Recent Google Update Pissing Me Off

I don’t know how many of you reading this have your own sites up that make you a little big of dough every month & rely on search rankings to do so but I have a few & a bunch of craziness has happened to my personal favorite. I’m going over everything I’ve done in the past couple months to have any kind of negative SEO impact & there’s only one thing I can think of. I recently acquired a domain & simply forwarded it to that site.

What gets me and has me in question though is that the domain was expired, the only reason I bought it was because it had thousands and thousands of links to it so I knew there would be some kind of traffic value and there was. From everything I’ve known & read as long as the domain was expired there should be relatively little to no SEO impact. So this is still a giant question for me, I did however remove the forwarding & haven’t attempted to do anything else.

Now apart from that I also know that Google recently did some updates, my sites all survived the last updates so I don’t know why anything would be hurting me now but whatever. I’ve overcome changes before and will again but the simple fact that Google is able to giveth & taketh away first page rankings at will is what really puts a HUGE emphasis on the fact that you need to work to build up your brand vs. simply working on getting your sites to rank well.

 

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Easy & Effective SEO For Your Blog Or Website

Discovering SEO For The First Time

One of the major issues with having a website or blog is being able to get traffic to it. I know when I created my very first website I thought it was just automatically going to pop up on page #1 of Google & all of a sudden there was going to be a ton of people coming to it. To my disappointment that wasn’t the case. So back to the ol drawing board I went. Now I had to figure out how I was going to get people to come to my website and find out why my website wasn’t on the first page of Google for the keywords I was searching for. This is when I started reading up about SEO.

My First Mistakes – Don’t Do These

After I started reading up about SEO & how to do it, not only was I completely overwhelmed but all I thought about was how to get people to my website from the search engines. The last thing I cared about was creating quality content that people would actually want to read, I just wanted to make sure that I had all the keywords I could stuffed into my content. I wanted search traffic & lots of it.

So once I had created a ton of basically crap content that was simply stuffed with keywords I needed to build links to this content. Back then it didn’t cost much of anything to have someone blast your website with forum profile & blog comment links so I that’s what a ton of my link building consisted of. You could simply pick out a few keywords to rank for, stuff them in an article & your meta tags then blast your website with these crummy links. That would get ANYTHING to rank, you could get a little crazier but it was basically like using a sledge hammer for SEO.

Even though those were effective techniques to gain search rankings my absolutely biggest mistake was not caring about the content on my websites. When all you’re worried about is how you’re going to rank a site your visitors are coming 2nd. With the recent Algo changes that Google has done & continues to do those techniques are basically dead. So the many of us who used those techniques & made the same mistakes wasted a ton of time.

Make Your Site’s Content Come First Then Work On Your Search Rankings

Alright this kinda goes with my new philosophy of building a brand for yourself, that means your website or blog or business. Whatever it is you want to make sure that you’re building up a base of readers or customers. The only way you’re going to do that is by delivering something of value for them. Which is another reason in my recent post about creating your first website I tell you to build a website about something you are passionate & knowledgeable about. This will make it extremely easy for you to write high quality content that makes your visitors feel like they didn’t just waste 2 minutes of their life reading what you have to say.

After You’ve Created Your Content It’s Time To Get Started – Keyword Research

I know after you’ve written an article that’s over 500 words it feels like you should be done working but that’s not the case, it’s more like the beginning. It’s time to get started with the very beginning of any SEO project….keyword research. If you don’t know anything about keyword research I encourage you to download the pack of free reports I’m giving away here to help bring you up to speed.

Now when it comes down to keyword research the first thing I look for is the easiest of all the keywords related to my content. You should create a list of 5-20 of these keywords & save it or just write them down in a notebook. I think keeping a notebook for each of your websites is a great idea. It will help you keep yourself more organized and allow you to come back for future reference to find out what has and hasn’t worked for you over a period of time.

If you want an awesome tool to help you out with your keyword & market research I recommend Market Samurai, it’s what I use.

Let’s Take A Step Back

Ok, now that you have some keywords that should be easy to rank for and ummm just in case you didn’t think about this…..they need to be related to your content I want you to go back to the content you created for your website. We want to find ways to place these keywords in your already created content but keep the quality of it at a high level. Synonyms are an excellent way to add keywords to your content without demeaning the quality. That means that just because you found 573 keywords related to your site you shouldn’t be trying to shove them all into a 400 word article.

Now here’s something I kind of mentioned in my mistakes but didn’t get too in depth with it, that’s over optimization. This is something you can get penalized for now so it’s also another great reason to be spreading around the keywords using synonyms & adding in other on topic keywords. You also don’t want to be stuffing every single keyword into your keyword meta tag or the meta description. As long as they’re in your content you have the chance to rank for that keyword. If you’re really wanting to go after a keyword then place it in your site’s title, h1 & h2 tags but still don’t over do it placing the same keyword in every single headline tag on a page.

Let’s Build Some Freakin Links Already

Links are still the most important part of any SEO campaign, you just don’t want a ton of spammy blog comments and profile links to make up your website or blogs link profile. We want link diversity. This also means that you’re going to have to either write more content or hire out some writing to someone else, it’s entire up to you. Either way we’re going to need more written content because that’s how we’re going to get more links, by submitting the content to article directories & web 2.0 sites.

Where To Get Your Links From

These are a few places that I recommend to get some links from, for a few different reasons. Not only are they solid sources of links but the sites themselves do get quite a bit of traffic so people are going to stumble across your articles by simple browsing through them, this in turn will also send traffic your way. That doesn’t even count the fact that the sites themselves also rank fairly highly in search engines for low competition keywords. This is going to be a great opportunity for you to use that list of keywords you created earlier as well.

Good Written Content For Links Sources

Ezinearticles.com – When I start a site this is one of the first places I start getting links from by submitting articles.

Squidoo.com – You actually have to put some effort into building a decent Squidoo lense to get it indexed, make sure you do that.

Hubpages.com – You need a certain hubber score to get a solid do follow link but it’s not very hard to get.

YouTube

Youtube is a great place for you to not only get links from by submitting your videos but you can also get a substantial amount of traffic from your videos as well. Sometimes it takes a little more effort to create a video but it’s definitely worth it, especially considering the site gets something like 25 billion views a day!

Blog Commenting

Now those definitely aren’t the only places on the internet for you to get links from. One of my favorite sources for links is commenting on other people’s blogs. They’re definitely not the best source of links but they’re still links & they add to my sites link profile.

Guest Posting On Peoples Blogs

People get tired of writing content, I’m on my 1300th word right now I would know. Find blogs in your niche and offer to guest post on them.

When you’re building your links you want to make sure you use keyword in your anchor txt, don’t use the same anchor txt for all your keywords though!

 

Have You Read All Of That Yet?

If you’ve read everything there hopefully you have a good understanding of how to increase your search rankings. Keep in mind that you definitely want to make sure you’re not compromising the quality of your websites content in an attempt to rank your site though, you’ll end up hurting yourself in the long run. If you’re still hungry for more, make sure you check out these reports that I’m giving away here.

 

If you have questions feel free to comment, I’ll do my best to answer them for you.

Regards,

Matthew Schollmeyer  <—- an example of anchor text for you (the keyword would be Matthew Schollmeyer).

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Article Marketing For Newbies – A Great Beginners Guide To Article Marketing

Article Marketing For Newbies

Article marketing for newbies, lets start from the beginning by letting you know what article marketing is all about. For some people article marketing is all about trying to push traffic to their site from the links in their articles and for others it’s about getting the back links with anchor text so their site or web page has a chance to rank higher in the search engines. For me my article marketing efforts are directed at both and yours probably should be as well.

Click Here To Read My Review Of The Ultimate Article Marketing Tool

Article Marketing For Newbies – Learn Keyword Research

For many newbies to article marketing and internet marketing in general, the ultimate failure comes from not knowing how to do proper keyword research. Regardless of what you write your article about, if nobody is searching for the keywords in it, nobody is going to read it. Another mistake many newbies make is choosing keywords that have far too much competition for their level of skill. Simply meaning you either pick a keyword or keywords that never get searched or you pick a keyword that you have nearly no chance at ranking for.

Now I’m not saying if your a newbie and you want to start engaging in article marketing that you have to be able to do great keyword research but you should at least understand the basics and there’s a ton of free information out there for you to at least understand the basics of it. So before you newbies start your keyboard on fire pumping out great articles that you’re passionate about, take a minute to learn how to research keywords and optimize your content for them.

Article Marketing For Newbies – Writing Your Articles

Alright article marketing newbies, once you’ve figured out a keyword that you’re going to go after then it’s time to start writing your article. You don’t want to blatantly stuff your keyword into your article either, it makes the article hard to read and many article directories simply won’t accept it if it’s over a certain keyword density. So simply make sure that your keyword is in your title, summary/description and located in the article itself. That’s going to give you a great start on getting your article to rank in the search engines.

Now this next part is also very important article marketing newbies. If you’re trying to push traffic to your website you need to think about who’s going to be looking at your article and what you can say to get them interested in clicking the link in your resource box. You also want to link back to your site using the anchor text for the keywords you’re trying to get your website to rank for as well. Try to make sure that the readers of your article understand that they’re going to find something even better if they click on your link. It can be difficult but if you find out one of your articles starts to get a lot of traffic feel free to play around with your resource box text to see if you’re going to get a higher click rate. It could help you generate a lot more traffic to your money site.

Article Marketing For Newbies – Getting Your Articles Published, Indexed & Ranked

Once you have your article published you’re going to be able to tell how well you’ve done by checking the search results for it. Don’t worry if it’s not indexed in Google right away either, if it’s not simply tweet, digg it it or comment on a few blogs leaving it as your link and it will be indexed soon enough. Your goal should be if you’re publishing articles on a site like ezinearticles.com that your articles are hitting the first page for your keywords. A lot of times your article will come up as the #1 result right away. However don’t be discouraged if your article ends up hitting the 2^nd or 3^rd page of the serps either though newbies.

This is the final lesson when it comes to article marketing for newbies, if your article hits the 2^nd or even 3^rd page, it’s not a bad thing. You’re article marketing efforts have just begun, so write another article optimized for the same keywords or closely related keywords and start building links to your article with new articles. If you use that article marketing method you’re likely to get your article, as well as some of your other articles on the first page for the keywords your targetting and you’re going to have multiple spots in the search results and if all goes as planned, the site you’re building links to is going to start ranking on page one and above the articles you’ve published on the article directories!

Article Marketing For Newbies – Key Points & Things To Remember

• Commit time to learning how to research keywords and competition
• Don’t give up if you don’t feel like you’ve succeeded right away, nearly nobody gets it perfect the first time.
• Article marketing is both an artform and a science, learn to use it properly and you’re going to achieve great results.
• If you’ve read anything, well you’re not a newbie to article marketing anymore!

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Tagged As: article marketing, article marketing for newbies, Internet Marketing, marketing