My prizes have arrived! As you may have read a couple of weeks ago, I completed the ezinearticles.com HAHD marathon, and today my prizes have arrived. Did I open them without you? Of course not. I wanted each and every one of my readers to take part in the excitement that I experienced when I opened the big box of prizes that I received from Ezine Articles.
Have you ever wondered why your website is not ranking for the keywords that you want to target? The content that you have on your website is very important and is something that gets looked at by Google when they are trying to figure out where they are going to rank your site. I gave an overview of this factor in my post #1 Google Rankings, but here I am going to go more in depth about what Google is looking for and how you can give it to them.
The way that you give Google what they are looking for when it comes to the content on your website is to use the keywords on your site that you want to target. This is something that is referred to as on-site SEO. There are a few different factors that Google will take a look at when they send their robots to examine your website’s content.
One thing Google will check for is the keywords that are in your title tag. Let’s say for example that you are trying to target the phrase Knoxville Photographer. Google is going to first look to see if you have that keyword in your title tag. They are also going to check a few other places to see if you are using it in more than one location.
Another place that Google is going to check for the keyword that you are targeting is the domain name that you are using. Going back to the example from before, if you are trying to target Knoxville photographer then Google is going to see if you have these words in the domain name that you are using. That would look like www.knoxvillephotographer.com
A final factor that Google looks at is the tags that you are using when you create pages and posts on your site. If you have a blog then Google is going to look to see if you are putting in Knoxville Photographer in your tags, and if you are creating pages they are going to look to see if you are using Knoxville Photographer anywhere in the pages that you are creating. There is a place in the blog that you are creating enter tags so make sure that you are putting them in so that Google will be able to pick up on them.
If you do all of these things when you are creating your website and trying to get it ranked on the first page for a certain keyword then you will be successful. Google wants to see that the site they are telling everyone is the most relevant really is the most relevant. If you have your keywords in your title tags, domain, and anywhere else that you can use it on your website then Google will see that your site is the one that will give searchers what they are looking for and rank you in the right spot.
There are a couple of other things that Google is looking for when they are trying to decide if you deserve the #1 spot, so make sure to stay tuned so that you will know what those are and how to use them. Also, if you are not signed up for my newsletter then make sure that you join so that you can get these tips before anyone else.
To Success,
Jeff Sherwood
Do you want to learn what I do as an Internet Marketer to get my websites to the first page of Google? As you can see by taking a look around my nifty little blog here I have already given plenty of ways that you can make your website successful online, but I am coming to you in this post because I am a little bit upset by something that happened to me recently.
The Plot
What am I upset about? Well, there is this Knoxville photographer who I was supposed to trade work with. She wanted to get more exposure to her website through SEO, and I wanted to get some photographs that she had taken of our maternity session and of our son when he was a newborn. Seemed simple enough, I was going to get her website ranked on the first page of Google for those who are searching for photographers in Knoxville, and I was hoping to get a few pictures that we really wanted.
As it turned out our definition of a trade had two different meanings. She wanted to give me some free sessions to take more photographs in exchange for my SEO services. After requesting photographs in exchange I was told that she could not afford to give me any photographs but wanted to give me session fees instead. Well, I did not want any free sessions. After all, she had just given us 2 free sessions that I did not have to do any tough SEO work for.
At this point I racked my brain trying to think of a way to get the photographs that I wanted, so I asked if she would be willing to send over the picture files that she had. I figured I would just send them off to the service that I usually use to get my pictures printed and would not have to pay the expensive prices that she was selling the photographs for. In response to that I got the following:
The Email
I get asked all the time by both people who are just starting out with Internet Marketing and those who have been involved in it for a while, “Jeff, how do you get your sites ranked #1 in Google so easily?” No matter where a person is in their attempt to make money online my answer is always the same. There are 3 main factors that Google looks at when they are trying to determine where a website should get ranked. I am going to be doing a 3 part series that goes more in depth on each of these factors, but I will go ahead and give you a basic outline of what Google is looking for when they are deciding if you deserve that coveted number 1 position or not.
Right about now some people might be scratching their heads wondering to themselves what the HAHD challenge is and why it is a big deal. I am going to explain it and then I am going to bask in my own glory….wanna join me?
This was the 4th Annual HAHD challenge at Ezinearticles.com and I am happy to say that I completed it. For those of you who were not a part of the challenge let me explain to you what it is.
What is HAHD Challenge at EzineArticles?
HAHD stands for Hundred Articles in a Hundred Days. That means from May 1, 2010 ’til August 8, 2010 I had to submit 100 articles that were at least 400 words in length.
To add even more of a challenge (as if submitting 100 articles in 400 days wasn’t enough) Ezinearticles also had a personal progress bar and allowed all of the contest participants to set goals for how many articles they were going to complete. I like to set the bar high so of course I did not meet my personal goal, but I did complete the contest and will receive all of the prizes that everyone was eligible for who completed the contest.
One thing that I got was this cool certificate (click to enlarge)
The rest of the prizes are coming in the mail to me, but I will go ahead and tell you what they are:
When a lot of people are doing affiliate marketing or any other type of internet marketing they sometimes go about things the wrong way. They are afraid of giving the people who they are trying to sell things to what they are looking for. I used to be guilty of doing this when I was first starting out, but once I realized what I was doing things started changing and I started making more sales. Hopefully you will be able to take the advice that I am offering here and use it to start improving the number of sales you are making no matter what product you are pushing.
One of the first things that you should do when you are trying to sell an affiliate product no matter what it may be is put yourself in the person’s shoes that is searching for the product. What is that person looking for? Why do they need the product? Are they looking for information or are they ready to buy? These are a few of the questions that you need to ask yourself in order to figure out what type of information you need to be giving to the person who finds your website or blog.
There are a lot of different steps that a buyer takes when they are interested in purchasing something. They first figure out that they have a need for a product, then they try to find out what all products are available to suit that need, next they figure out which product out of the ones available will work the best for the purpose they are going to be using it, then they might get some reviews of the product they are interested in, finally they are ready to buy that product. Now, I might have left a couple of steps out but you get the picture. For most buyers it is not as simple as getting online and purchasing a product right off the bat.
That is why it is so important to know where your buyer is in the buying process. You will be able to give the buyer exactly what they are looking for every step of the way and start improving your sales once you start putting yourself in the buyer’s shoes.
Have you ever heard the old saying, “Prosper where you are planted?” There is no place where that old saying holds true than working online. There are a lot of people who try to find ways to make money online by tapping into niches that they know nothing about. Some people are very successful at it, but most are not so successful due to a few different reasons.
I remember when I was first getting started working online all I wanted to do was build a website where I could showcase the essays I write in college. I have always been blessed with pretty descent writing skills, and wanted to help others who were struggling to write their college papers like so many of my peers were. If I would have stayed with that idea I probably would have been very successful with it and made a lot of money. However, I started thinking of all these other ways that I could be making money online by writing about things that I knew absolutely nothing about.
Every time I had a new idea I immediately went and bought a new domain name to go along with it. I was buying 4 or 5 domains per week that were targeting subjects I had no clue about. My lack of knowledge on these subjects led to a lot of problems for me.
One problem that I had was that I discovered how much research I was going to have to do to be able to come up with enough content to place on the sites that I had bought the domains for. It was literally going to take me days maybe even weeks to be able to research and write all of the content I needed for the site, and then I still had to research even further to be able to come up with enough content for article directories.
After struggling for a little while trying to find profitable niches to get into I got the idea that I would start finding things that I did know about. That is what I started out doing but I couldn’t see at the time that it was the best way to go.
Once I started building sites on the things that I knew about things started getting a lot easier for me. There was enthusiasm in my writing and I felt more confident in the products I was trying to sell. That is when I began to prosper.
So you see, when you “prosper where you are planted” you have a better potential to make money online. If you try to wonder off and go into niches that you are unfamiliar with you are going to have a very difficult time trying to get anywhere.
If you need a little bit of help trying to figure out where you are “planted” so that you can prosper here are a few questions to ask yourself:
There are a lot of people who think that SEO may be dead and have stopped using it. If you are one of those people I hope that you will read this full post and take into consideration some of the things that are mentioned in it very closely.
Ever since Google Caffeine kicked in June 2010 there have been a lot of webmasters who have noticed a huge change in their rankings. Some people have noticed their sites going from the first page to the 3rd page and some have fell out of the index completely. This change that Google went through has caused a huge headache for a lot of people, and some have even given up on SEO all together.
Thankfully, I am one of those people who tries very hard to stay on top of all of the changes that take place around the Internet and I was ready for the change in rankings. When Google made the change a lot of good things happened for me. I saw sites that were ranked in the hundreds go to the first page and I saw sites that were on the first page drop to the third page, and it was the ones that dropped to the third page that made me figure out how to get them back to page one.
When those sites fell to the 3rd page I started looking around for answers. I thought, “How could this happen to me, I’ve been doing everything I was supposed to be doing and now my sites are down in the rankings?” There were a lot of questions that I needed answers to, so what I did was went looking for those answers.
After doing a little bit of looking around I found other people who were going through the same things that I was going through. It didn’t take long before I figured out what to do about getting those pages back to page one, and if you are on my mailing list you probably already know some of the things that I did to get them there.
What I can tell you in the end is that SEO is not dead in any way, shape, form, or fashion and should definitely be used if you want to see results. Just remember, if you do SEO correctly your site is not going to be ranked in the first position on the first page of Google overnight. It will take a little bit of time to get it there, and you will have to work just a little bit harder than before to make your site stay there.
If you want to get some tips on how you can get your site to that number 1 position in Google and make it stay there then make sure that you subscribe to my Newsletter where you will get tips and information that will show you how to take your site from the bottom to the top of the listings the right way.
The other day, Stephen Davies of The Copywriter’s Institute called to ask me a bunch of questions that beginning copywriters most often ask me. And because they’re the same questions many of you send to our feedback box daily, I figure the answers will be helpful for you too.
Stephen Davies: Clayton, how did you get started writing sales copy? Would you advise others to take the same path you did?
Have you heard about the Perpetual Traffic Formula that Ryan Deiss has released? I actually heard about it from an email list that I am on which was some free stuff that he was giving away prior to his launch. At first, I wasn’t going to go and get the free stuff because I knew that I was going to be met with a sales pitch, but the stuff sounded pretty cool so I went over to check it out.
The email that I got was for some free software that Ryan Deiss had created that is actually really cool. It’s called Cherry Picker which is a real time saver for anyone who is doing anything related to Internet Marketing. What this software does is when you put in the keyword that you want to target it will pull up the first 10, 20, or 30 results (whichever you tell it) and give you the stats about those sites. It will tell you the page rank, how many links are going to their page domain, URL, and how many pages their site has indexed. This helps you to figure out which keywords are worth targeting and how hard it will be to rank for those keywords.
Another thing that I got from Ryan that was really cool was the Authority Codes Report which is a great report that tells you about the authority sites that you can get links from to help you rank high for the keywords that you are targeting. It also lets you know how many links you have to have in order to be effective.
The third thing that I got from Ryan Deiss was the Perpetual Traffic Report which gave me an inside look at what the Perpetual Traffic Formula is all about. This report has a lot of valuable information in it that. I’m not going to tell you what this one had in it because I want you to see for yourself. If you want it you can download it Right Here and make sure to read every word.
Overall, I was very impressed with all of the freebies that I was given as a part of the Perpetual Traffic Formula and cannot wait until it is released. It is set to be released on 7-28 and I am already on the early bird list to get in the door before everyone else. I know this one is going to sell out quick, so if you are interested in it then make sure to get on the early bird list. As soon as I get in I will let you know if in fact it does work or not. Stay tuned……
There is a lot of confusion for some people when it comes to link building for their website. Here is what most people do when they get a website for their business:
They pay someone thousands of dollars to create a website for them. When the website is set up just the way they want it they sit back and wait for people to come and find them. When they do not get the results they are looking for from the website that they have they start wondering what the problem is.
Most people do not realize that building links back to their website is a crucial part of being found in Google and other search engines that will bring traffic to their site. In fact, it is one of the 3 things that Google looks at when they are trying to figure out where to rank a site in their search engine.
If you use these 3 link building strategies that I am going to lay out for you there is a better chance that you will be able to get ranked for the keywords that you are targeting.
Okay, so your company needs a well-written brochure, a short press release or some fresh website content. Well, the smartest decision you can make is to hire a professional copywriter. Why? Simple. Because the words of your message are more important than glossy images and graphics… so don’t skimp on your copywriting budget.
Now, you may think you know your own business best and can do the job perfectly well but you’d be wrong! First, you’re too involved to see things as an outsider would and second, you’re not trained to write about it! A good copywriter, on the other hand, is able to look at your business with a fresh perspective and write about it intelligently and creatively. After all, that’s what copywriters do.