Are you still intimidated by search engine optimization (SEO)?

Do you still think there is no chance YOUR blog/site can be the one to show up on the first page of Google search results?

If so,

Take a look at these numbers:

1. 25% of marketers know little or nothing about SEO.

2. Only 14% implement SEO as part of their overall marketing strategy.

3. 60% do not currently invest in SEO at all.

3. 30% are not planning to invest in it in the upcoming year.

These and other statistics were revealed by SEO agency dotSEO in their new NakedSEO report.

Surprised?

Blown away more like it, if you ask me.

With numbers like that, what does REALLY stand between you and that top ranking position in Google?

If at least 60% of your potential competitors out there don’t do a thing to claim their fair share of Google traffic, what would you need to do to beat them?

I am not talking about becoming an SEO expert here, not at all. All you need to do is learn some solid strategies you can put into practice today and watch yourself break away from the pack.

Just find a way to be one step ahead of your competition. After all, getting a step ahead of someone who is standing still isn’t that hard!

If you are still not convinced that SEO is worth the trouble (which I am OK with: less competition for the rest of us), let me touch on one more thing from the report:

***23% surveyed marketers said that they were not all too sure about the benefits of implementing SEO and 14% of them said that they don’t see ANY benefits at all.

Here’s a very quick thought on that: what a bunch of hogwash!

Here’s the expanded version of that thought:

SEO Benefit #1. Google is the first port of call for anyone looking for services, products, or information.

SEO Benefit #2. The organic search engine traffic is absolutely free.

SEO Benefit #3. This is a leveraged traffic strategy, meaning once you achieve high search engine ranking optimization, maintaining it is very easy. You’ll be raking free traffic for a long time to come.

SEO Benefit #4. The traffic you get from SEO is highly TARGETED website traffic = increased sales of your products or services.

SEO Benefit #5. SEO is a marketing strategy that never sleeps – once your site is highly ranked, it will work for you 24/7/365.

SEO Benefit #6. It’s a very cost effective strategy, especially when you do it yourself.

Trust me, there are more where these came from.

Now if your objection to SEO is merely that fact that you don’t know anything about it and have no idea where to start, I’ve got the answer for you: download my free 7 Steps to Complete Search Engine Domination report, READ it and IMPLEMENT it. I promise that alone will put you miles ahead of your competition.

Question: is it wrong to take advantage of your competitors who want to know nothing about SEO by simply implementing a solid search engine optimization strategy of your own? Comment below.

And one more thing: I suspect that I will get a lot of comments on how difficult your particular market is and how it’s dominated by some heavy-weight gorillas. Yes, it’s true there are markets you are better off staying away from. However, these markets are not the rule. Find yourself a niche that doesn’t have a competition killer.

How can you loose something you don’t yet have?

Easily: by NOT taking your time to pick the perfect domain name.

Choosing the right domain name is one of the most important things you can do to get high search engine ranking optimization.

After you’ve done the proper keyword research and came up with that perfect niche market you want to make some money off, your next step should be to take you time picking the right domain name.

5 great guidelines you can use when choosing the right domain

Here are 5 great guidelines you can use when choosing the right domain (to make it easier, let’s pick a keyword – “pool chlorinator” for instance):

1. PoolChlorinator.com is THE perfect domain to get; it will trump all other variations you can come up with. When you have a dead-on domain, Google will WANT to put you in #1 spot!

2. PoolChlorinator.net or .org should be your second choice, if .com is not available.

3. Pool-Chlorinator.com – i.e. your-keyword.com. Many old school SEOs will suggest that this is a great way to go, and I won’t argue with them (or maybe I will). It was possibly the case back in the day when spamming was not so wide-spread. Rumor has it it’s precisely because many spammers are so fond of putting dashes in their domain names that Google discounts those type of domains altogether. Let’s look at it this way as well: how many big websites ranking high on Google you’ve seen that have dashes in their domain name? That’s my point.

4. PoolChlorinatorTips.com (i.e. suffixed.com) – this will be my next choice. When choosing your suffix, consider making it as short as possible unless it can be an additional keyword – more on that in a second.

5. MyPoolChlorinator.com (i.e. prefixed.com) – this would be my last choice. Google reads from left to right, as most of us do, and gives your first words the most weight.

Now a little exercise for those brain cells of yours:

Which domain is better?

a) PoolChlorinatorTips.com

or

b) PoolChlorinatorProducts.com

The former has a nice and short suffix that is more or less relevant to the topic.

The latter one… well, it has a suffix that clearly shows the BUYING intent vs research intent. Wouldn’t you rather attract visitors who are ready to buy vs just learn more about the topic? You bet!

So in this exercise the clear answer (although might be counter-intuitive at the first glance) is B.

Always use a suffix that gives you a bump in commercial intent. Here is a link to a great free tool that makes it a cinch to determine whether your chosen keywords have commercial intent.

One more word on that

Just because a keyword doesn’t have commercial intent, it does not mean you don’t want to optimize for it. As long as it has a great amount of searches, I say go for it! Just make sure you have good traffic conversion techniques in place and any traffic can be monetized!

So don’t take your domain choice lightly – it can definitely make or break your chance to rank well… VERY well.

When you have the dead-on domain name, the #1 Google listing is yours to lose.

Google Trends is to blogs as drinking a cup of expresso coffee loaded with sugar is to the human body. A short, sweet, cheap thrill.

Sunday morning I wrote an article about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. As an afterthought, I checked Google Trends looking for significant keywords to include or tag my post with.

Once found, I added them to my article and posted it to the blog. The hits were fast and furious – for a few minutes, then — nothing.

Here’s a partial screenshot so you can see the times of the hits. Explanation follows.

My article posted at 9:49am – the Google searchbot came by at 9:51am – The 25 hits registered between 9:52am and 10:12am – 24 minutes! That’s how fast things turn over on blogsearch.google.com and
trends.google.com!

That’s a visitor-a-minute… and if just one comes back or subscribes, it’s all good!

So, iIf you’re not doing anything one day, you can select a few hot topics, post them up on your blog and see what will stick!

*** (Keep in mind: my blog is on Google‘s blogspot platform, so the search engine responds immediately when I post an article!)

To ping your blog to Google blogsearches worldwide, go to Pingler.com

Follow the instructions… it’s FREE!

Today we are going to do our weekly round up. This week the round up is all about Google Adsense. Initially I only wanted to add Google Adsense articles to it but I didn’t find enough articles to solely focus on Adsense. That’s why I added the Internet Advertising category to it. I still hope you like it.

If you would like to get your articles featured here then be sure to submit them to MMO – Making Money Online social network as all of these articles have been submitted there at one point or another.

Here is What I Have Found For You Today on MMO Social Network

Google Adsense Articles

• Tips to Sky Rocket Your AdSense Revenue – I enjoyed reading this post because I think all the important points that you need to keep in mind when using Google AdSense.
• How Much Does Google Adsense Pay You? – This is a great article about how much Google pays you for every click the ad gets. If you are relying on Google AdSenseheavily then you must read this.
• Simple Changes Doubled My AdSense Revenue – This is another article worth reading on AdSense. The tips he mentions here are definitely worth trying out and also easy to incorporate into your websites.
• What’s Your Best-Performing AdSense Unit? – This is basically a discussion about what kind of AdSense units perform best. Definitely worth reading.
• Google Scams – Another nice article which talks about the typical Google scams and how you can really make money through Google AdSense.
• Increase Adsense Revenue: Google AdSense Revenue Sharing Sites for Backlinking – This is a hubpage dedicated to making money from Google AdSense. There is an interesting strategy that the author mentions to make more money and also to increase your traffic.

Internet Advertising Articles

• Tips to Get Your Website Noticed by Advertisers – I also enjoyed reading the post because I found the tips useful.
• Use an Automated Email Responder and Get More Profit -  This is a nice article by Andrew which explains the advantages of using automated email responders. Be sure to read it.
• The Best Content Spinner Ever – This article talks about software called “content spinners” which help you to get some new content by “spinning” your articles. I am not sure how legitimate the review is but it seems interesting.
• How to Get Your Business Online with a Shoestring Budget – This is a good post about how you can create your business online while only spending a limited amount of money.

Discussion: Making Money with Adsense?

In several articles I have mentioned above there is always the discussion of whether you can make money through Google AdSense. I have tried making money through it too but I haven’t been very successful. What do you think is essential to make money through AdSense? Have you built a website solely dedicated to making money from Google AdSense?

“The Google Story” by David A.Vise is about the most widely used search engine in the world – Google. The common phrase that people say when they want to look up something is ,”I’ll just Google it.” Everyone knows what you mean when you say “Google it” other wise if you haven’t heard of it, then you’ve been living in a cave or something. Google was created by two men -  Sergey Brin, a Russian and Larry Page, an American.

They both met up at Stanford University in the US. They had this idea of wanting to create a search engine that would organise every piece of information and would be accessible to the public for free. They also wanted to make money from it to people in the form of selling ads called Adsense, which are a type of  pay-per-click ad, where you make money from showing their ads on your site or blog.

They also invented AdWords, where people would buy advertising and pay each time someone would click on their advertisement. Which is very expensive.It can run into hundreds of dollars just to pay for advertising this way. They also had a favourite recipe that their chef cooked for them, which was called Buttermilk Chicken. The meals would be provided for free to the workers and the recipe itself was Google-sized to the max. Sergey and Larry wanted to change the way the world searched for and researched for information. They looked to make money by selling targeted advertising to businesses on the results pages. They wanted an accessible search engine that could be searched by people all over the world for free.

Blogging Heroes By Michael A. Banks

“Blogging Heroes” is a great collection of the world’s 30 top bloggers. Michael A. Banks goes into detail as to how he got in touch with them, and how he transcribed their words into text for inclusion in his book. He did it by using software that helps you dictate words into sentences on the computer screen as you speak the words  out via audio tape. The software is called “Naturally Speaking”.

The bloggers themselves go into great detail as to how the came into blogging, what their previous experiences were before they tried blogging, What sort of jobs they had or still have and how much time they devote to it. Some of them (in fact, most of them) blog full-time and write content for much of the day and for many hours. I was gobsmacked as to how many blogs that they themselves looked at via rss readers and the hundreds of blogs that they read per day to do research for their specialised fields.

No doubt about it, you have to be dedicated to your craft if you want the loyal readers to keep reading your blog. Why do they blog? because they are passionate and enthusiastic about doing it and it consumes an incredible amount of time.  They give plenty of tips for the newbie blogger, such as:  Be passionate about the topic you are writing about.  Good content will outbeat SEO tactics all the time.

Read and comment on other blogs, and continue the discussion rather that leave a short note. Google will bring a trickle of traffic to you forever.  And lots, lots more. And some of them have books that were written before the blog was created, others had email newsletter lists. And some even worked for Microsoft.  Dave Taylor, of AskDaveTaylor.com had this really good description of how to attract readers to your site. He likens it to going to a party. But you don’t go to a party and just leave. You go and engage in discussions. You have to make yourself known in the blogosphere, and people will want to come to your party, as it were.

It’s hard to get your blog to the top, especially if you’re blogging about “making money online” or something similar.

But the key to it is to keep blogging and never quit, no matter how slight the odds are that you will succeed with your efforts. How do you keep going? You need an inspiration. And what is the best blogging inspiration out there?

Unexpectedly, it’s your traffic stats.

“Whaaaatt??”

First, let me explain. Right now you may be thinking that your stats only make you feel down about yourself and your blog, but I strongly disagree – you’re looking at it the wrong way, the un-optimistic way. Remember, blogging, no matter what niche, is all about setting goals and having optimism and ambition. So what is the right way of looking at your stats? If you’re blog is growing, it should be obvious. Comparing your blog traffic from this month to another month in the past for example, is good inspiration. When I see my traffic increasing, I am always motivated to work-work-work.

Reading Your Stats

By stats, I mean any script or plugin that tracks how many visitors you get and is capable of comparing traffic from one period of time to another. If you know anything about traffic analysis, then you know that Google Analytics is the best choice. Since it’s free, there’s no reason not to get started today. For the rest of this post, I’m going to have my writing geared to bloggers who are using Google Analytics, but even if you aren’t, there should be a way to do something similar using your own tracker, so just keep reading.

A handy feature of Google Analytics is that you can see how your site has grown over the last 30 days compared to the 30 days before it. In other words, it compares the current month to the last using a percentage. This is all from the account view. Yup, you don’t even have to be in your Dashboard to be inspired by your statistics. I’ll call this metric the “Account Overlook”. But if you want a more detailed and more motivational view, you’ll have dive into your Dashboard. Your account overlook only compares how many visits you are getting, and not the most important piece of data, the amount of actual people coming to your website, or visitors. But from your dashboard you can view and compare to the past all of the main statistics available in Google Analytics, including visits, pageviews, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site, new visits, and visitors. Combined these stats will encourage you to keep blogging and keep growing.

Conclusion

Although you probably didn’t realize it until now, your increasing traffic stats are the best inspiration for working and writing as a blogger. Google Analytics is just one example of how you can use your stats to achieve this effect. After all, every webmaster loves to see cold-hard proof that their website is growing, and statistics are it.

Thanks for reading! I hope you got a lot from this article, and I hope it will encourage you to use your traffic tracker in a whole new way. Be sure to retweet and share!

Image credit: Butterflies

Google Page Rank update was not surprising to me this time at all, I remember last time that no body really cares for it, and I became one of those who think that Google Page ank kind of a big joke and only for decoration! But of course as you might know Google PageRank still something to consider if you are selling advertisements on your blog, it’s actually one of the main things that attract advertisers to your blog or webs site.

Google Page Rank was updated early today, I was talking with Andy of ComLuv network when he notice the change, but I couldn’t recognize it because this time non of my blogs has changed, all remain the same I guess!

I am just thinking about the reason that our blog is not getting a higher PR by Google, probably the blog is leaking it’s PR somewhere, so let me give you some notes that might be the reason:

• I have changed the blog title recently to “How to Blog and Start a business“
• I have added a long list of recent posts to the home page and posts
• I have changed setting on the robot.txt not to index some pages and tag pages
• I still have a lot of HTML and CSS validation errors and warnings
• I changed Thesis Theme folder when upgraded to Thesis Theme 1.7
• I have created a 301 redirect to the domain name without www. To the one with www.
• I run other sites and blogs on the same shared hosting and I don’t recommend that on BlueHost!

All these points above could heart the Page Rank, especially changing the Theme Theme folder, probably Google will consider that you have changed the whole theme, and probably you did! so if someone had the same problem, plz tell me!

SEO Problems

I will tell you about a problem I discovered recently after talking on Skype with Hash of ShoutMeLoud and he gave me some nice SEO advice that really helped with search engines traffic. After that I discover a big mistake I was doing which is hosting several domain names on BlueHost shared hosting, FamousBloggers.net is actually the primary domain, but for some reason when you host or transfer another domain name on the same shared hosting BlueHost create a sub domain from your primary domain name that you can access the new domain from it, confused? Let me explain to you more!

BlueHost, Add-On Domains, and .htaccess

When I first bought www.mmosocialnetwork.com domain name, I hosted on BlueHost as a beta, and it’s still beta site till now, I was planning to move it to a VPS hosting on the first chance, I just don’t have the time to do it right now. BlueHost created a sub domain from famousbloggers.net for the mosocialnetwork like this:

mmosocialnetwork.famousbloggers.net I didn’t at the beginning that this will give me SEO problems, and probably it’s the main reason that I can not control Page Rank or anything!

I Googled the internet trying to find a solution because customer service will not give a good help with that because it’s not their business to do SEO consult for their clients, I found one article talk about the exact problem I am having, it’s talking about BlueHost, Add-On Domains, and .htaccess, and they author was kind enough to share how he solved the BlueHost addon domain name SEO problem, but unfortunately the codes somehow was not working for me, or maybe I was tired that night and I gave up after some hard tries, and I decided to try again latter!

Why I am sharing this

Google PageRank is not so very important to me like before, but it’s good to get a PR of 5 to feel the power, I am sharing these notes and things happened with me on this blog, so maybe you will come across this post one day and give me some ideas, advice or maybe share your story!

News has struck the SEO industry. The speed of a website now officially has an effect on its Google search engine rankings. It has been speculated that Google was going to implement this factor into its complicated 200-factor algorithm for a long time, but this is still a major shock to most internet marketing professionals.

According to the official Google Webmaster Central Blog, it is important to speed up your site. I agree. A faster site will leave visitors satisfied and on your site for a longer period of time. Users do put a lot of value on speed, but does it make sense to rank websites on their speed? It just seems like a lateral move to me.

What Others Are Saying

Most webmasters feel the same way. Out of the 140 comments to the post, most of them are webmasters complaining about this change. One commenter shared a similar opinion to mine. My additions to the comment are italicized.

dianosq said…

I do not think that this is a solid idea. What about sites that post lots of photos on their pages or use complex services that take longer to load? What about all the sites that use advertisement? They obviously load slower than a plain HTML site. And a plain HTML site obviously is less interactive and probably less useful to searchers. Great job, Google – you just leaned your top search results toward useless websites.

It would be nice if Google would add more transparency to the new signal, including if a website’s rankings are affected by its loading time (in webmaster tools for instance). Great idea, but even if it was implemented, it wouldn’t make up for basing search results on the speed of a website, even in the slightest.

You guys hopefully look at the connection speeds and origins of visitors as well. A website with lots of Indian users for instance will likely have slower speeds reported than a website with Japanese or Swedish users. Are those factors included in the calculation? Another great idea, but I don’t think Google is capable doing this without drawing legal attention.

How can a webmaster check to see if a recent ranking drop (say on April 1) is related to that new factor? I think Google should extend this so that whenever a site’s rankings are changed, positively or negatively, Google should tell us why so we can improve. A great place for Google to do this is within Google Webmaster Tools.

Another commenter said that “since Google Analytics is slow, does it have an effect on Google’s rankings? That would be the ultimate irony.”

Google‘s Reaction

In an attempt to cool things down with outraged webmasters, Google has stated within the post that page speed doesn’t carry much weight and that fewer than 1% of search queries have been affected by the new algorithm factor implementation. Still, if you are in about 1 in a hundred of search queries, your site ranking in particular may have been affected.

Google also linked to a few tools for webmasters to use to examine, analyze, and optimize webpage speed:

Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.

YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.

WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.

In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

You can learn more about tracking site performance using Google Webmaster Tools here: Site Performance In Google Webmaster Tools

Google also defends itself by saying that by using page speed in ranking, it is helping satisfy its users by giving them faster webpages. That is a good point, but I’m still against using page speed as an indicator of the importance of a page.

Since Google has gone through with the new page speed implementation, the best thing you can do as a webmaster is improve your… page speed. The best way to do this without spending hours staring at the computer working and coding to make your website faster is switch to a better webhost.

Back to Google’s new algorithm change, I hope they know what they’re doing.

This is is out of my expectations, Google PageRank update is kind of crazy this time, almost all the old domains and blog remain the same, except a few of those I was checking, and the new domains jumped to PR 3 and 4, so… I am sure there is one factor is messing, or link building is not a real strong factor of increasing the PageRank. You will be amazed of my PageRank results.

Now, and after I was believing in Google PageRank, as I always think I should believe of what advertisers believe, because simply they are the ones who paying my expensive at the moment, but now I will have to change my mind about PR, yes I need a nice number and certificate for decoration only!

I started also not to believe the importance of other rankings, it’s all messed up and not reflecting the real results of hard work, and I am going to show!

My expectations for FamousBloggers.net is to get a pr of 4 or 5, but what happened is that it’s rank remains as it was, it’s still 3 with no changes for the home page, but so many internal pages got pr of 2 and 3 which is cool!

The really crazy thing happened, and I will tel you why it’s crazy is that my personal blog went from 1 to 3, I have published 3 or 4 posts since the last 6 months, and I have no idea why Google decided PR of 3 for it.

Let me tell you something more crazy about Google PR

Probably you know MMO social network and bookmark site, that was PR 0 as it’s still new, that 3 months old site got a PR of 4, WOW!

Another crazy thing about Google PageRank

I still don’t believe that my one month old designs social bookmark site DesignGizer.com got a PR or 4, and my 2 weeks old new design blog DesignGizer.net that no body knows about it and never visited it before went to PR2  Thank you Google!

So, in a way or another, I think I have sacrificed FamousBloggers.net Rank, and give it to other blogs, I used to believe of Google Page Rank, but not this time, I don’t want to say that, but Google PR is bulls**t.

I have just received a very a very good news, finally Problogger.net is out of the blogging competition, it has been acquired by Google, and Darren Rowse has received his contract, and probably he is going on vacation for a few weeks before he start working on his new blog series “331 days to Build an Even Better Blog“, specially after the great success of his 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Well done Darren and I wish you good luck with your new projects.

This is great news!

Here is what has been published about it:

MELBOURNE, Australia. (April 1, 2010) – ProBlogger, the web’s #1 Blog Tips site, today announced that it has been acquired by Google

“Blogging continues to grow in popularity, not only for personal use but by entrepreneurs and businesses around the world. Once seen as a ‘fools game’ – blogging has now grown up.” said a Google representative today

What a fantastic news on the beginning of April, finally Problogger.net is out of the competition and became a Blogging School, and we don’t have to worry about competing with Darren Rowse anymore, I wish that Google buys all blogs on top of FamousBloggers.net to clear the way, so we can became the number one on blogging with out having to blog for the next six years!

I was actually shocked because I just wake up now, and I still can not open my eyes, and just sow this tweet by john Haydon saying that “ProBlogger Acquired by Google“, I thought I am reading well, still kind of dizzy, but so excited because we don’t have to spend long days and nights blogging hard, we don’t have to compete with other blogs again, but other blogs will work hard to compete with us!

Now the blogging competition is between You and Me