Back in May of 2009, Google launched Search Options, which is the side panel that lets you apply filters and view search results in different ways. This might not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, but Google actually put in quite a few long years into the development of this technology. The concept surfaced in 2001 and was later unveiled in May of 2007 as universal search. Fast forward two years, and today we have very enhanced and beefed up search options available at only a few mouse clicks away.

So you may be wondering what can you do with the new search options. The simple answer: a lot! The better question to ask would be what can’t you do with the new search options. The more important question to ask yourself – assuming you’re a site owner interested in increasing organic search traffic – is how can I enhance my SEO to capitalize on these new features. Let’s look at a few of the new features and then I’ll offer some suggestions on how to take advantage of them.

The search options available are as follows: All results, videos, news, blogs, books, forums, reviews.

Additionally, you can add these filters to the first six: Any time, recent results, past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past year, specific date range.

On top of that, you can then filter your view: Standard view, related searches, wonder wheel, and timeline.

The last filter allows you to change your view even further: Standard results, images from the page, fewer shopping sites, more shopping sites, and more text.

So now that we’ve broken down the search options and defined each filter, let’s talk about some SEO tips. Here are a few things that you can do to make the most of the new search options in Google.

Videos: Creating and uploading a videos in YouTube and embedding them in your web pages will increase your chances of pulling up in the video results.

On video sites, such as YouTube, be sure to put the URL of your web page into the description. People as well as spiders will be able to travel from the YouTube video page to your web page. Both activities influence your web pages rankings.

Blogs: Creating and maintaining a blog, and publishing unique and high quality content related to your brand, business, products, and services can help you increase your chances gaining top ranks when users filter and show blog results only.

Don’t discount the possibility of running multiple blogs. The cost and time invested into maintaining blogs is much less than most people believe. Also, I recommend running blogs using multiple platforms. For example, you should have a blog on self-hosted WordPress, WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and LiveJournal. Lastly, I suggest that each blog appear independent and seperate from the others.

The most successful blogs are blogs that grow off the reader’s activity and contributions. Try to write content in a way that captures attention and makes readers feel compelled to take an action. The desireable actions you seek are backlinks, comments, and social network sharing. These are all activities that influence how well your blog post ranks for keyword phrases in search. Also, content can be carefully shaped and molded in a way to attract the attention of people as well as search engines. And that leads to my next tip.

Reviews: Adjusting your writing style can influence your chances of ranking in the reviews only section. Google looks for common writen trends that typically reflect written reviews, such as product reviews. Spend some time studying the content on some of the pages found in the search results and adapt some of their style into yours.

Index Frequency: You should constantly monitor how quickly new content gets indexed from your site. If content gets indexed within a few minutes of publishing, then you should take advantage of that and publish more content. I recommend publishing new content immediately after the most recent content has been indexed. In other words, everytime web crawlers come back to your site, you should have new content ready to be crawled for indexing. Doing so will increase your chances of pulling up in after the past hour, past 24 hours, and past week filter has been applied.

Another obvious reason why I recommend posting new content as frequently as possible is because doing so places your mark in hundreds and in many cases thousands of search result pages. A great pioneer in this strategy is Chris Pirillo. He has multiple blogs, forums, and sites, each being updated almost hourly. Secondly, these updates aren’t done just by hired or team writers. Most of the updates are user generated content. Chris Pirillo’s earns revenue by displaying contextual advertisements off the content created by community members within his network.

Adjusting how you do things and puting yourself more in-line, and in the same direction as Google, can make a significant difference in the amount of organic search traffic your site receives. Just being aware and perceptive of how Google presents information to users via their search results alone can help a lot. And with these new search options available, instantly there is a new resource of traffic that you can be tapping into.

In this article we’re going to help answer the question: What is ALLINTITLE search. As you may know,  in my last article I explained about advanced and basic search operators in Google. I then explained how understanding these operators can help you have a better understanding of SEO. In this article we’re going to further this lesson by showing you some specific examples of search engine optimization and how these efforts are visible in the search results.

Most programs such as WordPress automatically generate dynamic HTML pages, so unfortunately, many bloggers don’t understand the elements that make up a web page. It’s very important for bloggers to know and understand HTML. If you don’t know HTML, don’t worry, it’s very simple to learn. But again, it is something that you should totally learn.

Doing so, quite honestly, will give you a huge boost towards understanding SEO. That said, one of the first elements we’ll look at is the HTML <title> tag.

Here is a basic example:

<html>
<head>
<title>The Title of Your Webpage</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Your content goes here.</p>
</body>
</html>

In my previous article, I exaplained about the ALLINTITLE search operator. The ALLINTITLE operator is just that, it looks for the keywords you’re searching for all in the title of a webpage and only returns results that match. Earlier last week, I wrote an article titled, SEO Tools For The iPhone. The source code in my dymanic HTML file had matching HTML <title> tag.

It looks like this:

<title>SEO Tools For The iPhone</title>

If you do an ALLINTITLE search for [seo tools for the iphone] you’ll see that the article I wrote is ranked #1 in Google. In fact, the search is so specific, Google only returns 5 results total. One of the results was created by Gerald after submitting the article into Mixx. So with that said, you can probably now see the importance of creating excellent web page titles. Here is a screen shot:

If you’re a blogger, the HTML <title> tags are created automatically and mirror your post title. So you’re probably wondering what does this mean for SEO? Well, not many people use advanced search operators such as the ALLINTITLE search. So it’s important that your content rank well for the keywords you target. the HTML <title> tag holds weight towards keyword ranking.

Repeating the same search in Google without the ALLINTITLE operator, you’ll see that the same article still ranks #1. Only difference is that instead of ranking #1 out of five listings, it ranks #1 out of 5 million. There are other elements in this article hold some SEO weight and assist in the overall success of the article ranking #1 in Google. Here is a screen shot:

Stick around for my next article and I’ll discuss them in further detail. In the mean time, now that you know about the ALLINTITLE search operator, can you guess what the ALLINURL and the ALLINBODY operators do? My next article will show you how these elements enhance your optimization further. Also, I may touch on article writing and keyword density. If you should have any questions, feel free to use the contact form below.

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!

I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t have an interest in increasing traffic to their web site or blog. In this article I am going to show you how you can increase traffic using Google Analytics This is a free tool that Google provides to anyone who wants to track web site traffic data. There is no cost to sign up and only the only requirment is that you to register for an account, which is free too.

Gaining traffic to your web site or blog is probably the single most difficult element to achieve. Building a web site or blog indeed has its own share of challenges; however, what commonly happens to many people is that they do finally build a very nice site but fail to get traffic to it. I don’t want this to continue happening to you. So today, I am going to show you a very simple trick that will make a world of difference for you. If all this sounds wonderful to you, then let’s continue on.

How To Prepare Data Using Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics is very simple and this system produces some amazing statistics. Today what we are going to do is discover which individual pages of your blog or web site are scoring the most traffic. The goal in this tutorial is to show you how to find out which pages are hot and how to improve them to make them even HOTTER! But, is that possible, you may ask? Yes! This is very much a possibility and this is exactly what I do. So today, in this article, I am indeed revealing one of my own “personal secrets” in my success with search engine marketing.

Log into your Google Analytics Account. Click on the “Content Tab” found on the left sidebar. By default, the screen will show you results from the last 30 days. That is fine, you can work with this. However, sometimes because I deal in more “seasonal” type of keywords — holiday shopping deals to be specific — I tend to narrow my results by the previous week, as well as the same 30 day period from last year. However, for sake of simplicity, let’s just leave this set to default for now. Later you can experiment with this on your own to figure out which blend is best for you and your site. Please see the above screen shot for example. You can click on this to view it in full size.

Now what we have here is a simple snap shot of the individual pages that have received the most traffic within the last 30 days. You can see this section circled in red in the screen shot above. The next step I do is click on “View Full Report.” If you are following along with me, please do this now. After you click on view full report, you should see a screen that looks like this:

Once again, please click the screen shot above to view in full size. Now this screen shot is called the Google Analytics Top Content Performance Report. It will show you exactly which individual page(s) are receiving the most traffic and why. If you look closely you’ll see little “Arrow” icons to the left of each web page listing. You can click on these and a new page or tab will open up direct to the page that is scoring all the traffic.

You can do that now, if you’d like; however what I would like to do is actually click on the blue underlined text of each page. In this example, I am going to click on the /wal-mart-photo-center-vs-walgreens-photo-center.html listing. At this time, please follow with me and click your #1 most visited web page on your site. When you do, your current web page will update to a new screen. This screen will look something like this:

Once again, please click the above image to view in full size. This is called your Google Analytics Individual Page Content Detail Report. This report will give you quite a bit of information about this paticular web page. The element that we are concerned with is where the traffic is coming come (i.e. social network, search engine, direct referral, etc.).

Now at this time, please click “Entrance Sources.” By doing this, we will then discover where majority of the traffic is coming from. This is VITAL to know, because depending on where the traffic is coming from will dictate how we go about using strategy towards modifying the page to allow us even more traffic in the future. And real quick, what I mean by that is this. If more traffic is coming from the StumbleUpon.com social networks, it would be better for us to promote our StumbleUpon social network profile. If traffic is coming direct from Google, it would be better to promote a mailing list option or a RSS feed subscription sign up form. Please click “Entrance Sources” and you will see a page that looks like this:

Once again, please click the above screen shot to view full size. In this example above, you will see the StumbleUpon.com delievering the most traffic to this page. Second place is Reddit.com, third place is Google. Now, real quick… I want to talk to you about Social Network Traffic. This is VERY temperaory traffic. Meaning you will indeed only get a few days of “Burst Fire” Traffic from social networks. Social network traffic has a very SHORT shelf life.

Depending one how much time you want to invest on each of your individual pages, you very well may want to modify these pages twice. Once, to capialize on the social networking traffic and then once again about a week later to finalize your final edit towards a very fine tuned search engine marketing campaign towards increasing traffic.

With that said, in this example, I am going to bypass doing anything with the “Burst Fire” traffic I am getting to this page and focus on Google. As you can see, Google is the 3rd most popular source of traffic and quickly this will soon become #1.

At this time, please click “BACK” on your browser. What I would like to do now, is show you HOW GOOGLE IS SENDING ME TRAFFIC TO THIS PAGE. Please stay focused becausee this next step is CRUCIAL towards the goal at hand. After clicking back on your browser, click on “ENTRANCE KEYWORDS”. Here is a screen shot of what this page looks like:

Now, once again, please click the above screen shot to view in full size. Ok, folks… this is where the money is at. We have now hit jackpot. What we have in front of us is the “Answers” to HOW GOOGLE IS GIVING US FREE TRAFFIC. This report gives you a complete list of exact phrase keywords that people search for in order to find your web page. There NOW is absolutely ZERO mystery!

What Can We Do With This Data?

This data is worth more than gold! The reason being is the fact that you have totally UNLOCKED keywords and phrases that are delievering you free traffic to your web site. I have said this once, and I will say it again many times, in order for you to be highly successful in the business of search engine marketing, you have GOT to have skills or software that allow you to predict which keywords and phrases are HOT. It is all about keyword predictibility. Nothing less and nothing more.

With this list of keywords and phrases, I can then go back to my web page and better optimize, add to and rebuild the content on this page. Further research of these keywords may show my page being listed on page 3 or page 4 of Google and by going back and enhancing the content and improving my keyword saturation, I can then achieve page 1 on many of these popular search terms.

In my previous post, I mentioned how it is very important is it for a business to start a blog. If you have a blog, you could then add these keyword phrases as tags. Tags are additional pages that can be built with the snap of your fingers and instantly you have additional pages that get indexed in the search engines and are automatically optimized for the keyword or phrase you are trying to target.

I hope that you enjoyed this tip today. Stay tuned as I am going to do it again and show you how you can use Google Insights, yet another free tool by Google, that will once again, give you yet another blend in discovering and predicting keywords and phrases that you can use towards increasing traffic to your web site or blog.

For now, please share your feedback with me by leaving me a comment using the form below. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to help answer them for you.

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If you run a self-hosted WordPress blog, you may have noticed that the search feature that comes with WordPress doesn’t perform very well. On August, 4th, 2008, Joost de Valk, a very well known and respected Dutch search strategist and webdeveloper, published an article that explains how publishers can modify their WordPress search template file to increase the searching capabilities of their WordPress blog. The release of this WordPress tweak went viral and received over 250 Digg votes and made the front page of Sphinn.

Today at the Search Engine Round Table, a new debate started to surface regarding that asks if SEO’s are indeed providing service for clients or deciding to not accept new work and use their skills for their own internal uses. “why would the best SEOs decide to take on client work, as opposed to building out their own ideas and cashing in on those ideas.”, asks one of the authors at the Search Engine Round Table.

Much of the debate, however, is being discussed in a paid membership forum. The debates aren’t all behind closed doors as debate seems to have triggered much debate among the Sphinn community. A Sphinn member said this in a comment, “I don’t join a lot of these SEO type sites and don’t go to conferences but rather just do my own thing for my network of websites.”

August, 4th, 2008, site author of Slightly Shady SEO, releases an article titled, Examining a Search Ranking Fluctuation. This article hit off very well among the Search Engine Community as it provided a very in depth look at why many publishers indeed have a fluctuation in their search rankings.

The author said, “This is not a list of search engine ranking factors. Think of it like a list of potential factors and how the web looks from an overhead view; how the algorithm’s can see it.” In this article you get a very detailed review of the elements that search engines look for and how this information is used towards ranking.

When I set out to publish a page on the Internet, I already know well in advanced the primary keyword phrase I am looking to target in the search engines. In this article, my aim is to teach you how to target primary keyword phrases in the search engines by publishing uniquely written content. For me, I am a blogger and one who chooses to use WordPress as my choice blog publishing software.

WordPress is widely supported and increasingly growing in popularity. With that being said though, it really doesn’t matter too much as far as what program you use towards publishing content on the Internet. What really matters though, is how you go about it. For me, WordPress happens to cover pretty much all the bases I need with only a few minor tweaks to the program and the current template being used.

Here is what I do to assure that I am able to successfully target the primary keyword phrases that I am aiming for in a web page, or in my case, a blog post. Firstly, I have to identify choice keyword phrases to target. This requires research as I don’t want to waste time attempting to target keyword phrases that have too strong of a competition, nor do I want to invest time into targeting keyword phrases that no one searches for.

The ideal keyword phrase to target is one that has a very low amount of competition while also having a high number of monthly searches. The ability to spot out keyword phrases like this come with experience or just natural ability. Many people simply use software to aid them in keyword research. For me, I use both my natural ability and experience coupled with software to assure the most accurate level of keyword predictability. If using software appeals to you, I would recommend checking out WordTracker as well as Micro Niche Finder. SEOHosting.com provides some really nice free SEO Tools as well as a 7 day trial offer on WordTracker.

Once you have figured out the primary keyword phrase that you want to target, the rest is a snap. It is really just a matter of using the exact keyword phrase as your web page title, making sure that the same phrase is used again wrapped in <h1> or <h2> tags and then used again twice in your web page or blog post content. Don’t purposely make your content feel spammy and for sure, don’t over saturate your content with the keyword phrases that you are targeting. The best thing to do is just write naturally and allow your writing talents to kick in.

After that, then the final step is getting that page indexed in the search engines. The time it takes to index depends on the age of the site, how easily the content is accessible to the web crawler and how often the web crawler visits your site for updates. If it takes a longer period of time to index, you may consider setting up a sitemap.xml file. A sitemap.xml file is basically a road map for search engines to quickly find your newly published content. A sitemap.xml file works both on blogs as well as regular static web sites.

In the above example, you can see that the keyword phrase that I chose to target. You will notice that that exact phrase is also used in the <title></title> tag as well as the post <h2></h2> title and is used two times in the body content of the page.

The end result is a success. After my page was indexed in the search engine, I was able to search for the exact phrase and my page pulled up number on in the search result page. My advice to you is to target keyword phrases that have a very low amount of competition but also happen to be phrases that are commonly searched for on a regular basis.

Earlier I mentioned that over time you can gain more of a natural ability to do this. In the very near future, I’ll expand on how to do this more. In the mean time, I hope that you found this article helpful. For a complete list of other articles I have published here on SEOHosting.com you can visit my personal archives.