Make Money Online | Internet Marketing Success with Tom Duong

When you have a handle on the concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and what it is capable of doing for your website, beating your competition becomes easier than you could ever imagine. If you want to gain a significant edge over other websites within your niche, these six Golden SEO Tips and Tricks are the most logical place to begin. Follow these simple steps and you will be launched ahead of your competitors in no time.

1. Install SEO Quake

SEO Quake is a powerful tool that allows users to reference a number of customized and pre set parameters in three different functional parts. Compatible with both Firefox and Internet Explorer, the SeoToolbar displays parameters in a browser toolbar, the Seobar utilizes a fully customizable separate lock, and parameters can also be shown as outputs on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). SEO Quake has a growing community where customized parameters are shared so that web developers may be better able to track the effectiveness of their websites. SEO Quake is absolutely free to download, and makes an excellent addition to the SEO arsenal of anyone serious about flying past the competition.

2. Get Your Blog Out of the Google Supplemental Index

Here you could be potentially hurting your search engine driven traffic without even knowing it. This is especially common for Wordpress blogs, where multiple links lead to the same content pages. When Google or another search engine spiders these pages, it will follow all links and treat the same content as multiple instances of the same thing. The fastest and most effective way to undo this damage and to prevent further instances of the same occurrence is to put together an effective Robots.txt file. You may have to customize your robots.txt file to suit your particular requirements. This text file will tell search engines where they should and should not go, and can prevent search engine spiders from repeatedly following several different links to the same content.

3. Domain Canonicalization

Most people are surprised to find out that http://www.website.com and http://website.com are often regarded as two completely different websites according to search engine spiders. Robots are not all together very good at determining whether or not pages are the same, meaning that these pages may be stored separately from one another rather than the same. You can significantly diminish your potential page rank if you do not consolidate all versions of a page under a single URL, a process known as Canonicalization. By addressing these canonicalization issues, you can significantly improve how your website ranks by consolidating all of the versions of a page under a single URL.

There are other differences here worth noting, in addition to http://www.website.com and http://website.com, there are also http://website.com/default.php, or http://website.com/index.html and so on. There are many ways to get to the same page, so make sure that you are addressing them all. Scott Yang has an excellent Permalink Redirect Plugin for Wordpress blogs that is well worth downloading in order to to deal with this problem.

4. Restructure Your Permalinks

There are three different ways to have your permalinks structured in a Wordpress blog, but only one is really visually appealing and useful when it comes to boosting page rank. If you have a lot of permalinks to change because your blog has been active for a while, consider downloading Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin that will allow you to switch to your new permalink structure without losing the traffic you’re already getting from your old permalinks. The ideal permalink structure is one that contains the actual title of the blog post rather than simply a random blog post number, and sometimes the date information as well. Some bloggers choose not to use the date information, which makes for a shorter and straight forward permalink. By utilizing the actual titles in your URLs, you are increasing the likelihood that your blog posts will be indexed individually for greater search engine visibility.

5. Internal Link Building

The concept here is simple but packs a big punch. What you want to do is refer back to other content in your website on every content page. Links from your own domain name do still count as backlinks, though they do not count quite as much as one way links from other websites. Use anchor texts in your content to refer back to other pages within your website, including but not limited to your home page of course. Rather than simply using texts like “Click here” or “Next” to link to other pages within your website, use text that targets keywords for a more powerful linking strategy. In other words, linking the term Internet marketing products in “More Internet Marketing Products”, is a more powerful strategy than linking Click Here in “Click here for more products.” If you structure all of your internal links this way, the extra effort will go a long way in increasing the number of links pointing to your website.

6. Create a Sitemap

Creating a sitemap for your website is an often overlooked part of SEO. The more pages you add to your website, the more difficult it will be to maneuver, both for search engine spiders and robots, and for human visitors as well. Constructing a sitemap will create an effective way to show everyone where all the content on your website is at quickly and easily. This is an excellent way to make sure that search engine spiders are crawling all of your content, just not the most immediately accessible pages. A plugin can be downloaded and installed from Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator that will automatically generate the sitemap for Wordpress blogs.

When you want to beat your competitors and increase your search engine page rank quickly and effectively, it really does not take too much effort. All you have to do is implement the six processes I listed above, and you will absolutely see a significant increase in your search engine page rank. SEO is not a difficult process by any means, it simply takes understanding and a little bit of planning in order to master.

What are your experiences with search engine optimization? Which one is your favorite SEO tip or trick listed above? Please let me know by posting your comments and questions below. As always, your feedback is always appreciated.