As you may already know, I am doing a multiple post series on how to research keywords without buying software. If you haven’t already read the first post, then I recommend doing so. After you read it, I encourage you to stay tuned for the second post in the series coming up in the next few days. In the mean time, I want to offer some advice and guidance on building blogs and websites for profit.

Before I begin, I want to be clear about something. There are multiple reasons why people do keyword research. And as mentioned in my first post, the reason why I do keyword research is so that I can successfully build profitable sites that earn money. So, providing you with tips on building websites for profit go hand in hand with my multiple post series. In other words, it’s kind of pointless to learn how to research keywords unless you can successfully build sites off the topics you have researched.

That said, I have done quite a bit of digging in the SEO Hosting blog archives, and I have come up with a list of articles that will teach you some vitally important skills that you’ll need to learn if you want to be successful with building websites for profit. I have broken them down into two categories: Web Design Tips and Copywriting Tips. It’s important to understand that lacking strong skills in both web design and copywriting negates the whole purpose behind researching keywords.

Years ago, people were able to profit from building low quality sites. However, that is not the case today with the increased levels of competition and new sites being launched, as well as the constant adjustments search engines make towards fighting spam and controlling quality. Below are references to 16 articles previously published on the SEO Hosting blog that will provide you with concrete tips with copywriting and web design.

Copywriting Tips – The content you create has a huge impact on the overall success of your site. Writing the content can be tricky because it has to be written in a way that captures the attention of people, keeps them on the page, and delivers what is expected. It also has to be optimized so that the page can appear in search engines above other competing sites the cover the same topics.

1. The Importance of Research in the Copywriting Process
2. Pros and Cons of the Different Types of Content
3. How to Write Better Headlines
4. How to Improve Your Headlines Instantly
5. Tips for Using Bullet Points in Your Copy
   
6. 23 Copywriting Rules To Live By
7. How to Make Sure You Aren’t Keyword Stuffing
8. 5 Simple Tips for Proofreading Your Copy

Web Design Tips – Just like the content you create, your web design also plays an active role towards the success of your site. The inner workings of a properly coded website fortify the optimizations made to the content you create. It also captures the attention of people with the use of appealing colors, graphics, and styles.

1. The Anatomy of a Website: Which Pages Should Be on Your Website?
2. How To Be a Successful Web Designer
3. 5 Tips for Overcoming Web Designer’s Block
4. Tell-Tale Signs Your Homepage Sucks
5. Don’t Let These 8 Web Design Mistakes Kill Your Website
6. 23 Web Design Rules to Follow
7. How To Increase The Performance of Your Website
8. 8 Essential Website Maintenance Tasks

I believe that if you are serious about learning how to research keywords, then you will have a strong interest in developing, enhancing, or strengthening your copywriting and web design skills. I encourage you to read the articles referenced above. They will provide you with the highest level of advice and guidance.

Additionally, I invite you to ask questions and voice your concerns with past experiences. And lastly, I want to remind you to stay tuned, because in the next day or so I will publish my second article in the multiple post series that teaches you how to research keywords without buying software.

Almost once week I receive an email from a writer explaining that they can provide excellent content that will allow me to rank well in search engines. I am always open minded to evaluating what can be produce, so when I receive email from a writers trying to pitch their service, I typically respond back asking to have a 75 to 100 word example of their work sent to me.

Recently I was contacted by a writer and I asked the writer to provide me with a sample based around the keyword phrase “Cheap Bottled Water.” When I received the email back, my observations motivated me to write this post. Here is a copy of the content that was provided to me.

Cheap Bottled Water

Most people have turned to bottled water as an alternative to tap water since they think it is safer. Cheap bottled water has become a popular item in many people’s shopping carts. However, make sure that the cheap bottled water is up to the set standards before consuming it. There is cheap bottled water from various stores at comparable prices. Remember cheap bottled water may not be ultimately healthy compared to tap water.

Most people think that writing for search engines is nothing more then packing keywords into the writing. In the case of the writer who provided me with this sample above, he felt like he had to use the phrase, “cheap bottled water” constantly, and in fact, he did so almost in every sentence.

Search engines don’t like unnatural writing. The content provided to me was very unnatural. It was clearly and obviously written in a way to trick search engines. There was no pure and inner quality within the work. It was totally superficial and it will not do anything for the end user. In other words, and to put it bluntly, the content was garbage.

So the lesson to learn is when writing content for the purpose of ranking in search engines, there’s more involved than just stuffing keywords. In fact, stuffing keywords isn’t good at all. My advice to you if you are trying to write content for search engines, simply write about the topic at hand in a natural way. Write your copy in a way that is understandable to others, as if you were writing a letter to a friend.

Allow search engines to index the content, and then take some time to study results. Observe and make notes of the different keywords you’re ranking for. Also observe whether you’re ranking for the keywords you intended for. If results are less than what you desire, consider making some changes by editing or re-wording your content and possibly adding more rich content to the page.

If you’re looking to get some excellent search engine marketing tips, there’s obviously quite a few sites online that provide them. One site in particular has captured my attention. Recently, I discovered a search engine marketing company in Houston called, Search Engine Marketing Group.

The company was formed in 2006 by Gerald Weber, who happens to be an avid reader of SeoHosting.com Blog. The company started out as a web design business; However, when the needs for professional search engine marketing and optimization services increased over time, Gerald and his team adapted to the demands of business.

Quickly the group grew to be one of the leading search engine marketing companies in the city of Houston. Consequently – and in addition to providing some of the most top notch and professional search engine marketing services in their city - their group also sports one of the hottest blogs covering the topic of search engine marketing and SEO tips.

I discovered the blog recently after getting a trackback notification on a previous article I published on SeoHosting.com. It seems that Gerald had some opinions that differed from mine and he felt compelled to share them on their company blog. It’s a good thing that he did though, otherwise who knows how long it would have been before I would have discovered the site.

That said, if you’re looking for some excellent and practical tips on search engine marketing, I would definitely recommend checking out Gerald’s SEM/SEO blog. A lot of hard work goes into the articles being published and as always, the information and education is totally free.

Some of the more recent tips include information on how to reduce StumbleUpon message spam, how to become a Digg power user, and how to make WordPress more secure. Be sure to check the blog out and connect with them by subscribing their RSS feed.

So you just started a business website or a blog and now you’ve heard all the hype about ranking #1 in Google and how much traffic you can get for free. You’ve read a few articles, wasted a few hundred dollars on some eBooks and video tutorials, but still you can’t seem get your site to rank for the keywords you want. This leads to seeking advice and help with SEO.

Search engine optimization is the process of making your website or blog friendly and optimized for search engines. But, today, there is so much involved with SEO, at times it can even be mind blowing for those have experience. How do you get help with SEO if you need it? Well, there is a site called SEO Consultants.

SEO Consultants serves as a nationwide directory listing of search engine consultants. The site is very simple to use. Simply choose your country, state, and specify a few optional filters, and then you will be returned with a listing of SEO Consultants near you.

If you happen to be an SEO Consultant, I recommend getting listed in this directory. They rank #1 for the term SEO Consultant. And, I am sure they get a lot of traffic that can convert into profitable leads for your SEO business.

Getting listed in their directory isn’t cheap. The cost is $200 dollars to get your business reviewed by their staff. They have very strict standards and getting listed isn’t easy. But, if you are successful with getting listed in their directory, I am sure they pay offs will be huge. On their Submit URL page they mention this:

“As of 2009-07-10 we have 107 active members and 897 prospective members who have been declined since our initial launch on 2002-06-01.”

I think the $200 submission / review fee and hardcore standards make their directory listing a valuable resource to consumers. Only the best of the best are listed in this directory, and it only took me a few minutes to realize that. Consumers can place trust in the companies listed within. Getting your SEO business listed is something you might want to aim for and consider in the future.

By the way, I did send them an email prior to writing this and asked the staff if they would honor a special discount to readers on SEOHosting.com blog. I’ll update this post and do a follow up if they reply back honoring a discount to their submission fee.

This week produced quite a bit of excellent content around link building. In this week edition of SEO Friday, we’ll recap some of these excellent articles and references that were published during this week. As you may know, link building is a very important aspect of improving your visibility in the search engines.

Ann Smarty, author of the successful Search Engine Journal, wrote an article titled, How To Build Links and Awareness by Pitching Bloggers. In this article she addressed that bloggers can be an excellent resource towards building links for the fact that most bloggers are always on the hunt for new material to write about and they are connected with many friends which gives your links the opportunity to go viral. The article was submitted into Sphinn, so be sure to help Ann out by casting your vote.

The author of a blog titled, Link Building Best Practices, wrote a very thoughtful piece that distinguishes the difference between SEOs and Link Builders. It is stated that there is a clear difference between the two skilsets and it is noted that commonly most people are either one or the other but not both. Understanding the difference between the two very well might break the boundary and expand the skilset from both professions. You should take a moment to help out by casting a vote on Sphinn.

SMX in London is at full force this week and one of the more popular topics — you guessed it — link building. Wiep Knol, author of a very informative link building blog, provided some coverage for all the folks who could not attend SMX in London with an article titled, Blog Your Mind Link Building Techniques. Without a doubt, there are some excellent links and references found in this article including a wonderful overview of the line up of professional speakers who gave speeches. As with the other two articles, providing your vote on Sphinn will help out the author.

What an amazing week to learn more about link building. What other articles did you read this week that helped you? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts.

Heading tags are a very important element in creating and maintaining a search engine friendly web site or blog. In this some what short but descriptive article, I am going to explain to you what heading tags are and how they can be used on your website for improving your site SEO.

A heading tag defines headers. A header is used to mark sections on your blog or web site. There are six header levels. These levels are as follows: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. The H1 header tag is the largest font size and H6 is the smallest.

Search engines look for header tags because they are beacons for finding content as well as pathways on your blog or web site. The three most commonly used header tags are: H1, H2, and H3. Sometimes, H4 is used, but not too often. H5 and H6 are rarely used.

Here is an example of how I use Header tags on my blogs.

In the source code of my blogs, the H1 tag is the link to my home page. The H2 tags represent my categories, and H3 represent my post and page titles. From there, my WordPress Tags are made as STRONG, or otherwise called BOLD. Excuse my lack of being an artist, but here is a screen shot:

The home page of my blog feeds H2 links to my category sections. From there, my category sections feed h3 links to my blog posts. My blog post then feed BOLD links into my tags. Electricity always takes the path of least resistance. With search engine optimization, web crawlers follow the same rules. Web web site building, or in my case, blog building, I paved the path for web crawlers. I build the path of least resistance.

On the home page of my blogs, as you know, H2 links feed to my category pages. However, as you know, my most recent blogs posts still appear on my home page. These will remain H3 links. When web crawlers see this, they place emphisis on my category sections to find the content.

That is one of the reasons why I believe that I can pump out so much content and have it all index so quickly. Granted, nothing I say or do is proven. That is where many SEOs differ. I am just telling you precisely what I do and it works.

When you build these pathways for web crawlers, really in many ways you are building multiple HomePages to your site or blog. In fact, there are many situations where a category section of one of my blogs has more PageRank and power than its own home page and the same goes with a tag section too.

If I have a blog that has three categories: Dogs, Cats and Humans. And I write a post about Dogs. It is very likely that that post will get indexed because the crawler found it on the category section rather than the home page.

Using proper heading tags to shape and mold how I want web crawlers to perceive my sections of my blog is very important. Of course, getting an sitemap xml on your blog is extermely helpful too. Everything in SEO compliments each other. In order to have a site optimized for search engines, you should understand that there isn’t just ONE SUPER HUGE thing you need to do. Instead, there are many smaller things to do that add up towards the big picture of doing SEO on a site.

What did I miss? How else can you better optimize your web site or blog for search engines? Drop me a comment and share your thoughts.

Make no mistake folks, link building is a very important aspect in getting traffic from Google. Many of you guys and gals read my personal blog and I spend quite a bit of time talking about building micro niche blogs and targeting keywords that don’t require backlinks. While that is true, in a way that also limits you from capitalizing on prime keywords. Ranking for prime keywords are definitely in your reach; however, this can not be archived without launching a well thought out and well researched link building campaign.

So how do you launch an effective link building campaign? Well, really for many of you reading this, the problem is finding sites that will willingly add your link to their pages. But if you think about this for a second, you very well may already have a huge source of sites to use at your disposal. How many web sites or blogs do you have? Is there any reason why you’re not using your own web sites or blogs to help build backlinks to another blog or web site of yours?

I do this all the time! Granted, I have friends who’ll add my link to certain blogs posts upon request, but a large percentage of my link building comes from my own internal fleet of blogs. There is nothing wrong with using your existing blogs or web sites to help build up the number of backlinks to another blog or web site that you own.

What about doing this on sites that all share the same IP address? Well, that’s a good question… I am glad I asked myself that. Here are my thoughts about that. If you are in the business of building sites with the aim of trying to get them to rank high in the SERPs then you really need to do things right and be organized with how you distribute your sites among different servers. Granted, I think a lot of the myth about having multiple sites on the same IP might be slightly over-rated.

But guess what? I can’t prove that! I don’t work at Google. I don’t have their magical formula. There is one thing that I do know, and that is the cost of web hosting. When I started building web sites, hosting was expensive! Today, you can order web hosting for as little as $4.95 / month! So, to answer your question about having multiple sites on the same IP address, I’ll say this. I can’t prove that this is good or bad, but seeing how cheap web hosting is today, why risk it? Be organized, and distribute your sites among different servers.

Having that said, let’s talk about how to build backlinks to your web sites and blogs by using your own sites. When you determine which keywords that you want to start using to plug links to a certain site or blog of yours, simply do a Google search for that keyword on your site to see how many instances are there.

Example: site:yourname.com “keyword phrase”

When you do that, Google will return a list of web pages or blog posts on your site or blog that where that keyword is used. If the page or post is older, you can almost guarantee that there will be a little bit of PageRank on that page as well. Go back and edit this page or post and plug your link to point to the blog or site that you are trying to build links to.

If you are like me and use WordPress blogs and want to do this automatically, then there is a very handy plugin that will soon become your best friend. The plugin is called aLinks and unfortunately the web site has been down for several months. The only place I have found where you can download this plugin is HERE. aLinks is a plugin that allows you to automatically link keywords on your blog and point them to any destination that you want. It’s one of my personal favorites.

Anyway, I hope that you found this article to be helpful. What are some other creative ways to build backlinks to your site? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts!

Link building can be a time consuming venture for search engine marketers and webmasters. There is no easy way to go about it, link building is hard work. Google as the search engine leader wants backlinks that are meaningful to the content of the page and on topic. Business profiles can provide a safe backlink to your important web pages.

Business Profiles Equal One-Way Links
Profiles online are a good way to find free links for your website. There are pluses and minuses to profile linking. The main limitation is keyword anchor text, generally the link pointing back to your page from profile websites is a url link to your homepage. Be sure to look carefully through the profile set up when adding in your information. There are times an additional link may be added for other pages of your website, such as in the work experience section.

Watch For Nofollow Links
What is a nofollow link anyway? It can be complicated to explain. The short version is that Google recommends nofollow for paid links such as paid text link ads on websites. Nofollow generally means the link has no value to the search engines, and can also mean a “down vote” for the quality of the link. Unfortunately this practice has become more common place for many websites including websites that feature profiles. Most often this is due to spammers missusing a website to gain an excessive number of links or the website owner fears they may get in trouble from Google and the other search engines for allowing regular links on their website. For your backlink to count for link popularity you must be sure the link is a regular link.

How Do I Identify Nofollow Links?
There are ways to find out if a link is nofollowed or not. A handy tool is the Firefox extension SearchStatus. When you add this toolbar extension to your Firefox browser it highlights any link that is nofollowed making it much easier for you to identify links that are nofollowed. After downloading the tool to your browser choose “all” for the search engines, click on the “q” symbol from your browser and checkmark the “highlight nofollow links” section. You can download this helpful browser tool here:

http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

The Benefits Of Business Profile Links
Beyond the links back to your website a business profile tells the visitor about your company. Don’t skimp when it comes to providing information about yourself and your company in your profile. Be sure to provide information on services or products. Careful copywriting can interest website visitors who view your profile.

One thing to watch for is the possibility of your backlinks being nofollowed after you have added your business profile. Sometimes this happens with a website and suddenly the backlink no longer counts. The best you can do in this situation is know there continues to be benefit from visitors seeing your business information online. I know, an old fashioned idea marketing your website online with no links, but prequalified traffic is never a bad thing when it comes to your website.

The Search Engines Require Quality Links
In the long run Google and the other major engines want backlinks to be quality on topic links. A business profile is just that along with the option of sharing information about your business online. Examples of profile business websites include LinkedIn and Spoke as well as many other similar websites.

Using business profiles as part of your link building program will help provide long term quality backlinks to the most important web pages of your website and make your link building work easier in the long run.

There has been a great deal written about link building strategies. It may be difficult to sift through what works and doesn’t work. Whether you have years of experience in SEO link building or are new at link building, you should always think independently when formulating how you will link build.

Link Building Takes Time
There is no two ways about it: link building is time consuming and a great deal of work. Get that squared away before going forward with your link building plans. There are no easy quick answers when it comes to building links. Even paid links you have quickly purchased must be indexed by the search engine spiders in order to count and we all know it takes time for links to take effect. If you provide link building services you must set the correct expectations of link results for your clients.

Social Media’s New Link Territory
In the beginning much of link building had been relegated to submitting to directories, reciprocal links and paid links. This concept has changed in the past few years. With the growth of personalized search and social media link building has become super charged. Before you totally jump on the social media bandwagon take a look at what your client’s website actually needs to produce a solid link building strategy outcome.

Think Through Your Link Strategy
Newer link building methods such as social media websites may be popular now but using old linking techniques and new linking techniques together can work very well for your link building strategy. Eventually all new techniques become old techniques making way for yet more new techniques. We know some human edited directory links still provide good results. Reciprocal links can be dicey compared to one-way links. One-way links on topic still work well.

Articles and press releases work if carefully orchestrated to the right websites. Think quality not quantity links. Paid links can be problematic with Google so use them carefully. Think through your daily types of link building (blogging, digging, stumbling), your well known techniques (directories, articles, press releases) to your long range ideas (product reviews on blogs, creating new blog sites, business profiles, paid links) and on and on. Take a look at the whole picture: short term, long term, in the future…where do you want to be online?

Independent Thought For Link Builders
Quality links is still the name of the game when it comes to long term link building success. Yes there are probably quicker ways to get results and it may at times be worth this type of strategy. Think through what you find effective to build links. Not every technique works in every situation for every client. Instead of going with the popular choices come up with your own independent link plans then see what happens.

Individualized Link Strategies Work
Creating specific, individualized link building programs for each client will give you more ways to provide successful link building results. Combining traditional marketing, social media marketing and traditional link building can be a winning combination in your quest for good links.

Many years ago when the search engine marketing industry began there was no problem with adding a lot of keywords into a web page to help rank in the search engines. In fact it was pretty easy to rank back then in the major search engines. Switch to today and you see three major engines and many safeguards in place by them to catch over-optimization and on or off page techniques used by modern search engine marketers.

Afraid of Search Engine Spiders?
Search engine spiders (aka crawlers, robots) are software programs designed to find links, read through text, follow links from page to page and index the individual web pages of a web site. If you know anything about software you know human beings create them. If you are a software tester then you definitely know how fallible software is. Remember how often your browser or your laptop crashes?

That is human programming for you. As smart as Google is as a company, software is software. It cannot compare to human evaluation. Google tries to use human observation in combination with their search engine spider software but automation is the only way the search engines are able to spot potential problems with so many web pages online. The reality is that there are too many web pages and automation is a must when evaluating content on the web.

Patterns in Optimization
Google is thought to have their search engine robot set to flag certain situations when indexing. One way to work against being caught up in this is by breaking the on page pattern of search engine optimization. Using keywords in your text navigation? Be sure to use some descriptive keyword phrases that make sense for your text navigation.

Do not use all keyword text in your text navigation, this may trigger a spam filter or flag from the search engines. Instead use only a few select keywords or keyword phrases in your text navigation. For Example keep the text link for pages like “Contact Us” and “About Us” text navigation links left intact. Be careful when using too much keyword text in links throughout the content of the page.

“Click here” is not a good choice for a link going to a product, of course you want descriptive text related to the product the page leads to instead. As with other over-optimization situations use this type of keyword text link sparingly through the content of your web pages. Make sure your text on the page is natural for the human visitor.

Patterns in Links and Link Building
If you need to break patterns in optimization code it only makes sense to break the same type of patterns when it comes to link building. If you have an articles page or helpful resource for users be sure to find on topic backlinks for those web pages.

Vary your keyword anchor text when acquiring links. You want a variety of keyword links pointing back to your pages that relate to the content of that web page. Using one url address for all your links? Use your homepage url and also a variety of inner pages to point your backlinks to.

Natural Optimization Is The Way To Go
If you focus on readable, natural looking page of text this will go a long way towards achieving your goal of breaking the patterns search engine spider software can detect in your page content and text links. Search engine spiders focus on text on the page and text links when indexing web pages. Vary your use of keywords and website urls for your backlinks. Provide sensible text navigation and title tags that are not overly optimized. By focusing on what website visitors need you can outsmart the search engines and gain website visitors.