Google Adwords Success Tips Vol. 1

When you use Google Adwords and can’t be certain of what keyword matching option you must use, then you can enter all three variations you have in your keywords list. For instance:

Art Posters
“Art Posters”
[Art Posters]

After using them for some time you can check the clickthrough rates of the keywords and delete the ineffective keyword combinations.

Always use the negative keywords feature. For example if someone uses the search term “free art posters” then you should use the negative keyword –free in the Google appropriate field and in result your keyword “Art Poster” will not be displayed.

By doing that you avoid the freebie seekers who are not targeted in your offer and as result you improve your clickthrough rates and reduce the cost of your campaigns. You can also use similar with the “free” term such as:

-no charge
-no cost
-costless
-chargeless

and so on.

The keywords number factor. The age of creating an ad group and load 4000 keywords instantly is over. Although there is not a specific rule for how many keywords you should use, follow Google’s recommendations on the amount of keywords. Google recommends: maximum 100 Ad groups per campaign and 750 keywords per Ad group.

Targeted but not over targeted. So many people loose money because of that reason. If you have yoga training center in Florida it’s obvious that people from New York won’t be interested in your services. So displaying a general term such as “Yoga” or even “Yoga training center” will display your ad on Google Adwords and prospects with no interest in your offer will click your Ad which means extra cost for your campaigns and not transformed into sales.

On the other hand if you use a specific term like:

“Yoga Training Center in Florida”

You have more targeted clickthroughs, targeted prospects and eventually more sales.

But there is a drawback on that tactic. If you are extremely targeted and use a keyword of over 6-7 words it’s highly possible that no one will search for that term and have no clicks or even views for your Ad.

How to find keywords? You could use the Google keyword suggestion tool but because so many other Adwords users use it, the keywords from that tool are very expensive.

Other tools you can use are:

Overture suggestion Tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion
123promotion Tool: http://www.123promotion.co.uk/ppc/index.php
Good Keywords: http://www.goodkeywords.com

These tools are free but if you want a more sophisticated and advanced option you can use word tracker paid service: http://www.wordtracker.com

Use always the plural form of your words. Don’t use “Yoga Training Report” but also “Yoga Training Reports”.

Exploit the misspelling errors. Research indicates the 12%-15% of the search phrases and words are misspelled. So don’t use only the term “staff” but also “stuff”.

Use hyphens. For example use both terms like: “Yoga Training Center” and “Yoga-Training-Center”

Use Acronyms: If you use the phrase “internet service provider” in your campaigns you can also use the acronym ISP in your Ads.

Use of domain names. This is powerful because it’s the most targeted term you can find. If your website’s domain name is www.yogatrainingcenter.com you must use it as keyword term

What You Need To Build An Effective Adsense Site?
 

One of the greatest lies about making money online is this: Build a site, put up some Adsense ads on it and you will be raking in the dough. If only that were true, but unfortunately it isn't that easy.

The trick to putting up an Adsense site that actually makes money is this: You need to have a site that displays ads with the most profitable keywords available and get traffic to your site the cheapest way possible.

So how do you know what are the most profitable keywords? You can use the Google AdWords Traffic estimator. The basic functionality is available for anyone to use, even without an AdWords account. Just enter your keywords in the text box at the top. You can leave all the other fields blank for now. Push the Continue button at the bottom of the page and you will see how much each of your keywords costs to get the #1-3 spot in Google AdWords.

How does this help you to find profitable Adsense keywords? First of all, you are splitting the price of the keyword with Google every time someone clicks on your ad. The actual percentage is not know, but most experts agree that it is about 50%. If a keyword costs $20 for the number 1 spot and someone clicks an ad on your page that uses that keyword, then you will get somewhere around $10!

You should know that high priced keywords do not mean high levels of traffic. The traffic estimator will also tell you the number of clicks per day that each keyword is getting in the number one spot. What you need are keywords that are a balance between the most money and the most clicks per day.

Another thing you need to know before building an Adsense site is which keywords to use to bring in the most traffic. You don't want to go up against ten million other sites that are all talking about the same thing that you are. What you need is a niche topic, something that people are hungry for information about. Here is a step by step process for finding a niche topic.

1. Download a free keyword tool from http://goodkeywords.com.

2. When you get it, enter the most general keyword about your topic that you can find. It will give you a list of related keywords from the Overture search engine along with the number of times each one of those keywords was searched for in the last month.

3. For every keyword that the Good Keywords gives you, enter the following search into Google: allintitle:yourkeyword. Look at the number of results that Google displays for each keyword.

4. Divide the number of results by the number of searches and you will come up with what is commonly referred to as the R/S ratio. In economics, this is called Supply/Demand.

5. Look for keywords that have a high number of search, but a low R/S ratio. I wouldn't choose any keyword unless there were at least 1000 searches per month and an R/S ratio of 2.0 or less.

6. Take the most profitable keywords in this group and build your Adsense pages around them.

Alright, so you have the most profitable keywords that are in high demand. You now need to have some content related to each keyword in order to get Goggle to put the right kind of ads on your page. You can either write this content yourself, or you can go to one of the many free article websites on the net and grab some free articles related to your keyword. Just make sure to give the author credit for the article, it's not nice to steal.

Once you have your article, start putting your Adsense ads in the middle of the article, about once every few paragraphs or so. I have found that this is the most effective way to get people to click on your ads. You are allowed up the three sets of Adsense ads per page, so place them wisely.

That is really all there is to making a profitable Adsense site. Just find the best keywords, get some articles about them, add your Adsense to them, drive traffic to these pages, and start making money.

Another Affiliate Scam? NO1 on Google in 48 hrs!

Another Affiliate Scam?

Affiliate Project XYZ or whatever-6 Figure Income for working a few hours per day?

Affiliates that are making $50,000.00 a month? Don't make me Laugh....

I winced when I read anything like this, and click off the page. Since I first found out about people making money online, I wanted to know how to do it myself. For personal reasons (that I won’t go into here) I needed to work from home and obtain a decent income whilst doing so. I spend 1000's of hours surfing and I'm ashamed to say a good pile cash on useless guides and programs. I joined forums and groups and quickly after reading of their experiences decided that the majority of these e-books, programs and tutorial were nothing but a scam. I settled down to plod around, making a lot of sites and going via the tried and tested 'Work Horse' method. In the end, I was making about $300 a month. After making virtually nothing for the first 6 months!!! When I saw the latest affiliate secrets program appear, I thought 'Here we go again'. Another get rich quick scheme. I have to say I ignored it for some time...but then I started to hear whispers, all over the net saying how great it was. Blah blah, I still ignored it.

I am a member of a particularly harsh, clued up Affiliate Forum. (They are straight talkers! They review and report harshly on every single scam and new program on the net. I was grinning when I saw the headline 'New Affiliate project program reviewed'. At last, I thought some one will pull it to pieces and save all the money and cash hungry affiliates wasting their time! I scrolled down till I found a favorite forum poster of mine, he is a cutting, an SEO expert, sharp, harsh and pulls every 'Get rich Quick Scheme' that I've ever seen on the net to shreds.

Boy did I get a shock!!! Here are some real posts from this harsh clued up forum:

Geez, this guy knows his stuff! Damn-if everyone reads this info-I'm outta business.

One guy wrote in another thread that this is the type of product that you don't want a lot of people to know about. I agreed with him but then I forgot a few things.

a) 90% of the people that buy it won't do a thing with it

b) Of the remaining 10%, about 1% will implement it effectively

So I hope I don't need to worry. Damn, can't believe he is selling this info so cheap!

This is only one post out of 50-singing it's praises-Affiliate Scheme ABC this and that-wow, blown away etc. all over the forum!

Took the wind right out of my jaded sales. I thought ok-you know what...lets go see.

I read it all carefully, then the clincher was spotting the money back guarantee if not satisfied plus it was quite cheap-so I thought...hmm why not. So tentatively, I bought Affiliate the product to test.

I thought it would just be an interesting experiment that I could report back on the forum about. I really didn't expect very much to come of my purchase.

Now I also run my own work from home forum and we have a vibrant community and all help each other with tips and knowledge on how to earn from home. I almost felt it my duty to try this out so I could post about 'What a con it was'

I bought this particular un-named product, (let just nickname it Abc for the purposes of this article), downloaded it and was so disinterested in reading it, I forgot about it for a few days.

I really hadn't much faith in it at all. Eventually I got round to reading it-Boy was I mad!

Who was this guy anyway? Who was he to tell me that EVERYTHING I had already learn't about affiliate marketing through damn hard work...was wrong! I had to re-learn everything.

Yes the SEO advice we all get about backlinks, relevant link exchanges etc. is all still very valid however it was interesting to read what this particular 'white hat' internet Guru had to say.

I would have deleted Affiliate (un-named test product) right then and there except...on reading on a little...I got butterflies. Yep, this guy had a lot to say that suddenly made sense. I tried not to but became as excited as a kid on Christmas morning.

Could this be for real? Was (ABC) the holy grail of marketing that I had searched for, for so long? Nah couldn't possibly be.

I tried to ignore it, but if just to prove to the butterflies that they were wrong...I put the info into practice.

After all, I couldn't proclaim it a scam in all honesty unless I tried it right?

It's not a throw up a website in 5 minutes thing, but it was fast I followed every step to the letter (So I could crow after that I had tested APX and it didn't work) Took me about 6 hours.

Now one demand in the Program that put my back up was that is stated categorically-you must use ppc once you make you master site. Well I really wasn't keen to go down that road, I tried that when I first started...lost a lot of money. So I sneakily signed up to a ppc that gave you $50 free. So Apart from the cost of the program, and $8 dollar domain and 6 hours-it had cost me nothing to try it but time.

I got it all set up as per the instructions of 'the internet guru and had planned to market it a little, but unfortunately I had to go away and attend to a family matter for a few days. I quite forgot about the whole thing till I got home, I can only say now that I'm bowled over by the advice and amazing tips and secrets given by the un-named Guru, I'm not going to post fake looking stats, or make you jealous by giving you the actual figures involved. (I never believed these anyway when I saw these 'Actual Screen Shots' did you?)

The Experiment.

You don’t have to believe one word that I am saying here-I want you to go and see for yourself with your own eyes. I deliberately threw up a fast unattractive looking blog. Don't judge my web building skills on this please. www.projectxscam.com Within 48 hrs I was No.1 on Google for my search terms. Now this I will show you, you can check this fact yourself online right here at an independent web stats site HERE- http://www.seomoz.org/tools/page-strength.php. Just enter my test subject url. Now-trust me, Im no wizard with SEO, or anything else as a rule. I have never managed to get a no1 spot on google. It just shows you-if you know what your doing it can be done, cost $8 on a domain, marketing and promotion cost to achieve this 0. So learn a little for yourself before you go spending x amount on website promotion!

Now, I'm not able to disclose what's in this report, or it's name, I wont even give you a link to it, that’s not the point of the article. What I can tell you is this: I didn't do much on promotion, I didn't spam any one or send out any e-mails at all. This cost me $8.00 for a domain only!

Having now tested 'This internet Guru's Advice' I have to say, forget everything else you know, or think you know about on-line marketing-It's all a lie. I hope Mr. Guru's advice is available for a good long time but suspect that the writer of it will be given suitcases full of money to disappear and join the witness protection program before someone puts a price on his head:)

If it's still available out there-I'm sure you will find it, if you look.

I felt like writing this article to tell everyone a few things that I have realized lately-SEO is important, but slow and time consuming (normally) All (almost 99%) of 'Get Rich Quick' programs available for sale are a waste of money and tell you nothing you couldn't have easily googled yourself. Be extremely careful what you spend your money on, when it comes to internet marketing advice and webmaster tools. 90% of them are useless-the other 9% help a little. Don't give up searching for the 1% that will make all the difference. They do exist-there just really hard to find. Always question every bit of marketing advice you find-no matter where it came from. I don't care that they made a million with their system; do you really think most of them are actually going to tell you how they did it? They will throw you a few tips and leave out all the goodies as a rule, making their product a waste of

5 Things To Look For In A Potentially Profitable Niche

There is one basic reason you are reading this right now. You want to make money off the internet. Chances are, you have come upon this page by searching the internet for articles that can help and guide you in starting or developing your own niche marketing site.

If that is the case, you’re on the right track. To make it big in the online niche market, you have to be willing to learn and intensive searching and researching is the key. Arming yourself with the right knowledge will help you a whole lot in your search for a potentially profitable niche.

Not all niches mean profit. That is the true and clear fact. Before proceeding in building a niche marketing site, make sure that you have all the knowledge you need. Here are five things to look for in a potentially profitable niche.

1) Make sure that you have a market.

All you have to do is go to a search engine and type the keyword of your chosen niche in the page. Click for results. See if there are many sites that offer the niche that you want. The more sites there are and the more forums they have means more market that can potentially go to your own site.

Join some of the forums and see if the niche you have chosen is in the market for products that has something to do with your chosen niche. There are also many programs in the internet which provides numbers and figures on how many people search for the niche you have via the searches done.

For example:

If your niche is about a certain basketball team, see if they discuss about certain products like team shirts, team caps, team apparel, memorabilias, videos and others. If they are, then they probably would be in the market for other products pertaining to the same niche that you have.

2) Find other ideas that can attract interest for a niche product that you can develop.

In the same forums, jot down ideas and suggestions that many of the members mention. You can combine these ideas for a product that many people are looking for or want but is not in the market. Or better yet, you can take an existing idea and develop it for your own product providing more features and more options.

For example, an existing team clock for a team niche could be added with a feature such as a database and a screen where games schedule can be downloaded and stored in as well as players’ pictures and stats as well. There are many ideas out there and it’s just a matter of discovering them.

3) Find out if your niche market has potential in buying power.

This again is an easy task. The more ads there are and the more products being sold in the market means there are many people who are willing to shell out cash for this niche.

Google’s Adsense will help a whole lot when you see Adsense sites of your niche with many advertisers on the site. If there are many Adsense ads in the site then this means that there is a great profit potential for this niche.

4) Find out if your niche hasn’t been cornered by a major corporation.

Do intensive research on the competition. If there are many big and major corporations already covering this niche, chances are they have a finger of every potential big niche product idea in the market.

Even though there is always a good idea lurking around, these major corporations have large staffs and large capitals that can outsell you in terms of quality as well as pricing. They can afford to out price you.

5) See if there are potential sub niches for your niche products.

Try to see if you can expand to other sub niches for your niche product. These way, you don’t get stuck in a rut with the same niche every time. You can be diverse as well as fresh everytime for your potential customers.

By having sub niches you can add links as well get more Adsense advertisements because you cover a whole lot more without totally deviating from your niche. The more ads you have the more there are potential profits for your niche.

Tag and Ping - Social Bookmarking Secrets!

Tag and Ping, these three words have suddenly become the mantra that every body seems to be chanting. Its almost reminiscent of the days when Blog and Ping was being sold as the sole panacea for indexing and getting traffic to your sites.

The "Tag And Ping" method that every body is talking about is nothing but taking social bookmarking and leveraging it for SEO.

While social bookmarking has been around for quite some time and was originally intended to help users categorize and store their favorite links online, SEO professionals soon saw the potential for utilizing this to get their sites to rank high.

Tag And Ping can be used to promote any type of website, whether its a website monetized with Google Adsense, your Blog, Your sales page or even a site promoting affiliate products.

You know, luckily not many people know that Social Bookmarking can be used as a link building methodology and this presents you a great opportunity, as a Tag Automator subscriber, to stay one step ahead of the competition.

The strategies explained over the next few emails will help you get an unbelievable avalanche of traffic to your sites and the Tag Automator software suite will multiply that many times more.

So stay tuned and make the most of this strategy.

So, What Is Social Bookmarking ?

Social bookmarking is utilizing a web service, where users create a public repository of bookmarks pertaining to sites that they like.

The concept of social bookmarking dates back to 1996 with the launch of itList.com, followed by services like Blink and Hotlinks and many more. But, the popularity of Social Bookmarking increased with the advent of the most popular bookmarking site till date, del.icio.us.

Social bookmarking sites organize their content using tags. Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags.

And What is a Tag?

A tag is basically a keyword. It is a label that you categorize a website under. For example if I was tagging this website, I would tag it under "tag and ping", "tag", "ping" etc.

Tagging is simply a way to find a website that I bookmark without remembering where you put it. You can just enter a tag to find websites that you have marked with certain tags.

The tags act as a way to quickly find your bookmarks without remembering where you put them. This is why the bookmark sites allow you to assign more than one tag.

These bookmark sites allow you to share your personal bookmarks with the public. This is where the term "social" comes into play. When you bookmark a site other people can also find the site that you bookmarked if they enter the same tag that you classified the site under.

Not only can you find the sites that you tagged under certain keywords but so can everyone else.

These bookmarks and tags may seem like geekspeak, but from an SEO standpoint these can build you a massive amount of backlinks which seem to originate from authority sites.

7 Step: How To Create And Publish Your Own Ebook 
by: Bhakra Gani

In this simple article, I will show you step-by-step how to create your own e-book.

Step 1:

Open your HTML editor (Dreamweaver, FrontPage or etc); if you do not have one, you can create your HTML file using FREE online editor WYSIWYG. Go to search engine and type, "free online html editor".

Step 2:

Type your message or idea into your HTML editor or copy and paste it from your text editor. Design your page and make it simple. After you, finish your work, save your file into specific folder. When designing your page, consider creating your file in single page or multiple pages that link to each other like website. If you new to website design, better you design it in single page.

Step 3:

Compile your file into ebook using ebook compiler. Go to (www.ebookcompilers.com) and download ebook compiler. This is directory of ebook compiler and there are free ebook compilers too. Download and install ebook compiler into your computer. On the other hand, go to search engine and type, "free ebook compiler."

Step 4:

Open your ebook compiler and browse your file (html file you create in step 2) and follow the instruction in your ebook compiler until finish.

Step 5:

Go to www.winzip.com, download WinZip, and install it. Open WinZip application and create a new Zip file. Add your ebook file and zip it.

Step 6:

FTP or Upload your zip file (example - ebook.zip) into your web server. You can also sign up for free web hosting. Go to search engine and type, "free website hosting."

Step 7:

Publish your ebook on the internet. Submit it to the ebook directory or freebie directory (if your ebook is free). Go to search engine and type, "free ebook directory" or submit it to www.download.com. Submit first your e-book to www.upload.com because their website received high traffic every week. Allow your website visitors to download your e-book free.

Now you have successfully created your own e-book, publish it on the net but your e-book only can be view by Windows user. So, how your e-book can be view both Windows and Mac users. It is very simple just type your message or idea in word processor and save it in text format. Go to https://createpdf.adobe.com and follow the instruction on how to compile your text into PDF file. After you successfully create your PDF file, follow step 5, 6, 7.

Essential SEO Copywriting 1 - 6

by: Decebal (Dudi) Scraba

An article named "Essential SEO Copywriting" should begin, I guess, with a definition of SEO copywriting - as a starter for our short trip through the "mysteries" of this issue... Let's try: SEO copywriting makes a text (article, web page etc.) readable and likable for human visitors as well as for search engines, by providing valuable information in a coherent manner, structured around well-chosen keywords that are relevant for a specific topic.

.. Did I lose you? Just choose the keywords / keyphrases that are relevant for your topics and write a SEO-wise copy around them. This will help you getting high rankings in search engine results while still making a pleasant reading for your human visitors. Let's get into details and see how SEO copywriting should be completed.

1. Select your relevant keywords (keystrings)

How many keywords for a web page? There are a lot of SEO copywriting expert opinions here. I would say that it is better to have one or (maximum) two primary keystrings plus 3 - 6 secondary keywords. Be creative and keep in mind that you can have a complex keyphrase covering several alternatives. For example, "essential SEO copywriting" covers 3 other keystrings: "essential SEO", "essential copywriting" and "SEO copywriting", all related to the topic of this article / web page.

2. Keywords in META TAGS, targeted and concise

For this article the TITLE TAG is, obviously, "Essential SEO Copywriting". The DESCRIPTION is "Essential SEO copywriting: learn how to write a SEO-wise copy around relevant keywords for high rankings and traffic on your web site" and includes the title. The KEYWORDS META TAG is: "essential seo copywriting, copy, keywords, seo-wise, high rankings".

Keep your title / description / keywords META TAG to maximum 60 / 200 / 1000 characters each. DO NOT repeat a distinct keyword more than 3 times in any of your meta tags!

3. SEO copywriting - for humans

Include valuable and viable information in your SEO-wise copy. Write it in a coherent and easy-readable manner. DO NOT make it a meaningless list of keywords - search engines will penalize it and this isn't SEO copywriting. Check spelling and grammar. Write at least 500 words in the body text of each web page. If we are talking about an expert article, keep the copy around 800 words, structured in smaller sections for easy reading. Give a short subtitle to each section and include here some of the targeted keywords. Keep always in mind who will read your copy: search engine robots AND human visitors (readers).

4. Optimize the keyword density of the copy

Let's assume that you are writing a SEO-wise expert article, in order to promote your business (website). SEO copywriting specialists would say that you must achieve, for the targeted keywords, an optimal density between 2% and 7%. For example, if your keystring is "essential seo copywriting" and you have it repeated 25 times in an 1000 words article, it's density will be 2.5% - within the optimal keywords density range.

DO NOT forget that the text of the article will be placed on a page that will probably enclose also: a script (HTML / CSS), in-site navigation links, outbound links, copyright information, advertising of some sort and/or other type of content. Under these circumstances, the 2.5% initial keywords density may fall below the optimal threshold. So my advice is: try achieving in your article, at least for the primary keywords, a density around 3-5%. DO NOT stuff the copy with keywords, though - it may become unpleasantly unreadable for your visitors.

Make sure to place the main keywords at the beginning, middle and end of the copy.

5. HTML text formatting of your SEO-wise copy

All SEO copywriting specialists concur: increase the importance (for search engines and readers) of your body-text-embedded keywords by using the HTML text formatting tags. Use (heading 1) tag for your page's title, (heading 2) tag for the subtitles, (bold) and (italic) tags to emphasize the keywords scattered around the copy (DO NOT overuse these tags, though).

6. SEO copywriting for the entire website

We have examined the essential seo copywriting topics for one web page. If we are talking about writing the SEO-wise copy for an entire website, then there are some additional rules to follow:

-- DO NOT use image buttons for in-site navigation. Whenever you have on page "A" a link pointing to page "B" of your site, use a text link with the primary keywords of page "B" as anchor text. For example, on my homepage (http://www.ewolwe.com), the anchor text of the link pointing to this article is "Essential SEO Copywriting". Use the same rule for the anchor text of links placed on other sites (domains) that point to pages on your website.

-- use your primary keywords in the URL of the web page (e.g. essential_seo_copywriting.htm)

-- whenever you have a picture on a page, include that page's keywords in the "ALT" tag of the image.

Each section of this article will be detailed in 6 new articles, which will try to cover, in deeper details, the topic of essential seo copywriting. Read more to learn more and good luck to you all!

I Lost My Rankings – SEO Nightmare?

If you are ethical, search engine optimization efforts can take a long time and a lot of effort. So what happens when you find your rankings have disappeared one day?

I Lost My Rankings – SEO Nightmare?

It was a Monday morning. It had been a “lively” weekend. I had not touched the computer and was glad for the break. Staggering out of bed around the crack of noon, I nuked some coffee and sat down at computer. As it made horrible grinding noises while booting up, I wondered if a particular client would be ranked two or three today on Google. I flipped open my browser, searched for the term and spit coffee on my screen. Egad, I wasn’t in the top 10! Holy… I scrolled through page after page or results and was not in the top 100. I wasn’t even in the top 200. Damn, this client had paid a sizeable fee over the year.

What did I do? I went back to bed. It was going to be one of those Mondays.

Admittedly, going back to bed was only an option after I had gone through this experience a number of times over the years. The first time, I nearly had a seizure. After that, my reaction slowly evolved from sheer panic to a yawn. Why? For the same reason you should not panic.

Search engines are dynamic beasts. They do strange things and they do them often. Whether it was the panic caused by the old Google Dance or some new algorithm development or just a day’s variation, most rankings do not go from top 10 to infinity in one day unless a site has undertaken something very unethical. Instead, the rankings bounce around and then pop back. In the situation above, the rankings were back on Tuesday morning. Yes, I breathed a sigh of relief, but I knew they would come back. It might take a day or even a few weeks, but they will come back.

The point you should take from this is that panicking is not going to help anything. If you are playing the game straight, you should not run into a sudden catastrophe. Yes, you may drop 20 or 30 spots because of some new tweak from Google, but you can deal with it.

If you drop, don’t rush off to do something. Like fine wine, give the rankings a couple days to rebound. More often than not, they will.

10 Vital Steps to Boost Your Google Ranking

Let's face it: There are googols of information about getting high ranking in Google. As a loyal student of Brad Callen's, I believe he is one of the few who have a solid grasp on what works and what doesn't in SEO and site ranking. I'll try to keep this short and sweet as I boil down the 10 vital steps to boost your SE ranking by hundreds, maybe even thousands of pages:

1. Your title should only be your main keyword. Not too long; the shorter the better, and easier for indexing.

2. The first copy on your page, or the header, should be in h1 header tags.

3. Add h1 header tags. This can be a sub heading for your webpage. You should place your 2nd most important keyword in the h2 header tag. The h2 tag should be placed somewhere in the top half of your webpage.

4. Bold, underline, or italicize some of the keywords one time each, maximum. Only 1 per keyword or it will hurt more than help. Not a crucial step, but creating a little "style" here and there will help.

5. Write your keywords to flow in a natural way throughout your copy, but be sure to include at least one of the keywords per 1-2 paragraphs, depending on how large your page is.

6. Use <alt> tags for images. Something I never did, but will now! Again, be careful on how you name them as not to appear too spammy. Example: For the keyword garden, your first image could be garden image 1, and for your second image, use your next keyword: raised garden graphic 2...etc. - just a little different but keeping your main keywords.

7. Name your images after the main keywords: garden_image1.jpg, garden_image2.jpg, etc.

8. Strategically place your main keyword once at the very beginning, and once at the very end. At the bottom, it could appear like:
© 2005 copyright www.domain.com a site about gardening

9. Make sure Google reads your keywords first - Very important! Many, many people make this mistake: Putting their navigation links in the left hand column. Google indexes your page top left to right, which means the nav links will be indexed before your keywords! To get around this, here's what you do: You can still create your nav links on the lefthand side, but - create a column JUST ABOVE the nav column, with your keyword(s). Google will read the top first, then that top left column with your keyword, then will move laterally to the right to read the main copy.

10. Do Offsite Marketing

What this means is:

Which websites link to you
The number of websites linking to you
The Google page rank of the website linking to you
The page title of the website linking to you
The anchor text used in the link linking to you
The number and type of links linking to the website that's linking to you.
The number of outbound links on the website that is linking to you
The total number of links on the website that is linking to you
Whether or not the websites linking to you are deemed by Google as an authority website.

To learn more about offsite marketing, I recommend Brad Callen's Article, How To Skyrocket Your Website To The Top Of Google With Properly Planned Offpage Optimization                                    

How To Play Nice In The Google Sandbox

What is the Google Sandbox?

The "ageing delay" commonly known as the Google Sandbox was designed to stop people setting-up multiple websites and pointing them to each other in a way to inflate link popularity. The Sandbox effects new website domain names by holding them in a sort of "online purgatory" state where any site hoping to rank well for any competitive keyword phrases will not appear in the search engine results for a period varying between 6 – 12 months. Nobody knows for sure how long it takes to get out of the Sandbox but it is vitally important to know it exists.

The Sandbox can have some very detrimental effects for small businesses that don't have the big marketing budget to get the word out there any other way. However, it does provide the company owner with the incentive to use the time within the Sandbox to carefully optimize their site so once it gets out it can jump straight into the top 10 – 30 results.

The Google Sandbox shouldn't be a reason for too much woe. New sites aren't affected in the same way when it comes to getting listed in Yahoo and MSN, so website owners can benefit from traffic from these other websites whilst they continue to optimize for the big day when they are let out of the website into the Google search results.

How do I get out of it?

To put it very simply… you can't. Getting in to it is the first thing you should be doing. If you don't have a few links pointing from other websites to your site Google will never know it exists in the first place.

So what can you do?

Create valuable inbound links so that the googlebot spider can find your website in the first place and put it into the Sandbox.

List your site within directories that can provide you with a steady stream of visitors.

Conduct a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Overture to drive visitors to your site.

Think creatively and conduct any off-line marketing campaigns that will send visitors to your site.

Most importantly…

Take the time to develop your website and business in such a way so that when a large amount of visitors start to arrive from the Google search results you'll be ready and able to deal with this increase in traffic.

Analyze your website statistics so you can see where people come from and where they go to. Once a person visits your website they will be very quick to judge what they do and don't like.

If you can understand at the early stages of your online presence what your visitors don't like and where and why they leave before buying, inquiring, or whatever it is you want them to do on your site it will help you streamline your website in such a way that when you are released from the Sandbox you will be better able to provide them with an excellent service.