Archive for February, 2010
February 28th, 2010 | 
Author: By now everyone should have at least heard of the concept of article marketing – the creation and distribution of subject specific articles in order to generate traffic and back links to your site. The subjects of article topics, how to write articles etc has been covered many times before so we will not be covering them here, instead we will look at what you should do with your articles after you have created them i.e. where should you post your articles for maximum effect.
Before we cover this topic there is a general, but important to be made – for the top article sites that I am about to cover ALWAYS do a manual submission of your articles. It may well be more time consuming than using some sort of article distribution software but it is more effective in the long run.
So where are the best sites to post your articles ?, we would recommend the following sites:-
1) EzineArticles
Do to the high traffic and high Google PageRank of this site it is an absolute must for anyone distributing their articles. The editorial checking is rigorous so you will have to ensure that you have high quality and unique content to post but it is worth the effort (particularly as the Authors Bio box allows you to have some html code thus allowing you to control your own link anchor text)
2) GoArticles
Another high traffic, high PageRank site that is highly recommended for your articles. The editorial control is not quite as stringent as EzineArticles but still require high quality and unique content. The volume of visitors is not as good as Ezinearticles but certainly well worthwhile. Very good for helping to build backlinks to your site.
3) ArticleBase
Again selected for its high traffic, high PageRank status. The volume of visitors is not as good as Ezinearticles but certainly well worthwhile. Again very good for helping to build backlinks to your site.
4) iSnare
iSnare has had its ups and downs over recent times but still a firm favourite due not only to its high traffic, high PageRank status but also its article distribution service. Having said earlier that manual submission is the key to success in getting your articles on the top article sites there are also a large group of secondary sites where automatic submission is an acceptable route. The iSnare automatic submission service submits to the ArticleLive, ArticleDashboard and ArticleFriendly powered network of sites – a very large group of article sites indeed. It also submits to a range of other sites and discussion groups. The real beauty of the iSnare service is that you do not have to register at all these article sites prior to using the distribution service (this can run into hundreds of registrations !) – they have special accounts that allow them to log articles on your behalf. The critical aspect of this is that they still use your author biographies to do the posting so your links remain attached to the distributed articles – this is essential to ensure that you still get the visitors and backlinks that you need.
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WordPress is a fantastic tool for publishing your content on the web – although it is ostensibly a blogging tool it has now developed to become almost a fully fledged content management system (CMS). Having sung the praises of WordPress it must also be pointed out that it has areas of weaknesses. Fortunately WordPress is extensible through the use of plugins – small pieces of code / software that enhance the basic functionality of WordPress.
This article exams seven of the key plugins that you can add to your WordPress site to enhance its functionality. Plugins are very simple to add – simply go to your admin page, click on plugins then click add. The plugins outlined in this article can all be added to your site using this straightforward method. To find the actual plugins mentioned here simply type in the name of the plugin to the search box that appears after you have followed the simple steps listed above.
1) Advertising manager
A plugin that allows the flexible placement of adverts within your blog, I use it for managing adsense, click bank and other adverts. Very flexible and really takes the pain away from managing site advertising
2) All in one SEO Pack
Probably one of, if not the, most important plugins you can use. It radically overhauls the ability of WordPress to manage page titles, meta tags (particularly description and keyword tags). Although WordPress provides reasonable facilities to carry out search engine optimization on your site you will be leaving a lot on the table SEO wise if you do not install this plugin.
3) Automatic SEO links
This plugin automatically searches you posts as they are published and creates hyperlinks to either other internal pages from your site or to external pages dependant on the rules you have created. It can create these links based on single words or phrases, the target can be specified (i.e. does the link open a new window etc) and a title can be set for each link (appears during a mouse over of the link). A fantastic tool for ensuring that you have a good internal linking setup within your site and also for linking to such things as affiliate sites to help generate revenue for your site.
4) cbNET Ping optimizer
Out of the box WordPress can be setup to send out “pings” every time you update your blog, however there are some weaknesses with this inbuilt system. These weaknesses include sending out pings when a post is created even though it has been scheduled to appear at a future date rather than immediately and also sending out pings when existing posts change – this can lead to too many or inappropriate pings being generated. cbNet Ping Optimizer overcomes that problem and provides a more flexible and robust pinging platform – a must have plugin.
5) Contact Form 7
Every site should have a contact form to make it easier for users to get in touch with you – ContactForm 7 does exactly this in an easy to administer and flexible fashion. There are other ways of achieving the same functionality but none are as straightforward as this.
6) Embed iFrame
From time to time it will be necessary to embed external content into your blog – a nice way to do this is to use an iFrame. Unfortunately WordPress does not allow you to use such functionality and hence the need for the Embed iFrame plugin. It is not fancy but it does exactly what is says on the tin and adds an extremely useful piece of functionality to WordPress.
7) Google XML sitemaps
Having a sitemap can contribute to an improved search engine ranking. The Google XML sitemaps plugin is an extremely configurable and powerful automatic site map generation tool. It can be configured to regenerate the site map every time there is an update to your site, the contents of the sitemap can be specified, the output type can be set and many other factors are also configurable.
Of Course these are not the only plugins available; there is an extremely large and varied range out there for you to choose from. We will be producing more articles that look at other plugins that add useful features and functionality to your WordPress installation.
In this article we will discuss 8 more things that harm a High Search engine Ranking. The advice in this article should help site owners attain better rankings for the sites they are promoting. In other articles we will look at other factors that may affect your ranking and also at more factors that may actually damage your ranking.
1) Invisible or hidden text
In a similar fashion to the use of very small images using text that is not readable by a human (same foreground and background colors, very small font size etc) is not a good idea. This technique has been used by some to increase keyword density or to get more keywords per page. It can be detected by the search engine and will be penlaized.
2) Content gained by Breaking Copyright
Just like using duplicate content if you sue other peoples content without their permission this will harm your ranking (and may land you in legal trouble !)
3) Sloppy HTML code / poor site design
Whilst Sloppy HTML code / poor site design will not get you banned from the search engines it may affect your ranking. If there is a lot of excessive code on your page it may make it difficult for the search engines to spider it effectively. In addition to this poorly designed sites tend not to retain visitors or encourage repeat visitors.
4) Use of Flash
Whilst Flash driven sites can be visually appealing they can be difficult to achieve high rankings with (particularly when no HTML alternative is offered). Flash has its place in terms of adding extra wow factor to the site but I would recommend against constructing entire pages from it (particularly the home page !). Whilst Flash driven sites can be visually appealing they can be difficult to achieve high rankings with (particularly when no HTML alternative is offered). Flash has its place in terms of adding extra wow factor to the site but I would recommend against constructing entire pages from it (particularly the home page !)
5) Frames
Like Flash, the use of Frames can be very useful (particularly with respect to menu systems etc) but they can result in sites that are difficult for the search engines to spider and hence may damage rankings . Best to avoid if possible – particularly as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can deliver many of the benefits without the down sides.
6) Redirects (301 and 302)
Redirects can be useful to move users to other parts of the site but they must be used carefully, excessive use or re-directs to unrelated pages can be considered bad practice and result in your site being penalized.
7) Errors in the robots.txt file
Be careful with your use of the robots.txt file, used correctly it can be a useful pointer for the search engines, used incorrectly it can exclude sections of your site, prevent spiders from visiting on a regular basis and generally harm your ranking.
Session IDs
If your pages use session id’s then they are unlikely to get indexed – look at alternative methods of delivering pages.
We hope this tips prove useful to your online marketing efforts, please look out for more of our articles on this and other related subjects.
In this article we will discuss 8 things that harm a High Search engine Ranking. The advice in this article should help site owners attain better rankings for the sites they are promoting. In other articles we will look at other factors that may affect your ranking and also at more factors that may actually damage your ranking.
1) Overuse of keywords aka Keyword stuffing
Having your keywords appear too many times on the page is known as keyword stuffing and it will damage your ranking. The amount of times that a keyword appears is known as keyword density and it is expressed as a percentage. There are online tools for checking keyword density – you should be aiming for around 5% density, anything over 10% is running the risk of being classified as stuffing.
2) Lack of Focus / Dilution of keywords
If you are optimizing your site for a wide range of keywords or key phrases then you need to be careful that a) You group your keywords and phrases together on related themes and b)You do not try and cram too many keywords and phrases on the same page. As a rule of thumb you should have one primary y keyword or phrase and two or three secondary keywords or phrases per page. Any more than this and you run the risk of dilution.
3) Using tiny images as links
Whilst it is perfectly acceptable to use images as links to or within the site these must be of a reasonable (visible to a human) size. Having a series of 1 pixel images with hyperlinks to pages is not a good way to boost a sites internal linking – it does not look natural and search engines will detect, and penalize, this.
4) Cross-linking a group of sites
This is the practice of using a group of sites (normally owned / operated by the same person) to link to each other. So A links to B which links to C which links to D, B links back to A, C and D, etc ( these link groups are normally more complicated than this example and can involve hundreds of sites). It is recognized by the search engines and will be penalized as bad linking.
5) Outbound links to bad site or link farms
In a similar way that inbound links from bad sites / link farms can damage your search engine ranking so can outbound links. You need to check who you are linking to – pay particular attention if you offer visitors a chance to submit links etc on your site as you are not fully in control of the quality of these links.
6) Duplicate content
If you repeat the same content across your site you will be penalized. To a lesser extent this is also true of content hat is duplicated across sites – another rule of thumb is that the more unique your content is the more the search engines like it. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule – notably sites such as article directories can still do well even if all they have is duplicate content.
7) Search engine Specific Pages ( Doorway pages)
Whilst it is acceptable to tailor the content and optimization techniques employed to a specific search engine it is not acceptable to produce pages that have no purpose other than to provide results that search engine spiders will like. These pages, known as doorway pages, often contain no user readable data (and often simply re-direct to a more user friendly page). Producing doorway pages that aim to trick the search engines will, in all likelihood, get you banned from the very search engines you are trying to get into.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a variation of doorway pages that use various techniques to determine if a page is being accessed by a spider or by a human visitor and present different results to each. The same principles apply as do to doorway page s- i.e. do not do it ! (what is acceptable is to detect browser types etc and deliver content relevant to that browser e.g. a pc based browser may be different from a WAP browser)
We hope this tips prove useful to your online marketing efforts, please look out for more of our articles on this and other related subjects.
In previous articles I have discussed the most important factors in achieving a high page ranking for your site, in this article I will discuss another nine top tips to improve your ranking.
Whilst these tips do not have as significant an effect as the previous tips I have discussed they are still important – they may make the difference between getting on the first page or not. A key factor to remember when trying to get high rankings for your site is that there is no magic bullet, no single thing you can do that will guarantee a top spot. It is all about carrying out a range of tasks that will incrementally get you where you want to be.
1) Text around the anchor text of a link
As well as the anchor text of the link itself the text around the anchor text is also important – it sets the context. For example if you have text that is describing a cruise on the Nile and then suddenly there is a link to an automobile site with the anchor text of automobile repairs then it is not going to look too natural to the search engines !
2) The font size of your keywords
As well as using tags such as the h1 or b tags etc to highlight the important keywords on your page you should also consider increasing the font size of these keywords. In essence anything that you do regarding formatting of text to highlight it to a human visitor will also add weight to a spider visitor.
3) Formatting – use selectively
As discussed earlier you can use various formatting tags to highlight your keywords but if you use too much formatting and it ends up making your page look like a dogs dinner then it will have a negative effect rather than positive. Remember – look at your page and if it looks presentable and easily readable then it is probably OK, if it looks like an abstract painting you have gone too far !
4) Sitemaps
Sitemap – get one!, at the very least they are useful for the search engine spiders but they can also be useful for human visitors as well. If you do not want to generate one by hand then there are many free ones available, personally I use the Google XML Sitemaps plug in for my WordPress blog.
5) Site size
It is simple really – the more content you have the more likely you are to get one of the pages a good ranking. However the principles of good quality content apply – it is no use simply generating hundreds of low quality pages simply to bulk out the site. In addition to this, if you have a large site then you must ensure the content is accessible – you will need a good menu system.
6) File / Page Locations
This may sound a strange one but the actual location of your files / pages relative to the root of the site may have an effect on your rankings – pages closer to the root tend to get better rankings. Therefore but all your pages with primary keywords as close to the root of the site as possible – do not bury them many layers down.
7) Domain names – sub domains v top level domains
Is a separate domain name better than just having a sub domain – well yes actually – so mykeyworddomain.com should rank better mykeyword.genericdomain.com. So if you are serious about your site get yourself a proper domain name (preferably one where the domain name relates to your keyword !)
What type of domain to use?
There is a clear hierarchy of domain names – if you qualify for a .edu or .org name then they have the greatest weight with the search engines, following after that are .com domains and then all the rest (.net, .ws etc) all trail behind. If you are starting a new site you should bear this domain name hierarchy in mind.
9) Hyphenated domain names.
Hyphens help – particularly where you are optimizing for keyword phrases rather than individual keywords. This applies to both domain names and page names – my-keyword-site.com is a better name mykeywordsite.com and my-keyword-page.htm is better than mykeywordpage.htm. A guiding principle, as with most search engine stuff, is : if it makes it easier for a human to read or use then it will help to improve your rankings.
We hope these tips prove useful to your online marketing efforts, please look out for more of our articles on this and other related subjects.
In a previous article I discussed the 12 most important factors in achieving a high page ranking for your site, in this article I will discuss another nine top tips to improve your ranking.
Whilst these tips do not have as significant an effect as the first 12 I discussed they are still important – they may make the difference between getting on the first page or not. A key factor to remember when trying to get high rankings for your site is that there is no magic bullet, no single thing you can do that will guarantee a top spot. It is all about carrying out a range of tasks that will incrementally get you where you want to be.
1) Keyword positioning
It is important to get you keywords as close to the start of the document as possible i.e. they should appear in the first paragraph of the document and as close to the start of the paragraph as possible. It is also said that it may be useful to have the keywords repeated very near to the end of the document.
2) Placing Keywords in the
Images are not taken into account by search engine spiders so you must tell the spiders what the image is about – this is what the
3) Use of metatags
Yahoo! and Bing still use metatags as part of their ranking formula (Google less so) so they are still important. There are two important metatags – content and keywords. The content keyword is a brief (less than 160 characters) description of your site – this description is what appears in the search engine results. The keywords metatags is a comma separated list of the main keywords for your site.
4) Keyword proximity
Keyword proximity is a measure of how close together in the text the keywords are. The closer together they are the better – optimally they will be right next to each other. An example of this is – if you are optimizing for the phrase weight loss then the two words should appear adjacent to each other rather then – weight some more words loss. Obviously keyword proximity is only relevant if you are optimizing for keyword phrases rather than single words.
5) Keyword phrases
It is possible to optimize a site for keyword phrases rather than individual keywords, in fact this approach may be preferable as it gives a far wider range of choices. So , for example, rather than go for diet you could go for diet tips, diet techniques, top diets etc. Due to the greater range of choices on keyword phrases there should, to a degree, be less completion.
6) Secondary keywords
Whilst the majority of people chase the keywords that have the greatest number of hits (primary keywords) there is an alternative way – go for a wider range of less popular (secondary) keywords. By focusing on the secondary keywords you should experience less competition and should also be able to more closely target your visitors – quality of visitor will make up for the lack of quantity.
7) Using Keywords that stem from the same root
This is not such an issue for English language sites as most of the search engines do use this automatically – for example if you are optimizing for the word scientific then words such as scientifically will also generate search results for your site. If your site is not an English language site that you may still have to optimize for all the various derivatives of the same root word.
Using Synonyms
When looking at your keywords do not forget the synonyms (words that mean the same ). Remember not everyone will think the same way as you – to some people it is a car, to some it is an automobile !
9) Anchor text of internal links
As discussed in a previous article inbound links and the anchor text that they use are important for your search engine ranking but, to a lesser extent, so are your internal links. If you have a page on your site that is optimized for car care than make sure that all the pages that link to it from the rest of the site use the anchor text car care. This is something that is easy to achieve a sit is 100% under your control.
We hope these tips prove useful to your online marketing efforts, please look out for more of our articles on this and other related subjects.
