Internet & Affiliate Marketing News

OK, today I am going to show you guys how to easily install a fully optimized SEO Wordpress blog. It’s very easy and you don’t have to buy anything. All you have to do is download some plugins and install them on your Wordpress installation.

So let’s start from the beginning.

Step #1 - Install your Wordpress blog

Go to the download page and get the latest version of Wordpress. If you want your blog to be the main site then don’t install it in a “blog” folder. Just upload all the files to your main public_html folder and run the installation.

Step #2 - Once the blog is installed you want to edit your permalink structure. When you login to your wordpress blog go to settings and choose the “Permalinks” tab. If you have just installed your blog I recommend that you choose the “Custom Structure” option and set it so it’s only “/%postname%/”. Make sure that your host allows the rewrite rules in your htaccess file.

The reason for setting the permalinks this way is so your post pages look like this: www.yourdomain.com/post-name

This is the ultimate url structure you want on your site to get higher rankings.

Step #3 - Let’s Download The Weapons Of Mass Destruction - Installing Plugins

Ok, when you install your blog it has some things that needs to be changed like the titles of all your posts and pages. Wordpress ads your blog name to all posts pages at the beginning of the title so you want that to be removed. Also you want to add description and keyword meta tags to all your blog pages. You are going to need an xml sitemap plus better linking infrastructure across all your post pages.

Here are the main plugins that you should get started with:

Google Sitemaps Plugin - Great plugin that is a must-have. It will automatically generate xml sitemap for your blog and ping Google everytime you update your blog with new post. You can download it here.

HeadSpace2 - Very cool pluing that will allow you to control all the meta tags like custom titles, tags, description of your pages etc. I highly recommend you have it on your blog. Get it here

Related Entries Plugin - This plugin is also a must-have if you want to increase the activity of the Googlebot on your site. It will help Google index all your post pages but also pass page rank across your pages and help them rank better. You can download from this site

SEO Title Tag - This plugin also allows you to control titles of your blog posts. If you already installed HeadSpace2 then you might not need this one, but I have it on my blog. You can get that one here

Social Bookmarks Plugin - Let your visitors get traffic for you with this plugin plus build links for free. You should always have some kind of bookmark plugin on your blog and I like this one so go ahead and download it now.

OK so that’s basically it. Install all those plugins on your blog and set up your permalinks right. Also make sure you set your blog to ping these sites after you make a post:


http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://rpc.blogcatalog.com/


You should be set now. Start posting some new content regularly and concentrate on building links to your new blog.

Next thing you want to do is get a new theme for your blog, and do some more customization. You want to make things visible for your readers like the feed subscribe button and bookmark links.

So that’s basically it. That should get your started and if you keep up with new content and link building you should start receiving traffic within couple of weeks.

If you are a webmaster and own many websites like I do then you probably want to know the best SEO techniques to get your site ranked and get more traffic. Well, there are 2 routes with SEO and that’s blackhat and whitehat SEO. Which one you are going to choose is totally up to you, but I want to give you some insights to help you make the right decision. So let’s talk about blackhat SEO first…

Blackhat SEO

What does it really mean? Blackhat SEO means that you are bending the rules to get your site to the top of the search engine rankings. Usually those techniques violate Google’s webmaster guidelines and if discovered by Google or other search engines then you will get banned and deindexed from the search results. I guess that’s the basic idea of blackhat seo.

Here are a few techniques that are considered blackhat:

1. Doorway Pages (Cloaking) - It’s a tactic to trick the search engines that you have lots of content pages on your site. Those pages are used to redirect the visitors (search engine user) to another page or so called money page where you are trying to sell or promote something.

Here is how cloaking works

The basic concept is that you have a script running on your server that generates those cloaked pages automatically. When the search engine spider or Googlebot visits the site it’s being presented with pages that have lots of relevant content and optimized for varies keyword phrases. When those pages get indexed in Google they will usually obtain good rankings and start driving traffic to your site. When the visitor clicks on the link from the organic search results he/she doesn’t see the original page that Googlebot has seen. The cloaking script automatically detects that it’s a real person and redirects them to totally different page or your money page.

I have to warn you though. If someone discovers this activity on your site then you can say bye bye to that domain name. It will usually get banned within days once the cover is blown.

Some cloakers got smart and register so called throw-away domain names for cloaking purposes only. This means they keep indexing those cloaked sites and redirect visitors to a whole different domain name, so if the site where the cloaker is installed gets banned their money site is safe, but that’s not always true either.

So basically you need to create cloaking sites faster than they are being banned so you can keep constant flow of targeted traffic to your website or landing page.

2. Buying Links - This in fact is a big problem for Google and other search engines. The reason for that is because it’s ALMOST undetectable. The concept here is simple. If you want top search engine rankings then you need lots of backlinks to your website. If your niche is highly competitive then you need basically thousands of them. Some niches like for example financial, mortgage, credit report, insurance are insanely competitive, and it would require some long term content development and link building campaign. If you have the budget you can buy links from other authority sites which is against Google’s terms of service. If this was allowed then any company with a lot of money could dominate the search engine rankings by simply buying links from other high PR and authority sites. Google has managed to keep up with this by integrating some changes to their algorithm, but the problem still exists on massive scale because in reality you would need a real human editor to visit every site to see if you are buying links or if you are gaining them in the natural way.

3. Keyword Manipulation - This tactic used to work about 7-8 years ago and now is being used to trick Adwords for higher quality score more than SEO. The basic idea is to insert keywords on your site and hide it by making them very small and not readable to human eye or just changing the color of the text font to white on the white background. Google has pretty much crushed this. Their spider can easily detect this on your page so I wouldn’t recommend this at all.

4. Cross-linking - This has been going on for years and still is quite effective if you don’t get caught The idea is to create many niche sites on different IP addresses and link them all to get higher rankings. It’s against Google terms of service to link to your own sites within the same niche. This is why Google has become a domain name registrar and now has access to WHOIS information so they can see which domain names you own. So if you are using this technique you better mask your WHOIS data.

5. Scraping Content - Scraping other sites for content is actually becoming more and more popular. Most of the people that use it try to monetize those sites using Adsense. The idea is that you have a script installed on your server that automatically pulls content from other sites and creates pages on your website. This falls into the duplicate content category, but it looks like Google really doesn’t care much about this anymore. The sites with scraped content usually get filtered out off the search results, but somehow they still get indexed and manage to pull some traffic. So if you use this on massive scale you could actually see some great results as far some affiliate income.

6. Hijacking - This one is actually pretty evil and you wouldn’t want this to happen to you, but here is how it works. The hijacker goes and creates a 302 redirect on some established site which gets indexed in the serps while the original site gets deindexed. So basically if some company has an affiliate program and you want to monetize on their traffic from search enignes without doing any work you would go and create this kind of redirect and your page would appear in place of the original domain name. Of course you would redirect through your own affiliate link. This is one bad technique that should not be used ever.

There are many other black hat SEO techniques like link spamming, building link farms and more.

Black Hat SEO is not for everyone. It usually delivers fast and quick results but it’s not a long term business model that will continue to grow. You need to constantly tweak and put up new sites to keep the momentum going. I have done some black hat seo in the past when I first started, and I know what kind of risk is involved. I was constantly under stress and hoping that my sites will survive another day

I switched from black hat to white hat SEO and I like it much better. Some people never make the switch and stay underground…lol

Anyway, let’s take a look at White Hat SEO and what it’s all about.

WhiteHat SEO

Whitehat SEO delivers slower results but much more stable and steady income. The idea is to provide high quality content that gets noticed. If you put out great content it will accomplish 3 things - get higher rankings and gain authority plus get natural links back to your site.

The problem why so many people struggle with Whitehat SEO is because it takes a lot of work at the beginning without and results at all. For the first month or 2 you will be creating content without getting too much traffic or generating any substantial income. Most people quit because of that and then try black hat stuff.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you try to build a stable business and only use White Hat SEO. You will not have to worry about getting banned or losing your site. Once you get to the point where you are making decent money from it then it will be much much easier than any black hat technique. In fact you can make more money with doing a legitimate business than trying to trick the search engines.

Hope this post helped you understand the whole concept better, so you can decide for yourself which way you are going to choose.

Feel free to post your comments below with your opinion.

I have integrated a new feature on affhelper.com that allows you to create marketing pages on our domain name just like you would use Squidoo.com.

As you probably know, some pages of this site rank pretty good in search engine rankings. You can now take advantage of this and start creating your own pages to promote your own products, services, affiliate programs, or your own website.

If you are marketing on Squidoo or Blogger then you might want to consider creating some pages on our site as well. Right now the page creation is free and it doesn’t cost anything, so please hurry because that will change in about 2-3 weeks. After I am done testing I will start charging $1 per page.

Using marketing pages to generate targeted traffic has been very effective for some marketers. It’s almost like getting instant traffic for whatever keywords you want.

You can also submit articles to our site. Article marketing has been proven to increase search engine rankings, and drive more traffic to any website.

To start creating marketing pages on our site and submit articles please follow the link below:

http://www.affhelper.com/submit-content.html

Are you a clickbank marketer? Try creating some pages on our domain name to promote your products.

Keep in mind that we are accepting only relevant content. This means that pages related to “Internet Marketing” will be approved.

I have done a lot of thinking lately about building content sites and how to roll them out faster and easier. I came to the conclusion that the best way to do it is to use user generated content. This means that your website visitors can contribute content to your site and that way it could grow virally.

If you think about it, that’s how all the big web giants are generating their content. For example, Squidoo allows people create their own business pages.  Blogger lets people create free blogs. Craigslist allows people post free classified ads.

You see, every time people who visits those sites and contribute content create a new page that gets indexed in search engines. This allows those web giants to grow exponentially. Just imagine what kind of income you could earn through Adsense if you owned Craigslist.

User generated content is absolutely the best way to grow your sites on autopilot. It’s all original content and you almost can’t stop it from growing, unless you shut down the server.

Since we established that user generated content is the ultimate solution to develop huge profitable sites, I want to let you in on a little secret. You see, I have been working on a content management solution that you can plug into any of your existing websites and take full advantage of the user generated content.

Imagine what this could do to your Adsense income. Imagine having so much new content on your site that you won’t be able to keep up moderating it. That’s exactly what you need to make the big bucks with content sites and control the search engine traffic.

I am planning on revealing more information about my software product very soon. I am testing the platform right now and should be able to release it within the next 2-3 weeks.

Yes it’s true. Reciprocal links do not play a big role in search engine optimization anymore in my opinion. They still work and can influence your search engine rankings, but not as much as it was 3-4 years ago.

I noticed that Google started stripping websites out of their page rank for having to many outgoing links from their link directories. Latest update made a lot of webmasters mad and frustrated. Lots of authority sites lost their high page ranks, and there is a good reason for that.

You see, when your site has a page rank of 7 or 8, you will get people trying to pay you good money for linking back to their sites. Google doesn’t like it at ALL. You will most likely get penalized and the site that is selling links could get banned as well.

Anyway, going back to reciprocal linking, if you are exchanging links with other sites then don’t include more than 15-20 links per page. Also, if I were you I would only have one “partners” page, where you only list highly relevant link partners. Don’t exchange links with 100 websites or 1000s like some do. It could actually hurt you. A lot of times you won’t be able to monitor them to check if some of them are black hat sites. Keep in mind that linking to a black hat site could also get you a penalty from the Big G.

One-way links are so easy to get nowadays, that there is no need to exchange links anymore. So how do you get them? Well, let see:

- Article marketing (write 10-20 articles per month and submit them to article directories with links back to your websites)

- Press releases (write 1-2 press releases per month - one good press release could result with 100s of one way backlinks to your website)

- Social bookmarking (If you have great content then bookmark it through onlywire or some other social sites - this could go viral and get you a lot of links and traffic)

- Link baits (create some web based tools that visitors can use on your website - this will get other webmasters to link to it)

- Create free blogs on Blogger.com and link back to your sites

As you can see there is so many ways to get one-way links, that you almost don’t want to waste time on reciprocal linking.

Those links will also have much bigger influence on your search engine rankings, so get as many as possible. One-way links from articles, press releases, and other relevant sites shows Google that you have great content that is worth linking to.

Hope this helps

I have been asked this question so many times. It doesn’t matter if you have keywords in your domain name that much. In fact in some niches it helps not to have them at all.

For example, if you are going after a very small niche with only 2000-3000 searches per month then you might want to consider including one of the keywords in it. If you can register a domain name with the exact keyword phrase then get it, but only if it doesn’t exceeds 2-3 words and you don’t include the dashes “-” in it.

If you are going after a very competitive niche then you probably don’t want to include them at all. From my experience it’s better not to have them when trying to rank for high traffic keywords, because it’s a fast way to Google Sandbox (Google will filter you out for a BIG while).

To avoid it just don’t include your keywords in your domain name. Also I suggest you to register your domain name for longer than 2 years. You see, Google is a domain registrar so they have access to all the whois data. If you register a domain name for 1 year only, it looks like you are not that serious about your business.

This doesn’t always apply. Like I said, if you are going after very competitive markets then that’s just the best way to fly under the radar.

Another very interesting thing I wanted to tell you about is how Google treats .org extensions. I have noticed that .org domain names have much better chance to rank on the first page of the search results. This applies to Google only. I haven’t experienced it with other search engines.

So what is more important? Well, that depends on which search engine you are trying to optimize your website for.

From my experience Off-page optimization is more important when it comes to Google. I have ranked one-page websites without too much content for highly competitive keyword phrases. I would get lots of links through press releases, articles, and blog posts. One-way links do wonders. It’s so easy to get backlinks through article marketing or press releases that there is no need to do reciprocal linking at all.

I stopped exchanging links with other webmasters completely. Once I concentrated on getting one-way backlinks my search engine rankings went up very quickly for almost all my niche sites.

Lately this is the strategy I have been using to get my niche sites ranked for any keywords I want:

- Find a profitable niche

- I create 5-10 page website for that niche

- Hire a freelancer to write me 10-20 articles

- I submit 10 articles through Isnare.com and 10 through SubmitYourArticle.com

- I write 1-2 press releases and submit it through Webwire.com

- After the site is indexed and already getting some traffic I write a PRWebDirect press release and use the $249 option for distribution.

So that’s it! I just gave you my million dollar strategy to steal search engine rankings for any niche keyword I want (Almost any :))

It’s important that you have unique content on your website and unique original articles when distributing them through the services mentioned above.

So there you have it

I wouldn’t worry too much about On-page optimization. Just make sure you do have some of the keyword phrases you want to rank for. Don’t try any tricks or over do it. Make sure your content makes sense.