Some say that SEO is a black art, others claim it is a science. If you read all the blogs, ebooks and articles out there, it can seem that SEO is a bit of a minefield There’s META tags and titles, alt tags and content, keyword density and page rank, links and reciprocal links – and that’s just for starters. No wonder the average business is confused when it comes to SEO!

After reading all there is to read, and heeding the warning tales of dire Google penalties if you get it wrong, you could be forgiven for thinking that the only way you’re going to get that coveted front page on Google is by paying an SEO expert hundreds, maybe thousands, of pounds.

Well you’ll be delighted to know that there is another way, and all it needs to take is a little of your time.

What do you have to do?

Start blogging!

OK, it’s not just a case of writing the first thing that comes into your head, but believe me, blogging really can help your search engine positions. Here are 5 simple steps to blogging for search engine positions.

1) Find out what keyphrases your audience are searching for

Use the Google Keywords tool to find out what people are searching for related to your industry. Do you sell a particular range of jewellery or handbag? Look and see what phrases people are looking for regarding those items. A professional service? Find out the issues people are having. Knowing what people are searching for allows you to tailor your blogs to those phrases.

2) Write your blog titles with those phrases in mind

One of the most visited pages on my blog recently is the ‘What size should the new Twitter background be?’ post. With ‘New Twitter’ being launched, I knew that people would be wondering how to redesign their new backgrounds, so I wrote a blog post with that in mind. You can do the same. Solve a problem ‘How to’, ‘How can I’, How do I’ blog posts that answer queries and problems tend to do well in search engines, and bring in visitors.

3) Make sure you use your keyphrase in the body of your post

Don’t just put your phrase in your blog title, make sure it’s used a couple of times in the body of your blog too. That way Google will know that your post is relevant to the phrase being searched for.

4) Update your blog regularly

Google will come back and index content that is updated regularly, so ensure that your blog is updated frequently It doesn’t have to be every day, but a couple of times a week at least is optimal.

5) Link to your blog posts

Tweet them, Facebook them, refer to them from your website – Google follows links, and the more relevant links you have to your post, the more likelihood of it being indexed. Don’t spend hours on this; a few well placed links will do the job.

The simple fact is that Google loves content – and the more keyword strong content you can post, the more chance you have of being indexed and being found by people searching.

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The best free blog traffic strategies to increase your traffic - guaranteed. Or, at the very least, the most numerous ones.

Please enjoy, implement, and share.

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1. Create lists.

2. Write a tutorial.

3. Give away your very best content and some.

4. Be current – write about tomorrow today.

5. Don’t write about your cats, dogs, boyfriends, kids.

6. Be timeless – write a post that will remain current for years.

7. Write with “everybody is entitled to my opinion” attitude.

8. Write about your kids.

9. Write about other bloggers’ best posts.

10. Make your own “best of the best” list.

11. Become an expert in your niche.

12. Break news.

13. Make news.

14. Write short, laconic posts.

15. Do interviews with the “cream of the crop”.

16. Use polls, giveaways, and other eye candy.

17. Write long, conclusive posts.

18. Answer your comments.

19. Answer your email.

20. Write about pros and cons of an issue.

21. Write on a controversial topic and close comments.

22. Make readers depend on you by sharing your expertise generously.

23. Write about blogging.

24. Blog about writing.

25. Take an alternate position.

26. Write a post for beginners.

27. Ask experts to make comments on your best posts.

28. Write an advanced post.

29. Encourage your readers to digg, tweet, like, buzz your posts.

30. Write about Google.

31. Write about Twitter.

32. Bookmark all your posts.

33. Interview parties with opposing views.

34. Research a topic and post your findings.

35. Integrate references to sports in your posts.

36. Post with personality.

37. Run relevant ads that are even better than your content.

38. Write exclusively about a certain theme for a week.

39. Ask a question everyone else is afraid of asking.

40. Run no ads.

41. Use your skills to help a non-profit – pro bono.

42. Update an old post with new ideas.

43. Post your photos on flickr.

44. Crowdsource your next post idea to your readers.

45. Write a satirical post.

46. Use an outrageous photo.

47. Make it easy to share what you are doing.

48. Encourage visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed.

49. Give visitors a good reason to opt in to your list.

50. Coin a term or two.

51. Pioneer a great topic and then encourage others to blog about the same thing.

52. Don’t overwhelm visitors with too many options.

53. Write a list of 101 people, blogs, topics in your niche.

54. Create a mock head-to-head competition among bloggers.

55. Mention some useful, but little known resources.

56. Make a post that solves a problem.

57. Make a post that inspires.

58. Encourage your followers to help you dominate top blog lists.

59. Write a post that causes controversy.

60. Do a 30-day challenge.

61. Write a long comment.

62. Start a blog meme.

63. Share your blog statistics with your readers.

64. Pick a topic by reading business book titles.

65. Pick a headline by reading top Dugg stories.

66. Start a discussion in your blog comments.

67. Answer your readers questions in a post.

68. Challenge your fellow bloggers by writing something nearly borderline about them and close comments.

69. Share link love and expect some back.

70. Add to the list started by another blogger.

71. Be complimentary.

72. Do your market research on Amazon.com.

73. Write about stuff that most people want to read about, like Web 2.0.

74. Disprove a myth.

75. Write a post about something merely good, but not great.

76. Constantly read other blogs, leave comments, look for ideas.

77. Edit yourself without mercy.

78. Create cornerstone content.

79. Skip introductions and get to the meat of the posts – your readers do.

80. Point out something ironic or contradictory.

81. Write a series of posts.

82. Come up with a more efficient way of doing something.

83. Create a widget or plugin.

84. Make your content unmissable.

85. Be everywhere, all at once.

86. Take in other people’s ideas, learn from them constantly.

87. Tell a story through pictures.

88. Focus on unmonetized, but high-trafficked searches.

89. Combine some of your best older posts into a new series.

90. Treat every day as a new beginning, because you’ll always have new readers.

91. Be patient.

92. Post on the weekdays because more people will read it.

93. Change up your posting style every once in a while, like do reviews, etc.

94. Showcase some of your best posts on Squidoo lens.

95. Post on the weekends because there are less posts.

96. Leverage April Fool’s day with an outrageous truth.

97. Write about how things have changed in your niche.

98. Invite your readers to do guest posting for you.

99. Answer your readers questions with more questions.

100. Aggregate ideas, tips, etc from numerous places/blogs into a blog post.

101. Attend a live event and broadcast about it.

102. Write “Dear Abby” posts.

103. Don’t be boring.

104. Write a post about a scam.

105. Write about everything under the sun so that you don’t bore your readers.

106. Alternative to link exchange: get a group of bloggers together and write reviews for each other’s blogs.

107. Turn off “nofollow” to encourage comments.

108. Be very focused on one topic, in deep detail, so you become a recognized expert in it.

109. Be opinionated.

110. Answer very specific questions in deeper, more specific ways than currently exist.

111. Help people who are just starting out.

112. Don’t interrupt your posts with a lot of links.

113. Connect with your blogging peers and share ideas.

114. Create a guide for your niche.

115. Write an interesting analogy.

116. Write posts that includes tons of trackbacks to other blogs so that other blogger will notice you.

117. Make a post simplifying a complex problem.

118. Create a huge list of your best posts.

119. Give credit to those who inspired your post.

120. Respond to criticism in a post (i.e. criticism of you, your company, of the way you squint your eyes, etc).

121. Make a “[blank] for Dummies” post.

122. Tell a great story.

123. Put some thought into post formatting – increases readability.

124. Check out your competitors’ archives to see if some of their old posts can be turned into an updated version on your blog.

125. Write a post that uses the words “futile” and “desperate”.

126. Write something to inspire and motivate your readers, especially if you don’t do it on a regular basis.

127. Don’t try to be all things to all people.

128. Review your analytics to see what keywords are brining in traffic and make more posts on those.

129. Contrast two or more positions in your post.

130. Write about obscure stuff that appeals to an obsessed minority.

131. Post about what’s popular and why it’s beneficial.

132. Invite a couple of bloggers with opposing opinions for a duel on your blog.

133. Tell a joke (preferably funny one).

134. Browse thesaurus to spruce up your posts.

135. Don’t make your readers pull out a dictionary to understand your posts.

136. Make a post about frequently asked questions in your niche.

137. Make a post about questions that should be asked about your niche, but nobody thought of asking.

138. Create an exhaustive list of jargon for your niche – with definitions.

139. Make a post alleging conspiracy.

140. Don’t always focus on your own niche to find readers.

141. Write about how to use a product in an unconventional way.

142. Poll your readers on a topic and post results.

143. Don’t promote yourself or your products at the expense of the readers’ attention.

144. Write a post about a blog, which is popular, but provides poor content – explain why. You’ll open pandora’s box, but create traffic.

145. Run a contest, offer a cool (but not expensive) prize.

146. Visit your readers’ blogs and post comments.

147. Dissect an argument in a post.

148. Gather a bunch of creative commons images about your niche and make a gallery-post (with credits, of course).

149. Narrow your blog focus.

150. Write a “tag” post and have other bloggers who you tagged add to a list.

151. Make a post about what in your niche is being done wrong and how to correct it.

152. Offer an ethical bribe for commenting or subscribing.

153. Make friends with power users on Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc.

154. Make friends with forum and message boards addicts.

155. Make friends with influential bloggers and social media leaders.

156. Create a post that leaves your readers hanging till a later post – it’d better be good!

157. Create a list of “bite-sized” tips for your niche.

158. Write part 2 for any of your posts that are extremely popular.

159. Submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

160. Put together a list of the most tweeted/dugg/shared posts in your niche.

161. Dress your blog (design-wise) like you would for your first date.

162. Collect inspirational quotes from other bloggers in your niche; compile them in a post.

163. Invite a well known blogger in your niche to contribute a short guest post.

164. Use a human voice.

165. Use a translation plug-in to translate your blog into other languages.

166. Ask other bloggers (preferably more influential ones) to review your blog and make a post about their findings.

167. Tell your readers to change the world and give them examples of how they can do it.

168. Turn your blog posts into articles (use EzineArticles plugin).

169. Write a press release about your blog.

170. Add a forum.

171. Interlink your blog posts.

172. Keep tweaking your template to optimize readability.

173. Write a post about a generally unknown secret in your industry/niche.

174. Be a comedian – “They’ll be standing in line for that old honky-tonk monkey shine!”

175. Ping the comments you leave on other blogs.

176. Always work on improving your blog.

177. Join a blog carnival.

178. Submit your site to Alltop.

179. Answer questions on Yahoo!Answers via a post on your blog.

180. Answer forum questions by linking to a post that has the answer.

181. Add your RSS feed to MyYahoo, IGoogle, Netscape, Bing.

182. Install OnlyWire plugin – simultaneous posting to many bookmarking sites.

183. Start reciprocal guest blogging: you guest post on their blog, they guest post on yours.

184. Ask your readers to email you links to their best resources and make a post about it.

185. Write an “attack post” by setting up an argument and them shooting it down.

186. Share the secrets that made your blog successful to enable your readers to do the same.

187. Make your blog DoFollow and submit it to DoFollow directories.

188. Twit your blog posts, blog your tweets.

189. Come up with a series of posts unique to your site.

190. Post linkbait.

191. Assign a theme to each day of the week and write about it on that day on a weekly basis.

192. Review your blog’s stats (weekly, monthly, yearly) and write about the results.

193. Do a Twitter search on a particular subject, compile them in photoshop and do a review of the trend.

194. Compile YouTube videos on a specific topic into a VLog and post it to your blog.

195. Walk your readers through a day in your life, use photos, videos, but put a fun/funny spin on it.

196. Write a post about things you can learn from “…” (insert a popular personality in your niche market).

197. Write a summary of a long report, white paper, ebook – make it an easy bullet-like format.

198. Compile a list of niche-related news over the past week, month, etc; keep adding to it over time making it into a series.

199. Create a sense of urgency in your title, make readers think they will miss out if they don’t read it.

200. Be undeniably interesting for years.

201. Write stuff people want to read and share.

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SEO copywriting has traditionally been about optimizing web page copy by targeting keyword phrases in certain frequencies and densities.

And yet search engine research shows that almost 85% of the total factors that determine how a web page is ranked in a search engine is based on things that happen off the page itself.

While keyword research is still crucial, search engine algorithms have evolved.

Google treats the trust and authority of your domain, what others think about your content, and the words they use to describe it in links as an important indication of quality and relevance.

Thanks to blogging and social media platforms, more people than ever are able to cast their vote on what’s relevant by linking to it, bookmarking it, and tweeting it.

Modern SEO is all about crafting content so compelling that other people want to promote it by linking to it or sharing it, which increases your trust and authority and helps the pages you want to rank well for certain keywords.

Step-by-step strategy for creating content that scores links, is highly readable and engaging, and ranks well in search engines. You’ll discover:

• Why SEO Copywriting Still Matters
• How Search Engines Work
• Why You Have to Spoon Feed Search Engines
• The 5 Essential Elements of Search Engine Keyword Research
• How to Create Cornerstone Content That Google Loves
• Five Link Building Strategies That Work
• Five Areas to Focus On for Effective SEO Copywriting
• Why Writing for People Works for Search Engines
• How to Make SEO Copywriting Simple

Google Webmaster Tools Launches Improved Options for Handling URL Google first introduced parameter handling about a year ago. When I wrote about the launch, I described how optional parameters in URLs could cause canonicalization problems and gave a rundown of some of those issues, as well as the available solutions. Now the list of solutions has gotten even better.

How has parameter handling changed?

In the earlier version, you could specify if a parameter should be ignored during the crawling and indexing process. This ability was helpful in cases when the parameter was completely optional and didn’t change the content of the associated page. For instance, http://www.example.com/glee-is-awesome/reviews and http://www.example.com/glee-is-awesome/reviews?ssessionid=1234 both load the same content. The sessionid parameter can be ignored entirely.

This latest version solves a similar, but slightly different use case. For example, http://www.example.com/glee-is-awesome/episodes?sort=newest and http://www.example.com/glee-is-awesome/episodes?sort=oldest both load the same content in different sort orders, but the sort parameter can’t be ignored. Without it (http://www.example.com/glee-is-awesome/episodes), the content won’t load at all. In this case, Googlebot needs the parameter, but only needs to know one preferred value of it. You can specify, for instance, “newest” as the specific value for the “sort” parameter and Google will use that version of the URL as canonical. This means that Google will index that version and will consolidate links to all other versions to the canonical one. Google will use this value anytime it encounters the parameter across the site. Note that you have to choose a listed value — you can’t manually type in a value that Google hasn’t yet crawled.

Yahoo Site Explorer has a similar feature called Dynamic URL Rewriting, although it’s unclear if that data is still being used, since Microsoft Bing now powers Yahoo search.

Parameter handling is now located in its own tab under Settings.

New search queries data

With this release, Google Webmaster Tools also now provides more detailed query data, including the percentage change from the previous month of impressions, clicks, and click through rate. You can also see a chart that shows impression and click volumes for a specific query. The data is still available for only the most recent 30 days however. (In a much earlier version of this data, it was available for a six month period.)

One of the many factors that can attract both people and search engines to your website is the speed at which it loads. If a site takes more than just a few seconds to load on a standard Broadband connection then most people aren’t going to stick around very long and most SEO experts generally agree that Google factors the speed of a page load into it’s ranking of sites. The bottom line is simple…get your site to load faster.

I have a very close friend who lives in Australia who often badgers me about how slow my site loads. He’ll send me a message in Skype or we’ll be chatting and he’ll begin to make fun of how slow Site Sketch 101 loads in Australia. When I load my site, it only takes about 4 or 5 seconds from start to finish so I always make fun of the Aussie internet services and tell him that his island full of convicts just needs to get caught up with modern society and get real internet.

The problem, however, isn’t his internet service…it’s my site. Even though I’m able to load my site in just a few seconds, my friend, Andrew is literally on the other side of the world trying to pull images, html, stylesheets and more off of my shared hosting platform in the United States. It’s slow.

Introducing the Cloudfront Server

So today I made a change. I uploaded my images, my media library and my includes file to an Amazon Cloudfront server. Amazon Cloudfront creates copies of my content on servers located around the world so that when I load my site, I’m connected to a server somewhere here in America and when Andrew tries to load my site, he’ll be connecting to a server in Australia. This allows both of us to experience faster load times and a much better overall experience for all my readers throughout the world.

Have you noticed Site Sketch 101 loading any faster for you? How fast does it load? What do you use to speed up the page loads on your website or blog? What advice would you give to others who are trying to accomplish this same task at their site?

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