. If there was a problem with the googlebot reading your sitemap you get an error message. It tells you how long ago the error occured and what it actually was. I have one large site that occasionally gets “HTTP Error: 408 (Request timeout)”. Google also has other tools, like the ability to analyze your robots.txt file, you can set a “geographic target”, set a “crawl rate”, remove URL’s, and set a “preferred domain” (with or without the ‘www.’). In your site overview you can also find the last time googlebot crawled your site, and any errors that it encountered. Since google is the “dominant” one of the 3 search engines I will go into webmaster tools just to make sure there are no errors with my sites or sitemaps and that the googlebot search crawler has been to all my sites within a reasonable amount of time.

WordPress XML Sitemap Search Notification

If you use WordPress and the XML Sitemap plugin, in the latest version there are checkboxes in the Options page that allow you to “notify” (ping) google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo!, and Ask.com when you post new content and the sitemap is rebuilt. Make sure you enable all these options, and in addition there is a new feature where you can notifiy Yahoo! now by using their API “application ID” – make sure that you signup and get one today to ensure you can directly communicate with the Yahoo! crawler!

Follow Up Search Engine Checks

Of course you can go to each individual search engine and query for site to make sure your blog is indexed, but that’s a really tedious (and sometimes forgettable) task. Wouldn’t it be better if you could automate it? I thinks so. In my next post I’m going to tell you how to automatically track your blog or web site for search index and SERP changes automatically (for free)! Don’t you think now would be a good time to subscribe via RSS or email?? On the top right corner of this page are the links my friend…

How many widgets and chiclets are in your blog sidebar? Is all that sidebar crap giving your blog value, or making you look foolish?

When you’re out dropping entrecards or surfing and reading blogs do you notice all the crap in the sidebars? I know that to some extent you do – because that’s how the sidebar widgets virally spread. You see blogrush on Shoemoney.com or JohnChow.com and you just have to have it. Then in a week or two, like a brushfire – everyone’s got it. A month later we’re asking ourselves “why do we have this, what good does it do?” Even though some bloggers remove it in a month when they are unhappy with it – most leave it on their blog sidebar and over time the widgets pile up like trash you haven’t taken out. I did a little cleaning of my own lately, and it appears I’m not the only one who is tired of sidebar clutter.

You may have noticed (if you’re returning) that the other day I updated this blog and the WordPress theme a bit. I decided to clean up some of my own sidebar clutter during that process, and ended up removing myBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and all my 125×125 ads. One of the first comments I received was “how clean my blog was…” What does that tell you? It must have been “cluttered“.

Maybe it’s time that you thought about your own sidebar clutter? Before you start ripping out all those widgets to go back to your barebones theme, I’m going to give you some things to think about.

Do a “Sidebar Assessment”

• How fast does your blog load? Does your blog load in 3-4 seconds? Have you ever noticed it “hanging” while loading during certain times of day (peak hour)? Every widget you place on your blog make an “external call” to another web site to get information. These external calls add up if you have a half dozen widgets. If any one of them is slow – it will in turn slow down the load time of your blog. It may even be intermittent. I noticed that during peak hours during this last week, myBlogLog was particularly bogging down my site during peak hours. I also tried to use adToll (which I quite like) for 4 125×125 ad blocks – but it slowed down my blog so much I had to remove it. If you have widgets that slow down your blog – they’ve got to go!
• Is it annoying? Some widgets are so damn annoying, things that move and blink routinely piss me off. Also things that distract me and keep me from getting the information I want. If I feel tricked, I’m outta there. The one (that’s not really sidebar) that most annoys me lately are these new “peel ads” from adTool in the top right corner of a blog. You’ll know one when you see it because it flashes raunchy green stripes back and forth with such velocity that if you epileptic you’d probably have a seizure! You could lose any value a widget could provide if the format or display so annoys people that they leave your blog! Another big offender are widgets that automatically start playing audio or video! If I want to watch or listen to something I will click on it – turning your blog into an infomercial turns me off!
• Is it related to your niche? Am I the only one who’s tired of this? Look, if I’m on your site about blogging – I don’t want to buy an iPod! I don’t want a total gym, I don’t want ringtones, and I don’t want to learn how to make money trading F0rex! This reminds of a few years back when a few undercard boxers started to accept money to have golden palace dot com stenciled on their back for a televised match. What the hell does online gambling have to do with boxing? Sure golden palace got exposure, but how cheap and sleazy did that boxer look? One of the biggest offenders in this area that I can recall is John Chow with his little widget on posts hawking electronic gadgets. Sorry John Chow, if I’m on your site about making money online I DON’T want to buy an LCD monitor or a digital camera. Maybe John actually gets enough traffic to pull this off – but 99% of blogs don’t. It’s not relevant, it looks stupid, and you’re probably not making any money from it anyway.
• What Value Does it Provide? If you’re going to have a widget in your sidebar make sure that it actually adds value to your site and that it doesn’t “de-value” it. Does it do more than just look cool? Does it monetize? Does it allow you to communicate with site visitors or network with other bloggers? There’s nothing worse than a non-used widget. What about these “chat with me” or “live help” widgets that always say “not available” or “offline”? If you’re not there or the widget can’t be used most of the time – get rid of it!
• Does it have a Track Record of Results? Well, you placed these god-awful widgets on your site, have you gone back a month later to see if they lived up to expectations? Does blogrush really provide visitors for your site? Are you actually networking with bloggers in myBlogLog and BlogCatalog – or just getting spammed with notifications? Has that amazon widget ever made you any money? Are people using your shoutbox? Are they voting on your polls? Are people actually clicking on those 125×125 ads? Be sure to re-evaluate all your widgets on a regular basis, and if you and your visitors aren’t getting any real clear and measurable value – get rid of them!
• Would You Use it? This is what they call “eating your own dog food”! When you are on other blogs what annoys you? What widgets do you like? A good rule of thumb is to not add any widgets that you yourself don’t use when you’re out there reading blogs. If it’s not good enough for you – it’s not good enough for your blog visitors.
• Is it professional? Certain widgets, chiclets, and forms of monetization work well on one blog and not another. It depends on the factors of professionalism and audience. For instance, on my “jokes” web site using in-line contextual text link ads is completely acceptable – and it does make money. On this blog most bloggers would hate it, and I would get almost no clicks. On my tech blog a widget with tech deals is fine, on this blog probably not. You set the level of professionalism on your blog, and if your sidebar looks like a Christmas tree you may not be taken as seriously. If your blog is about celebrity dirt and not making money online different guidelines apply.

All I’m asking you to do is take an assessment of your own blog sidebar(s) and not only the value of your widget(s) to you and your visitors – but whether or not it’s distracting and making your site look like the city dump! Please, comment now and let me know what you think!

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Now playing: Loverboy – Working For The Weekend
via FoxyTunes

How to find, fully test, and setup new WordPress themes on your blog without anybody knowing. Don’t put it live until it’s ready!

**UPDATE** – This post is up for informational purposes only, now theme testing support is available natively in WordPress as of version 2.6!

One of the worst things about WordPress is that when you hack your blog, or your theme, or try a new plugin or theme you’re doing it “live”. In other words – everybody sees it. So if you want to try a new theme you have to switch them live while visitor are going to your posts and pages. I hate that. I’ve heard of guys keeping a “test” version of WordPress installed in another folder just to test new themes and hacks – and that’s not only more effort than I’m willing to do, it’s just a bit rediculous.

I have a recipe site accordingtokieli.com that I just had to dump the theme on. It was causing too many problems, it was old, and not worth hacking anymore. I have too many web sites and way too much to do to create a new theme from scratch. So I went theme shopping, and within 10 minutes I found Blog Oh Blog!. This dude’s got 7 killer themes, so I downloaded them all to test.

Next, I downloaded the Theme Test Drive WordPress Plugin, and installed an enabled it. This plugin allows you to set a theme for your entire blog that only the administrator will see. In other words, when you are logged into your WordPress dashboard as the admin account, you can test any post or page in your site under a theme and nobody will be the wiser. You can hack the test theme pages and nobody on your site using your normal theme will be the wiser. Of course, if you make changes to widgets or plugins, everyone will see them on both the public and test themes. Once you enable the plugin all you have to do is go do “Presentation -> Theme Test Drive” in your WP Dashboard and enable the theme you want to test:

So in another browser windows I went to site, and one by one enabled and tested all 7 new WordPress themes. I found and settled on one that I really liked. Luckily in this site I use widgets, so everything updated beautifully there. All I’m missing are any customizations I made to my current theme pages. So I looked at the code for my Main Index, Single Post, Archive, Comments, etc., to see what I’ve added over time to make a list.

It turns out I added quite a few things, but they’re easy to put into the new template:

• Print this page
• Ratings
• Threaded Comments
• Post Views
• Feedburner Flare
• Breadcrumbs
• adSense

Then I went through the pages in my new theme and added in the code to add these functions one by one. I tested each one as went, because with “theme test drive” installed as admin I could view any page in the site with the new theme and see these changes as I went. After I added the code and uploaded the updated theme files to my site – I tested everything one last time. Looking through the pages the only other thing that I saw was in the sidebar(s) of my new theme the category pages weren’t listed, and in my current theme they are. I did a little shuffling of the sidebars, and then I set the theme live! So instantly when I enabled the theme for the first time, people saw a fully functional ready to go blog with nothing broken! I did all the testing and updating behind the scenes on my WordPress blog without anybody knowing it, and when I put the new theme live – voila, there is was! You can see my updated layout and new WordPress theme at Free Recipes Online by Kieli!

If this helps you or you have a question – be sure to comment now below!

Wordpress Makeover Tutorial

By Hacking WordPress or your theme, you can easily customize your WordPress blog. I’ll show you my hacks so you can get some ideas how to make your blog more “your own”.

You may have noticed recently that this blog underwent a bit of a makeover. Things not only look better on top, but under the hood things are running better than ever – with some of the best SEO I could muster! I’m going to show you some quick things you can do to hack your own WordPress theme into more of what you want.

Add a featured block to your homepage: I think every homepage should have a block with the featured areas of the site – the same way any store would have a flyer for the week or sales of the day. To do this you need to know some html and have a slight bit of graphics skill. I only do this on my homepage and I added this block by going to “Presentation -> Theme Editor -> Main Index Template”.

After these lines of code:

<div id="wrapper">
	<div id="content">

I added a div with by block of featured links like this:

<div id="featureblock">
<img src="/wp-content/images/featured-keyword-mistakes.gif" alt="featured keyword research mistakes" border="0">
<img src="/wp-content/images/featured-seo-mistakes.gif" alt="featured SEO mistakes" border="0"><br>
<img src="/wp-content/images/featured-wordpress-mistakes.gif" alt="featured wordpress mistakes" border="0">
<img src="/wp-content/images/featured-traffic-building-mistakes.gif" alt="featured traffic building mistakes" border="0"><br>
<img src="/wp-content/images/featured-monetization-mistakes.gif" alt="featured monetization mistakes" border="0">
<img src="/wp-content/images/featured-linkbuilding-mistakes.gif" alt="featured linkbuilding mistakes" border="0">
<img src="/wp-content/images/featured-series.gif" alt="featured article series" border="0">
<img src="/wp-content/images/featured-tracking-blog-mistakes.gif" alt="article series tracking your blog progress" border="0">
<img src="/wp-content/images/featured-monetize-mistakes.gif" alt="article series how to monetize your blog" border="0">
<img src="/wp-content/images/featured-bans-mistakes.gif" alt="watch me build a niche site" border="0">
</div>

If you’re wondering why that code only shows the links and text graphics and not the box and frame, it’s because I made it the background in my style.css like this:

#featureblock {
width: 495px;
height: 210px;
padding-left: 20px;
padding-top: 45px;
background: #FFF url('/wp-content/images/featured-crumple.jpg') no-repeat;
}

Hopefully that gives you some idea of how you can a featured block to your blog homepage.

Change your WordPress Theme’s Color: This was a really quick fix. I like the layout of my blog, and this theme (Prosense) is great too. I was just tired of brown, so I went into my themes images folder and found the 2 graphics that make up the background. I just took them into a graphics editor (Fireworks) and used the paintbucket to replace the colors. Then I re-uploaded them to the server and “voila” we have new blog colors!

Change your Theme’s Headings: By updating your style.css file in “Presentation -> Theme Editor -> style.css” you can quickly give your post and / or your sidebar headings a new look and feel. A heading or “H1″ (H2, H3, etc.) tag is an HTML tag that can be “styled”. It can have a border, a background color, a background image, and you can control the font face, bold, italic, link, link colors, and more. All WordPress blogs have the same bland plain heading tags – spice yours up! Your theme’s stylesheet may be a bit different, but I’m going to give you the code I wrote to change my style to get you started:

.post h2 {
	background: #FFC125 url('/wp-content/images/sharpie-star.gif') left no-repeat;
	border: 1px solid;
	border-color: #000000;
	padding-left: 25px;
}

If you don’t know HTML – or CSS stylesheets, I would recommend reading up over at W3Schools.com – they have some of the best (free) HTML and CSS tutorials on the web.

Give Your WordPress Categories Descriptions: I gave each and every one of my WordPress Categories a meaningful description to be used for the category page(s) meta description for search indexing purposes:

Why? I use the wpSEO plugin and it allows you to assign various options for the meta description field of any page in a WordPress site. By default WordPress category pages don’t have a meta description so the search crawler will pickup the words of the first post excerpt on the page. This causes “duplicate content” and can get you a google penalty. At best, every single category page you have is “wasted” in the sense that it will NOT get any good indexing in the search engines.

As you can see I’ve set mine to make the meta description tag for my WordPress category pages to be the “Category Description” I wrote by going to “Manage -> Categories” in my Dashboard and editing them one by one. These will get me a couple dozen more indexed pages in SERP’s!

Create Separate WordPress Category Template Theme Pages: This is a goal I set for myself when I wrote Better SEO and $$$ with WordPress Category Templates last month. At the time I only created a few of these category template pages and didn’t follow through with creating them for every category in my blog. I should have, but did it today when I updated all the category descriptions. Basically what you’re doing here is making a separate category template page for every WordPress category you have so you can write original content at the top of each page. By doing this you are making sure the page will be indexed well and you won’t get dinged by google for “duplicate content”.

This also gives you the opportunity to monetize certain categories in special ways (with special offers) before or after the excerpted posts, you could even make unique graphics for the top of each category page. The possibilities are endless!

WordPress Hacks of the past: These aren’t hacks as much as good WP plugins, but I’ve also modified my theme by adding things I felt were necessary. Like breadcrumbs on every page, post (count) views, post voting, “print this post”, and Feedburner “flare”. Oh – I almost forgot the most important thing – the “related posts”. To find out how to get any of these plugins just visit my WordPress Plugins Used page!

I hope this gives you some ideas for giving your own wordpress blog a makeover! If you happen to make changes, come back here and let us know what you did and what worked (and what didn’t!). Comments always help everyone by sharing even more information.

Has your blog or site been #1 in google? What keywords do you rank well for in SERP’s? Where your site stands today helps plan better search placement tomorrow!

This post is part of the Tracking Your Blog’s Progress series!

I came across a situation the other day where I was checking various keywords and how I ranked for them and I found that for one phrase I came up #1 on google:

I saw this a couple weeks ago – and at the time the page (I came up #1 for) was maybe 24 hours old. The fact that I made #1 for the keywords ‘bans setup’ is no big thing, that keyword combination gets very minimal search results anyway. What IS IMPORTANT is that I knew enough to check the status of my site in SERP’s in the first place.

If you’ve been reading my site lately you’ll see that the majority of the posts I’ve been writing all tie in together nicely. Like the last article in this series 5 Key Google Analytics talked about watching your traffic sources. I meant you should look for keywords and phrases that bring visitors to your site in search. My Keyword Research Cheat Sheet tells you how to find relevant keywords for your site. You want to combine these two activities a bit to not only make sure your keyword research is paying off, but also to build on strengths your site already has.

What Keywords Work Now

Unless your site is brand new, you are already getting some organic search engine traffic. Any decent web site statistics should give you the top keyword phrases people use as search keywords to find you. You could get these in google analytics, but I also like to watch my keywords in wordpress stats because you quickly see keywords from today and yesterday that were used. You might not like what you see here, or you might be surprised by the results. In any event, the results you get are one indicator of blog progress you need to take note of.

The search terms in the image above were taken from one of my tech sites in my WordPress dashboard using the WordPress stats plugin. That site has a wide variety of posts centering around gadgets, computer and techie type stuff. I was kind of surprised that these were the top keywords in the last 30 days, becuase these are the keyword that seem to be working for this site now. Then I decided to look at the top content in google analytics:

The top 10 pages in this site pretty much matches the top 10 keywords table. Also, on this site search engines account for 80% of the traffic. I was glad these keyword are working (at least something is), but “why” are they the top ones? Why are ‘unbuntu’ keyword phrases most used in searches to my site? Good question. I head to the homepage see what keywords I was using and lo and behold there is no meta description tag at all. Wow. I looked at a lot of other pages and it turns out that every page on my site has no meta description tag. That explains why so many posts I would have thought would be in the top 10 weren’t. It turns out the wpSEO (WordPress SEO) plugin I’m using didn’t have description turned on (big mistake on my part!). So I fixed it, turned them back on – and now turn my attention back to the keywords. The reason I want you to find out what keywords work on your blog is so you can build on them and their success (if possible), and to find out how much more keyword research you need to do to bring your blog or web site up to the level of success you desire.

Now I take my top keyword phrase “ubuntu firefox flash” and pop it in google to find out I’m the #1 result. I begin to check out the other ones like flash plugin for ubuntu (#1), firefox flash ubuntu (#1), ubuntu flash plugin (#3), and a few more and I’m #1 for all but one keyword set. It’s understandable why that one page got 17% of all my traffic in the last month.

Interpreting Keyword Data

So now to decide what to do with the information I just researched. Based on what I’ve learned I have some action items to take care of:

• The firefox flash page is a resource now, maybe I should feature it on the home page (with some other posts that were popular)
• Append the article with my best related posts and write a little about each in a synopsis paragraph at the end of this post
• Write more more ubuntu help articles to tie into this existing traffic
• look for other ways to monetize this page if possible
• work on specific “keyword campaigns” to build new high traffic pages for my top 10 spots

I’m more worried about that last point than all the others. While it would be nice to get some more traffic related to “ubuntu”, I’ve written a few gadget reviews and posts lately on that site that didn’t place in the top 10 at all. Having no descriptions on the pages didn’t help either, but now that’s fixed. I’m going to perform a few searches for keywords related to my last few posts to find out where I rank with those. For the keywords “wireless bluetooth usb” I’m on the first page in google. Not bad considering I’m competing with engadget, amazon, and geeks.com for top spots. The next one is “wireless hard drive review” where I come in #3. Wow, not bad out of 400,000 results. The next one is “ip cameras guide” and I’m #1 in google for that. Last with “network storage drives” I’m #1 on the second SERP. Based on these results alone I’m doing a great job at SEO. Based on my top URL’s and search terms these awesome google SERP pages aren’t working well at all.

Connecting the Keyword Dots

You can probably already see the handwriting on the wall. I went to Trellian’s free keyword discovery tool and typed in the keyword phrases I ranked well for in SERP’s and just take a look at what I found:

wireless bluetooth usb – 15 searches per month
wireless hard drive review – 0 searches per month
ip cameras guide – 0 searches per month
network storage drives – 0 searches per month

Ouch! I wrote some great articles that nobody will every read! Granted these posts have been read by many people from my existing traffic – but none of the four pages are getting any google traffic at all! I want YOU to LEARN from MY mistake! I came up with some good posts and (what I thought were) killer keyword combinations. I failed to take the time to come up with relevant keyword phrases for my posts that actually get lots of search traffic!

I’m trying to get you to think about every page and every post you write like an advertisement. Be sure to take the time to write relevant original content for your blog, but the title heading and first few sentences are like a classified advertisement in a newspaper. It needs to be catchy enough to make people want to read it, BUT if it’s not in the right category nobody will find it. Few if anyone will find your advertisement for a used car in the pets section. The heading and title keywords you use are that kind of categorization for google – much like the card index at your local library. If you want to get the most traffic for your blog you have to do a little research before you hit “publish”. I already told you how to make your previous posts profitable, and what I’m about to tell you will not only help with that effort, but you should be doing this for every single new post or page you create – if you want to maximize your efforts and drive more traffic to your site.

Beyond Linkbait: Creating High Traffic Posts

Crafting a good title and description laden with quality linkbait is one thing, but as I pointed out if nobody sees it – your time was wasted. I’m going to rework one of those failed pages right now to show you how to create a better title that will not only entice people to click but draw more traffic. There are many ways to do this with many tools, but right now my preference is the free keyword discovery tool at Trellian I spoke of earlier.

I’m going to rework this page. As you can see I’m #1 for the phrase “network storage drives” in google.

Using the keyword discovery tool I enter some related search terms that come to mind like “external hard drive”. It turns out that keyword phrase gets 13,335 searches per month. That’s a lot better than ZERO! I do some more searches and get network attached storage (714), network storage (623), storage area network (600) and network storage solution (65). I decided that the best term to target on this page is “network storage” so I changed the title, description, and key areas of the page to feature this keyword phrase. I’ll see in the coming weeks how well this actually worked to get search engine traffic to this page.

What you Should Now Do

Based on this article you should now:

1. Check your web site stats to see what keywords are working for you
2. Determine if you are successful or need new keyword campaigns to work on
3. Search for your top 10 keywords in google SERP’s to see where you rank
4. Search for keyword YOU WANT TO rank for in google SERP’s and see IF you rank
5. Find keyword phrases that get LOTS of searches per month
6. Write new posts (and rework old ones) to use THOSE keywords to bring maximum traffic!

Once you’ve tried this plan, please come back here and comment on whether you were successful or not!

To make money with BANS Build a Niche Store you need traffic. Why Pay Per Click (PPC) when content BRINGS YOU traffic?

This is installment #2 of Watch me build a BANS niche site from scratch! Today we’re going to start to get this BANS site ready for some traffic and research some keywords before editing store pages.

To all of you that have been patiently waiting for the next installment of my series Watch me Build a Niche Site from Scratch, I’m sorry it took about 10 days to get this out. Sometimes life (and accidents) intrude a bit into the business of blogging.

The potential of my new BANS niche site

I am very excited about this BANS niche store because I think that it has great potential. Since “Build a Niche Store” populates itself with all the pages it needs based on the eBay category ID you fed it, you could already have buches of pages pre-populated in your store right after setup. When I went in to my admin panel today the first thing on my mind was writing some content to populate the site. I knew I didn’t have any content pages except for the home page (yet), so I decided to check out “store pages”. Boy was I shocked!

First of all, BANS has pre-populated for me every single sub-category under “Cell Phones & PDA’s” – so to my amazement there are already over 3,000 “store pages”. Each one of these pages is pre-populated with the latest eBay auctions, but there is no content or text on any of the pages. That would probably explain why after 10 days there are only 2 pages indexed by google out of those 3,000.

So, if I want to drive traffic to my site I need good content and keyword to bring in organic search results. Otherwise the only way to make money with this site would be to pay for clicks in an Adwords campaign, and (my) goal is to bring in traffic for free without spending any advertising dollars. I realize that I need many more store pages indexed (but not all 3,000). Taking the highest level category pages and writing better descriptions and titles would fix this problem. I also want to highlight some products on the home page, and I need to write some regular content pages with tips, tricks, reviews – I have to decide what kind of content might work best in this site.

Like I talk about in my Keyword Research Cheat Sheet – you need to know what your best keywords are before you even write your first shred of content. I could used some of the best paid tools for this, but I think that for this project I’m going to show you (first) how to do free keyword research in case you absolutely have no money to work with.

Basic Keyword Discovery Research

I’m going to start with the Trellian free Keyword Discovery tool, which helps you find not only search terms – but how many people are searching for them. I typed in the keyword phrase “used cell phone”, and these were the results.

I’m pretty pleased with the results, and this image shows most of the results I got back that get more than 100 searches per month. Nearly all these have some kind of variation on “used cell phone”, which is of course the name of my domain (w00t!), and the additional keywords all seem to coincide with many of the store pages pre-populated with eBay auctions. Right away I now know that I need to key in on getting content on those pages. I copy and paste all these keyword into a text file so I can use them later on. Now, I’m going to put some more variations of this through the keyword tool to see if I get any more great keyword suggestions. I try things like cell auctions (138), new cell phone (2,555), cell phone no contract (810), cell phone eBay (432), cell phone charger (2,133), cell phone battery (6,503), cell phone ringtone (6,930), cell phone skin (174), cell phone help (101), cell phone repair (2,332), cell phone bling (867), cell phone rebate (474), cell phone discount (453), cell phone signal (1,167), cell phone antenna (2,444).

I could have stopped after that very first search and just stuck with those used cell phone phrases. But by spending an additional 20 minutes brainstorming other things people might search for related to cell phones I dug out some even better keywords to use throughout the site. Not only do I have great keywords for the home and category store pages, I have some ideas for tips, reviews, and articles now as well. I had no idea that many people searched for batteries, antennas, or chargers (good news for me!!).

Other Keyword Suggestions

Now moving on, I used the goRank ontology tool to get some fresh related words to see if I’ve missed something obvious. The words I’m going to write down (after I searched on ‘used cell phone’) are sale, surplus, pre-owned, wireless, cellular, and mobile. All great suggestions.

How to find the competition for my BANS site

Now I use the google Adwords external Keyword tool for the same search. Why? Because they show little bar graphs of your “competition” for each suggest keyword. Competition looks pretty fierce for “used cell phone”, “used cell phones”, and “used cellular phones”. It’s funny though – with this free tool you can detect areas that would be good concentrate on, like where you have some search volume but almost no competition. The ones that stick out for me that are like this are “used cell phone sale”, “used cell phone nextel”, “unlocked used cell phone” – and there are tons of others. I am very pleased with the results of the Adwords tool since I have specific keyword phrases I want to work on right away. I write them all down in my keyword text file under the heading “low and no competition adwords keyword phrases”.

This is the list I saved:

buy used cell phone
second hand cell phone
used cell phone gsm
samsung used cell phone
used cell phone sale
used cell phone nextel
unlocked used cell phone
used sell phone
used cell phone t mobile
used cell phone wholesale
alltell used cell phone
used cell phone tmobile
used cell phone price
used cell phone lg
used cell phone pda
used cell phone stores
used cell phone contract
used cell phone batteries
used cell phone charger
cell phone resale
preowned cell phone
used cel phone
cell phone forsale
used alltell phone
used unlocked phone
pre owned cell phone
used tmobile phone
polyphonic cell phone
computer cell phone
99 cell phone
cases cell phone

I’m going to compete head to head in the keyword areas that have very high competition, but why not take as much as the “low hanging fruit” as possible? All this keywords seem to have no competition, so I’m going to key in on them as well to try and get first page google results.

Another great way to find your competition quickly is by using the free Keyword Spy tool. Just input some keywords and they show you your top 10 competitors web site URL’s. I used of course “used cell phone” for my search. The difference between just using google to do this search and using Keyword Spy is that here they tell you how many total keyword a web site has, and if you click on any one you can see what top 10 keywords they are actually using. Click on any of those keywords and you can perform a new search to see the top 10 for it. If you subscribe you can get more than the top 10 – which may be very helpful to me in the future, but for today’s purposes Keyword Spy showed me that there are a TON of keywords in my niche, but most of the competition isn’t using any of them very well (and using the hell out of Adwords).

Finding and Researching Trends for BANS

Stopping by google trends I compare new and used cell phone, and it looks like new is actually getting more search activity than used. This is good to know, because it means that I need to stress new (as well as used) throughout my BANS site.

I also did a few other comparisons in google trends like “sprint, nextel”, and “t-mobile, verizon”, to see if it gave my any additional ideas.

The Keyword Forecast Tool at adCenter labs shows that searches for “used cell phone” should only go up, and surprisingly the age group is evenly split from 18-50, BUT the demographic doing the searches is 65% Female and only 35% Male! Wow, this is very, very surprising news to me, and tells me that after I get some content in this site I need to do some real hard thinking about how to make sure my site caters to women.

I’ve done sales for years (since I first started working) and one of the things you learn is that men buy impulsively and women purchase emotionally. You can actually design a site so it caters to one type of buyer more than another – which is in fact where the reviews and content pages will make a distinct difference in this site.

Oh – and a quick cursory check of the eBay Pulse shows the iPhone as the number one most searched term. Looks like I’d better have some special pages just for that little monster.

Editing the Top 4 Most Important BANS Store Pages Right Now

It took me about an hour to do all that research and now I’m armed with some pretty good keywords, it’s time to edit some store pages. With over 3,000 store pages there’s only so much I can do each day – and even looking at my home page of Used Cell Phones out of the top 6 Store Navigation pages (on the left) The only one I care about today is “Cell Phones” and the 4 child pages directly under it.

I’d been tipped off by Alan over at Affiliate Confession when I initiall set this up that two of these pages gave a 404 error. They were “Phones w/o Service Contracts” and “Phones w/Service Contracts”. They didn’t work because they had a “/” in the name and bans made that part of the URL, and the slash makes the browser think that’s a new directory – so the page can’t be found and breaks.

All you have to do is edit that page and remove the slash from the “File Name”. That’s “how to fix BANS page with a forward flash filename”. While that fix makes the page work – the more important thing is that you can edit both the page title name and the filename (which becomes the URL) to whatever you want. Let me repeat that “your BANS filename can be ANYTHING you want regardless of what it was named when imported form an eBay category ID“! Got that? That list of keywords will come in really handy right now!

After looking back through the text file of golden keywords I created, I think that the best keyword phrase for this page is “cell phone no contract”. It gets 810 searches per month. Remember when you make these edits that you want the phrase to be exactly like you found it when you did the research if possible. Any slight changes might make a dramatic difference. While “cell phone no contract” got 810 searches, “no contract cell phone” only got 633, and “cell phone with no contract” only got 48!! You could reduce the effectiveness of this phrase to 95% just by adding in the word “with”! There are ways around this in page text (by using italics, bold, and quotes), but in a page title or filename it’s best to just stick with the exact way you found it.

Before I save this updated BANS store page I’m going to title (heading), description, and content to make it actually indexable by the google spider.

You can see I used the same title (heading) as I did filename html title name earlier. I didn’t have to, but I wanted to so that keyword combination would be even stronger. Most SEO’s would agree that keyword (meta tags) are useless nowadays – but I add a few anyway. The description (which becomes the description in your search listing in google) I crafted to not only entice someone to click, but also used my golden keywords for this page yet again. Notice I kept my description under 30 words (and my title heading under 8 words). Then I wrote 2 paragraphs or original quality content. I can come back and add more to this page in the future, but that should be enough to get it indexed right now – there’s lots more to do today elsewhere!

So this is what we have, our new page is now updated in navigation as you can see to “cell phone no contract” and when you click on it the page has our updated 2 paragraphs of text. The new description is in the HTML meta tag code – this page is now SEO’d and ready to go! The actual work took about 10 minutes, and most of that was thinking of what to write for the 2 paragraphs of original content. Now I’m going to go back through and edit the other high level pages in this category the exact same way I did this one!

What I accomplished on my BANS site today

• I did Keyword Research (for free)
• I researched Trends for my Niche (for free)
• I edited my 4 most important pages using SEO and original content for better search engine placement

In the next installment we’re going to beef up the homepage and make it look more professional, we’ll start monetizing this BANS site in other ways, and we’re start the initial stages of link and traffic building for this BANS site!

If you’re reading this page to try and figure out is Build a Niche Site for you or not – please consider buying BANS through my affiliate link. I make a small commission, which would help defray some of my time and expense for putting together this BANS tutorial (and future BANS success articles) for you! I purchased my copy through an affiliate link in gratitude to the blogger who talked of his success with this niche building site script.

Now you can read Installment #3: BANS Makes Money with NO CONTENT!. Also – if BANS isn’t for you, please consider reading How to earn money using Affiliate eBay WordPress Plugin BAYRss. With BANS you build content basically around eBay auctions, but with BAYRss you place eBay auctions in your posts and pages. Check it out, I use (and make money) with both BANS and BayRSS!

As always – if you have any thing to add that would make this article better (or a question), please comment now below, or Contact Me!

You can make money with Adsense on any blog or web site. It doesn’t matter what you niche is – or what you’ve been told before…

I’m tired of people saying either you can’t make money with Adsense, or you can’t make money ‘in this niche’ (blogging help, making money online) with Adsense. Google Adsense can make you money on any web site or blog in any niche passively and easily. How much money depends on your niche and if you’ve setup your blog properly.

I started thinking about this post from a comment I received yesterday on this page. Hock, of Marketing Tools Review writes:

I saw your message on Entrecard and decided to check out your blog. The AdSense blocks really detract from your actual content. Most of the folks who are serious about setting up a blog in this space will generally not put AdSense on. Think about it, your target audience is someone who probably knows and uses AdSense and chances of them clicking on the ads are very low.

I’m guessing that you would do better with other forms of monetization on this type of blog.

Hock has a good criticism, because I think a lot of bloggers feel this way. I don’t feel this way though, and I’m ready to tell you why. First – if you’ve been reading my post you know I recently wrote about how to make (more) money with adsense. That post was for all the people that say they can’t make money with Adsense. At the end I key in on a point that I learned a few years back about leaving money on the table. This was a phrase I first heard from Joel Comm a few years back. He’s an adsense expert that feels that he shouldn’t be leaving small amounts of money laying around if he can collect them – because it adds up! Day after day, week after week, month after month – it all adds up!

Think about this in perspective for a moment. What stage is your blog at? A hundred visitors a day (if that)? Five Hundred? A thousand? When do you think you should be making money? How much money will be you making? I am a firm believer in monetizing your blog from day one. I am also living proof that you can make money from day one on a blog that only gets 20-30 visits per day. I’ve had several blogs with that kind of traffic (they get more now) that made $1-2 per day from adsense alone.

I think that Adsense and be profitable as well as an indicator. “Use Adsense so your bounce rate doesn’t hit you on the ass on the way out the door, but instead drops a few coins in your jar.” Everyone has a “bounce rate”. I talk about bounce rate in 5 Key Google Analytics to Watch. Your bounce rate is the percentage of people that visit your site and rapidly leave. Because of the variety of ways people can visit your blog (and find you in search) everyone has a bounce rate. It’s a google analytic “to watch” because you surely don’t want nearly everyone that comes to your blog rapidly leaving. What good are 500 unique visitors a day if 90% of them quickly leave because you didn’t have the content they wanted? In that article I said (in my experience with many blogs and sites) that “I think (a bounce rate of) 90% and up is pretty bad, 60-90% is to be expected once you get 25+ quality posts, 40-60% is excellent, and under 40% is amazing!“

Let me give you a game plan here…

1. You should be using google analytics and you should check your bounce rate at least once per week for an active blog.
2. Take steps to reduce your bounce rate:
   • List recent and popular posts in your sidebar
   • Have a working prominent search box
   • Have both a contact form and an about page
   • Offer “related posts” on every page
   • Link similar and complementary posts and categories on every page
3. Once you’ve done everything you can to keep them on your site monetize the bounce rate you can’t control!

There always seems to be some purist or lone holdout who says to my argument – “that’s unprofessional”, or “it detracts from your content”, or “there’s better ways to monetize a site like this…” – you get the picture. I say to you – first of all I am not an A-List blogger (yet) so I’m not worried about it ruining my “image”. I can certainly make more money (at a time) by other means on this blog – but I’m not making any money now from bounced traffic anyway! In other words – Adsense is setup on this blog (and most of my other ones) to make money from visitors who WERE LEAVING ANYWAY!.

What kind of person are you? Are you a saver or a spendthrift? Have you seen these commercials where they offer to “round up” your purchases on your VISA card and deposit the change from every transaction to a savings account in your name? I knew a woman once who did this (rounded up every purchase in her checkbook register) and in one year she saved $5,000! If you passed the same table every day and it had loose change that would be gone the next day – would you take it? Don’t leave money on the table – it could be your biggest blogging mistake..!

If you have a question or something to add to this lively debate, please comment now!

Ever wished you could get back a previous version of a web page? You can – quickly using google cache!

I was hacking my WordPress comments.php file the other day and changes that I made didn’t work. When I decided to back them out I realized I made too many to remove by hand – so I used a version I had on my local PC. I thought it was the latest version. It turns out that the last time that I made changes I did it in through the theme editor in WordPress, so my local version was really old.

Last Month I wrote about creating Rockstar Comments in WordPress in 12 Steps. When I wrote that article I modified my comments.php file and placed a new block at the top of the Comment form showing readers that we reward comments. Now those changes are gone!

I backup my site and I could dig up my previous version from a backup – but there’s an easier (and quicker) way. This has worked for me before when I made a change and needed to get back the previous version within a week. With this method you can “restore a blog page” yourself!

First you need the full URL of your page. Then paste it in google. When the search result comes up just click on “cached” (which I have highlighted in red below):

When I clicked on it the google cache says that the page it’s showing me is from February 4th (and today is the 9th). Perfect!

When I scoll down the page I find the block of text that I need to recover. I take my mouse and highlight it, and then right-click the mouse and choose “view selection source” (you can only do this in Firefox).

Once you do that just what you highlighted will he highlighted in the html code for you like this:

I copied the div I had lost and pasted it back into my comments.php (on my local PC of course) and then made the changes in WordPress. I have successfully recovered my page using google cache! This method also works if you somehow delete a page and don’t have it at all – google cache to the rescue! It’s not nearly as specific, but if you want to go back in time months or years You can always check out the Wayback machine at the Internet Archive! My blogging mistake this time was not keeping a local backup copy of all my WordPress theme files! Editing them in WordPress using the theme editor is handy, but overwrites the previous copy every time.

Have a story about losing a page, post or content? Have a question? Please, comment now!

Learn how to update previous posts to get more traffic and make more money than ever before! Make them more findable in search and get them re-indexed by the search crawlers for more visitors!

Whether you use WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, PostNuke, or even Blogger to manage your site – we all have “previous posts”. The longer you have your blog and the more posts you write – the farther down that old content gets buried. Yesterday’s post on how to earn more money with adsense talked about how to attract the highest paying adsense ads by using good keywords. You will need to have good keywords on hand before you rework your previous posts. You might want to visit my new Keyword Research Cheat Sheet before proceeding any further.

If you’re ready to go I’m going to rework one of my posts for you right now as an example so you can see how to make your previous posts more profitable. I’m going to use a post that I wrote at the beginning of December: 30 Days of the Highest Pay Per Click of the Year. In most blogging software the title you write becomes the permalink or “pretty url” path. The title “30 days of the highest pay per click per year” becomes “/2007/12/05/30-days-of-the-highest-pay-per-click-of-the-year”. In that adsense article I told you about how important titles were. I pasted the URL of that page into google so you could see the result:

See my post title became the linked title in the google result? This was the original first paragraph of that page:

If you have a blog, web site, online storefront, e-commerce site, forum, or any type of online affiliation that has to do with advertising – there is not a day to waste! This is already the 5th day of December, which only leaves 26 more days left in this month!

See how in the google search result the description for that page is only the first 32 words (or the first sentence)? I did a pretty poor job naming this page, and the description isn’t very good. But in just a minute or two I can change all that and give this page new life!

The two most important things about any page, post, or article are what becomes the title and the description, because for most sites the greater percentage of visitors will come from search. Your search result is an advertisement. Do you understand what I just said? Think about it…your search result is to your web site what a yellow pages ad is to any brick and mortar business. If you need a new dentist you go to the phonebook (or online phonebook if you’re like me!). What makes you call one dentist over another? Usually the one with the most information up front gets your call – don’t they? A plain old name and number would probably get less calls than a nice ad that says “free x-rays and first consultation” wouldn’t it?

You need to view your post title and first paragraph (especially the first 30-odd words) as an advertisement! The thing that’s tricky is that not only is the search result an ad enticing someone to click – but it serves a dual purpose. You must pepper your title and first 30-odd word description with important keywords. This helps google decide how relevant you are to incoming searches. If you do a poor job of using relevant keywords in your title and introduction sentence YOU WILL COME UP POORLY IN SEARCH RESULTS!

*Update* – after I wrote this post I read an article by Carrie Hill entitled “HTML title tag defines your SEO strategy that completely illustrates everything I just taught you. You should read it.

Now that you understand how important the title and first sentence are – let’s go about changing them on my example page! I use WordPress – but you can do this in whatever blogging software you use too. In WordPress the Title you enter for a post or page becomes the URL in the permalink and this is called the slug.

The slug is created automatically in WordPress from the title you enter when the post is published (like in Drupal, Blogger, etc.). You certainly don’t want to change this at all – because your page is already indexed by search engines, people have bookmarked it, etc. Changing the “slug” would change the actual URL of the page and visitor’s that didn’t know the new URL would start getting 404 errors. The URL stays the same – but there’s no reason you can’t go back and edit your post and change the title. Won’t changing the title change the slug or the URL? No, that’s created from the title the first time you publish the article. If you go back and edit the post and update the title the URL will remain the same.

So what does this mean? It means that you can essentially “edit your own search engine listing” by changing your title. Once your page is re-indexed by the search engine it will have your new title. You can modify the description too by changing the first sentence or first 30-odd words on your page.

My previous title “30 days of the highest Pay Per Click of the year” doesn’t have good keywords and it has 11 words in all. Over time (especially with this blog) I’ve learned that the best post titles are about 6 words or less – and they get the point across quickly. That post was about the fact that in December people pay more for keywords (in google AdWords) than any other time of the year. So in turn, the Adsense ads that are on your site are worth more money and you’re going to get paid more per click than any other month of the year. Now that you know that the title makes sense, but before I explained it you were probably wondering. I’m going to rename this page “December Adsense Pays More”. It’s got good keywords and it says it all in just four words.

Now we’re going to work on the description.

The first sentence of the page used to be:

“If you have a blog, web site, online storefront, e-commerce forum, or any type of affiliation that has to do with advertising – there is not day waste!“

I’m going to change it to:

“December Adsense pays more per click, learn how to PREPARE TO MAKE MORE MONEY during this time of year than all the other months combined!“

In two easy steps I have:

• Modified my search result title
• Modified my search result description
• Gotten my page re-indexed in search
• Re-pinged the blog engines with my upated page
• Attracted better adsense ads with better keywords
• Position my page for better search placement

Now doing this only took a few minutes, but sometimes while you’re in there (looking at an old post) you might also want to think about giving the page a quick once-over to determine if there isn’t something you couldn’t quickly change to make it better.

Quick Post Updates to Consider

Monetize better: Do you have something that you could add to better monetize this page? An affiliate product to recommend? Link to your hosting company? An amazon book? A new product from a Commission Junction vendor or eBay?

Link to other posts: All the best blogs I read recommend others posts throughout. Just like this post, in the beginning I told you that you would need some good keywords, and I linked to a page that shows you how to get them. You are your best advocate – don’t be throwing opportunities to keep people on your site away!

Add an Update paragraph: How many times have you read a post about something and wondered “how are they doing with that now?” Especially posts that tell how much money someone has made or how much they like a certain product or feature. Updates can make all the difference in the world making old content new again!

Now that I’ve taught you how to make your previous posts more profitable what are you going to do about it? Depending on the amount of content you have – this is probably something that you should work at every day. Organize yourself by setting both an amount of posts to edit and an exact time to get it done every day. Put it on your calendar or set an alarm everyday! My biggest blogging mistake was not working on this earlier – because I have a lot of web sites and (now) a ton of content!!

If you have a question or comments please comment now! Also – if this method works for you, I expect you to come back to this page and comment about it so everyone can benefit!