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The Scottish Connection
Those of Scottish ancestry (and everybody else of course) might want to have a look at MacFhearghuis of Boglach, where I will explore one of the many family lines that converge in me: a true mutt!
Tags: clan, ferguson, fergusson, macfergus, macfhearghuis, scottish
PPC Web Spy: get the best key words!
Just a short message to alert you to PPC Web Spy, a nice free tool to discover the keywords other websites use to rank high in the search results.
Tags: key words, keywords, ppc web spy, spy on keywords
Article Directory Added
We now offer you the uption to upload your own articles to our new Article Directory, or to download other peoples’ articles from same. Article marketing continues to be a very effective way of “spreading the word” about your website(s) - search engines eagerly list the articles with the links contained therein!
Tags: article directory, articles, upload articles
Aviation Search Engine works again
Just a quicky to let the visitors of my “Good Aircraft” niche site know that its Aviation Search Engine is fully up and running again. For some time it didn’t do what a search engine is supposed to do, to wit “search”, but I finally figured out that what I thought was the latest hot fix was, in fact, the second latest… (embarrassed grin)! so I applied the “latest latest”, and you can now search for, and even find, everything about aerospace, flight, aviation, aircraft and much more flight-related stuff..
Tags: aerospace, aircraft, aviation search engine, general aviation, good aircraft
Twitter Tutorials and Tools
Although most people only use it for letting the world know that they have brushed their teeth, managed to survive A Terrible Traffic Accident Through The Grace Of God, or just had the best sex any inflatible doll did ever provide, Twitter is a fine tool for doing much more than just spread rumors, trivia and/or lies. I honestly admit that, initially, I didn’t have much use for Twitter myself - but I’ve come around a full 180 degrees.
Twitter is actually a fine instrument for building a crowd of “followers” that you can sell stuff to, and it’s also a pretty effective generator of backlinks - provided that you do a bit of thinking, learning and clever applying. Yes I know, I’m “twittering away” rather ramblingly, but if you surf to our newly opened Twitter Tutorials and Tools section, you’ll see for yourself. There’s more to Twitter than just a Tweet!
Tags: tweet, tweets, Twitter, twitter tips, twitter tools, twitter tricks, twitter tutorial
Yahrps List cleaned up
At least once a month I clean up Yahrps List which, as you may have gathered, is my very own safelist. I sometimes boastingly advertise it as the “best bloody safelist in the world”, which it probably isn’t. But it certainly ain’t the worst one either! Exactly because I clean out the parasites every few weeks, there are hardly any members who only send and not receive list emails. I’ve also got a fairly strict attitude towards the number of mails a member may send during any period of time: there’s no spamming at Yahrps List! You may want to have a look, and possibly subscribe. It’s free anyway.
Tags: best safelist, safelist, yahrps list, yahrpslist
We provide you with Great Support!
For all you eager internet marketers YourShopShop opened a support center with FAQ’s, a support ticket system, and a range of forums. The picture to the left shows how strongly we are dedicated to providing good and sound support (wide and wicked grin)!
Of course the link to our support center can also be found in the navigation bar on every page, so you’ll never need to plunge into deep despair on account of being unable to find help.
I invite y’all to open, and/or partake in, one or more discussions on the forum. You may want to ask questions, help other people out, state an opinion, utter devastating criticisms… as long as it makes just the tiniest bit of sense your post is welcome. Please be aware that it takes time to get a forum going, so don’t get upset if at first there’s (next to) nothing there. Why, you could even solve that problem by posting something all by yourself!
Tags: support, support center, support centre, support for internet marketers
For the Love of Search Engines
Befriending Google and other Search Engines
Current trends in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and practical ideas on how website owners can better apply SEO and SEM to their own businesses.
Every website owner wishes to be great friends with the major search engines. Developing a good relationship with the search engines is a lot like developing a quality friendship in real life with real people. If you are genuine, interesting and reliable, you’ll make lifelong friends. The same is true of search engines.
It’s all about expanding your circle of friends!
The interesting thing about search engines is that they can help you make more and more friends every day – if you manage your relationship with them carefully.
Search engines use automated scripts, better known as robots or bots for short, that go out to find and index content on the web. Because the bots detect new links and signal the search engines that they’ve found something new to index, the engine’s knowledge of the web grows out like a spider web.
Because of this, the search engine bots are even called spiders and the process of indexing new pages is then called spidering.
The search engines, each with their own set of rules, decides how to serve up the pages that they have indexed. Initially these rules were quite simple, but that soon changed.
SEO: the abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization
Many years ago some smart marketers realized that you could literally optimize your website pages by repeating keyword search phrases over and over in the text and within the tags of the page. (More on tags later.)
By repeating the word a lot, it tricked the search engine spiders into thinking there was a lot of information to be found about that phrase on that page (whether there was indeed any at all). So the more you used the phrase, the higher you could rise in the search engines for that phrase – at least that was the theory.
This ultra simplistic manipulation tactic made the search engines an easy target.
Fortunately the search engine engineers soon recognized this and changed their system so that this keyword stuffing (is: search engine spamming) wouldn’t be valuable anymore.
From then on the search engine marketers and the search engines have been engaged in a sword fight of sorts. One side learns how to optimize for the current search engine system and the other ‘jabs and parries’ and puts a stop to it and it starts again.
Alright, enough of the reader’s digest version of search engine history. If you want to learn more about the emergence of search engines as a major power on the web you can find some good resources at:
Let’s move on to define some important terms and begin to understand more about how it is possible to make friends with the search engines.
What exactly do we want from those search engines?
Primarily, we want ‘Organic Search Traffic’. This refers to the natural visitor who comes to our website because they searched for something and the search engine felt that our website could deliver what they were searching for.
For example: a lotion wholesaler website contains several pages of information about learning how to make a product available for wholesale. A man goes to his favorite search engine and types in ‘sell my lotion wholesale’ and the lotion wholesaler’s website shows up on the first page of results in the number three spot on the page. The man sees a bit of text from the website that includes his exact search phrase and he clicks through to visit. This is organic search traffic.
You get organic search traffic by providing content that people are searching for. Where you turn up in search engine results, now that is dependent upon a lot of other factors that we’ll get into.
Anything more we want from the search engines?
Perhaps we want ‘Pay Per Click Search Traffic’. This refers to the visitors that we can receive by placing paid search ads with a search engine.
Go to any of the big search engines and search for just about anything and you’ll see ‘sponsored links’ either at the top or at the side of your results. These are the paid search ads.
With Paid Search Marketing you can buy a top ranking in the search engines for any of the keyword phrases that you would like to – if you have deep enough pockets. Some keywords and phrases become so highly competitive that the cost per click can exceed $10.00. In extreme cases amounts close to $100.00 aren’t even unheard of!
What is meant by Keywords and Keyword Phrases?
When you go to the search engine and you search for something, the text you enter is a keyword or keyword phrase. A single word is a keyword, a phrase including that keyword is a keyword phrase.
For example: you are looking for information on coffee, so you go to your favorite search engine and type in ‘coffee’. Coffee is then your keyword.
You’ll soon realize that putting a single word into a search engine will bring you a pretty wide variety of results. So you may opt to re-search with a more specific keyword phrase, such as:
- flavored coffee
- coffee risks
- effects of coffee
- coffee maker recommendations
- caffeine in coffee
In some cases, to find the info you need you have to depart from your original keyword completely, for example instead of coffee:
- hot flavored beverage
- cappuccino supplies
- espresso pads
- latte maker recommendations
Since we know that searchers use a lot of different search phrases, if we want to develop a website that attracts a lot of that organic search traffic or carefully target searchers with a paid search campaign, we need to know what search phrases they’re using. So the one million dollar question is: how do we do that?
We use Keyword Research Tools!
Keyword research tools provide us with data about actual search engine use. One of the best known and longstanding keyword research tools available is Wordtracker. With Wordtracker you can brainstorm keywords in a variety of ways and judge whether a particular phrase is worth targeting. Google provides a free tool that will even analyze your website and give you keyword suggestions and indicate how competitive the keyword phrases are. Give it a try at: Google AdWords.
There are some higher end options for keyword research that involves purchasing a membership or downloadable software.
- KeyWord Discovery $49.95/month
- Keywords Analyzer
- Keyword Elite $176
How do you do keyword research?
If you’re working on a brand new project and have no info to start with, begin by making a list of what you think people are searching for when they seek out what you’re going to offer.
Take this list to the keyword tools and run them all through to see what you can learn. You’ll find out that some of your phrases are rarely searched for, while others are being searched for a lot. You’ll also get suggestions for good related phrases.
If you have a current website, start by taking a look at your web statistics to find out what phrases your visitors are currently using to reach your website. Hopefully you do have statistics that provide this information! Run this list through the keyword tools and do the same as above.
We could write an entire report all about keyword research and developing a comprehensive list of great keyword phrases but we don’t have time for that here. My best advice to you is to develop as big of a list as possible, staying very targeted to the purpose of your website and avoiding fluffy phrases that won’t bring you the target visitors you are looking for.
For example: if you want to sell someone ring tones, create a long list of ring tone related phrases based on your research but leave out things like ‘free ring tones’ because this will bring you freebie seekers instead of shoppers (unless, of course, you do distribute free ring tones)!
Now, what to do with this huge list of keyword phrases?
Of course that’s easy to answer: we use them! Now that we have a wonderful long list of often searched for keyword phrases, we need to make certain that we incorporate them into our website in a useful and natural way. That means that we should be using them:
- in page titles
- in page headlines
- in our content
- in product descriptions
- in our sales copy
- to name page files
- to name graphics
What you definitely do not want to do is to take one or two popular phrases and use them over and over and over again. That’s keyword stuffing that the search engines won’t like.
Instead, use one or two popular phrases a few (2 or 3) times on a page in as natural a fashion as possible. And then also incorporate a few of the other related phrases as well.
For example: I sell wireless keyboards and mice and my keyword research has provided me with a great long list. These five phrases top the list:
- wireless keyboards
- Microsoft wireless keyboards
- Logitech wireless keyboards
- Wireless keyboard and mouse
- Wireless computer keyboards.
If I were foolish I would spam the search engines by placing ‘wireless keyboards’ in my content about ten times then use the same term in the title, header, page title and on the graphics too.
Not being foolish, instead, I use ‘wireless keywords’ a couple of times, then I also use ‘wireless keyboard and mouse’ and ‘wireless computer keyboards’ as well.
Search engine strategy leaders teach us to create as many pages as possible for your website in order to adequately target all of your keyword phrases and to choose just one keyword phrase to optimize for on each page – but that doesn’t mean that you don’t use any other phrases at all.
Using your keywords in the content is simple, but how do you incorporate them everywhere else? This brings us into the code of our website.
The use of tags for better SEO
If you’re building with html you’re going to do some simple things. When you create new pages, name the pages using the keyword phrase (ie: wireless-keyboard-reviews.htm instead of reviewarticle.htm or article34q123.htm, etc).
If you use a blog or some other content management system you’ll need to investigate what is necessary to make your page files keyword rich. Every tool is a bit different and most applications have some plugins or hacks that you can use to incorporate your desired keyword phrases.
Then you will give the page a title, this is done with the 
tag up in the head of your document. You’ll enter ‘Wireless Keyboard Product Reviews’ like this:
Then to incorporate a phrase in our headline, we’ll insert a headline font tag at the top of our page above our content like this:
Up to know we’ve been talking about what you do on your website to let search engines know what you are about. If only that were all that mattered, our job would be easy. But that is not where it ends. To make great friends with the search engines, we have to venture outside of our own website and optimize our website from the outside in.
The Importance of Links
If what we have to say about our website were enough, we’d all be so happy! But just like in real relationships, it’s what others say about you that carries weight and this is just as true with the web.
Search engines do index our website and they do take note of all of the content and tags. The next step then is to take a look at what other websites have to say about us. This is done by taking a look at how other websites link to us.
Obviously, if nobody links to us, we’re chopped liver as far as the engines are concerned.
If lots of other websites link to us, we start to rise up in the search engines estimation. But don’t get too excited yet. There was a time when the sheer number of inbound links mattered a great deal but that time is gone.
It’s not enough that we have a link. We have to have a link from a quality, related website and its best if the link has anchor text that confirms the content of the page it links to. Anchor text refers to the words used within the link. (They are the words people see on the web page that they click on to follow the link.)
Because the total number of links can’t be used as a valuable weight anymore (since that’s easy to manipulate through simple determination and lots of worthless directories) the engines have instead decided that each link should be examined for its own intrinsic worth.
How do they do this? The engines consider its source
If I have created a website to provide useful information about natural health, and I have incorporated many well research natural health related keyword phrases into my website as instructed in this report, I’ve done what I can for myself. Now I have to go out there and find a few people who will befriend me with a link from their website to my website.
I could make twenty new friends in a months time and get each of them to link to me from their existing website – and all twenty links would not all be seen as the same as far as the engines are concerned.
Ten of my friends may have websites that have very little to do with natural health, but they like me so the link they give me is nice, but not terribly useful for building up my reputation as a natural health resource on the web. Still, a link is a link and we don’t scoff at links. If we can at least get them to use good keyword phrases in the anchor text, we hope that will count for something.
Five of my friends do have sites in the natural health business, so the link point to my natural health website is coming from another existing natural health website. This is good! The engines will give these links greater weight.
Four of my friends have natural health businesses that are very closely related to my own. The content on their website strongly compliments my own. The link from their site to my site holds even greater weight with the search engines because it stands to say that these websites wouldn’t link to me if I weren’t useful in some way.
My last friend is a natural health guru. Her website is huge and has been on the web for a long time. Not only is her site great but she has hundreds if not thousands of other websites that link to her, confirming to the engines that she is indeed a recognized authority in the natural health field. Her link to my site is given tremendous weight by the search engines.
Making contact with complimentary website owners and developing new links to your website is a huge part of your overall strategy to make friends with the search engines. If you don’t do this, you’ll never become best buds with any of the big three.
Some ways to develop those links
- Write and distribute articles
- Post on forums
- Comment on blogs
- Write the owner and ask for a link
As a rule, one way links are more attractive than swapped links but again, we don’t scoff at the link exchange if it is with a complimentary website. I would not waste any time at all exchanging links with unrelated websites though.
Another way to develop links is to take advantage of social bookmarking and networking sites. You’ll meet people, create relationships and have many opportunities for posting a link back to your site.
The fine conclusion:
If you do all this and if you keep your nose clean as far as not pursuing any of the questionable grey hat or black hat SEO techniques, you’ll become and maintain a wonderful friendship with the search engines. And… if you don’t have the time to “do all this” yourself, you can have it done for you by a company like SubmitEdge. That’s wat I do!
Tags: black hat, grey hat, major search engines, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine spiders, seo, SubmitEdge, white hat
