Keeping up with all the Google search algorithm changes (about 400 updates / year) might sound like a complicated task, and it actually is; this troubles many SEO companies, consultants and even business owners. And while we can’t control or influence Google in any way, there are many things within our power that will make the search engines love our websites.

SEO used to be a much easier task in the past, when the automated link building tools were ruling. All you needed to do was to input the website details, and then push a few buttons – that was all! And believe it or not, these things worked quite well (either by themselves or in conjunction with some “real” SEO work) until last year’s Google Panda update, when millions of websites were sent into oblivion. I can only imagine the pain a website owner can feel when he sees that his precious online property has turned from a sales churning machine into a useless website that is outside Google’s top 100.

Google Panda has tried to improve the quality of the search results once again, penalizing the websites that were getting good ranks due to low quality, spammy and / or automated backlinks, and I’ll have to admit that the new version of the algorithm did a pretty good job. It’s true that some quality websites were hit as well, while a few thin content sites managed to keep their good ranks, but when was the last time you saw a bug-free piece of software?

So what should you do in order to build an authority website that the search engines will love forever? We’ve got quite a few suggestions from Google itself:

- Write good quality, well researched articles and post them on your blog. Avoid going with the “me too” trend; spend a lot of time researching the topic and you will see that the people will link to your articles naturally. This also means that the good old 100 words posts are not appreciated by Google anymore; go for meaty articles that have at least 600 words.

- As a general rule, you should always come up with great, original content, or hire somebody to do that for you. Resist the temptation to write for the sake of writing; better wait until the inspiration strikes and / or you’ve got something worthy to write about. You want to have content that is talked about, bookmarked, shared, and so on. And while we’re here, try to avoid using neologisms like “shockvertising“ in your articles – Google wants the content that’s being displayed on its results pages to be as easy to comprehend as possible (write for a 10 year old and Google will love you for that).

- Avoid overdoing the on-page optimization. I have seen countless pages that repeat “buy cheap shoes” (just an example) obsessively, and this will actually hurt your search engine rankings. Sure, if you are targeting the “buy cheap shoes” keyword, it makes sense to include it in the title of your article, and maybe once or twice in the body, but don’t overdo it or you’ll suffer the consequences.

- Can you guess the keyword I’m trying to optimize this article for? If you can’t, that makes two of us – I don’t know and I don’t care about it either. I prefer to write content that pleases my readers rather than the search engines, and believe it or not, this is one of Google’s recommendations as well.

- Become an authority in your field by creating outstanding content (blog posts, infographics, etc), publishing books, networking with your peers, doing guest posts on authority websites in the industry, etc. Google didn’t state this officially, but I’ve got a feeling that they will trust (and thus rank) Wikipedia better when it comes to “tinnitus cures” in comparison with my thin www.cheaptinnituscuresreviews.net website (I made that website name up, let’s hope it doesn’t exist).

- Avoid monetizing the website through any type of ads, unless this was your original plan. It still surprises me to see website owners that ask me if they shouldn’t include Google Ads on their sites, in order to recoup some of their internet marketing costs (the ads would bring them about $20 / month). If you are one of them, stop doing that because it can hurt your website.

- Social sharing and websites that are optimized for mobile devices will become much more important in the future. While creating a fully functional, good looking mobile version of your huge online store can be a challenging task, adding social sharing buttons to your website pages and blog posts is very easy and can be done by you (or your webmaster) in only a few minutes. Resist the temptation to use (or hire a SEO company that uses) automated social bookmarking tools; Google can determine if those accounts were created for the sole purpose of getting a backlink or not. Better wait for real people to bookmark your worthy content; this is the type of social bookmarking service that we are offering for all the clients that invest into one of our monthly seo services packages.

- The page loading speeds and layout will be much more important in the future, so consider having your website redesigned if you’re still using that template you bought for 30 bucks back in 1995.

- Build your website and promote it knowing that if it reaches the first Google page for a competitive term, it will have to withstand a review from one of Google’s employees. Your favorite search engine now uses a team of about 15,000 human reviewers (don’t quote me on this number) which make use of a 100+ pages guideline (don’t quote me on this either) to determine if a particular website actually deserves to get a top rank, or is there only because of a very effective link building campaign.

- If your site was penalized by Google, there’s hope! It looks like Google is not going to penalize entire websites for wrongdoings from now on, but specific pages. This means that you can add new, good quality pages to your website and expect them to get good ranks for the targeted keywords, provided that you didn’t do something really nasty in the past. Don’t duplicate a penalized page and expect it to rank well for the same keyword until the penalty is lifted, though – it won’t happen.

Any website owner wants to get better search engine ranks, but getting a thin 3 pages site listed on the first Google page has become much harder since last year’s Google Panda update. If you want to get a first page rank for the years to come, you have to prove Google that you deserve to be there due to the quality of the content that you are offering. Link building continues to be very effective, but if your website reaches the first Google results page and isn’t prepared for a human review, it will be penalized for sure.

Creating a quality website isn’t easy, but the effort invested into doing this will definitely pay off in the future, when your spammy competitors will be weeded out, as Google rolls out better and clever algorithm updates. Thank you for taking the time to read this 1200+ words blog post! If you have learned something new by reading this article, please let others know about it by clicking one of the social media sharing buttons below.

If you sell (or plan to sell) a product or a service using the internet, you already know that the key to success is to drive as many people as possible to your website. Let’s take Joe the plumber as an example: Joe has read that the internet can be a great client referral source, so he has created a website to advertise his services.

Joe has also got involved in several home renovation forums, posting useful tips and advice. He opened social media accounts at Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, asking and answering questions, sharing links, and so on. He even paid for a monthly SEO services campaign, so the website traffic started to increase significantly. Several months later, Joe is still scratching his head, trying to understand why none of his hundreds of website visitors has converted to a client. If this sounds familiar to you, read on to discover what you can do to improve the conversion rate significantly, turning your website into a vigorous customer churning machine.

Let us start by discussing about the law of reciprocation, the powerful force that makes most of us eager to repay the people that help us or give us something. Let’s imagine that a distant relative, for example your grandpa’s cousin, gives you a call to congratulate you on your birthday; this will put a pressure on you, making you (well, not necessarily you, but most of us) do the same thing for that relative you’ve never discussed with before. Basically, we were designed in such as way that we feel the obligation to return the favors.

How can you use this to your advantage? The answer is simple: offer a free, valuable sample. Just take a look at the right side of this page; there’s a link to my “SEO Basics: Tips for Business Owners” e-book, which offers useful information and can be downloaded without opting in to a mailing list, etc. The key to success is to offer something that’s really useful: an e-book, a CD, a coupon, etc. This simple technique is very effective; most supermarkets are using it each day (think product sampling).

Another important tip that can skyrocket your conversions has to do with consistency; it is much easier to get your existing customers to continue to pay you on a regular basis than it is for a total stranger to become your customer. If one of your website visitors decides to become your customer, chances are he or she will continue to be your customer for a long time – this is how the consistency rule works.

How can you make this work for you? Diminish your customers’ risks and calm their fears by lowering the entry barrier – this will help you turn many more website visitors into clients. If you are selling (let’s say) a $100 / month lead generation service, offer a $1 trial version of it for the first month of service. Who would refuse this offer, when a single lead could generate much more money than the dollar that was paid for the trial? And if your service is that good, the customers will gladly pay you $100 / month – you have created a business relationship with them now. Use inexpensive trials, free product samples, and so on; the method works very well.

The third tip has to do with trust; people tend to buy from reputable companies. Use testimonials to make the people more comfortable with the idea of giving their hard earned money to a stranger. Call or email your existing customers and ask them to provide a testimonial, be it a video, an audio recording or a simple text paragraph that talks about the quality of the products or services that they have bought from you. As a general rule, video testimonials are the best, especially if the client is representative for your target audience. Not sure what your target audience is? Then try to get as many different testimonials as possible; some of them will match your website visitor’s profile for sure.

Are you a likeable person? Most people are much more likely to buy from likeable persons. I don’t really like it, but this is how it works; just think at your favorite actress / actor and you will see that in 99% of the cases you are thinking at an attractive person. The good news is that the customers also tend to buy from people that are similar with them, no matter if we are talking about looks, nationality, etc. You might not necessarily be a likeable person (I know how it feels ) but if you have made some friends using social media, forums, etc, you should ask them to recommend your products or services; chances are that some of their social media friends like them, so they will check out your offer.

Are you an authority in the industry? Do you have more knowledge and (most of all) more recognition than the other 10,000 e-book authors that you are trying to compete with? We have been taught to respect and obey authority since we were kids, and this works very well when it comes to client acquisition as well. Would you purchase a book on pregnancy written by a nurse, or one written by a highly regarded medical doctor? The same thing applies in the online world; the visitor to client rate will increase significantly if you are going to be perceived as an authority in your field.

So what can you do in order to increase your authority? Write a book and publish it. Hang out with the specialists in the field, take pictures with them and post them online. Go to school, learn something new and get a title. Getting a testimonial from one of the industry experts is also a fast way to boost your authority.

Use this advice and your website visitors will convert in greater and greater numbers for sure, increasing your revenue. Don’t forget to ask for a testimonial whenever one of your customers is really excited about your products and services. And if you liked this article please give in to the law of reciprocation by clicking one of the social media sharing buttons below. Thank you!

Everyone loves Google! OK, I have to admit that some of us hate it, but most people use it on a regular basis for various purposes. This article will show you five powerful, and yet little known Google search operators that can prove to be very useful for any business owner.

Let’s start with the first one, the “site” operator. Just type “site:mywebsite.com” in Google’s search box (without using the quotes) and you will get a list with your indexed website pages.

As you can see, my website has 35 indexed pages at the moment; this number will grow as I continue to write more articles. The more website pages you’ve got, the greater the chances to get more website traffic and better ranks in the search engines.

But why is this search operator useful for a business owner? First of all, it allows you to see if your website can be found in Google’s index; a search result that looks like the one in the picture below can mean one of these two things:

a) Your website has been created recently (less than 1-2 weeks ago) and Google’s search robot hasn’t managed to discover it yet;

b) Your website was de-indexed by Google; this can happen if you violate their guidelines by trying to manipulate the search engine results through black-hat SEO techniques, etc. Any result that’s greater than zero is a sign that your website isn’t deindexed.

The same “site” operator can be used to check if your newly published page / article / press release / etc was indexed by Google or not, thus being visible in its search results list. A search string like this:

 “powerful google search operators” site:ethicalseocompany.com

won’t return any result now (this article isn’t published at the moment) but will most likely display this article in Google’s search results in a few days, when its robot visits my website again.

Let us move on to the second powerful search operator: “filetype”, which can be used to display only files (documents, presentations, mp3 files, etc) instead of displaying regular web pages. Let’s pretend that I am working in the car insurance industry and I am looking for a Powerpoint presentation that discusses this matter. A regular Google search that looks like this:

car insurance presentation

will return a few good results, but also a lot of irrelevant website pages. On the other hand, this search string:

car insurance filetype:ppt

will only return ppt files, Powerpoint presentations that discuss about car insurance – see for yourself:

Some of you might have used “filetype” before, but I haven’t seen too many people using the following Google search operators:

&tbs=rltm:1 – returns real time search results
&tbs=qdr:s  – returns the results that were indexed a second ago
&tbs=qdr:n – returns the results that were indexed a minute ago
&tbs=qdr:h – returns the results that were indexed an hour ago
&tbs=qdr:d – returns the results that were indexed yesterday
&tbs=qdr:w – returns the results that were indexed a week ago
&tbs=qdr:m – returns the results that were indexed a month ago
&tbs=qdr:y – returns the results that were indexed a year ago

It is true that these operators are a bit more difficult to use, but don’t let that scare you – I’ll show you a step by step example right away. First of all, do a regular search for “car insurance”:

Now click the web address field (close to the top of the browser window) and then press the “End” key to move at the end of the web address:

Copy and paste one of the search strings above at the end of the web address, just like I did in the picture below:

You will notice that Google only returns the results that have been indexed during the last 24 hours now (that’s what my search string told it to do). Use this search operator to track your competitors’ website updates, get industry-related news that doesn’t appear in Google News, etc.

Google can also be a free rank tracker for our SEO-related keywords. Let’s use my website as an example: a search for “ethical seo company” will display it at the top of the first Google search results page:

But does this website really have the #1 Google spot? As you can see, Google displays it using a different color, which shows that I visited it at least once in the past. As we visit certain websites, Google learns that we like them and personalizes the search results, placing our favorites closer to the top.

As you can probably guess, this won’t help us, because our real rankings are probably much worse. Fortunately, the solution to this problem is very simple; just do a regular search for the keyword that interests you and then copy / paste the string below, which turns off the personalized results, at the end of the web address:

&pws=0

Phew… we continue to have the #1 spot, but your mileage may vary. Add this string at the end of your web address and you will be able to track the rankings for your keywords accurately by going through the search results pages until you find your website.

What can you do if you like to get results from (let’s say) google.de in Germany, but since you aren’t a German you are being redirected to google.com? Meet the 5th operator, which can show you results from any country in the world by simply adding a: “&gl=desired_country” (without using the quotes) search string at the end of the search web address. As an example, if I wanted to see the Google “car insurance” results pages just like the people that live in England, I would search for “car insurance”, and then I’d add &gl=uk at the end of the web address, the way I did it in the picture below.

Visit the Google Country Codes page to see / download a full list of country codes.

Bonus tip: type in “google.com/ncr” (without using the quotes) in your browser to connect to google.com no matter what country you’re in (you won’t be redirected to another country-specific Google page anymore).

Did you like the article? If you have found it useful, please share it using one of the buttons below. Thank you!

Article marketing used to be an effective way of promoting websites until this year, when the Google Panda update has punished some of the biggest article directories, diminishing their rankings and thus making them lose a lot of traffic. For many SEO consultants, this was a clear sign that article marketing is dead, but nothing could be farther away from the truth.

But how does article marketing work? The website owner (you) writes a good quality article, including a resource box that links to his or her website, and then it submits it to various article directories; some of them will accept the article, while others will reject it. If your article is accepted, it will be published and (as a consequence) two wonderful things will happen:

Your article can be read by hundreds or even thousands of people that are visiting the article directories, generating a consistent stream of visitors to your website. Think about it for a second: EzineArticles has about 5 million visitors each day; would it be so difficult to have 0.1% of them read your fantastic (and maybe controversial) article?

Wonderful thing number two: your article might be republished by other webmasters, who decide that your content is so great that they have to put it on their websites, keeping the links from the article that point to your website intact (this is the only legal way of republishing your article). As you can probably guess, this results in even more visitors to your website and better rankings for the targeted keywords.

Now let’s imagine that instead of writing an article per month, you decide to write one or two per week; this way you will increase your website traffic significantly. I am quite busy working for my monthly SEO services clients, but I still have the time to write a few articles per month; each time I’m posting a new article, the website traffic grows with about 300… 400%.

You’ll laugh, but I heard some SEO consultants saying that article marketing is now a black hat technique – that is one of the biggest mistakes ever! Creating great content and having it syndicated everywhere on the internet was always Google’s formula for SEO success, and this rule is more effective than ever after the Google Panda update.

On the other hand, I have to admit that article marketing is a cheap way of producing a large quantity of backlinks, so it was abused by many SEO specialists. They used to set up hundreds of accounts at various article directories, producing crappy 200… 300 words articles and then blasting them all over the place. Some of the article directories used to auto-approve content, so these SEO consultants were getting hundreds of links pretty much on autopilot.

Who was reading those crappy articles? Nobody! Who wanted to reuse those articles, linking back to the article author? You are right, nobody wanted to do that. Google realized that more and more low quality articles were showing up on the first search results page, so it implemented the Panda algorithm to fix that.

However, getting traffic and better rankings for your website by writing quality articles is more effective than ever, considering the fact that you’ve got much less competition today, since many people stopped using article marketing for good after the Panda update.

So what are some of the advanced article marketing strategies that you can use? First of all, make sure to create high quality content; it is always better to write a great article per week instead of putting together a poorly written article each day. Well, if you can’t write great content you can always hire somebody else that does this for a living.

Google itself is looking for quality content these days and even though we’re probably a few years away from the moment when Google’s software will be able to determine the quality of your content, it’s very easy for their bot to count the number of shares, retweets, mentions, etc that your content is getting, which is pretty much the same thing with measuring content quality, don’t you think?

What makes an article great? Start by making sure that it provides original information, helping solve other people’s problems or at least entertaining them (making them mad is an alternative, but I wouldn’t go in that direction). If you only plan to write 2 or 3 paragraphs, then it’s better to stop and do your research, because Google loves longer articles – and so do your readers, if you offer them high quality information. Finally, take all the precautions to ensure that your article doesn’t have any factual errors, spelling errors, etc.

I wrote before about the importance of picking a great headline for your articles in my Blogging for business 101 article a few months ago; nothing has changed since then. You might have written a quality article, but it will not be read if its title doesn’t attract the readers’ attention. I gave a few suggestions in that article, but you can also learn how to craft a powerful headline by studying the most popular articles on EzineArticles, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.

OK, so now you’ve got a great article and a killer headline; you are also going to need a great resource box, a paragraph that gives the readers some information about you / your company and (very important) includes one or more links that point to your website – the channels through which you can receive website visitors, turning some of them into friends and / or customers.

I’ve seen hundreds of resource boxes until now and let me tell you from the very beginning that most of them are poorly constructed, giving the article reader information that he or she doesn’t want to read, along the lines of “Jimmy Johannes is happily married and a father of two bright children. When he doesn’t write articles, he likes to take long walks with his dog Skippy…” – who is interested in reading that?

Your resource box should provide fantastic value for the readers, making them want to click through to your website because you’ve promised to offer them so much more value there! As an example, if your great article was discussing “3 Easy steps to lose weight in a week”, your resource box should mention that you’ve got a free “101 recipes that help you lose fat” which can be downloaded at your website.

Article marketing continues to work fine for SEO purposes, so don’t forget to include a link that contains your targeted keyword as anchor text (“lose fat” would be good as anchor text in my previous example). Also, make sure to surround the link with text – don’t put it at the very end, the way that most people do it.

If your articles offer quality information you will be perceived as an authority in your industry and you might be invited to guest blog for authority sites; you can prepare for that moment (and also get a few more ideas about this topic) by reading my How to become a Guest Blogger article.

I believe I’m the first SEO consultant to state this officially, but I have to admit that I spend a lot of money on SEO training materials, using other people’s experience and also testing myself what works well and what doesn’t work anymore. I learn from the best, and then I apply the most efficient SEO techniques, thus getting the best results possible for my clients – just Google “monthly seo services” or “ethical seo company” and you’ll see where this website is ranking.

As I was buying those expensive SEO courses (most of them are full of fluff, but you can pick a golden nugget from time to time), I wanted to make sure that I can have access to the training movies even at 7 a.m., when a particular website was down for maintenance on a daily basis, or even when the seller removed the movies from his website after 6 months, thinking that nobody is interested in viewing them anymore – this happens quite often and there aren’t too many things that you can do about it.

Anyway, this article isn’t supposed to discuss about my monthly SEO services; my goal is to show you how I can download any movie I want and view it anytime I want to. There are several ninja tactics I’m using and I’m listing them all here, starting with the easiest ones and moving on to the more complex methods, which require more work but have much greater success rates.

1) The first method involves the usage of the DownloadHelper Firefox plugin. Install the plugin in Firefox, and then simply navigate to the desired web page; if the embedded movie can be downloaded, you will see that the little icon at the right side of the “Forward” browser arrow gets colored. Just click the little triangle arrow pointing downwards and you’ll see a list with all the movies / movie resolutions that can be downloaded from that page.

2) Sometimes the DownloadHelper plugin won’t show any movie download options; in this case, if you right click the movie window and you can find “Copy video URL” or a similar option in the contextual menu, you can then paste the copied URL at the Keepvid website and download it from there.

The Keepvid website also offers a downloadable application that can be used for similar purposes, but the free online version does the same job; simply paste the URL of the video in the “Enter video URL” box, allow the website to run its script and then you will see all the available download links, just like in the picture below.

3) What should you do if none of the methods above work? Open Firefox, go to the desired address, and then click the right mouse button in an area that doesn’t contain any text; this should bring up a contextual menu that includes the “View Page Info” option (you need Firefox to do it). Choose that option, click the “Media” tab just like I did in the picture below, and then go through all the items from the “Type” column until you discover the media file (movie, etc) that interests you.

Right click the desired media file path, and the choose copy – now you can paste that link in a browser to download the movie, or (if the browser opens the movie instead of downloading it) paste it into a word processor like Microsoft Word, press the Enter key to create a hyperlink to the movie, and then save the file as html on your desktop. Double click the html file to open it, and then right click the link to download the movie to your computer.

I know that this might sound a bit too complicated, so I have created the picture below that will walk you through all the steps.

4) Sometimes the movie URL is very well hidden; in this case, you can right click an empty area of the page and choose “View Page Source” (Firefox) or “View source” (Internet Explorer) – this will open the source code for the website page that you are currently viewing. I know that the code might look a bit scary, but don’t worry – we aren’t going to change anything (in fact, we can’t change anything).

Press the “Ctrl” and “F” keys to open the “Find” dialog, and then type in typical a movie extension: .mp4, .swf, .flw are the most common ones (don’t forget to include the dot). Go through all the results until you discover the URL that includes a proper movie name (take a look at the picture below to see an example), and then copy / paste it in a browser window to download it; if it opens up in the browser instead of popping out the download window simply paste the URL in a word processor and continue with the steps I’ve detailed while I was explaining the 3rd method.

5) I have to admit that sometimes it’s almost impossible to download the movies because the server they’re on is encrypting the information. Still, this last method that has a 100% success rate: you can record anything that is visible on the screen using a free tool like Debut Video Capture – the free version works perfectly. The only drawback is the fact that you need to play the entire movie in order to record it, but I guess that we can all live with that.

Let me know what you think. And if you like the article, promote it by clicking on one of the social media sharing buttons below. Thank you!

Creating great content is a surefire way of getting a lot of traffic and sales, especially if you publish that content on somebody else’s web page. In addition to this, if you manage to put your content on several authority websites in your industry, the search engines will start considering your website an authority, boosting the ranks of your keywords, not to mention that you will get laser-targeted website visitors.

First of all, you need to write great content; if you aren’t sure how to do that, hire somebody else to do it for you. Then, you need to take action and ensure that your great content is published on an authority site. And then, you’ll have to repeat these two simple steps until the sales start to overwhelm you.

This isn’t rocket science, but you should have some great samples of your own work before trying to push your content on an authority site; having a blog in the niche you’re trying to guest blog for is mandatory. In fact, make sure to browse the authority site you’re targeting on a regular basis, reading dozens of recent articles and thus getting to know what they like to publish.

Then, go even deeper; point your browser to http://www.quantcast.com and then type in the name of the website you’re targeting in the “Search” box – you will get a lot of information about the amount of website traffic, demographics (gender, age, number of kids, education, etc), similar blogs that the visitors are also reading and so on. And have I mentioned that this incredible resource is free? Make sure to use it and then you’ll know who you are writing for; you will also ensure that the visitors that come to your website through the article resource link will find exactly what they are looking for. Also, don’t ignore the blog readers’ comments; if many of them are requesting a related blog article, you might be the one that fills the gap.

But what should you write about? Your best bet is to go with evergreen topics, articles which offer advice that’s never outdated. A “Saving Your Marriage in 10 Easy Steps” article will make a great read for the decades to come, while a “Best website hosts of 2005” article will be read less and less as the time goes by.

Another good idea is to create lists using other people’s hard work. A “7 Great Websites to double your blog traffic in 24 hours” article would be well received if you can back the title with solid evidence. “How to…” articles are bound to be successful, especially if you can break down a complex process into several easy to follow steps.

A good tip is to identify and explore the popular posts for the targeted website, by using a simple Google search, for example:

“popular posts” site:lifehacker.com

Then, click Google’s “More search tools” link on the left side of the screen, and choose the results within the last month – we aren’t interested in seeing what was popular on Lifehacker 5 years ago. Read these blog posts and you should understand what’s hot.

In fact, it’s better to copy / paste these articles in a document editor and read them from there; this will also allow you to compute the average number of words / article, in case that this isn’t specified in the submission guidelines. And while we’re here, copy / paste just the titles in a separate document – you’ll get lots of great ideas for your own article titles this way.

No authority site will want to publish an article that’s similar with something they’ve published before, so make sure to use Google again, this time verifying if your targeted keywords appear in the result list:

“my targeted keyword” site:authoritysite.com

Try several variations of your keywords, with and without using quotation marks around them; if you don’t get any significant results it’s a good sign. And even if you see a few results popping out, make sure to read those articles and rewrite your content until it stands out on its own (if needed) by discussing topics that aren’t mentioned in those articles.

Try to get the targeted keyword in your article’s title, if possible; the actual URLs will include the article title most of the time, and a contextual link that comes from a page that has your keyword in its title and in its URL is going to give you a lot of SEO link juice. Don’t try to squeeze the keyword in the title if it doesn’t fit it naturally; the website owners might reject your submission because of that. Repeating the keyword once or twice in the article body is always a good idea. If it’s allowed, use H1, H2 and H3 tags that include the keyword – they will help your SEO efforts.

Now that your great content was published, make sure to promote it posting links to it on as many social networks as possible. Also, be sure to respond to all the comments; fortunately, you’re going to get lots of them.

But what should you do if your article is rejected? Proofread it, edit it and then read it again; sometimes you will discover that the article has some flaws. If it’s a great article indeed, try to submit it to several other websites, until it is accepted – maybe you didn’t target the right audience at the very beginning. And if this fails as well, you can always post the great article on your own blog

If you browse the internet on a regular basis you might have heard about a recent Google algorithm change named “Panda”; it has been rolled out at the beginning of the year, but new versions of it are being released on a regular basis throughout the entire world wide web each month (or so).

The main focus of this major update was to devalue the low quality websites, which were creeping on the first Google page in greater and greater numbers. And trust me; it was very easy to rank a crappy website! All you needed to do was to buy a keyword-rich domain name, install WordPress, post a few scraped articles and then build a ton of backlinks to the website using automated tools. In fact, I remember myself reading a report where a black hat SEO specialist was actually giving you a formula that was computing how much money you need to spend on SEO in order to get the #1 spot for the desired keywords.

Fortunately, these things don’t work anymore; Panda has sent these low quality websites into oblivion, unfortunately dragging down several legitimate sites as well. If you have been hit hard by the Panda update or want to prevent it from hitting your website in the future, as the algorithm is being refined, read on to discover the best countermeasures that you can take in order to protect your site from losing its traffic and search engine ranks.

Let us look at the type of websites that were hit by the Panda update first:

a) Article directories. One of the top article directories (Ezinearticles.com) lost about 90% of its monthly traffic; I can only presume what this did to their profit. It’s safe to say that Google now sees many of the article directories as being low quality content sources.

b) Web 2.0 websites containing content generated by their users like HubPages, etc. In the past, you could create a highly targeted page on one of these high authority websites and you were pretty much sure that it will land on the first Google search results page. This doesn’t happen anymore after the Panda update.

c) E-commerce websites which were scraping product descriptions or user reviews from all over the web were penalized as well, because they didn’t produce any original content. In fact, Google has hit hard most (if not all) of the scrapper sites, websites that were copying other people’s content, in many cases ranking higher than the original (source) websites.

With this algorithm update, Google has put the emphasis on the user experience once again; the crappy websites, which don’t provide any value for their visitors or simply copy content from other sites, have been severely penalized. In the past, having unique / rewritten content would have guaranteed that you would stay away from Google’s radar forever; this isn’t true anymore, because these days the information you’re putting up on your blog must be useful and relevant – this is what the people using Google are looking for, after all.

At this point you are probably wondering how can Google tell if someone’s website has great content or not. I guess that even their advanced algorithms can’t do a great job yet, but Google can measure lots of other parameters like the amount of time your visitors spend on the website, the number of pages that they are viewing, the number of tweets and likes that your blog articles are getting, and so on.

So how do you make sure that Panda won’t hit your website? Or how do you recover if you’ve been hit by Panda already? First of all, make sure that your website content is fresh, interesting and invites the users to interact with you and with their peers, recommending it. Writing a unique article isn’t enough anymore; you need to write articles that attract attention, being perceived as authoritative sources of information that help your website visitors solve their problems.

I see many SEO experts encouraging people to blog on a regular basis; from now on, I suggest that you should do that only if you have something worthwhile to say to your audience. Sure, an original article can’t hurt, but since the Panda update it won’t help either, so try and create quality content for your visitors – Google will reward you for that.

But how can you become a great content writer? Try and learn as much as possible in your niche by doing a lot of research, reading other people’s blog posts, and then come up with your own original content. Nobody can guarantee that all your articles will turn viral, but if you are offering quality, unique information you’ve got great chances to attract many visitors to your website and also please the mighty Panda.

Let’s presume that you are working in the business financing industry; an article that teaches your visitors about the low interest rates offered by your company this semester would be helpful, but what about an article that presents the history of the U.S. money – which one of these would have a greater chance of being bookmarked and talked about? Sure, the later article will take much more time to create because you’d need to research the matter, but this is exactly what Google expects to see on its first results page – great sources of information that are referenced over and over by visitors from all over the world.

Let’s not forget that Google also takes into account the user interaction signals: the number of comments that your articles are getting, the number of shares on the big social networking websites, and so on. Are your visitors bookmarking your article? If they do, Google will know that it is an important source of information that they plan to return to in the future.

How many returning visitors do you have? If the visitors check the website once and then never return to it, this sends a negative signal, so Google will penalize you. Also, do you have any direct visitors, people that are typing your website address in their browsers or opening it from their bookmarks? If the answer is negative, maybe your website isn’t providing the best information out there.

You might be wondering how can Google know so many things about your visitors. The answer is simple: it tracks the data through Google Analytics (if you have installed it on your website) or through your website visitors’ Google toolbar.

Make sure to use a website template that is easy to navigate, loads fast (doesn’t use a lot of graphics) and actually encourages people to read as many pages as possible; linking to other relevant articles from within your articles is a great invitation for your readers to discover more quality content, and thus spend more time on your website. Embedding an interesting 1…3 minutes video is also a great idea which can increase the amount of time spent by the visitors on the site.

On a side note, Google released a great tool a few weeks ago; it is named Page Speed Online and it will analyze your web pages, giving you tips on how to make them load faster, and thus reduce the bounce rate, keeping your visitors happy. Make sure to use it and you’ll discover a lot of useful information that will help you beat the Panda.

Do you have a strong social presence? Opening accounts at Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube is highly recommended. Create a Facebook business page and then use an opt-in form to give away a free, precious report to the people that “like” your page. Create a Twitter account and start following targeted people – here’s an article that explains how to get local twitter followers. Then, place Facebook, Twitter, etc buttons on your website.

Remember that the key point is to provide top quality content for your readers, no matter if it’s something that you have produced or if you are promoting somebody else’s great content by writing a 100 words post and placing a link to the source.

If Panda has hit you, this is a sign that you might have low quality content pages on your website. Find them and delete them – Google has probably penalized you for them, and by removing these bad pages you’ve got the chance to increase your website traffic once again.

Here are a few guidelines:
- Pages with duplicate content, which was copied (even rewritten) from somebody else’s website are bad.
- Pages that use low quality content and / or private label rights (PLR) articles are bad.
- Pages that receive very few (zero?) visits are bad.

If you still like to keep one or more of these pages, ask your webmaster to “no index” them; this will allow you to keep them without losing any of the SEO-related benefits.

Use this information properly and you will never have to fear the Panda again. In fact, my clients’ rankings have improved after the Panda update; I can’t give their keywords away, buy try and Google “ethical seo company”, “monthly seo services”, etc and you will see that this website has got the top Google spots, even though I am competing with the best SEO companies in the world. And if your business needs powerful SEO services that work great after the Panda update, make sure to check out our monthly seo services packages, which have prices that start at only $297 / month.

If you’ve got questions or comments feel free to post them and I’ll try to answer them all. And if you like this article, please share it using the social media buttons below.

Writing a press release is both a great way of attracting highly targeted visitors to your website and a 100% ethical method that will help improve your website’s rank in the search engines – this is one of the key reasons why we are including PR submissions into our Rank Mover SEO package. Sadly, many business owners don’t benefit from the usage of press releases because they don’t know how and what they should write about; this article will give you several ideas that can be implemented easily.

PR Title

Let’s start with the title of your release: keep it short (under 62 characters if possible), make it punchy and include the main keyword that you are targeting in the title – here’s an example:

XYZ Enterprises now Offers Small Business Loans for Students

We can see that the title includes the company name, the main keyword we’re targeting (“small business loans”) and presents the company’s offer clearly. With this title, I’m pretty sure that many of the students that see your PR and want to start their own business will be interested in reading it.

Leading paragraph

The opening paragraph is crucial; if you don’t get it right the visitors will stop reading your press release for sure. This means that you should dedicate a lot (and I mean a lot!) of time to the creation of the leading paragraph – here are a few pointers:
- What makes your story interesting? Is it relevant for the audience that you are targeting? Does it relate to a hot topic, in other words is it newsworthy?
- Does your story have an emotional hook? Does it make your readers identify with the person / case study that you are talking about in your PR?
- Can you offer any proof to your readers? They will be much more likely to take action if you can show verifiable proof.

Basically, the leading paragraph should be short, including your company name / website link and revealing a summary of the press release content, but without covering all its aspects – that’s the role of the text body, which usually contains 300…600 words.

PR Body

Ensure that the body of your PR keeps your readers engaged; don’t use complicated, technical jargon, but short sentences written in plain English. Use the text body to create hyperlinks that point to the proper website pages that promote your products and / or services. As an example, if your PR talks about small business loans, you should turn one of the “small business loans” occurrences into a link that points to yourwebsite.com/small-business-loans page – this will help it rank better in the search engines for the “small business loans” keyword.

And I know that it might sound obvious, but make sure to add your keywords to the text body only if they fit in naturally and don’t forget to avoid link stuffing; many press release submission sites discourage that, so try and keep the maximum number of links per PR to 3 or 4.

A good tip is to use the press release as an instrument that tells a story about one or several of your customers; go ahead and contact them, asking if they can provide a good testimonial. Another important tip: always write using a 3rd person voice (“According to Mr. Samuel Jackson, CEO of Fortunate Cookies Inc…”) even if you are writing about yourself, and avoid addressing to your customers using “you” (“the website visitors will benefit from free consultations” is much better).

The body should also include an image or a video that showcases your new product or service. Finally, don’t forget to add a powerful call to action, giving your readers a reason to click that link and visit your website. The closing paragraph can summarize the key points of the release, offering your company’s contact information and website address close to its end.

PR Ideas

What happens if you don’t have any newsworthy content, and you still want to write a press release? It might sound surprising, but launching a new website, opening a new office, securing business funding, launching a contest, offering free consultations and / or product samples, winning an award, reaching a milestone (the 1,000th client?), partnering with another company, giving away a free e-book, local event sponsorships, having a company anniversary, hiring a new staff member / CEO, and so on are all valid reasons to write a compelling press release.

But how can you write a press release in only 10 minutes? I recommend that you should take the time and come up with your own PR template, but if you don’t have the time to do it, simply use the template below, editing it according to your needs. Make sure to apply all the tips and techniques that you have learned by reading this article.

PR Title

Leading paragraph – Business Name now offers / is pleased to announce / will launch / is proud to offer / has teamed up with / etc  - make sure to list the key points of your release here.

PR Body – Give the readers more information: details about the event, new website features that will make the visitor experience more rewarding, client benefits, etc. You can also include a quote from the CEO, using something like this: According to Mr. James Black, CEO of XYZ Enterprises, “Our new product will help the American entrepreneurs…”. If you’ve got a case study, make sure to include it here.

Boilerplate – describe your business, stating your company’s offer, experience, etc. Include a powerful call to action (or at least a website link) at the end: “Visit http://www.xyxyz.com for more information / to download / to get / etc”.

With hundreds of millions of tweets being sent each day, Twitter is a force that cannot be ignored by any responsible business owner; in fact, this is the main reason why close to 50% of the American entrepreneurs have a Twitter account. In addition to this, Alexa ranks Twitter as being the 9th most trafficked website in the entire world, placing it very close to Wikipedia and Microsoft’s Windows Live search engine when it comes to the number of visitors that access it on a daily basis.

The recipe for success includes following a good number of people each day, knowing that some of them (usually in the 10…40% range) will follow you back, and thus will increase your number of followers. But how can you make sure that you are following the right people and not a bunch of overseas tweeps (Twitter peeps) or even worse, several Twitter bots that don’t have anything to do with you, your company or your offer?

The first method makes use of Twitter’s own search function, which can be found by pointing your browser to http://search.twitter.com; it might have a simple interface, but this web application allows us to use several complex search operators. Type in the search box something like “near:TargetedCity within:DistanceInMiles” (without using the quotes) and you will get a list of people that are located within the specified distance near the targeted city – here’s an example.

This search operator will bring in a list of people who have put the city you’re interested in as their location in the Twitter profile. If the results that you have gotten aren’t exactly what you are looking for, feel free to click the “Refine results” button in order to bring on Twitter’s advanced search window.

So now you’ve got a good sized list of people that are located in the city you’re interested in – what do you do with it? First of all, examine their profiles, looking for tweeps that have an active presence and a decent number of followers, and then follow them – some will follow back. And as a general rule, try to stay away from people who don’t take the time to use a picture for their profile; they will not be of too much help.

Time to move on to the second method: Twitter’s hashtags (#). The tweeps use # to tag certain keywords, and this includes city names as well; this means that if we use Twitter’s search function again, this time looking for something like “#hartford” (without using the quotes) we will get another list of targeted tweeps, even if they didn’t fill in their profile data using the proper city location, etc.

Make sure to experiment with hashtags; the people that you are targeting might use a very specific tag to name the city or neighborhood they live in, or even a hashtag they’ve invented. As soon as you’ve discovered the proper tags, start checking the tweeps one by one, following the ones that are active on Twitter.

The third (and last) method I’m going to talk about is the usage of Twitter directories, websites that usually list the names, profile descriptions and number of followers for many of the Twitter users. Just google “twitter directory” (keep the quotes to filter the noise this time) and you’ll discover hundreds and hundreds of websites that group the followers depending on their location, no matter if we are talking about countries, cities or neighborhoods. If you live in the U.S.A. try to use Twellow and Twocals, two Twitter directories that have data for several millions of American citizens in their databases.

Bonus ninja tactic: find one (or several) of your main competitors on Twitter, and then click their “followers” button to reveal the entire list. Go through their followers list, following all the people that match your criteria, and thus get access to a highly targeted number of local tweeps without doing too much work.

If you like this article, make sure to follow me on Twitter; I don’t post spam or nasty links, so you’ll be safe with me.

I have to admit that Facebook used to scare me; I work as an SEO consultant for several companies and getting good Google ranks for my clients’ targeted keywords is what I do for a living. I was getting great results with the search engines, but from time to time I would hear things like “Facebook grows faster than Google”, “Facebook finally gets more traffic than Google”, etc.

I feared Facebook because I thought that using paid traffic would be the only way to grow your business in the future; it was looking like the days of free (organic) traffic coming from Google are numbered. To me, nothing compares with the joy / sadness you feel when you get up in the morning and see that your client’s website has moved up / down a few places in Google.

Fortunately, Google was secretly working at its social network (Google+) and at a social voting system, named +1 (not necessarily a great name, I’ll agree with that). If you use Facebook, you will discover that +1 is similar with Facebook’s like button; if you are logged into your Google account you can vote for websites you like, helping them move towards the top of the search engines and letting your friends know that you find them interesting. There are several free +1 plugins already, just like the one that is installed on my blog, and while +1 was released before Google+, it is now obvious that these two products were intended to work together from the very beginning.

This is pretty much it when it comes to +1, so let’s get back to Google+. I was lucky to receive an invitation a while ago and I was surprised to see that at a first glance it looks very similar to Facebook. First of all, it has got a “Stream”, just like Facebook’s news feed, where you can see your friends’ activities. Then, it’s got status updates, photo sharing, link sharing, etc just like Facebook. And all the contacts / email addresses that can be found inside your Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail accounts can be easily imported into Google+.

However, one of the unique Google+ features is “Circles”, an option that allows you to separate the people you follow into several categories like “Friends”, “Family”, “Business contacts”, and so on. You can create as many circles as you want, define custom circles and only share posts with the desired circles; this way, you can really keep your private stuff for your inner circle and you won’t have to fill auntie Clara’s news stream with your techie links. It’s such a simple and powerful feature, and yet the Facebook developers haven’t implemented it until now.

Another great invention: “Sparks”. It is similar with (and probably derived from) Google alerts, helping you stay up to date with the topics that really interest you. Feel free to pick one of the suggested feeds (movies, recipes, comics, etc) or add your own sparks by typing the desired keywords (“iphone”, “mac”, etc) in the search box, and then use this (sort of) RSS feed to learn more about a particular subject, share quality stuff with your business-related circle or friends, and so on.

Google+ “Hangouts” uses Google Voice to create text and / or video conferences with one or more people. Just click the “Start a hangout” button and you’ll be able to start chatting with people the way you do it on Skype; nevertheless, Google+ allows you to connect with more people than Skype at the same time. If you’ve never used Google Voice before, you will have to install it on your computer, but this is a very straightforward process.

Can you take Google+ on your mobile phone? The answer is a sound YES; the application is already available for most smartphones, having practically the same features as the web version.

How will Google+ change the way we do SEO? It is quite clear that Google+ and +1 have already an impact on the search engine algorithm; from my experience, the number of shares and +1 votes help certain websites rank a bit (1-3 places) better. The impact on the actual ranks might not be that big in the future, but more and more people will see personalized results, websites recommended by their friends; the people that follow you will see different results depending on which websites you’ve +1ed. One way or the other, it is quite clear that if you get many +1 votes for your website and posts you are increasing your Google ranks, so please click the +1 button below and let’s see where it will land in Google’s search results.

Another thing: if you get lots of followers on Google+, your +1 votes will influence their search results as well. Feel free to use some of the Twitter account growth techniques (following many people) in order to grow your Google+ following; in the end, don’t be afraid to ask for +1 votes and shares, especially if you have created a good piece of content.

Will Google+ outgrow Facebook? It’s been the fastest growing social network so far and it’s got over 10 million members as of today, but frankly, I don’t know and I don’t care if it is going to overpower Facebook or not. I’m simply happy to know that with Google behind this new project, we’ve got a great alternative to Facebook, so the free traffic coming from the search engines will never disappear. Well, I guess I’ll have to make a confession: seeing my clients’ websites moving up in the search engines is my morning coffee