The SEO Blog - Traffic Generation Techniques

This lesson covers why you need high quality content on your website if you want to succeed at having good long term search engine rankings.

In today’s lesson, I want to cover something that’s going to be vital to your long term search engine rankings.
Content.

What is content? Well, it’s the actual stuff that makes up your website. The articles, blogs, forums, saleletters, opt-in pages, videos, all that stuff.

I’ll admit that I used to be a fan of using as much automation as possible to build a website. Today, however, I sing a very different tune, and for a very good reason - that crap doesn’t work anymore. When you build crappy sites with automated software, or something that you just quickly threw together, you’re severly limiting your websites potential. You may be able to fool people and the search engines for a little bit, but sooner or later, you’re going to be found out, and at that point, you’re going to need to start over from scratch.

To help illustrate this point, lets pretend you’re opening a shoe store. To get people to visit your store for its grand opening, you decide you’re going to visit everywhere. You advertise on the TV, the radio, the newspaper, heck you’re even putting flyers on peoples’ doors. You’re going all out because you want people to visit your store.

So the big day comes, and you did your job - you’ve even got people waiting outside for you to open. So you open the doors, and the people start pouring in.

However, there’s a problem. There’s no shoes in your shoe store. Instead you’re trying to pitch everyone who comes in on why they need to buy a timeshare. Do you think people are going to stick around? Heck no. People are gonna be pissed off.

And some of these angry folks aren’t just going to leave. Nope, they’re going to call up and report you to the FCC for false advertising, and if you don’t clean up your act in a hurry, you’re going to be out of business.

So let’s move back to the Internet world. But instead of all that advertising, let’s say you went out and used the methods in my Ultimate Traffic Blueprint to build yourself a ton of links because you want to rank well in the search engines. And as a result of those links, you’ve gotten yourself traffic to your website. Let’s just use the example that you’ve built a shoe site. And you’re advertising your site as a place to get shoe reviews and buying guides. However, when people visit, all they say are a bunch of advertisements, an no shoe reviews. Do you think people are going to stick around? No. Do you think any of those people are going to recommend your site to anyone else? No again. And just like our shoe store example, some of these people are going to report you, but not to the FCC, to the search engines for being a spam site. And once the search engines deem your site to be crap, all those links you’ve gotten aren’t going to do jack for your search engine rankings because you’re going to be heavily penalized or banned outright. And once that happens, you need to start over. Any time, effort, and money you put into that start is pretty much going to be wasted.

I’ll be covering several methods for getting links in future videos, but I wanted to talk about content first, because you’re linking efforts are going to be less effective, if not wasted, if you’re not focused on quality content for your website.
Hopefully, I’ve persuaded you that quality content is important. So now let’s move on to what makes up good content?

Good content really isn’t that hard. It can be a lot of things. Educational, interesting, opinionated, controversial, news, a review, entertaining, funny, commentary, accusational, and the list goes on. It is usually an article or blog post, but it could be video, audio, a series of pictures.

When you’re writing your content, don’t concern yourself with things like keyword density or optimizing your article for certain keywords or phrases - just write. When you start trying to incorporate that search engine optimization stuff, you typically sacrifice the flow and readability or what you’re writing.

And one last thing about content, you always need to have a steady stream of new stuff to add. Search engines like sites that are updated frequently. So give them what they want. Update your site regularily, if you have a blog on your site, that’s the easiest way to keep adding fresh content, but that’s certainly not the only way.

Well, that covers my lesson on content. Remember, quality first. In my next lesson I’ll start covering the link building process - I just wanted to make sure you understand that a quality site is important.

Outdated And Obsolete Search Engine Optimization Techniques

In the world of search engine optimization, there tends to be a lot of misinformation out there as well as a lot of outdated info. Part of the reason is because things tend to change quickly in the world of SEO, and people don’t take the time to update what they wrote.

Today, I want to cover some of those outdated techniques that used be important when optimizing your website but are nearly obsolete today. So if you run across this info somewhere, you know that what you’re reading is out of date or the author is misinformed.

The first thing I want to cover is meta tags. Meta tags go in the head of your web page and they’re used to provide information about your web page to the search engines. Now the two that are most commonly associated with search engine optimization are the keyword tag and the description tag. You’d place the keywords you want to rank highly for in the keywords tag, and you’d write what your web page was about in the description tag. And back in the old days, this had a strong correlation to your search engine ranking. However, it didn’t take too long before search engines realized how easy it was to abuse meta tags by stuffing them full of keywords, sometimes unrelated keywords just to get good search engine rankings.

Nowadays, search engines tend to ignore the keywords tag or give it minimal weight. The description tag can still be useful because some search engines will use your description as their description of your site when you show up in the search engine results pages – also called SERPs. But from a search engine optimization point of view, they’re not important, so don’t expect a big boost in ranking just by including meta tags, and ignore anyone who tells you otherwise.

Next up, I want to cover search engine submissions. This one I never really understood in the first place. But several years ago, there was a lot of software and services out there that would submit your website to thousands of search engines and thousands of free for all pages on a weekly or monthly basis. Apparently, they thought that if you submitted your website to a search engine often enough, they’d not only index you, but rank you higher. These days, submitting your site to search engines is not necessary. All the major search engines will find you by finding a link to your website from another site. So if you really want to get your website in the search engines, just get links from websites already indexed by that search engine. It’s that simple. And there’s no reason to ever pay anyone for search engine submission. You’re just getting ripped off if you do.

Okay, and finally I want to cover keyword density. This one is a bit more controversial, since for years, there’s been a magic keyword density that will help you website rank best with the search engines. The only problem is that its varied by each search engine, and the search engines kept adjusting it too, so it was really hard to keep up with. Now keyword density isn’t as dead meta tags or search engine submissions, there is still some evidence that it matters to Yahoo. However, it’s unimportant as far as Google is concerned. And even with Yahoo, keyword density is likely to be less important in the future. You see, rather than keyword density, the search engines, especially Google, are using Latent Semantic Analysis. Basically, it is a way for software to do what humans do without even thinking about it – it allows the search engines to figure out what the theme of a website is. So if your site is about dogs, a search engine using latent semantic indexing would expect to find words like pets, canine, and breeders. And the better you cover the theme of your website, in this case dogs, the better you’ll rank in the search engines.

So forget about keyword density, just write your site’s naturally, and you’ll likely get better rankings from the search engines, not to mention your site will sound a heck of a lot better to your visitors, which is what you want anyway, right.

That covers todays’ SEO lesson on obsolete search engine optimization techniques.

Want to learn more techniques that will completely transform your website’s traffic from a ghost town to a boom town? Then be sure to sign up to receive my printed newsletter - Traffic Transformation Monthly - and I’ll send you this month’s strategies right away.

A lesson on the title tag and its importance to your search engine optimization efforts.

The text version (and probably a typo or two):

Welcome to another SEO lesson. Last time, I covered the the importance of building quality links and how links are the most important aspect to getting high rankings.

Today, I’m going to cover one of the most important on site ranking factors, and one that’s really simple to use, The Title tag.

First, let’s cover what the title tag is and where to find it.

Let’s take a look at a sample piece of code for a website. I’ll use the code from UltimateTrafficBlueprint.com. If you want to follow along and you can’t read what’s on the screen here, in a new window go to UltimateTrafficBlueprint.com (pause this video if you have to) click on the view button and then click on source. It’ll bring up a notepad file that will show you the code for my site.

So let me just give you a quick explanation of what we’re looking at - at the very top you’ll see my document type declaration.

Below that you’ll see the head of the document. This is where we put our title tag and our meta tags.

Okay, so what do we put in our title tag - easy - the words we want to that particular page to rank highly for. In this case I want to rank highly for the phrase free search engine optimization report so that’s what I put in my title tag. I’ve also found that it helps to include more words - perhaps another keyword phrase - just don’t go crazy with this.

And since we’re here let me cover meta tags since this is a topic that comes up frequently if you read any seo books. Now you’ll see that have a meta description tag and a meta keyword tag. These used to be important from a search engine optimization standpoint. That’s no longer the case. If you don’t include them, don’t worry, the benefit you get from having them is minimal at best and they tend to be ignored by some of the major search engines. So you realy don’t need them.

Getting back to the title tag. Here’s where it shows up, whenever you look at search engine results, the part that you see in blue is the title tag for that site. It not only tells the search engines the topic of your page, it also tells your potential visitor, which is ultimately our goal, right, to get visitors.

So that pretty much covers title tags. Remember, good titles include the keywords you want to rank highly for and leave out words like homepage or website.

Here’s my first video in my SEO video series. This video covers the importance of link building.

For those of you who don’t have broadband or prefer to read, here’s what the video says:

In the world of search engine optimization, there are a lot of myths floating around, so I’ve decided to record a series of videos to help you understand what Search engine optimization is all about. Today I’m going to cover link building.

Links are the MOST important aspect of any search engine optmization campaign.

Yes, the most important thing you can do to get your site ranked highly in the search engines doesn’t involve doing anything to your site. It depends on what are called “offsite factors.”

In general, the more links you have, the better.

So if everything was equal, a site with 100 links would perform better in the search engines than a site with 10 links.

But in the real world, all links are not equal. You need to focus on getting quality links to your site. getting mostly one way links instead of reciprocal links. getting links from sites that are related to yours instead of random websites. For example, if you have a site about horses, you want links from other sites about horses, or horse racing, or equestrian, not links from sites about computers and video games.

Now this lesson oversimplifies things a little, but this is just the first video. I’ll cover this in more depth in a later video.

I’d also encourage you to read the Ultimate Traffic Blueprint (available on the homepage), which is a free guide that to helping you build links.