In this post I want to discuss this latest update, and once again address some common concerns, as I seem to be getting a lot of worried people contacting me after their sites got hit hard by Google over the past few months.

So What is Google Penguin?

Penguin was an update to the Google algorithm that was released on the 24th of April, with intention of apparently penalizing sites for over-optimization, otherwise known as spamming. The first thing I want to say is that its early days, and no one knows exactly what this update was precisely targeting, but nonetheless I will do my best to share some insight, as I can happily say that I actually experienced a positive increase or no change across the board on all my websites after this update, and also after the latest Panda update which happened the week prior.

First off, we can start to get an understanding of this update by reading what Google officially states about it. If you read the Google Webmaster blog it says this:

“The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.”

OK so as you would expect Google doesn’t spell it out for everyone, but rather provides a very vague overview and focusses on their overall intention with the update. The key things that we can take from this statement I believe are “high quality sites” and “good user experience“, nothing we didn’t all know already, but who’s actually doing it is more to the point.

One can safely assume that this update, after reading the full Google blog post, was looking at keyword stuffing in content, as Google gives  a really over the top example of what this looks like. The example is a poor one, as that sort of keyword stuffing has been slapped by Google for years, so I guess it’s some level of more critical analysis of over use of keywords in your On Page SEO that this update was targeting. With that said, you might want to pay attention to how your content uses keywords and make it look natural. Golden rule for all SEO, make it look natural if it isn’t totally natural!!

The Good Old User Experience

I’ve been harping on about the user experience on this blog a fair bit over the past few months, and you guessed it, I’m going to continue to do so, as I keep seeing sites that get slapped by Google, where the webmasters are shocked and have no idea why. In most cases when I look at these sites, I can see glaringly obvious reasons, as the sites are clearly not designed for the user at all.

I want to also add this quote from Matt Cutts (head of Google Anti-Spam team):

“We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we’ll keep our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that goal.”

…”even no optimization at all…” yeah right, and pigs may just fly one day too!

Also its important to note that Google Panda 3.5 was also rolled at a week prior to the Penguin update, around the 17th of April, so if you lost a significant amount of traffic around that date, then you were most likely ‘Pandalized’ rather than ‘Penguinalized!!!!’

Oh and let’s not forget the 750,000 unnatural backlink warning messages that Google sent out prior to these changes, warning webmasters to remove links that were acquired through unnatural means…what an interesting few months its been!

Google is on the Aggressive

Ok so it doesn’t take a genius to notice that Google is on the aggressive right now, trying their hardest to remove spam from the results and level the playing the field for SEO. I ‘ve never experienced this many changes so closely related than what we are seeing now.

One thing that I must say I find pretty frustrating is that Google tells us not to do much if any SEO, other than make your sites easier to crawl etc…and when it comes to offpage SEO they expect it to happen naturally. The problem for the small guys and gals doing web marketing is that it’s virtually impossible to get enough exposure in the first place so that other webmasters even know about our sites to even consider linking to you. Sure large brands don’t have to worry as they already have a following.

So I don’t think the playing field is that level when Google does the changes they make, but regardless we have to play by their rules as closely as we can, or pay the price of getting no traffic from Google.

So with that said, in light of all the carnage going on out there right now, here’s some suggestions that might help:

Build Sites that Don’t Look Optimized

If Google wants people to just blog away and build affiliate marketing sites or stores etc…without doing any significant SEO, then we really need to mimic this as closely as possible. If you take a look at a few dozen sites ranking in Google now for various keywords, ask yourself if you think they are doing careful On Page SEO or not.

It’s really not that hard to spot, just look at some of the titles of pages on sites and ask yourself if these look like they were written with the keyword in mind or the topic in mind. Of course you will see some junk that is ranking and ask yourself how this got there, but just overlook that as Google will remove the junk eventually, so don’t get caught up on that just focus on good quality yourself.

Also have a look at all the content on the sites and ask yourself if the topics were written with keywords in mind or with topics in mind. Of course if you want to get traffic to your sites, you really have to do keyword research, and then target these keywords, however do it as natural looking as you can, so you still target keywords but fly under the radar!

Create Sites that Will Naturally Get Good Signals

If you focus on building great quality sites, that your traffic will love, then they will naturally want to bookmark your site and share it on Facebook and Google Plus. Not only that though, they will most likely come back again and also search for your site in Google using the site name. Ideally you want your site to get a lot of searches for its name, as it’s a clear signal to Google that people like it. Other good signals are the time on your site, low bounce rate, high average page view etc…

The only way you stand any chance of getting these “good signals” happening on your site is if you actually have a good site, not rocket science really. The problem is that good sites take effort and time and a lot of people can’t be bothered, and instead continue to put up low quality thin sites, and try all sorts of things to dodge the Google bullets, but honestly it’s all a waste of time in the long run, trust me I’m speaking from experience.

Google are only going to roll out more and more updates like Penguin and Panda, who knows maybe the next one will be called “Google Poodle”, ha ha, then you can say your site was “Poodlized!!! In all seriousness though, the sooner you move towards managing less sites, and focussing on higher quality, and thinking about the user experience, that better you will do in Google.

Off Page SEO Can’t Hurt Your Sites…Or Can It?

Ok so here comes the bombshell, Google sent out all these unnatural link warning to webmasters over the past few months, and sites who got them experiences a drop in rankings. The result is that many webmasters frantically started to remove any links they thought Google might frown upon and then submit for a reconsideration. I assume many SEO companies got dropped by webmasters, only to be replaced by news ones who get on their high horse and claim they are pure whitehat SEO and all will go well if the webmaster is to choose them…I doubt it…no one is 100% whitehat.

So why is this a bombshell then? Well the obvious question is, “if low quality backlinks to your sites can harm them, can’t we all go out and build a bunch of low quality links to our competitors?”

My response to this used to be “No way, if Google allowed this it could well create total chaos online”

My response now is “I’m not sure anymore, and I am starting to think low quality links combined with a lack of good signals coming off your site may well cause problems for you!”

I don’t think these recent changes in regards to backlinks will cause widespread chaos by any means, the reason being that chaos, I assume, would mean the likes of Amazon could be taken down, or other well established authority brands. I don’t think will ever happen, as these kinds of sites have way too many good signals for Google to ditch them, and the same goes for much smaller, yet quality sites too.

So what about sites that are ranking well but don’t have many “good signals”, are these open for attack from this negative SEO? I can’t definitely say, but my assumption is that possibly yes, if the negative campaign against them is particularly nasty in nature and well planned out. I sincerely discourage anyone from getting involved in these tactics, as it’s not the way to win a battle, and we would all not like it if someone did it to us.

Avoid Obvious Forced Linking

I encourage people, if you are using forced link building, and I think most of us will have to, make sure you don’t use overly spammy links, such as mass auto-blog comments, profile links, very public blog networks etc…anything that is really obvious and easy for Google to spot as forced linking. Also do your best to create content and tools, anything that will increase the chances of people linking to you naturally.

Also if you create a decent following in your niche this will happen much more easily. I think the key is to use linking as much as you need to, to gain momentum, but don’t rely on forced linking only, otherwise your site will not look natural.

Conclusion

To close this post I want to leave this final thought, spend time analyzing high quality sites in various niches, and take notes on how they make the user experience a good one, and do your best to employ as many of these techniques on your own sites.

If you enjoyed this post, I would be super grateful if you would shar on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus below.

Thanks!

The Google Penguin Update is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

The main network that got hit hard recently was BuildMyRank which a lot of affiliate marketers have used. They got pretty much all of their sites deindexed from Google, and I’ve heard some estimate it to be in the 10′s of 1000′s of domains. They are not the only one that got hit hard, others such as SEO Link Moster and Authority Link Network, plus others.

Blog networks are an easy way to get backlinks to your sites, however Google doesn’t like this type of link, as they do see it as paying for links, which we all know they frown upon, even though Google themselves have done this sort of thing!!

Google sent out over 700,000 notifications over the past few weeks to webmasters, warning them of unnatural linking. The result of this warning is varied, but I can say that one of my sites had this warning, and has consequently had a minor drop in rankings, but nothing too major at all.

Why is Google doing this then?

Well the short answer is that Google wants all backlinks to sites to happen naturally. Matt Cutts the head of anti-spam at Google says that all you need to do is put up good quality content and let Google do the rest. This really doesn’t work though, as you need to do a lot more than that, especially when their is so much link buying going on. My point is that Google is trying to level the playing field all the time, by removing any source of paid links, and blog networks are a prime place to target.

If you had all your eggs in one basket and got all your links for your sites from say BuildMyRank, then you would not be having a very nice week, as one can only assume your rankings will soon, if not already, drop and your traffic and income with it.

However I don’t consider spreading your risk as simply joining more blog networks, as these may also do the same way as BuildMyRank, the way of the internet grave yard. The problem with neworks like BuildMyRank is that they own all the domains in the network, and hence a footprint, or pattern, is much easier for Google to spot. This is made worse when these networks get more and more popular.

What to do now?

In order to best explain what I think is the best solution to do if you have been heavily using blog networks, I’ve recorded a YouTube video for you below.

Essentially it comes back to quality, because if you have higher quality sites, it opens up many more opportunities to gain backlinks. If you have a good quality site, you will to a certain degree get people naturally linking to you, this blog does. Not only that, but you will also get a higher percentage of people that will be willing to accept a guest blog post from you, which they will publish on their sites, and of course there will be a link in that to your site. Social links will come more easily when you have a great site too.

These changes at Google just further reinforce to me that gone are the days of throwing up lots of low quality sites, that really solely on forced link building methods. Google Panda was the first big wave from Google to clean up their results, and this backlinking move is yet another wave. The sooner you move away from the mindset of trying to trick Google so much, and move towards giving Google what they want, then you will be in a better position.

I personally have scaled back massively on the number of sites I focus on now, because in order to do sites the way Google likes, and the way they should be done for that matter, takes more work, and therefore I find managing less is best. You have to manage Facebook fanpages, Google Plus, create quality content, etc…a lot of this was what Lisa Parmley spoke about in her recent webinar.

I see these changes at Google as a good thing, as if you stick with it and build good sites, which most people are too lazy to do, then you will win out big time folks, plenty of opportunity out there in SEO.

YouTube Video Below

Google Drops Bomb on Blog Networks is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

In January I have lined up quite a few live coaching webinars for us, and one of them is with a keyword expert, so look out for that email. In this post though, I’ll be discussing the concept of building sites for the user, in these post Google Panda times we now operate in.

I’ve been and still am a big fan of the ‘Buyer Keyword’, for the simple reason that if you get someone to your website that is ready to buy, then you stand a much higher chance of converting that person into a commission. However you do need to give more thought to the kind of keywords you choose for your SEO websites these days, and can’t rely solely on buyer phrases only.

The reason for this is, if your site is built only on buyer keywords, yes you will be getting laser targeting traffic to your site, however unless done very carefully, the overall user experience on that site can be a bad one. In order to explain this, let me first provide some examples of classic buyer keywords: product names, model numbers, how to phrases, buy XYZ, XYZ review…

When people search in Google using these types of very specific keywords, they are much further along the buying process than someone who searches using very broad phrases such as “plasmas”. However if all your pages are built on these types of keywords and nothing else, then your site will not be able to provide a great user experience. For example if you have an affiliate marketing website on baby strollers, and all your pages are just targeting keywords which are stroller names, this might be an ok site IF you have good content of course. However I think a better site, especially post Google Panda, is to have a more balanced selection of keywords and interlink between this content as much as possible.

For example I would have pages targeting: “safest baby strollers” “most popular baby strollers” “compare baby strollers” “what to look for in a baby stroller” “baby strollers under $200″ “jogging baby strollers” etc….Even if you’re not trying to rank all of these pages, you are providing good content to improve the user experience on your site.

By doing this, you’re more likely to collect social votes from your users from Google +1, Facebook, Twitter etc and you’ll also collect natural links from various places…and Google will also view your site as higher quality because you’re not only creating sites for search engines but for the user, which is what Google wants.

As I just mentioned, some of the pages you won’t bother doing off page SEO on, however the buyer keywords you should, and also the keywords that might not be considered classic buyer phrases, as often these keywords are not as hard to rank for and will increase the scope of traffic you can get to your sites.

When choosing keywords for SEO websites, always ask yourself when doing your research “is there enough diversity in the keywords for me to create a site that will allow me to provide a good user experience, while also getting enough traffic to be profitable”. By thinking this way with your planning, you’ll have no problems with Google, as you are essentially giving them what they want.

Another simple rule of thumb is to ask yourself if you think you can create at least 3 different categories in your site, as this will provide diversity in the content, assuming you have a few articles in each category.

Also don’t forget to follow the other guidelines I discussed in my SEO Quality Score post, so you set up your sites the right way. It’s true that Google have made some big changes in 2011 with the Panda update, and what most people don’t know is that Panda is an ongoing thing. Google keep rolling out more Panda updates every few weeks. Each update Google learns more and gets closer and closer to filtering out the low quality sites from their listings, until they get what they want, which is high quality sites that provide a good user experience.

I know they have quite some way to go in order to get to this goal, as I still see some pretty terrible sites at the top, but don’t be fooled by this, as Google are not dumb and they will refine Google Panda until they have it just right. A friend of mine, who I’m getting on a webinar in the first week of January, is an expert at Google Panda, easily the most clued up person I know on this topic, and he’ll be providing some brilliant training on this topic for us, plus showing how to build sites that Google loves.

One thing that he said which I found very interesting was “some people falsely think Google Panda was all about attacking affiliate and Adsense sites, but this is not true. Panda is about filtering low quality sites, and sometimes this can look like Google is targeting affiliate and Adsense sites because the highest amount of low quality sites are often these types of sites.”

Hope you all have a nice end to your year and find some time to spend with family and friends. I’ll be in touch in the first week of January with some live webinar coaching.

Choosing Keywords for SEO Websites is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

In this post I’ll explain some new things I’ve learned about Google and what they’re looking for and also reinforce a few things I’ve mentioned in webinars I’ve done recently on this topic.

Give Google What They Want

I think the key underlying theme, is to give Google what they want and don’t try to trick Google, well not too much anyway!

If we take a step back and look at the organic listings in Google, from Google’s stand point, the most important thing for them is quality. Google introduced what is known as their “Quality Score” for Adwords campaigns some years ago now, which was a way to assess the quality of sites that were using their paid Adwords platform.

Google does this so that they ensure the user experience from people who are clicking their ads is a good one. The biggest threat to Google’s business is people not having a good experience when using Google and deciding, enough is enough, and choosing another search engine or other means of finding what they want. If this happens, Google is done for!

So with that said, you can see why quality control at Google is pretty high on the agenda.

However what’s more interesting is that many SEO marketers heard of the horror stories of people getting their accounts slapped with a low quality score from Google Adwords and having to pay sky high prices for clicks, or worse yet get their accounts shut down completely (which has now happened to a vast majority of affiliates) and perhaps somewhat naively thought “glad I don’t use Adwords…it will not effect me!”. Along comes the Google Panda, on the hunt for low quality sites to chew on, and all of a sudden the tables turn.

My point is, all SEO marketers should have known that Panda was on the agenda, as the organic listings are just as important to Google as their Adwords, because people use Google for the free organic results primarily, and click the ads as a result, so quality across the board is key.

I think the difference is that with Adwords, Google has humans checking accounts more than organic, therefore accurate quality checks were easier to assess. However with more and more human reviewers checking organic listings now, and Google using their feedback, they have now worked quality into their algorithm, hence Google Panda.

What Should We Do Now Then?

The first thing to do is panic, run for your lives now!!!….no only joking, everyone always says the opposite of that, so I couldn’t help myself. Ok so the first thing I suggest doing is start looking at your SEO, and mainly your ‘on page SEO’, from a view point of quality rather than a view point of super optimized.

Content

Quality is now a ranking signal and Google is looking for certain things that tell them that your sites is a quality one. Some obvious indicators are that you have well written, grammatically correct, original content. So be super careful when hiring writers to produce your websites content for you.

I recently hired a writer and only checked one or two articles and even I skimmed then super fast, as I was too busy with other things. However after chatting with a friend about quality, I soon realized that I need to check my content more carefully.

When I did check this content, to my horror I found spelling mistakes and poor grammer all over it, and even worse the content really wasn’t that helpful. If I had arrived on a page with this content, I would have been dissapointed with it.

At all costs, try to make sure your content doesn’t come across as really salesy and only trying to make you money and not help the reader. This is low quality and somewhat sleezy content, and while it might last for a while in Google, they will work it out soon enough, as quality control is only going to keep getting better at Google. On that note, I am not talking about the odd spelling mistake, as we are all human, I mean every fouth word being wrong.

Website Features

Some of the things I’m about to list next, will not apply to everyone, as affiliate marketing sites may not be able to encorporate all of these.

Blog comments – if you can have blog comments, then have them on, and interact with your readers on the site. I do this on this blog, as you’ll see below and on other posts. If your content doesn’t lean towards having people comment on it, then you might want to look at your content and your style of site.

Social links – Social media is only getting bigger, and Google is looking for signals that websites are getting interaction and links from places like Facebook, Twitter and more recently Google +1. The first and most obvious thing to do is add a social link buttons to your content, as I’ve done below. The more interaction you get from these the better, and I assume Google +1 will be a big player soon enough.

I also think, that if you have good content, which of course you will, is to ask your readers to help spread the word by giving you a Google +1. With that said….hint hint…go on click the Google +1 one for me! ha ha…

Low ad to content ratio – Another indication of low quality content is having too many ads in your content. Ads can be in many forms too, such as Adsesne, banners, affiliate links. Again just keep in mind what a quality user experience looks like for you, and don’t go overbaord with your affiliates links. Yes we all know that if you have less affiliate links it will reduce conversions, but the alternative is to lose your rankings when you get slapped with a low quality score and then your conversions are zero!

Important pages – make sure you have pages such as: disclaimer, contact, privacy and any other important pages that you see high quality sites have on them. This is a pretty obvious indicator to Google that you care about your site and take it seriously.

Over Optimization – This is actually something that my friend Jackson pointed out, and is a very good point indeed. Post Panda, you want to be careful not to over optimize your pages so that they look spammy. What this means is, when writing the title for your page, don’t just have the exact keyword, especially if the keyword looks odd.

For example, if you’re trying to rank for “Cheap Wart Cream” then just having that and that alone as your title, does look a little strange, it’s not too bad, but let’s say you were a webmaster that is not intentionally trying to rank in Google and is just writing about wart cream because its your hobby!!! ha ha…anyway, if that were the case, then I think you would not use a title like that, and would probably use something like this “Where to find cheap wart cream online”. You can see the second title looks more natural and less obviously optimized.

Logins – If you can have a way for people to login to your site, such as a forum, then this shows Google your site is important to people and is another indication of quality.

In closing, the main thing to think about when doing your SEO, is always keep QUALITY in mind, and make sure the user has a good experience on your site. You ideally want the kind of site that people like to come back to, like to bookmark, like to read other pages on it. I always take time to write quality posts on this blog, and as a result I can see that people go back through older posts that I write, to see what else they can learn. This is what you want to create on all sites from now on I believe.

That’s all from me, don’t forget to Google +1 me; Thanks!

Regards

Matt

SEO Quality Score is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I happy to announce that my very own SEO training course, SEO Experts Academy, is now open!!

Here’s the link: SEO Experts Academy

I’ve partnered up on this product with another SEO marketer, also with years of experience building SEO sites, Terry Kyle, and the academy is our combined knowledge and expertise on SEO packaged in one concise training academy for our students.

The academy is for all website owners who want to know how to get top search engine rankings and massively increase the traffic to their sites. Whether you do affiliate marketing, Adsense, or any site, our training will equip you with the skills to drive a lot of free organic traffic to your sites.

When you join our academy, you will become one of our insider circle of students, who has access to our SEO MasterPlan, which will give you a huge advantage online!

Until midnight November 1st, we’re running a special launch discount of $100 off, to celebrate the opening of the academy, so make sure you don’t miss out!!

Here’s the link again:

SEO Experts Academy

Enjoy!

SEO Experts Academy is Live! is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Most people don’t enjoy building backlinks, I on the otherhand have a mild addiction to it, and enjoy the strategy of backlinking and working out new and better ways to be effective in my backlinking plan for my affiliate marketing sites.

One of he most common mistakes I see people make when it comes to backlinking, is ignoring their indexing. When I say indexing, I mean whether or not Google (and other search engines) have found AND indexed the page that the links are on.

If they haven’t indexed the page, then they won’t be counting the link on that page as a link to your site to help improve your sites rankings.

Most people just get as many backlinks as they can and hope for the best. This is never the best approach, for a number of reasons, first that the number of backlinks is not really what matters, it’s more the quality and the rate at which you build them, but that’s for another post altogether.

The second reason is that if you take a step back and work out the percentage of the pages with your links on them, that have actually been indexed by Google, then you can start to plan to increase the number of pages indexed by Google, meaning you can build less backlinks.

Work Efficiently

By focusing on getting more of the pages with your links on them found and indexed, means you can spend less time having to create more links, because your backlinking will be more effecient.

Remember the best kind of backlinks are ones that are contextual, which means they are found in the middle of content, and creating this content to place you links in takes times and resource, so the less you have to create the better!!

Most online marketers get anywhere from 10%-30% of their links found, which is not high at all. If you don’t know the percentage of your links that are getting indexed, then you definitely need to start looking at this. My indexing rate is currently over 80%, which I’m very pleased with, however I now want to get it to over 90%, which I intend to very soon!

My SEO manager and I, have weekly meetings about indexing, amongst other things, and we’re constantly testing new ways to get more of our links found. One of the things that helped us increase the index rate to over 80%, was not giving up on URL’s until Google indexed them, sounds obvious, but let me explain.

We have a system in place of indexing techniques that we first put all our URL’s through (I can’t reveal my secret sauce completely here), and then we check all the URL’s again to see if Google indexed them, and the ones that were not indexed, are placed in another list of non indexed URL’s, where we continue to link to these pages, using automated social bookmarking and blog comment tools, hitting them with loads of links on auto-pilot.

We then check the list again to see what got indexed, and everytime we do this the percentage goes up and up. Most people don’t do this, and they either have no idea where their links are and how many Google has found, or they use one indexing tool and hope that works and leave it at that. However I highly encourage you to focus more on indexing as it makes a big difference.

Google often won’t index a page if there are no links coming into that page, so if your links are on new pages and these pages have no links coming into them, then Google will either never find the page, so they won’t find the links, or they will find it but won’t index it. This is why you need to use indexing methods to get pages indexed.

Where Are My Links?

It is not uncommon for SEO marketers to have no idea where their links are. Many people just build as many links as they can and hope it works. I don’t do this, as I like to work smart and build the least amount of links possible. Therefore I keep a record of the pages my links get placed on. Sometimes this can be more difficult, for example if you’re a member of a blog network, and they don’t give you the URL’s of the blogs in their network, to protect their network.

This makes it hard to know where your links are, however if your site is a wordpress blog, and another blog links back to you, ie. one from a blog network, then you get notified in your WordPress dashboard with a “PingBack”. Open the link in that pingback and you now have the URL of the page linking to you, then check if it has been indexed!!

You can save yourself a lot of time by increasing your indexing rate. For example, if you build 1000 links a week, and only 20% get indexed, that is 200 successful backlinks. However if you can even increase the index rate to 30%, then you just got 300 successful links, which is 100 more.

Getting these 100 more indexed links is much easier than having to create 100 new links. Now imagine if you can take that 20% right up to 80%, that’s 600 more links and you have just saved yourself a lot time and will be working much more efficiently, which is very important when it comes to SEO.

Some of you might have tried or are still using RSS feed submissions to get your links indexed, but I don’t use them anymore, simply because I do a lot of testing and they just don’t work very well. I never just listen to what everyone says, I like to test things and see what actually works for myself, and I encourage you to do that as much as you can.

I hope this SEO tip helped. Very soon I’m launching my concise and very indepth SEO training product, where you can learn everything fine detail about how I do my SEO,  so you can replicate my systems, which includes the exact methods I use for getting this 80% indexing rate. The launch date is Oct 25th, stay tuned….

How to Create Less Backlinks is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

To help you with this process, I’m about to tell you about a  new tool that I’ve recently started using called AHref’s. This tool is very impressive and it’s only in Beta version too.

The thing I like about this thing, is that it shows you the anchor text of the backlinks that websites have, AND it’s super fast, the fastest I’ve ever come across. The reason knowing the anchor of the backlinks of a site is so helpful, is because you can get a much clearer picture of what that webpage is really targeting.

The best way to demonstrate how I use this tool when doing keyword research for SEO is with an example.

Let’s say I go through the Google keyword tool, and I’m looking for keyword in the acne niche. Once I find potential keywords, I need to then analyze these to see how competitive they are. So carrying on with the example, if I’m looking at the phrase “vitamins for acne” the site in position 1 in Google is this one: www.acne-vitamins.com

Now if I was to use a backlink checking tool like SEO Quake (see image below) you can see that the URL has 500 backlinks. However what I cannot tell from this number, is what the anchor text of these backlinks are. If I know the anchor of these links, I can work out if this phrase of “vitamins for acne” is their primary agenda for this page or not.

This is where ahrefs.com comes in. There is a paid and a free version of this tool, however I think the paid version is the one that allows you to see anchor text. When I placed this URL, it allows you to plugin exact URL’s not just the home page, ahrefs shows me the anchor text count in decending order for the page.

As you can see in the image above, the top anchor for the links coming into this page are infact “vitamins for acne”, however only 302 of them are this exact phrase, so not all 500 as we might have first thought if just looking at SEO Quake.

Now this is still pretty competitive, and not a keyword I would recommend targeting, as the search volume is not that high. However what you’ll often find when using this tool, is that pages ranking at the top of Google often are not even targeting the keyword phrase they are ranking for. When you look at the results, you’ll see the phrase way down the list, sometimes not even in the first 20. What this tells us is that that particular phrase is not their priority for the page, which makes them less difficult to outrank.

One thing to keep in mind is that if the sites at the top are hard core authority sites, like PR 6+, then be careful, because even if they are not trying to rank for a phrase but Google is giving it to them anyway, it is usually because of their authority on the general topic and they still can be hard to beat.

I am not an affiiate for this tool either, I just wanted to share something cool I am doing that I hope will help you also.

Regards

Matt Carter

Keyword Research for SEO is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

In this post I’m about to explain what online lead generation is, why it is an appealing revenue generating method and a few other things I’ve learned about it recently.

What is Online Lead Generation?

For those of you who don’t know, online lead generation is where you collect leads, using an opt in form, where the persons details are stored in a database and automatically emailed to the company who wants to buy them off you!

Having been on holiday for the past month, I’ve had a lot more time to read, and one book that I enjoyed was “The Bathrobe Millionaire” (not an aff link;). This book is written by a guy called Jason Yelowitz, and explains how lead generation made him 9 million dollars in three years, collecting and selling leads in the real estate market. I bet you want to see the site that made him the millions right, well here it is: ehousehunting.com

The site itself is nothing too fancy, although it is quite detailed in the way it captures leads, but once up and running all you need is traffic to a site like this and you can see how it would be a cash cow, if you have the right traffic ofcourse.

Kinds of Lead Generation

The real estate market is just one of many industries that are willing to buy leads. Essentially all businesses need leads, but not all will be ready and willing to buy them. The higher priced the item/service the company sell, they better for lead generation in most cases.

PPC prices have gone up over the last few years, making it more and more expensive for business owners to get leads, and this is why many business owners will be quite open to striking up a deal to buy qualified leads from internet marketers. You should also look at the Google Traffic Estimator to assess the CPC for the main keywords for an industry, to give you an idea of what industries have to pay a lot for clicks, as these will most likely be good ones to target for lea generation.

The other thing to look at is the length of time a customer stays with a company, and the repeat sales the company can earn from the leads you send that they convert into customers. For example, Insurance, the customers here usually stay with the same company for a long time, so they are most likely more willing to spend more up front on leads from marketers like you and I, because they know they can make the money back in the longer term from repeat sales.

Who’s This Best For?

For those of you who are new to the world of online marketing, and still developing your traffic generation skills etc…then this is not something you would want to do, best to stick to a more simple model, such as affiliate marketing, however I can’t only write posts for newbies, as I have a mixed bag of subscribers to this blog.

If you’re good at getting traffic to your sites, and have got a few successful affiliates sites, then this may well be something that you should consider. The site template would need to be designed by a coder, and Joomla or WordPress would work fine and this is something that can easily be outsourced.

The next thing is to look for industries, preferably locally, so you can get in contact with them easily, but not essential, and the work out mutualy beneficial deal that works for both parties.

I think now is a good time to learn how to do this, as more business owners are looking to the internet for marketing purposes, yet a vast majority haven’t got a clue about SEO, and therefore they NEED people like you and I to help them get traffic and leads to drive their business.

Hopefully this sparked some creative thoughts for you all!

Online Lead Generation is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

The first thing to consider when looking at what keywords to target for your site, is the commercial intent for that keyword. By this I simply mean are people who type this keyword into Google in a buying mode or just info seeking.

How can you tell if a keyword has high commercial intent? Well the easiest rule is, the more specific the phrase is, usually the more commercial intent it has. Also if people type in product names and model numbers these have high commercial intent, but they are not the only ones. Anything where someone is indicating they have a problem that needs fixing, such as “how to stop sweating”, also has a high degree of commercial intent.

The next thing to consider is the search volume of the keyword. If you’re using the Google keyword tool, aim for about 1000 searches a month on exact match.

Of course you then need to look at the competition for the keyword, this is a whole new topic on its own, so I won’t go there now, but essentially just make sure you target keywords that you have the equivalent SEO skill level to rank in position 1 or 2 in Google for, don’t go after keywords that are out of your league, because you will only waste time, and end up giving up and be very dissappointed.

Remember the largest part of ranking in Google is the backlinks, so by skill level I really mean you ability to get good quality backlinks.

I know people always want a detailed plan of exactly what keyword to choose everytime and I do go into more detail in my Rapid Profit Formula course on this, but really the best way to learn what keywords you can rank for, is by practice. The more keywords you rank the better you get at analyzing what to target and what to avoid.

So if you do target a keyword that is too difficult, all is not lost, you just know for next time to go after something easier. In the same regard, if you go after something that is easy but has hardly any search volume, then all is not lost, you just know to go after something more competitive next time.

Google Update

As most of you’ll know, Google recently did a major update to the way they rank pages, which I did a post about a few weeks back: Google Farmer/Panda update. Just recently Amit Singhal the head of Google search made a statement regarding the update, of which I want to discuss now.

Mr Singhal didn’t say exactly what the changes were, as he has to protect the integrity of Google, however he did list a number of questions for webmasters to ask themselves in regards to the content on their sites.

One question he stated was:

“Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?”

This is very interesting, and what you need to be careful of here is if your sites pages target keywords that are very similar. For example if one of your pages targeted “stop dog digging” and another one targeted “stopping dog digging” then you would be in trouble with Google, as they see this as low value as the content on these two pages will be virtually the same stuff.

If you do want to target more than one keyword, you are better to target them on the same page, which is easy to do, and something I do all the time. All you have to do is backlink for the different phrases and make sure your  ‘on page SEO’ includes all the phrases you’re targeting.

Another question he stated was:

“Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?”

When I first posted about the Google update I mentioned that too many ads is not a good thing, and I actually had a few people attack me on the comments, claiming that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that I was simply speculating, and that there’s no evidence that too many ads can  hurt rankings. However as Mr Singhal states, too many ads and not enough good content is not a good thing, and something Google will penalize for.

Mr Singhal added a lot more questions, but you can pretty easily cover yourself by simply making sure your content is quality. Therefore make sure you don’t have excessive spelling mistakes, poor grammer, use headers, add images, use video where you can, and have 600 words minimum of content, that is well written and is not just rehashed info from all the other sites ranking for that keyword.

How to Choose the Right Keywords is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

At the moment I’m planning a new affiliate marketing site and I decided to do something different when I was trying to find related keywords to the main keywords I was targeting.

What I did was use an online thesuarus to find lateral keywords. For example when I was looking at some buyer keywords in this niche, I came across the word “purchase” when I typed “buy” into the thesuarus tool.

Now I know that is not exactly ground breaking stuff there, but the fact is that I wasn’t thinking about the word “purchase” and when I checked the search volume for “purchase XZY”, XZY being the product name, I was pleasantly surprized to see a decent search volume and virtually no SEO competition at all.

That’s when I realized how cool this free thesuarus tool can be, because it can help you find related keywords to you main keywords that you might not have ever thought about or that they Google keyword tool didn’t provide.

The advantage of finding these lateral keywords, is that often less people have considered them and you can find little openings with less competition, which we all know is a good thing.

Any market where the keywords can be interchanged with other lateral keywords, which are essentially other keywords that mean the same thing, are good ones.

When I see a market that has a large variety in the keywords I love it, because there are so many combinations when it comes to the keywords, and often this can also mean that you can find keywords phrases that have less SEO competition.

Another example of interesting keyword phrases that I discovered with help from the thesaurus tool, which again I wouldn’t have thought about that are in the laptop market, were:

Highest Rated Laptops = 480 exact match searches and easy SEO competition

The thesaurus also provides antonyms, and I saw “worst” when I was looking for the word “best” and then I looked for “worst laptops” and it had some, not much, search volume and again easy SEO.

That’s it for this quick updates folks, until next time, bye for now!

Matt

Find Related Keywords is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing