This is what she had to say:

Hello Everyone,

This is Anu back again with an update a week into the internship.
It has been quite a week – busy and informative.

Phase 1 was all about learning how to set up Wordpress properly, get it indexed and secure the site. Bill’s post on Phase 1 is detailed and I am not going to bore you by repeating everything.

What I would like to share with you is that While I knew how to set up Wordpress, set the permalink correctly, add the necessary plugins, I have always lacked the knowledge to secure the site properly and strongly. I knew enough to delete admin as user in Wordpress, set a strong password, change it frequently and even move the .htacess file. However,I never knew how to modify the .htaccess file to block hackers, trojans and viruses or set up the robots.txt file correctly. I also never knew about some of the security plugins and how to set them up correctly.

There is lot of information out there online but not much about securing your site well, how to do it and most importantly, why. I have normally pulled bits and pieces of info from all over but nothing comprehensive. JT has laid all that out on the internship site in a organized fashion. He was always available to answers questions or just to help. Oh, I did need his help …. spent a few frustarting hours getting locked out of Wordpress because of a plugin conflict and had to send out an SOS email. :). If you have not read JT’s security guide, go back and read it. There is tons of valuable information.

It has been a long week but at the end of it, have gained much knowledge that I did not have before.
I am now 3 days into Phase 2 – Keyword research and analysis etc but will leave that for another post.

- Anu

I’m using my interns to create an entire Online Marketing Course using the exact same principles and techniques I use with small business and corporate clients every day. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, signup to my email list using the form below. I’m not going to spam you with crazy “magic bullet” and “google cash” offers. I will only send you email every now and again about techniques and products I actually use (there’s a small handful), and later this year my Online Marketing Course when it’s available.

Here’s LaShae talking about what she’s learned in Phase 2:

LaShae again, with an update on Phase 2 of the intern program.

In Phase 1 I talked about learning how to set-up a wordpress site so it readily ranks in the search engines and hopefully gets on the first page of the SERPS, so people find you. I also talked about how to make sure your Wordpress sites were secure, so when the search engines do begin ranking you and you’re getting traffic, your site loads quickly and is available.

So how do you get ranked on the first page of search results by the different search engines?

That is what Phase 2 – Competitive Analysis helps uncover.

The first thing to determine is which keyword phrase or phrases you want to rank for in the search engines. JT walks through the process in How to SEO. I used the same basic concept to locate 3 specific keyword phrases to target on my intern site.

Finding the keyword phrases for my site was decidedly more complicated due to the competitive nature of the CPA (Click Per Action) market I was entering.

So JT and I both located 3 keyword phrases each. After he put the phrases through the paces using a paid SEO tool (we’ll reveal later), he determined that our phrases would be extremely hard to rank for in the search engines. He then went on to locate 3 other keyword phrases using the same paid tool.

After the keyword phrases were decided upon, I began the full competitive analysis.

First, I completed an SEO competitive analysis, looking at rank on the first page of google search results, google pagerank, alexa ranking, backlinks, title, description, url and heading for each of the competitors on the first page of search results for each of the 3 keyword phrases.

There are tools, both paid and free, that can do this for you in an instant, but knowing how to do it manually is helpful. It provided me with information I would never get from a tool. It gave me an opportunity to view each of the pages in my browser and poke around on them looking at site design, layout, useability, appropriateness related to the keyword phrases, as well as the level of interaction and personality of the site.

Next I did even more competitive analysis this time for traffic statistics using free services online to learn how and where visitors were most likely coming to the site from and where they were going after leaving the site. I also looked at the demographics of the traffic – age range, income levels and education levels.

Using yet another free service, I learned that many of the competitors were using adwords to get traffic to their sites. And I learned whether they offered advertising directly on their sites and what the general ad sizes were on the sites.

Still, even with all this information, what did it mean for my assigned site?

Honestly not a whole lot, at first.

Initially it felt like information overload. And it was in many ways. However, without doing the competitor analysis, I might have spent months trying to find a way to get rankings and traffic in a niche that relies heavily on more than just SEO for traffic and conversions.

As it turns out, this niche is definitly suited to a long term plan far outside the scope of the 5 month intern program.

This sounds like a lot of time and energy to take researching. And it’s worth it to spend the time and energy up front, before spending any money, to figure out what the odds of ranking in the search engines are for your keywords.

Learning how to do both the data gathering and how to interpret the data is priceless and will certainly help me to use any paid tool I chose to use in the future.

What I know now about the CPA market is that it will take a year or more to unseat and outrank most of the sites in the top 10 on the search results pages, using an SEO strategy. That’s not unusual in the case of competitive and aggressive niches. It’s also not useful in meeting the objectives JT has set for the intern program.

It’s okay to change direction and it’s easier to do before money and months and months of time have been invested.

I specifically chose a market with lots of competition because I knew it would get JT to go deeper into his process and that means we all win in the end.

I learned how to chose appropriate keyword phrases to target. How to determine whether those keyword phrases are good or bad targets based on what other sites have done to target the same phrases. I learned how to determine the general source of competitors traffic and general demographic information about the visitors coming to their sites. I know how to do all this using free services to gather data. I also have a better understanding of how to interpret that data. The data doesn’t look or feel as overwhelming as it did before.

I’d say all in all Phase 2 is the most frustrating simply because it determines the strategy you’ll use for your site. And reading the data accurately truly determines if your strategy is destined for failure or success.

Since the internship is teaching interns how to make new sites profitable using SEO strategies, by the time you’re reading this I’ll have chosen another site to work on.

It will still be competitive enough to take JT deep into his mental knowledge databanks, while meeting the time constraints and strategy objectives of the intern program.

Stay tuned for the next update to see what happens.

LaShae talked about using different tools and methods for research, and one of the purposes for my intern program is document my 4 Phase program for success so later in 2010 I can make it available for anyone that wants to learn. If you’ve read any of my hundreds of posts on this site, you know my penchant not only for detail, but for complete and unabashed honest. I’m not one of those crazy IM gurus writing a 16 page emotional sales letter trying to hype and sell you on my “latest greatest” thing.

I’m using my interns to create an entire Online Marketing Course using the exact same principles and techniques I use with small business and corporate clients every day. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, signup to my email list using the form below. I’m not going to spam you with crazy “magic bullet” and “google cash” offers. I will only send you email every now and again about techniques and products I actually use (there’s a small handful), and later this year my Online Marketing Course when it’s available.

Read my Guide to Article Directory Promotion to learn more about the benefits of article submission and more about Ezine Articles.

14 HAHD Published Posts

Article #100: eBay Quality Click Pricing Model: Good or Bad?

Article #99: Free Ways to Build More Backlinks

Article #98: Become a Blogging Good Samaritan

Article #97: How to Create a Checklist for Switching Themes

Article #96: What Did I do to Make Money today?

Article #95: The Importance of Pillar Articles

Article #94: HTC Hero Android Cell Phone Review

Article #93: Samsung BD P3600 Review

Article #92: No Web Site or Blog Should Be Without a Contact Form

Article #91: How to Build High Quality Backlinks by Guest Blogging

Article #90: 9 More Ways to get Juice from Blog Comments

Article #89: Change Change a Theme Change Search Engine Positions

Article #88: Can Bing Bring Your Web Site Back from the Dead?

Article #87: Does Google Hate Datafeedr Wordpress Affiliate Stores?

Article #86: How to Build Your Own Authority Page

Article #85: 15 Ways to Save Water and Conserver Energy

Article #84: Polybutylene Piping or Blue Poly Problems

A little about me. My name is Anu. Home is in a quiet neighborhood in the Northern Virginia suburbs of the DC Metro area. I am in my early forties and have two children. The oldest is 21. He finished college and joined the army and is now in Afghanistan. The younger one is 13 and in middle school.

Grew up in tropical India in a coastal city in the south and completed my education there with Masters’ in English Literature, HR Management and Application Development. I am a Management Consultant by profession and run my own consulting company.  We do all manners of projects that are HR related from the Fortune 500s to midsized companies.  I lived the consulting lifestyle with the long hours and constant travel until about the beginning of 2008. I decided I wanted a different lifestyle, one that would let me work from home and spend time with family. Since then I have taken a break from real work, one where I get dressed, get into a car and drive miles to sit down at client place and open up my laptop to work or attend meetings. I have spent the past couple years exploring options, considering a complete career change, one that would let me work from home.
Yes, my work is interesting and the money is very good. However I have done this for nearly 20 years and it is no longer the driving passion it once was. I would eventually like to get away from Management Consulting and make a full time income from my various blogs. (Wouldn’t we all? ;)

I have been exploring internet marketing and blogging now since 2007.  I am fascinated with the amount of knowledge that is out there. Reading is a passion, an obsession if you will and to me the internet appears to be this vast library of books. There are all these really wonderful blogs that are both informative and entertaining. What really surprises me is that people are making good money on the internet. I was raised with the notion that one has to excel at education to be able to have a profession that helps you make good money. The internet explosion and the successful bloggers that I have read about dispel that myth soundly.

Everything I know about internet marketing and blogging I learnt by surfing, reading and from forums. I love reading, writing, cooking, eco living and blogging and hope to combine my interests and begin a new career online. Of course, I will still have to pay the bills and keep the home fires burning, so I need to be successful at this or get back to being away from home 5 days a week.

The internship came along at the right moment. It interested me for various reasons. While I know how to install WordPress, tweak themes and plugins, write some PHP code and launch a good looking blog, I never really learnt or know well how to monetize. Additionally, all of this knowledge came from 3 plus years and hundreds of hours of surfing, reading dozens of books on the subject and breaking down any number of blogs and themes and rebuilding them again. I also know there is a lot more to learn in other areas as well before I can be successful. When I emailed JT a few days ago after stumbling on his blog, it was with the hope that I would be able to reduce this long curve and gain knowledge faster and have the opportunity to learn from someone who is successful at it.

Another thing that attracted me to this internship was JT’s obvious willingness to take on interns and give generously of his time. I have not seen much of that in my surfing and exploring online.

To everyone that is reading this, Good Luck with your own online journeys! Come back and visit, I will be posting updates regularly.
Cheers, Anu

You can track all her activities on the main Online Marketing Internships page.

Having said all that, I usually can’t get away with less than 12-18 plugins installed per site. My main site has almost 3 dozen+ plugins installed at any given time. I’m going to give you some additional plugins that can really help you organize and plan and maintain your blog, just realize your mileage may vary – and only install the ones you think you will REALLY use. Don’t be the guy that installs everything just to check it out, and then just leaves them all installed. Wordpress itself only has 13 database tables on a default install. Sometimes plugins create their own database tables for their options and data. I once had a client that had 48 database tables for his wordpress site because of all the plugin he installed over the years, half of which he was no longer using.

Backend Plugins

Broken Link Checker: I don’t use this in all my sites, but over time links get broken and this plugin can help. It monitors when people click on links going outside your site that are broken, and broken images. You get notified in the dashboard when you have a broken link. If nothing more, this plugin is handy because if you have affiliate links anywhere on your site and they break, this plugin will tell you the next time you login to the dashboard.

Pending Review: If you have people writing and submitting content for your review, or if you’re scheduling posts for your review later – this will give you a list in the dashboard.

Dashboard Scheduled Posts: This plugin lists your scheduled posts, great if you’re using WP Robot or datafeedr to stack up posts for you to rewrite and publish. I believe the current 2.9 WP dashboard shows you recent drafts, I don’t know how that compares to this.

Scheduled Posts Calendar: Maybe you have posts scheduled for the month and you’re more of a visual person. This plugin provides a calendar and shows all of your scheduled posts throughout the month.

Cross Linker: Cross Linker is a great plugin because it boost your blog “inlinks” automatically. Let’s say you are selling an ebook with a custom workout. Add the keyword “workout” in crosslinker and the page you want it to go to on your site. Then every time you use the word “workout” in a post it will automatically link your landing page. You just give the plugin a list of words and pages you want it to cross link, and it will do all the work for you.

Go Codes: Need to add an affiliate link, and you want to track how many times people click on it and you don’t want everyone to see your crazy referral code and URL? Ever wonder how everyone else is doing it? Go Codes! Enter what you want the redirect to be, and what the affiliate URL is, and whether you want it tracked or not and voila! you get site.com/go/link!

Layout Plugins

Privacy Page: Honestly you really don’t need a plugin for this – you could (and should) create this page on your own. Try the plugin, see what it generates, and then copy the text and make your own privacy page, and deactivate and remove the plugin, lol. Why do you need a privacy page? Adsense, eBay, and nearly every affiliate program out there requires that your have one to promote their products.

Breadcrumb NavXT: I’ve been creating and maintaining web sites for 15 years, and I still don’t understand why Wordpress and most modern CMS system don’t have better navigation. If google isn’t a clue, EVERY SINGLE PAGE on your web site should have what we call “breadcrumbs” at the top. It gives visitors a way “home” at all times and it shows where they are in your site (if you have multiple levels or sub-pages). Users expect that. The biggest sites have it – why shouldn’t you? There is NOTHING wrong with having redundant navigation in your header, sidebars, footer, and breadcrumbs – so long as it doesn’t clutter your site and make it more confusing.

WP PageNavi: The last thing your blog needs is to have those nasty “previous” and “next” post links on your homepage and single post pages. Lester Chan’s WP PageNavi plugin adds a bottom page navigation more like google’s. This doesn’t work automatically – you have to edit your wordpress home or index.php and single.php theme files on your own.

Subscribe to Comments: If you haven’t already, install and activate the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin. When I comment on a site if I can’t “subscribe” to any replies to my comment, I just get really annoyed.

Customizing Your Theme

One thing that many wordpress web site owners don’t do is much more than create blog posts or an about page. I’ve written articles about the main things you should understand about your Wordpress site(s) and customizing or creating main theme pages. I advise you start here first: Hacking Wordpress Template Files

And then work your way through these:

Fixing your search results page: Custom Search Results Page and Template
Fixing your 404 Error page: Create a Custom 404 Error Page
Fixing your navigation: 10 Ways to improve your navigation
Fixing Categories: 9 things you can do with Categories
Fixing Tags: Hacking Wordpress Tags and Hacking tag pages
Fixing your comments: Rock Star Comments in Wordpress in 12 Steps

Of course when you submit the articles it can take 3-5 days to get approved, and this challenge started on Jan 11th, but so far I only have 5 articles actually published – but more are pending review.

Here are the ones that have been published so far:

Article #100: eBay Quality Click Pricing Model: Good or Bad?

Article #99: Free Ways to Build More Backlinks

Article #98: Become a Blogging Good Samaritan

Article #97: How to Create a Checklist for Switching Themes

Article #96: What Did I do to Make Money today?

If you’re interested in taking part – it’s still not too late! Read my Original post about the HAHD challenge. Another great reference is my Guide to Article Marketing. Get writing!

Here are the articles I’ve written to date that have been published for the HAHD challenge:

Article #100: eBay Quality Click Pricing Model: Good or Bad?

Article #99: Free Ways to Build More Backlinks

If you’re interested in taking part – it’s still not too late! Read my Original post about the HAHD challenge. Another great reference is my Guide to Article Marketing. Get writing!

Article marketing can generate massive amounts of authority and backlinks for your web site or blog. You can get more exposure, more traffic, and this is something you can do for FREE! I have a story I often tell about the largest diet affiliate program on Clickbank. Out of $12 million dollars paid out in the last year to affiliates, 95% of the commissions were paid to less than a few dozen people (from thousands of affiliates). When surveyed, the main difference between the successful and those that didn’t earn much – it was article marketing. Nearly all of the handful of successful affiliate marketers had performed article marketing to build links. The shocker is they all submitted from 100-500 articles EACH for their target sites!

Have you ever submitted 100 articles? Odds are you never submitted more than a dozen or more (if that) for the same project. I’ve had my Ezine Articles account for about 2 years now, and I’ve only submitted 40 articles in all. I’ve received over 99,199 views for them to date, imagine my exposure if I would have submitted 140?

I’m going to do it, I’m committing to the 100 articles in 100 days. Follow the link above to signup – blog about it, tweet about it, comment below about it – and follow my blog as I’ll be writing about it every step of the way!

Read my Guide to Article Marketing if you’re ready to get started! It will teach you all about how article marketing works, and the best ways to write and submit content!

Search Engine Basics

Search engines send your traffic based on a multitude of factors – ranging from authority, to pagerank, the power of your backlinks, the amount of your backlinks – and even the sites you’re associated with. When someone types in a search google attempts to give it’s “best match” of relevant original contet results. Sometimes the results are people that actually “targeted” and tried to come up for that search, and other times it’s just a bunch of pages that accidentally ranked for that result. Did you know that 60% of all searches entered in google have never been entered before? That’s because more and more people are treating it like a question and answer portal and asking it a query as if google were some magical oracle.

Linkbuilding Basics

Even if you were smart enough to find and target keyword phrases for your site, over time you end up getting ranked for all kinds of “long tail” searches and broad match terms you never thought about. Simply linking to your own internal pages, or creating your own “inlinks” (deep linking) can often times be enough to change your SERPs for some keywords from say the 2-5th page of google results to the first page! Just tagging complementary pages with the same tag can be enough. Linking a page or post in your sidebar dramatically help as well.

Enter SEO Booster Pro…

SEO Booster Pro is a premium Wordpress plugin that costs $39.95, and it’s purpose is very simple – to help you do better in the SERPs. It doesn’t do anything you can’t do on your own manually, and it shouldn’t raise the ire of google in any way. Once you install it, it monitors your incoming search queries. So far it’s captured results on 31,000 incoming searches for this blog.

You can view the top 10 incoming searches, it records the SERP page, your position on the page, what they keywords were, and which page it’s ranked for:

It also records the last 35 SERP visits. This is pretty handy, as it records the last top 35 that came in – and it really shows you that nearly all your incoming traffic comes from the first page of google results. You also get the total visits and the landing page they went to, but I think the handiest thing is the fact that you also get the link to the google results page in case you want to see what other sites were listed for that search, etc.

It has some very interesting settings. You can choose what SERP positions you want to try to boost higher, and how often you should run the cron job so the plugin can do it’s work:

It has some nice auto-tagging features as well. It can tag posts with phrases you might want to boost your search ranking for, and all the related posts as well. If you want, it can even re-write your post titles with incoming search phrases. The plugin creates a long and extensive log of everything it does, it will show you the last search positions it researched for you, and any rankings that have changed.

In addition to the tagging, it also has a widget functionality that you can use to put keywords in your sidebar (you choose how many) which helps your inlinks and boosts your SERPs as well.

Conclusion

SEO Booster Pro can help you get better search rankings, but the level of reporting and analysis you can get in just a few minutes (without digging through data in google analytics or some other stats) is awesome. There’s nothing grey hat about it, it’s not wrong to use it, you could create your own inlinks yourself to do the same thing (many people do). In my opinion, spending $39.95 one time (free lifetime upgrades) is well worth the money in the time alone it saves me – let alone the increased incoming traffic I’ll get from using it.

*Disclaimer: I’m an affiliate for SEO Booster Pro, and if you buy it from the link below I get a commission. That’s how we pay the bills around here!

Click to Visit the SEO Booster Pro web site

Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC): Pagerank 8 directory accepting free submissions. Many directory listings are Latin American – but many are just good resources.

Kelly Search: Pagerank 6 directory accepting free submissions. This is a great business to business directory. I like the fact that you can submit to different categories with different descriptions and URL’s if you want when you signup.

Canlinks: Pagerank 6 directory accepting free submissions. This directory is nice because once you submit the form your blog is automatically listed – you don’t have to wait for approval.

Free Links Directory: Pagerank 6 directory accepting free submissions, but only if you reciprocal link

Pegasus Directory: Pagerank 6 directoy accepting free submissions. Also accepts reciprocal and paid submissions.

Skoobe.biz: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free and paid listings.

Surf Safely: Pagerank 4 directory accepting free submissions, but you must have a PICS label and family safe.

Flookie: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, very easy to submit to.

Resource Help: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions for reciprocal link back.

Zoomdir: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, but if you do reciprocal link you’ll get listed in just days (vs. months with no link back).

Zico Sur: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, very easy submit.

Sufficed.com: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions with reciprocal link back.

A2Z Web Index: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions with reciprocal link.

Directory World: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions with reciprocal link back.

Also – as an honorable mention – I’d like to throw my own hat into the ring. You can submit any Wordpress powered blog or web site to my Wordpress Directory.

How to find Quality Directories?

If you are interested in finding more quality directories to submit your web site to, I can give you a few links that will keep you busy for hours – if not for days.

When we SEO has a list of 560 PR4+ directories to submit to. Some are paid, some are niche, some are free. My list of free directories above was generated from a few hours of going through this list.

If you’re wondering how I found such a list, you can always google for this kind of thing – but often times webmaster type forums are the greatest source of free information. Check out this forum post of directory lists and information that will keep you busy for days. In fact, the digital point forums has a forum specifically for directories.

If you like this article, you should check out my ever growing Link Building Cheat Sheet page!

If you need to get ranked in top search engine results, but find linkbuilding and building backlinks to hard or time consuming – consider getting a linkbuilding quote from me.