Here are a couple links to some noteworthy blogs that I’ve been looking at this week.

Rather than using twitter to “tweet” them one at a time like I usually do, I decided to post a few here.

Defining Search Engine Optimization – Online Marketing Blog

The search engine industry frequently innovates as do consumer behaviors for discovery and sharing. Those changes require search marketers to take a fresh look.

CPA Cost Per Action Online Marketing

CPA online marketing is a type of marketing that is making a lot of waves.

Defining Search Engine Optimization – Online Marketing Blog

The search engine industry frequently innovates as do consumer behaviors for discovery and sharing. Those changes require search marketers to take a fresh look.

Gary Vaynerchuk has got to be my all time favorite marketer.

His enthusiasm and energy just makes you want to get to work. Check out this video he whipped up. He shows you LIVE how to just go out and grab the money.

What do you think of the advise he gives? Please leave a comment.

I just found a plugin for Photoshop and the less expensive Photoshop Elements that will take your basic designs and instantly turn them into CSS-rich, standards compliant websites even if you don’t know how to write a single line of code.

I happened to score an interview with the CEO of Media Lab (the company behind the software)

Listen in as he explains what you can do with the plugin.

Essentially, if you’ve played around with Adobe Photoshop or even Photoshop Elements, you know that it’s pretty easy to generate and manipulate an “image” of what you want your site to look like…

But…

The hard part is taking that design, chopping the images up and then making the tables to put all the images into a website that actually works.  The learning curve is tremendous.

Download The Demo Software and try it first…just to see if this will work for you.

Turning Photoshop images and creations into websites is a skill.  Even when you learn “how” to do it manually, the time it takes to do it is a drag.  So if you are a graphic designer, web designer, or even an amature (novice) just playing around with Photoshop designs…

This software is HOW you do it.

Outsourcing ALL your work can get expensive.  If you have Photoshop or the much cheaper Photoshop Elements…give the software a try.

Learning how to create dynamic websites manually from designs can take months to master.  With the Site Grinder software, the learning curve should only take you a couple hours…even if you are a novice and know nothing about html.

If you are a graphic designer…

This is going to make your life a lot easier.  That’s for sure.

SERPS.

You’ll hear that term a lot once you start to dive into what Search Engine Optimization is all about.  When you hear the term SERPS, it means “Search Engine Results Pages”.  In other words, it’s where your site is listed on Google, Yahoo, Ask, and hundreds of other search engines.  Are you on page 1, page 12, page 344….This is your SERPS ranking for your site.

You’ll rank differently on each search engine but the holy grail of TOP SERPS to aim for obviously is Google.  Google, by far, is the most popular search engine so it makes sense that you’ll get a lot more eye balls on your website if it is ranked somewhere on the first page of Google.

So when someone asks, how do you rank on the SERPS, hopefully now you’ll know what they are talking about.

Now, HOW you rank has a lot to do with how your structure your website.

How you structure your website to get higher SERPS is the “science” behind Search Engine Optimization work or SEO for short.  Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today that means utilizing tools and methods to make your site rank as high as possible in the results of search engines (SERPS).

Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

A few days ago I was reading a study that showed over 80% of internet users only access the sites that appear in first page of the search engine results.  Personally, I think it’s way higher than that.  People are so impatient these days.  If they don’t see what they are looking for on their initial search…they search a different term.  So you can see how important it is to get a ranking in at least the first page.

Search engine optimization requires a fair bit of work on a regular basis because the search engines are changing all the time.  Each search engine has it’s own algorithms to determine the order in which they place websites in their results pages for a particular keyword or keyword phrase.

What you do to get a high ranking one month might not work the next month.

But…

There are some basic “rules”  that are universally accepted as “SEO basics” that every website owner should at least pay attention to.  If you don’t have the basics down, you’ll never graduate to more advanced methods.

Keep these rules in mind with every website you publish and you’ll be ahead of the game from the start.

RULE #1

Content is King!  Unless you are paying for traffic of course…then the old rule “Cash Is King” still applies…;-)

Make sure your site has content releveant to what people are searching for.  The more content the better.  As your site continues to grow with more and more content you have a good chance of Google and other search engines liking you.

This is one reason why search engines tend to favor blogs.  Blogs generally have content added on a regular basis.  Blogs usually focus on a theme and that’s really what a keyword is anyway…a theme.  So focus on your theme.

Now, don’t start to think that the more pages you have  the better your chances are at ranking.  Quality is better than quantity.  THAT’S what the search engines are looking for…good quality content.

RULE #2

Keyword research Is Essential!!

When creating content for your website or articles or blog post, you need to think about the keyword search term you’re aiming for.

I’m about to give you a link to a free tool from SEO book for keyword research…

It shows how many searches are made by users and how many search results are in the search engines.  This is extremely valuable information if you are concerned about SEO (which you should be).

Check your competition and make sure you’re not going up against any site too hard.

You’ll want to aim for a search phrase rather than a search term.  Search phrases are commonly referred to as a long tail keyword.  So if you hear the phrase “long tail”, now you know what the heck they are talking about.

In other words, instead of trying to optimize your site for the term “art” you may want to refine your optimization to “best oil paint brush” or “art supplies in Orlando”….

Those terms are related to “art” but they are long tail, specific phrases.  THAT’S what you want to aim for.

But how do you know what phrase or phrases you should have content about???

Well, that depends a lot on what your site is about.  However, it’s something you should consider when you are developing your site or even a blog post for that matter.

Here’s a tool you should be using whether you are paying for traffic (pay-per-click) or trying to optimize your site for natural SERPS.  This will help you determine which keywords or “long tails” you should be focusing on.

Free Keyword Research Tool

Below is a short video demonstration of the keyword tool.

RULE #3

Fresh content rules over old content.

Again, this is one reason search engines favor blogs over static sites right now.

Fresh content will get you higher in the ranks because Google wants to give the users the newest info, not info that is years old.  When it sees a site that is constantly being updated, it will favor it again and again assuming that you keep your content updated with RELEVANT content on a consistent basis.  Always keep in mind your keyword research and build on that…

RULE #4

Use Your Keyword in Your Page Title

This is a big one.  The title of the page is the bit of text that appears in the top of your browser. You can add this to the HTML code of your web pages between the and tags.

Also, you should add in keyword and description meta tags to your document.  This assists the search engines to know more about your site.  Don’t focus too much on the keyword meta tags…they are pretty much ignored now by Google.  It doesn’t hurt you to have the keyword meta tag though because some engines still use them heavier than Google.

RULE #5

Get Backlinks.  A backlink is a hyperlink on someone else’s site pointing back to your site.

The search engines  like sites that appear popular. If a site has a lot of websites pointing to it, it means there is something of value that people want to share.

One way backlinks are the best, but two-way links are fine too. If you can get a link from a high ranking website, it will certainly help in your SERPS.

The absolute BEST way to get backlinks to your site is to comment on blogs. Usually when you make a comment on a blog, you need to enter your name, email address, and website address.  When you enter your website address…that is giving you a backlink to your site from the blog you are commenting on.

Plug….Plug….Plug….Plug

Another highly effective way to get a backlink is to be a guest blogger on this site…”The How To Project”.

When you click  “submit a tip” in the navigation bar you can make a blog post directly to this site.  You don’t even need to register or login or anything like that.  If you’ve got something valuable to share with others (and it’s internet marketing related) please feel free to make a post.  It works similar to making a comment but instead of a comment to an existing post…it’s actually YOUR post.

You will have a chance to enter any site you wish to point back to….so go ahead, get another backlink to YOUR site by making a post here.  I’ll make you famous 

Rule #6

Forget everything you thought you knew about Google Page Rank.  Just forget about it.  Seriously….it means very little any more.  Don’t try to get a “good” page rank.  It really doesn’t matter when it comes to SERPS.  (I’ll write more about this later…it’s a whole different post in itself)

Comments????

Suggestions???

Did you learn anything from this post?

SEO Lies

You know, most of the info floating out there about SEO actually creates more questions than answers. Wouldn’t you agree?

The biggest LIE about Search Engine Optimization is that it’s “hard”. It’s not. It really boils down to doing a few simple tasks and doing them well.

If you know the truth about SEO, it won’t be so scary to try and take on.

That’s why I’m going to recommend that you get the “SEO Lies” report from Justin Brooke. He has brilliantly outlined and debunked a lot of crap information that’s continually floating around.

Normally, I’d reserve this type of post for my “recomendations” tab but after reading the report I figured I needed to put it here in the main section of this site to give it the exposure it deserves.

It’s only $1 to!!

I know, I know…

This site is usually all about FREE information.

Well, for a buck, I don’t feel bad for offering it up here. It’s a FULL 35 pages! Way more than a single blog post can offer.

So head on over and pick up your copy. Once you read it, come on back, leave your comment and let me know what you thought about the report.

Click the report cover to get the report.

• If you’ve ever wondered about the “duplicate content” penalty….read the report.
• If you’ve ever wondered about the “nofollow” tag …read the report.
• If you’ve ever thought that SEO is hard to perfect…read the report.

Obviously, many of the subjects that are in the report will be covered here on “The How To Project” but if you want it all in a comprehensive, no fluff manual…

Do yourself a favor, spend a buck and get the report.

Happy reading!

Well, I hope you like this post today.  I spent a good amount of time on it for you. 

It’s about SEO, keywords, tracking, pay-per-click management, competition research, and more all wrapped up into one nifty software package that’s…FREE…and it’s not a “trial” either.

In fact, what I’ve done here is take the press release that they provided and I’ve taken the liberty of adding some screen shots of the software and what it does.  At the end of the post, I’ve included a link where you can get this powerful software.

Without further addo, here’s the press release.  Please leave a comment when you’re done reading this post.  I’m curious if this is the type of information you would like more of.  Enjoy the post!…

 Press Release: 

Nov 12, 2008 – Small website owners are finding it increasingly difficult to rank in the search engines as competition on the Internet intensifies. New webmasters often don’t even realize just how important search engine optimization is to the success of their website until they have had their site online several months. It’s only when their website begins to slip into oblivion and traffic dwindles away that the truth hits home.

Mark Ling, founder of SEO software Traffic Travis, says that at this point “website owners’ panic and use snippets of information they have gathered from blogs and articles in a haphazard approach to SEO that usually produces very little in the way of results. Some webmasters take some bad advice and end up watching their sites slip even further down the ranks.”

However, he says, it is not just newbies who struggle with SEO. Even experienced webmasters find it challenging. “The cost and time involved in SEO can be very restrictive – we don’t all have the resources of the BBC. Obviously something had to change.”

Traffic Travis is SEO software designed to make ranking in the search engines achievable and easy for website owners of all levels and experience, without the need for a big marketing budget. And the newly-released 3.0 version includes even more features to streamline the SEO process.

“Search engine optimization does not have to be labor intensive or a financial burden,” says Ling. “Traffic Travis 3.0 offers a simple optimization system that can be carried out quickly and easily using a variety of custom-created tools. The tools automate different stages of the research process, so that previously time-consuming research tasks can be achieved in minutes.”

Not only this, says Ling, but Traffic Travis can also help to point out factors that might otherwise go overlooked.

“Say you’re researching a competitor, and you want to look at their backlinks. Traffic Travis will tell you this, and it’ll also retrieve the IP addresses of the websites, the PageRank and the anchor text. All these are very important factors when assessing backlink quality. You can’t judge a link on one of these factors alone, so any tool that doesn’t give you all this information at once is only giving you a tiny portion of the picture.”

The results that Traffic Travis users have achieved are impressive. Many are regularly achieving first page rankings for their main search terms. 000Relationships.com is one such customer: “We’ve been plodding away for years trying to get our search engine rankings up. And now, using Traffic Travis, we’ve managed to get our site to #4 & #5 in Google, #1 & #2 in Yahoo and #2 & #3 in MSN for our highly converted search phrase — ‘How to Attract Men’’”

This unassuming software tool is quietly revolutionizing the way website owners do business on the Internet. “Our aim is to give all website owners the means and opportunity to rank on page one for their search terms,” says Ling, “Traffic Travis puts all webmasters on an equal footing, no matter what their budget or experience is.”

To find out more about Traffic Travis SEO Software and how to get it FREE, click here.