There is a lot of hype around how website owners can get hundreds and thousands of visitors to their site and how they can get their site on Page 1 of the Search Engines – yes, a lot of it is hype and some of it is true.

There are a couple of excellent ways for Small Business Owners to gain targetted traffic to their site including:

1. Pay Per Click Marketing (Google AdWords)
2. Search Engine Optimization – so your business can be found in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
3. Social Marketing
4. Offline advertising

Out of all of these, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the one method that site owners should have a basic understanding of, because it’s the one method that is ongoing and, in my opinion, most beneficial.

Search Engine Optimization is literally about having your website listed in the SERPs (indexed) for the search terms you want to be found for. SEO is also about having your site found as high as possible in the Search Engine rankings for those keywords – preferably on Page 1.

However, SEO is an ongoing process – once you’ve got your site listed, it takes ongoing work to improve the ranking of your site, and then maintain it.

Whilst a lot of the SEO work can be outsourced, it pays to understand the SEO Basics and why they need to be done – that way, business owners will understand whether they are getting a fair price and whether the work being offered by SEO companies is the right type of work.

My one single tip to ensuring that website are indexed, and start ranking for their chosen keywords is to write great content. Don’t be fooled by the stories that you can get your site ranked with a little bit of content – whilst you may get your site listed and ranking well for a while, it will most likely be temporary. Writing great content is the way to ensure you maintain and improve your rankings.

When you write your content, use one of your chosen keywords throughout that content – but no more than 1 to 2 times in every 100 words to avoid ‘keyword stuffing’. Once you’ve written your content, read it aloud before publishing it to make sure it sounds natural.

My final advice with this tip, is to use formatting like bold, italics and underlines to highlight your keywords and bring attention to them.

This tip is only one part of a series steps to optimizing your website for Search Engines, but I consider it one of the most important parts to the process.

I have created a simple report (and email series) where I share my 11 Steps To SEO that I use when setting up a clients site. You can obtain a copy of Get Ranked: 11 Steps To Search Engine Optimization here. However, I’m going to share one tip with you here.

There are over 1400 training videos in the StomperNet Library, so I figure they can afford to give a *lot* of stuff away.

While you’re there, you should also check out their new StomperCommerce software – this makes it easy to build a search-engine friendly shopping cart.

I love the fact that the StomperNet team are providing daily webinars on those topics.  The webinars are proving very popular – so make sure you go check out the webinar page and sign up for those as well.

The greatest thing is the freebies you can get just be joining in the launch fun.  Take a look at all their free videos, and the Seven Deadly SEO Mistakes download as well (this is a great learning tool).  And… they’re giving away Stomping the Search Engines 2 for free as part of their amazing Stomper 09/09/09 launch.

There’s no doubt they know this stuff – they were teaching SEO before anybody even KNEW about SEO.

And they also announced something called StomperSyndicator, yet another free tool you’d get when you joined.  Apparently, this thing is the mac daddy of syndicating and distributing content for SEO.

So go check out Day 3 of StomperNet’s launch. If you’ve missed Days 1 and 2, easy to get caught up while you’re there.

Stompernet for Everything SEO

Admittedly, it has taken a bit of time for me to evaluate the software – but I have and I’m going to share my observations and thoughts here.

As an avid WordPress Blogger – I was fairly intrigued about anything that will help traffic to my site.  However, I was wary – I’m really only interested in getting targeted traffic to my blog, not just ‘any old traffic’.  After all, I would rather 100,000 visits and 1 sale than 1 million visits and nothing.

I installed this plug-in on one niche blogs that is doing fairly well and ran through the process.  I really was less than impressed….

The plugin – Traffic Getting SEO reviews your blog settings and gives you a rating for the level of SEO you achieved.  In the version I tested, it did not give any reasons for the level – it prompted me to allow the SEO changes to be made though….

Word of Warning: Back Your WordPress Installation up before running this process.

Not that the plug-in stopped my blog working – I just have no idea all the changes that are made.

One change that is made by the plug-in is the permalink structure.  The permalink structure is modified to:

/%post-id%/%postname%/ - putting the numerical post id into the permalink (url) of the blog post.

This immediately rang alarm bells for – for two reasons:

1. It had modified my urls for ALL of my blog posts.  As my site is existing, a number (all) of my posts are indexed by Google.  Changing the permalink structure means that the links in the search engine results WILL NOT work…

There are plug-ins available that help you migrate your permalink structure – care needs to be taken.

2. This is not a recommended permalink structure, by many blogging and SEO gurus.

Let’s look at this… one of the key tips for SEO is to ensure that your keywords are included in the url for your stie / post.  Therefore, including the postname as part of the link is wise.  The inclusion of the post-id seems to extraneous and just adds to the length of the permalink.

Checking the SERPS myself – looking for the term – which permalink structure is best to use with WordPress? – I found several interesting posts.

AUBlog:  from 2007 in a post titled Choosing the Best URL Permalink Structure for your WordPress Blog states:

5/29/08 update: After having used the above formatting (id added to end or beginning, I would not recommend it. Use just the post id OR post name, don’t combine them).

I’ve seen a lot of bloggers recommend using the “/category/postname” structure
/%category%/%postname%/

but from experience, one potential issue to think about is if you ever want to reorganize or edit your categories, you’ll need to redirect your existing posts to the new category structure. I recommend avoiding this situation – redirecting tons of posts can be a pain.

Therefore this is the permalink structure I recommend 9 times out of 10

/%postname%/

A small thing to note: you can use a trailing slash at the end or you can leave it off. Personally I think it looks nicer with it off, however, it does give a very tiny boost to your webserver’s performance and is technically the right way to specify URL’s.

At Wordcamp 2007, Matt Cutts shares that youshouldn’t include the post date in your URL.

The SEO Blogger also recommends only using /%postname%/ as the permalink

Sure, these pieces of advice are dated and we know that the search engine algorithms change from time to time – but if the impact of your Permalink was a factor, there would be more recent information available….

This factor alone caused me some concerns about the effectiveness of the plug-in.

The second ‘function’ of the plug-in is to find ‘SEO’ plugins to improve your blog.  The report lists the fact that I wasn’t running specific plugins – Sociable, MaxPressBlog Pinger, Auto Tags, Backup and Captcha.

O.K – this was somewhat helpful, but I was running a Ping Updater and a Social bookmarking tool – I think that the Share This bookmarking plug-in coupled with an embedded ‘Bookmark With Onlywire‘ link is just as effective and a better use of space on my pages.

Overall, I didn’t consider the ‘Traffic Getting SEO Plugin’ to be all that helpful.  You still have to manually configure the plug-ins it recommends you use and the modification of the permalink structure on a live blog is a major concern.

Optimizing your blog for SEO is important – and there are any number of great plug-ins available to help you out.  I’ve listed my fave WordPress PlugIns here

If you really want to ‘pull traffic to your site’ – certainly optimize for SEO but also remember that you need to have content that is of interest to your Target market.

The Stompernet team have done it again. They are offering a 7 part course that will help you crack the code to Top Search Engine Rankings For Good. There is nothing to buy – just sign up for the course and take what they are sharing….

These guys know what they are talking about – it is worthwhile getting the course to help increase your understanding.

In this course, delivered via email over 7 days, Andy Jenkins and his team will share their views on what they consider to be the 7 Deadly Mistakes In SEO.

I think these guys know their stuff…. I subscribed to the Net Effect and DVD of the Month late last year and really look forward to each edition arriving.  By reading and studying what they share, I’ve learned a bundle.

So, do yourself a favor and sign up for this 7 part course – there is no charge… nothing to buy – and start learning and avoiding the 7 deadly SEO mistakes.

However, if you’re like me… ‘jazzing up your videos’ to be the next level is a challenge. I’m not particularly graphical in nature (thank goodness for my graphic designer) and trying to create my own backgrounds or graphics are a challenge.

I was so pleased when I saw this package… Media Shock FX…

Media shock FX comprises 45 High Quality Video Background Animations. They are 30 seconds long and have a resolution of 640×480 Pixels (29.97 fps).

Take a look at the great royalty free video backgrounds here.

Also included in this amazing package is Screen Snap FX – Screen Capture Video Recording Software. Screen Snap FX is a quick and easy way to record your screen and provide demonstrations, tutorials etc.

Screen Snap FX saves video files in standard AVI (Audio Video Interleave) format, which you can then edit in most current video programs.

If you are creating videos for your website, Media Shock FX is a fantastic addition to your library.

Now, I knew that Free For All (FFA) sites are frowned upon…. so why would link building packages like this be any different.  So I haven’t personally used the services myself.

However, on reading this months Net Effect I see that they have some cautions to consider when using these services.  What they do say is the following:

1. Backlinks are a MUST to improve the rankings of your site in the Search Engine Results
2. You don’t need hundreds, or even thousands, of backlinks to your site though
3. You need highly targetted, high quality, well placed links back to your site.

Sure, you can pay for backlinks to your site — just be careful about where those links are from and how they link to your site.

Many link building services will offer to submit your site to directories.  The team from Stompernet advise the following on using directories:

Aside from the major directories like DMOZ, Yahoo! and Best of the Web, very few get any real traffic today.  In my [Jerry West, Stompernet Faculty Member] testing, I have seen a HUGE drop off in the quality of directories that are currently available.  Many directories are being sold to marketing firms and the current listings are either being dropped or the links are worthless.  Google has also removed the “submit your site to directories” in their Webmaster guidelines, so Google is “cooling off” in giving value to directory submissions.

So, if you’ve found a service that offers only directory submissions as their submission service – it possibly isn’t worth the effort – do your homework.  You can manually submit your site to DMOZ, Yahoo! and Best of the Web without much effort.

In following posts, I’ll discuss these services a little more.  For now, I wanted to share some great strategies that I’ve found work really well for my sites… and are relatively easy for anyone to implement….

1. Use the blogging facilities on high ranking social networks
Use the correct anchor text to link back to your site.  The anchor text — the text that shows as the link — should have your keywords in it.

Link to pages on your site, not just your home page.

Sites that seem work really well are Ecademy and, if you have a BlogTalkRadio show, the Blog Talk Radio blog.

2. Article Marketing
Using articles, with the Author resource box correctly set out, is incredibly effective.  The best directories to post on are:

• EZine Articles
• Qassia
• Associated Content (and you can earn some money here)

You should take one article and post variations of this article to these directories.  That way you avoid any duplicate content penalties.

If you want a wider distribution, I use the Free submission service for Article Marketer as well.

3. Blogging
My favorite! Create a blog and generate high quality content.  Use your blog to link your sales pages or website.

Better yet!  Make your website on the blogging platform.

To really juice up your blogs indexing, if you’re using WordPress, install Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger and notify these directories at least when you add a new post:

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://rpc.wpkeys.com

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.britblog.com

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://api.feedster.com/ping.php

Of course, one of the great strategies is to take your blog posts and write a short article about it and submit it to the article directories, directing readers back to your blog post for the whole story.

If you’re not sure how to install your blog and don’t want to pay someone (like me) to do it for you, check out WordPress Unleashed….

4. Create Squidoo Lenses and Hubpages
Another favorite of mine…. I’m not as active on Hubpages, but I really like Squidoo.

Create a Squidoo lens about your topic and link back to your website, pages or blog.  Squidoo ranks well in the Search Engine results and I found that my site was often found for my lens before it was found for itself.

Hubpages are the same — they use a different interface and system.

These are just 4 things that I use to help the rankings on my sites and they are very effective.  In my next post, I’ll talk about other methods I use including Social Bookmarking.

Please let me know what works for you by leaving a comment – you’ll also get the benefit of the backlink from my site.

So, to continue my SEO experiment, I left my blog running and turned on pinging services. The results are far more interesting.

Here is the screen shot today of the Google results for my site:

What’s interesting to note, is that this blog gains top rankings in the search, even though I don’t have hyperlinks to the site.

The last blog post for the site in question went out on May 2, two days ago and you can see the results so far.

So no definitive results yet. But more next week, enjoy.

The question was again posed on the Women Internet Marketers Social Network they other day and, as part of that discussion, we decided to test the premise.

Here’s what I’m going to do:

1. Setup a Blog on a “clean” domain. The domain will have no links or standing in the Search Engines
2. Remove the Tag and Ping automation on the blog
3. Configure the Blog to Tweet it’s posts on release
4. Monitor traffic and Search Engine rankings for each post

I will need to conduct this experiment over a number of weeks and will be releasing at least two posts a week. I’m expecting the results to be interesting. So keep an eye on my Twitter category on this blog to see the results.

What happens when you are trying to record your weekly Podcast and your husband decides to that it might be “cool” to record a promotional video for his business, particularly focussing on the Google natural search results? Well, take a look and enjoy.

Stuart is very pleased with the results we have achieved with a very simple site that ranks on Page 1 of Google in our chosen niche.