Internet Marketing Strategy

Pretty much every blogger that utilizes WordPress for a blogging platform has a post that has a similar title to this one, so I decided, “Hey, why not join the brainless mass of sheep that grazes on the green grass of the web?” Just kidding. But seriously, I want to share with you what I feel are the three most useful WordPress plugins.

The first is included by default, but you must register with WordPress and get a WordPress API key to make it functional. Akismet is a spam countermeasure for your blog that filters and catches incoming spam comments and spam trackbacks, catching them and letting you delete them all, or if one comment is magically not spam (never happens) … allow it into the index.

Second is the no-www plugin. I believe eventually, the way the internet is headed, that we will do away with the www prefix before domain names. So I recommend you get to an early start and install this plugin today!

Last, but certainly not least, the All In One SEO Plugin for WordPress is definitely one of the most useful tools out there, and there really isn’t a comparable SEO plugin at all. This plugin lets you customize all aspects of search engine optimization on your website, such as your title tags, meta tags, and header tags. It’s also backwards compatible with other seo plugins.

Enjoy, and I hope your WordPress blog is better now that you have read this article.

1. Title and header tags are the most important seo elements on your website.

Definitely true, true search engine experts structure their whole website around these elements, that’s why there are so many plugins for various content management systems that make it easier for you to make changes to these tags. Title and header tags probably hold more value in SEO weight than meta tags do now.

2. Relevant keywords contained within your domain name (base or full URL) is an excellent search engine strategy.

Having a TLD that contains the keywords for the niche you are targeting is a very powerful asset in your mission to brand and market your product and/or website, in fact I’d say it is one of the most important aspects of optimizing your website, aside from number one.

3. Image descriptions help increase traffic.

Aside from being compliant, alt tags on images will give even more weight to your page by letting search engine spiders know even further exactly what your product is and which market to deliver it to.

4. Good quality links are good quality links.

And you can’t go wrong with that. Search engines currently do and will always give high value and increase your search engine rank positioning as you accumulate links from high traffic and/or high quality websites and networks.

5. New, unique content will bulk up your traffic.

As long as you keep updating your website, search engine bots and readers will keep coming back to your website, hungry for more information that you can provide them with. So keep it up!

So remember to adhere to the standards, because they will always guide you in the right path.

Good God, I’ve resorted to making a list of tools and utilities that are well employed by any internet marketing specialist or seo practitioner.

ValidRank – Provides an analysis of a website’s PageRank and checks to see if the data projected is accurate or not.

Google Ranking Factors – Good resource for double checking your own website’s optimization strategies.

SEO Test – Rates the search engine optimization techniques used on your website, provides a nice basis to improve your SEO.

Shoemoney SERPs Tool – Easy to use SERP checker, check your URL against your keywords.

NoFollow Check – Check if a website or blog has the nofollow attribute enabled.

Page Strength – Rates your website’s relative importance and net visibility.

StatCounter – My favorite website metrics and analytics utility.

Backlink Checker – Categorizes the backlinks by domain linked from, useful tool.

Hope you found the list useful, if you have any really neat utilities I failed to mention here, please leave a comment, thanks!

Before you run off and start plugging your link halfway across the internet on every semi-related website you come across, take some time and examine the internet real estate where you are going to be placing a gateway to your own website. Whenever I place a backlink, I always make sure to run through a series of criteria, first.

1. Quality Backlinks are RELEVANT Backlinks

Make sure the page where your backlink will be displayed is in the same niche as your website! Why link to your website selling car parts from a blog that reviews baby diapers? It makes no sense at all! The more relevant the link, the higher your position in the search engine results pages. Hopefully the page is keyword rich and highly ranked already, which brings me to my next criteria.

2. Quality Backlinks are from RESPECTED and RANKED websites.

If the website that is displaying your backlink ranks highly for the keywords or keyphrases you are after, chances are they are an authority website with some steady traffic. Backlinks from these authority figures will increase interest in your own website. I try to get build backlinks with websites that are in the top two hundred results for my search criteria.

3. Quality Backlinks contain your TARGETED KEYWORDS or KEYPHRASE

Last but not least, when submitting your link, don’t forget to target your anchor text! Do NOT have your link saying “Click here to go to ____________” … bury your anchor within a catchy, keyword rich paragraph or sentence. For example: “Internet marketing & seo techniques are a necessity in promoting your brand and increasing traffic.” That sentence gives opportunity to give myself three different relevant, keyword rich backlinks.

So, make sure to take a step back and examine the website your about to place your link before you do so. Just don’t take over my keywords!

WordZe has provided a public list of the top search keywords and keyphrases queried via Google per hour since January 8th, 2008. The list includes over 130,000 search terms!

Combined with the Google AdWords Keyword Research tool, this is a very formidable tool to add to your SEO arsenal for keyword research.

WordZe’s keyword information included on this list is mined from Google Trends.

http://www.wordze.com/Gtrends

In 2007, alot happened in the world of search engine marketing. Several strategies were born and met their fate last year. Some of these strategies were eighty-sixed because they provided unfair leverage within the search engines and made websites appear to be of more worth than they were.

1. Directory Links – Google pretty much stripped away all the value gained from one-way and reciprocal links that were achieved by directory submissions. PageRank dropped, and so did link value. Now, directory listings are close to good for nothing.

2. Reciprocal Links – Anyone who actively pursued link exchanges as their main source of backlinks felt the wrath of Google as they stripped PageRank of websites who did not have a good ratio of reciprocal links to one way natural links.

3. Text Link Brokers – Companies like Text Link Ads thought they were going to be the next big hit, but as they were starting to grow, their very foundations were shook when Google applied penalties to the SERP’s of many websites. Now text link brokers have gone underground, and carefully swap their goods in 2008.

4. Sponsored Blog Posts – Many websites who were using sites like Smorty, ReviewMe, and PayPerPost as a main way to drive revenue to their blog experienced PageRank and search engine ranking position penalties as well, now bloggers using these paid to post networks have to disguise their paid blog posts to look more legitimate to search engines.

5. Subdomain Supremacy – Many networks (and also spam blogs) utilized this handy SEO technique to leverage search engine spiders’ mechanics by adding many keyword rich subdomains onto the main domain. Google swiftly amended this problem by allowing no more than two subdomain results from a single domain to appear in the search results for a given keyword. This hasn’t fully been worked out as some search queries still return more than that.

Social Networking (media, bookmarking, sharing) is not just for the one hit wonder burst of traffic that surges to your website after advancing to a social networking website’s “popular” page, there are also many long term benefits.

First, whatever you are sharing usually ends up linked directly from your profile on the social website, giving search engines one more link to find your article from. You can successfully build up your profile’s PageRank as well, giving any link from your social profile that much more link juice.

Second, if you managed to land an article on one of the “popular” pages on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Mixx, or StumbleUpon, a link to the submission on the respective website will appear on social aggregators like popurls. Popurls aggregates links from many popular social networking websites, not just the big hitters.

Third, sharing on social networking websites builds trust and authority. If a reader wants to find more information about you, or more articles written by or about you, he or she can simply do a search query on the various social networks and have the information they want in seconds.

Hooray for the digital age, huh?

P.S. TYPELiFE underwent an aesthetic revamp yesterday, how do you like it?

I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but AboutUs is a website where many high profile companies and personas go and establish a standardized about page, stored on a centralized server. (Sometimes it’s even interesting to search for a person or business on AboutUs and find interesting facts on them. You’d be surprised!)

Many AboutUs pages gain PageRank quickly, and provide a solid backlink to your website. You can even create an AboutUs user page about you that links to all your AboutUs pages, making them even stronger. Recently edited AboutUs pages are linked to from the AboutUs homepage, so don’t forget to update your page regularly! Also, there is no limit to the amount of about pages you can create, so make one for every website you have!

If you would like to create your about page, go to www.AboutUs.org/YourName, it will present you with a Wiki style page you can customize to your heart’s content.

Check out TYPELiFE @ AboutUs.

I was browsing through Google’s Webmaster Tools, and after submitting and verifying TYPELiFE, I noticed when I expanded the “tools” tab on the left, there was a menu option that said “set crawl rate” … hmmm, I wonder what this does?

A quick skim over the tool page shows me:

“Google collects documents on the web using Googlebot, our web crawler. You should leave this control at the Normal setting unless you are having trouble with the speed at which Googlebot is crawling your server.”

“We’ve detected that Googlebot is limiting the rate at which it crawls pages on your site to ensure it doesn’t use too much of your server’s resources. If your server can handle additional Googlebot traffic, we recommend that you choose Faster below.”

It also lets you know the current rate Googlebot is indexing your website.

If you think you can handle it, choose a new crawl speed! I set mine to faster, now I’m just waiting to see the results!

This site is currently set at a Faster crawl rate. This rate will return to Normal on Mar 10, 2008.

I’m trying to optimize a website that has a keyword “collectables (collectibles?!!??!?!??!?!?)” that we need to shoot for.

Searching Google for the term “collectables” yields 76 million results, and no “did you mean to search for collectibles?” link.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=collectibles&btnG=Search

Searching Google for the term “collectibles” yields 17 million results, and no “did you mean to search for collectables?” link.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=collectables&btnG=Search

Do you mean to say people will be searching for both variations of my website’s key phrases, and both are correct spellings?!?!? What in St. Peter’s name is this?! Will I have to build backlinks for both variations of my site name?

A quick refresher, maybe I have just forgotten some remedial English, there can’t be two spellings for this same word …

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/collectibles
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/collectables

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! I guess I will have to expand my link building campaign.

I seriously want to cry, strike up another reason I really hate the English language.

Anyway, now my workload for this website has grown some, it will be challenging and (hmph … educational) though, so cheers!