The SEO Blog - Traffic Generation Techniques

Today I want to talk about something I like to call the link building paradox.

When it comes to getting your site to rank better in the search engines, the most important thing you can do is get more quality links to your site. Now there are a lot of ways to get links to your website, but the major search engines like Google will tell you to do this by providing quality content on your pages and people will naturally link to you over time.

It says so right on their website.

The only problem is that if your site is new and you have no links, it doesn’t matter how much great content you have if you don’t have any links – nobody’s going to see it.
It’s like building a shopping mall in the middle of Siberia.

Which brings me to the paradox. If you have a site that ranks well in the search engines, other people are naturally going to link to you if your site has good content to offer. By having a high ranking website, it’s easy to get more links to your website since when people are doing searches in the Internet, your website will show up. Next time they’re writing about a topic the site covers in their blog or in a forum, the high ranking site they found by searching in Google is going to get that coveted link, and that high ranking site gets even more links - it’s the rich getting richer. Conversely, if you have a site that doesn’t have any links, your ranking in the search engines is going to be low, if not non existent. Nobody is going to link to your site naturally over time if they don’t even know it exists, the poor get poorer. Hence what I call the link building paradox.

This is why I don’t like such conservative views on how to build links to a website - the just provide great content and the links will come method. This view may be in the best interest of the search engines, but it’s definitely not in your best interest especially if you have a new website that you’d like to get the search engines to notice and rank well.

This is where hiring a link building company or doing the link building yourself comes in. Think of it just as you would any other promotion for your website. You don’t usually expect a TV reporter to just randomly call you up and ask if they can promote your business - no, you buy ads on their network. You also don’t expect to see anybody writing about your business in the newspaper if you haven’t done any type of promotion.

The same goes for link building, if you’re not willing to promote your website then why should anyone else care and link to you?

For the do it yourselfers, here’s a couple strategies you don’t want to be without when promoting your website.

The first is the press release. You can do this yourself or hire a pro. If you have a brand new site, then be sure to write one and let the whole world know that your website is open for business. Even if you think you have a boring and normal website, an experienced press release writer will be able to come up with a press release that will get you more links, traffic, and sales. Anytime you do something new or launch a new product or service, be sure to send out another press release. This is a surefire way to work your way up in the rankings.

The second is to be sure to write articles. You can use articles to get the word out about your website and post them on hundreds of sites that will give you a link back to your website just for allowing them to use the article. You could even take an article and turn it into a video just like this and get even more bang for your buck.

Want to learn how to build links quickly and effectively? Then you’ll want to pickup a copy of my link building course - Mission Unlinkable - and you’ll never again wonder how you can get more links to your website.

In this lesson I cover the concept of deep linking.

So what is deep linking? Well, for our purposes, I’m going to refer to deep linking as any link to your website that doesn’t go to the homepage, i.e. it’s a link you’ve got that points to one of the internal pages of your website.

Now why is this important?

Well, for just about any good website, there’s more pages that are interesting enough to link to besides the homepage. And Google knows this, so if every link you get is pointing to your homepage, well, that looks unnatural, and Google get suspicious. They want to see links links pointing to internal pages on your website. If you write a particularly good article, if you site has some really interesting threads on its forum, if you site offers a free tool or piece of software, those are pages that people should find interesting and they should have links pointing directly to them.

So when you’re out getting links to you site, identify pages that you think are interesting or that you want to rank high for their keywords. Now, next time you’re submitting an article, or you’re bookmarking your site, or even issuing a press release, point a link to that page instead of your homepage.

Once you start getting links to your internal pages, you’ll find your position in the search engines taking a nice bump up.

Of course, it helps if the pages you’re getting links to are actually good enough that people will want to link to them, but that’s all I’ll say about quality in this video.

Well, that covers deep linking. Now go out and start getting some links. And I’ll just hang out here, and see you for the next lesson.

Not sure how to go about getting new links? Then be sure to visit MissionUnlinkable.com and pickup my complete guide to link buildling - you’ll never again wonder how you’re going to get more links to your website.

Today I’m going to cover the topic of Article Marketing and how it applies to search engine optimization.

This is probably one of the most popular methods for building one way links to a site. So popular, in fact, that some marketers exclusively use it. I think using it exclusively is silly, but it’s definitely worth using.

Writing articles isn’t hard. You simply pick a topic, write 400-700 words about it, and then submit it to the article directories you want your article to be seen in.

When the directories publish your article, they also link back to your site. The real power of this method, however, comes from the fact that other website owners can reprint your article on their website as long as they provide that link back to your site. So instead of writing one article to get one link, writing one article can get you dozens of links, hundreds if you write a popular article.

Writing articles not only results in links to your site, which helps improve your search engine rankings, but it can also result in a lot of traffic to your site. I’ve had sites where 1/3 of all the visitors to the site were coming directly from people clicking those links in my articles.

Which brings me to my next point. Quality matters. I know I harp on this quality thing a lot, but for some reason this seems to be the first thing people forget so I figure if I keep bringing it up, everyone will remember.

If someone reads your article and it’s well written, they’re far more likely to visit your site and spend money on your site than if you have something that is full of errors and clearly took you all of five minutes to write.

Okay, now that we’ve got the obligatory mention of quality being important, let’s move on to one of the most common questions I hear about writing articles - coming up with ideas.

Sure, writing 2 or 3 articles on a topic is usually a piece of cake, however when you’re writing new articles every week, you might struggle with coming up with new ideas all the time. Fortunately, there’s a few simple tricks you can use to come up with new material. First, get out a notebook and a pen, and just start brainstorming - write down any idea that pops into your head. You can usually come up with a pretty good list then and there so anytime you need a new article and you don’t already have an idea in mind, you can return to that list.

But what if you still want more topics or you didn’t come up with much from your brainstorming. Fortunately, we’re not done yet - not by a long shot.

Start reading posts on peoples blogs that on the topic you want to write articles on. Usually, you can find ideas for more topics. Don’t copy them, but feel free to use them as inspiration and put your own spin on something. And if you need help finding blogs, just use google blog search, technorati, or icerocket, and you’ll have more blogs than you care to read at your disposal.

You can also do a news search in your favorite search engine and see what comes up. And just write about what’s new in your industry.

Or hop on some message boards on your topic and see what questions people are asking. If you see a question that you could easily answer with an article, then write it down Heck, you can even use the article you write to answer the question.

And once you’re done with all that you’ll probably have more ideas than you know what to do with.

When it comes to the actual writing of your article, just focus on writing the best darn article you can. Don’t think about things like keyword density. You also don’t need to get too uptight about being grammatically perfect. Just as long as your article flows and makes sense, you’ll be fine.

Now, once you’ve got that writing part done - where the heck do you submit it? Here’s what works well for me, but feel free to experiment and see what works for you. I only submit my articles to two places - the first is EzineArticles.com and the other is Isnare.com. Isnare is an article distribution site, so when you submit an article to them, for $2 they’ll submit your article to several hundred article groups and several other article sites. You get a lot of bang for your two bucks, so I always recommend using it. And the reason I recommend using EzineArticles is because Isnare doesn’t submit their articles to them. Since EzineArticles is the most popular article directory on the web and can send you a lot of traffic directly, you’ll definitely want your article there.

And when you’re writing the about the author section for your article, keep two things in mind. First, remember how I talked about anchor text in my last lesson? Well, be sure to use anchor text for your links whenever possible. And don’t always link to your homepage. Find some other pages on your site to link to.

Okay, that covers this lesson on article marketing. Just remember, that article marketing helps your search engine optimization efforts best if you do this on a regular basis.

If you want to learn some little known, but very effective methods for using article marketing then you’ll want to get a copy of my link building course - Mission Unlinkable - and watch video #4.

And if you’re looking to get outstanding traffic to your site, take a look at my link building services.

No video on this one (not until I get my mic fixed - need to do a screen capture video for this one) yet.

Today I want to cover the topic of making your forum search engine friendly, specifically PHPbb, since it’s a common open source forum and is easy to modify.

Why would you want to optimize your forum anyway? Simple. To get more traffic from the search engines. And that’s what we all want, right?

You see, forums the way they’re setup aren’t all that search engine friendly. The urls look something like this - yoursitehere/forum/viewforum.php?f=1 and the ? character is a red flag for search engine spiders. They look at a url like that and get scared, don’t crawl much if any of the forum, and hence the forum doesn’t rank well. (Major search engines have improved their ability to crawl these types of URLs, but it’s still better to go with static urls instead of dynamic.)

So basically you want your urls to look something like this yoursitehere/forum/topic-of-post/ instead. When search engine spiders see a url like that, it looks like any other static page on the Internet and they will easily and happily crawl those pages. And as a result you get your forum pages indexed and ranked well by the search engines.

While a forum isn’t likely to rank well for any competitive terms, it is likely to rank well for very specific, long tail searches. For example, if you search Google for the term “seo mod phpbb forum” you’ll get a forum result giving you directions - a forum that’s been modified to rank well in the search engines.

So if you’re ready to get started, I’ll give you a few places to go checkout on how to do this. One tip - make backups before you start making any modifications just in case you make a mistake.

Here are a few good resources that can help you make these modifications to your forum. If you’ve never done this before, I’d recommend setting aside at least an hour. The actual modifications don’t take that long, but you’ll want to take some time to carefully read all the directions.

http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/advanced-mod-rewrite/advanced-seo-url-vt43.html
http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132.html
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=407141

Happy Modding - see you for the next lessons.

Want to learn how to get more traffic to your website, get my monthly traffic building newsletter - Traffic Transformation Monthly - mailed to your address every month.

Sorry about the long layoff in between videos here. I’ve had this one sitting on my hard drive for the last month but haven’t posted it. Oops.

Anyway, this video covers the topic of anchor text and how to use it to dramatically improve your search engine rankings.

So what is anchor text? Anchor text is the text you see on a webpage that you can click on that will take you from the page you’re on to a new page or website. For example, on the text that’s on your screen, Traffic Generation Techniques, is the anchor text.

And if we look at the code for the page, we see that the anchor text is simply the code for a link with the text showing up in place of the url for the link. I’ve made the exact syntax blue - hopefully it’s big enough for you to read.

So why is anchor text important. This is one of the ways that search engines like google figure out what your site is about. Now you might be thinking that Google should just be able to read your page to figure that out, but the way Google sees is, that part is easy to manipulate.

For example, if a restaurant tells you that they’re the best restaurant in town, are you going to believe them? Maybe, maybe not. However, if ten friends of yours tell you that restaurant is the best restaurant in town, you’re probably far more likely to believe that it really is the best restaurant in town.

Basically, that’s what links using anchor text do for your website. They’re your third party endorsement for what your site is really about.

So when you’re out getting links, you want to be actively seeking links that will use anchor text that describes your site. So if your site is about horse racing, you want links that say horse racing in their anchor text instead of click here for Bob’s site.

When the search engines read horse racing in the link and they visit your site and the text on the site also says it’s about horse racing, then the search engines are far more likely to believe you than if you didn’t have links with anchor text, which will result in much higher search engine rankings.

Now not everyone who links to you will use the anchor text you want, and that’s okay, you don’t want everyone to say the exact same thing anyway.

If you want to go out and get some links pointing to your site that will allow you to choose the anchor text, then submit some articles to article directories or submit your website to regular directories. Both will allow you to choose the anchor text that points back to your site.

That covers this lesson on anchor text. If you have any questions, just post them in the comments.

Want to learn more about building links, getting more free traffic from search engines, and making more money from your website? Then you’ll want to get my complete link building course - Mission Unlinkable - everything you need to know about building links.

In this lesson, I talk about the link building process.

Now that we understand the need for quality content, let’s talk about the link building processs – but before I do, I want to mention this again - if you’re not going to put time into putting quality content on your site, you’re wasting your time. You can only fool people for so long before you have to deliver. So just save yourself the trouble, and start with quality content - it’ll make this whole process a whole lot easier.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s jump right in. I’ve already mentioned in my first lesson how links are the most important aspect to a site ranking well. So let’s talk about the process of building links. Just remember that this an ongoing process – it doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s not something you do just once. You need to take consistent action to building links over time.

Just like moving up the corporate ladder, you typically start at the bottom and work your way to the top. When you start a job and you’re just out of college, do you start out as the CEO? Probably not. You start somewhere towards the bottom, maybe in management, but there are a lot of people above you, and over a period of years you start working your way up. And just like in the corporate world, there are ways to accelerate your ascension to the top, and there are plenty of things you can do to stay just where you are.

There are some idealists out there who claim that search engine optimization is bull, and that all anyone who claims to do seo is a scammer or a snake oil salesman. They boldly proclaim that all you need to do is focus on providing quality content and the traffic will come to you. Yeah they’re full of it.

The thing that I find most interesting about these so called idealists is that they’re usually already in a pretty good position. They’re sites are already getting tons of traffic, and have tons of links. It’s easy to say only focus on content when you’ve already got traffic and links.

Well, as far as I’m concerned, I’m not willing to just sit around and hope I get lucky. I want a system that I know will get results instead of just sitting around buying lottery tickets and hoping I hit the big one.

You see when it comes right down to it, you need to be willing to promote your website if you want traffic - it’s that simple.

Now there’s a lot of ways to promote your site. And since this is a search engine optimization video, let’s look at it from a search engine point of view – in this case promoting your site means getting links. There are a lot of ways to get links, and I’ll be covering my methods for getting them in greater detail in the future. I’ve also written an ebook called the Ultimate Traffic Blueprint on this very topic of getting links and the entire system I’ve developed for getting them - so if you don’t want to wait, I’d recommend giving it a read - it’s available at the ultimatetrafficblueprint.com homepage.

Before I continue, I want to mention that while the links I’m going to show you how to get can be very beneficial to your rankings in the SERPs (that’s Search Engine Results Pages) just getting these links shouldn’t be your ultimate goal. You should instead look at them as middlemen.

Say, for example, that I want to get a link from cnn. Well, if I just call them up and say, “Hey, can I get a link from you?” They’ll either say no, or they’ll direct me to their advertising department and those aren’t the kind of links I want. So getting a link directly from cnn isn’t going to work, however, by using a press release, I just might be able to get my site featured on cnn and a link back. The methods I use to get links, and the press release is one of my favorites, are to act as the middlemen to helping us get the links that we really want. While the links that we get directly from these middlemen are okay, we’re really just looking to attract the attention of those really high quality sites that we couldn’t have done on our own.

Now that that’s out of the way. Let’s talk about this system. I have five methods that I like to call the cornerstones to building links.

Article Distribution, Directories, Press Releases, Social Media, and Linkbait

Article Distribution is simple the process of writing an article, preferably on a topic related to your website, and submitting it to article directories. If these article directories decide to use your article, they’ll give you one to three links to your website for allowing them to use your article. Not only that, but when you submit to these directories, you also allow anyone who wants to the right to reprint your article the ability to do so as long as they also provide a link back to your website. A single good article can result in hundreds of links pointing to your site. And because of the ability to get so many links from a single article - a lot of people use article distribution as a cornerstone to their link building efforts.

Next is the directory, probably one of the oldest method for getting links. Directories are simply sites that provide listings of other peoples’ sites, much like the yellow pages in a phone book. There are literally thousands of directories out there that you can submit your site too, and provided they like your site, they’ll link to you. A lot of directories are free, but some of them require a payment to get them to consider listing your site. I think directory submission is one of those techniques that people tend to forget about and instead favor of newer, sexier methods. But keep this one in mind, it may be an oldie, but it’s a goodie.

Now let’s talk about the press release. Never have I seen a method for promoting a site strike fear in the hearts of webmasters quite like the press release. I mean for some people, including clients I’ve worked with, that when you bring up a press release, they practically run out of the room terrified, lock themselves in their bedrooms, and refuse to come out until you promise them they’re not going to have to do press releases. A press release is nothing to be afraid of. And if you think that when you write a press release and send it out that the next day you’ll have a flood of reporters calling you up and knocking down your door, you’re probably giving yourself too much credit. Once you get good at them, maybe, but probably not at first, so don’t be scared - give them a try. And remember, a press release doesn’t need to be earth shattering news. If you launch a new site, write a press release, have a new product, another press release, have a creative or interesting article, another press release. Press releases can generate a ton of traffic to a site, so don’t dismiss this one just because you’re scared of it or you don’t know how to do it.

Next up is Social Media - Web 2.0. There’s a new trend on the Internet that’s moving away from traditional news outlets and search engines when seeking out information. Instead, they’re relying on sites where what’s new, interesting, and newsworthy, comes from regular people rather than what the newspaper or television tell us. And with this new trend, of course, comes a lot of opportunity to not just get links, but to get a lot of traffic. So don’t be afraid to venture into the world of sites like squidoo, myspace, digg.com, del.icio.us and others.

And my final cornerstone is the topic of Linkbait, probably the most effective long term method of building links. Linkbait can be defined simply as have some type of content on your site that people will find interesting enough to link to. So what do people find interesting enough to link to? Well, just about anything, really. Controversial articles - free software - free tools - how to guides - mashups - videos - podcasts. Be creative here. Just remember, if your website is boring, you’re going to have a harder time getting links. So try brainstorming things you can do that will get attention and get links.

That’s the gist of my five methods for building links. I know I covered them pretty fast, but I’ll be diving into each of them in more detail later. For now I just wanted to go over them quickly to let you know what methods you’ll be wanting to implement for your website.

One question I get asked a lot is, “Gary, which method should I be focusing on?” To Which I say - all of them.

Have you ever seen the cartoon, Captain Planet? It ran from early to mid 90s in the U.S. And it was a show about these five kids, and each of them had this ring that gave them a special power. I loved this show - to this day I can still sing the theme song.

But anyway on their own, they were effective, but when they really ran into trouble, they had to combine their powers to form Captain Planet. And then Captain Planet would defeat the bad guy.

Same goes for these five methods. Each on their own can be effective, but when you put them all together - watch out.

I know I know - it sounds like a lot of work . And To be honest, a lot of search engine optimization is just that - some hard work . However, if you want to take the shortcut, just hire me to do your link building for you - check out my premium link building services.

Want more than five methods for building traffic and links? Then you’ll want to get my link buidling course - Mission Unlinkable - I guarantee it includes some methods for building links you’ve never heard of, and these are methods you want to make sure you’re using.

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.