Internet Marketing ABC

Just got off a webinar with Steven Clayton (the Commission Blueprint guy) and Mark Ling, and they shared some really great info in there.

Apart from the whole FTC crackdown and affiliate nexus laws things (there seems to be a quick and easy way to keep on going), he also covered some strategies for getting backlinks.

I just want to mention one way of finding squidoo lenses that allow you to post a link.

Simply go to Google and type in this:

“add to this list” site:squidoo.com “keyword phrase”

(of course you want to replace “keyword phrase” with a keyword that is related to your market)

Then you’ll get a whole list of squidoo lenses that allow you to add your own links that have the keyword phrase in them (and are thus likely related).

Using a firefox plugin like SEO Tools (which is free), you can also see the pagerank of the different squidoo lenses in the google SERPs and thus easily decide which ones are gonna be worth the time to post a link to.

The whole webinar will be published soon, probably right after this post.

Jeff Johnson has just released a new WordPress plug-in for Seo purposes. It’s a free plug-in that helps you to get more blog traffic. I’ve used the old version on a couple of my blogs and I am getting some good results with them. So definitely upgrade to the new one, and I think it’s worth it especially if you have many many niche blogs where you are and really putting a lot of work and sweat into each individual block that you own.

Lots of people are trying to get a page ranked on in the top ten of Google’s search results for a given keyword.

If the keyword phrase you are targeting isn’t insanely competitive (phrases like: credit repair, credit card application and stuff like that), then it’s actually not that difficult to get the top spot if you just put in the necessary work.

But how would you like to show up on page one of the Google search results not only once, but twice or even more?

Imagine someone searches for professional stainless steel cookware and you show up not only once… but 5 times on page 1! Do you think that would get you some clicks?

Nicolaus Prudhon has recently shared a method that takes a bit of work that can get you just that. It’s a simple 10 step process to multiple rankings on page 1 if you chose your keyword wisely.

If you want to get lots of free traffic, then one thing you’ll want is high placement in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your relevant keywords.

And that, for the most part, is about getting backlinks. Lots of high-quality backlinks from relevant pages.

If you’re not yet there… well, then look at who is sitting on top of the SERPs.

And then copy and paste their URL into this neat little free SEO tool called BacklinkWatch.com.

It will reveal most of the backlinks towards that site. Now, you go through each of those and try to get backlinks from them too where possible.

It’s called reverse engineering, and it works wonders when it comes to SEO.

Just try this search query

"__________________" "[IMG] code is on""keyword"

and

"__________________""html code is on""keyword(s)"

The only thing that you gotta change in this is keyword.

So, for example, if you are selling an ebook on organic pestizides, your query would look like this:

"__________________" "[IMG] code is on""organic pestizides"

It’s a pretty nifty search query to locate forums that allow image code and/or HTML code.

Don’t abuse this to spam forums, but use it to locate forums where you can become a member of the community that contributes value AND profits from the backlinks.

Google image search can be a powerful source of traffic for your website. According to Dev Basu one in five Google searches is an image search – that’s A LOT.

My own experience with traffic from Google image search is that it converts lower.

Google Image Search Screenshot - Click on Image for full size

But – and that’s what’s important – the images on your page do play a crucial role in how relevant Google thinks your page is for certain phrases. If you have lots of relevant images, on an otherwise also relevant site, you’ll rank high in the search engine results pages.

So, if you can, include relevant images into your pages. And name these files with relevant filenames, and add relevant alt tags to them.

Also, Google image search results show up on Google universal search, Google Maps and even on Google’s normal SERPs when Google thinkgs the images are relevant to that search query.

So if you are selling aluminium ipod covers, and you have a picture of a aluminium ipod cover, than you want to

1. name the file: aluminiumipodcover.jpg
2. give it the image description (alt tag) “aluminium ipod cover”

This will make Google include your image in the google image search results.

Alt Tag

If you don’t know what the alt tag is – look at the source code of your webpage, where your image tag is.

<img src="filename.gif" alt="image description">

Image description is where you want to insert your… well, image description

Title Tag

Also, there is a title tag for images – if you use that, it will sshow a caption underneath the title. Again, you can insert relevant keywords here. note that the image title will be visible, so it has to make sense for the real human visitors of your site.

Text Around The Images

The text in the immediate facinity of the image also factors in – the more relevant it is, the higher Google will rank your image.

Image Size

Larger images seem to ‘count’ more than smaller images.  Somewhere around 400 pixels by 400 pixels seems to be the ‘magic threshold’, but this is not set in stone and more of a guess. If in doubt, make your images larger than 400×400 pixels.

Google Webmaster Tools

Log into your Google webmaster tools account and activate image site search for image labelers.

Image Folder

If you keep your images in a separate folder, it should always be a subfolder of your main domain (or several folders deeper), but not a subdomain. Some people like to use a subdomain like http://images.internetmarketingabc.com, but it’s better to use http://internetmarketingabc.com/images (or a deeper folder structure).

XML-Sitemaps For Images

Another thing you can do if you really want to take it that far is to create XML sitemaps for your images. However, I only do this in exceptional cases where the addional effort is really justified.

Don’t Spam!

There used to be a time when you could name any image you want any keyword you want, and add any alt tag you want, and Google would send traffic your way. These days are over. Do NOT try that. Google has mechanisms in place to detect if you try to use that trick, and it will heavily penalize your site for it.

What about irrelevant images like borders, backgrounds, buttons, etc?

You could just name them leftborder.jpg, rightborder.jpg, etc – but don’t do that!

Instead, just name them with numbers, or number-letter combinations. For example, name them 1a.jpg, c3.gif and so on. Google image search ignores these kinds of images, and that’s what we want. Because if Google ignores all the images that aren’t relevant to what that particular site is about, then it will only see the relevant images. And if you have 3 pictures on your site, and all of them are relevant, then your pictures are 100% relevant. But if you have 10 pictures on your site, and only 3 of them are relevant, then your images are only 30% relevant.

And this will again contribute to you ranking higher in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

February 2009 Google Image Search Presentation

Here’s a video presentation from a Google guy who works on image search from February 2009;

He talks about:

• unique behavior of image searches
  • a lot of deep searches (so being on page 1 is not as important on Google image search results as it is in the normal SERPs)
• for what is google image search used?
  • inspiration
    • get a haircut
    • get a tattoo
    • etc.
  • shopping
  • fun
• how Google determines which images are what
  • how they classify images
• and a lot more (just watch yourself)

When it comes to SEO, too many people focus ONLY on Google’s main search engine at google.com and forget that Google also has many other, more specialized search engines, like:

• YouTube Search
• Google Image Search
• Google News
• Google Maps/Local Search
• Google Blog Search

Chris Crum recently blogged about how to get traffic from those other Google search engines too. It’s worth reading – and even internet marketer John Reese sent out an email to his list today to recommend it.

Most people think that SEO is getting more difficult every year. The search engines get “smarter” every month, major algorith changes happen frequently, rankings change.

Back in the olden days, it used to be that you could just put any keyword into the title tag, meta description and meta keywords of your website and your website would get found for that keyphrase. Easy as pie.

Nowadays, that doesn’t work anymore. And people are spending thousands of dollars on SEO.

So why am I saying that SEO gets easier? It gets easier if you provide real value with your website. It gets easier if you keep your website visitors in mind. It get’s easier if you create each piece of content that you produce for other people.

You can get anything you want in life, as long as you help enough other people get what they want.

- Zig Ziglar

If you’ve been into sales or self-help, you probably heard that quote by Zig Ziglar. I’m probably the first one to put this into the context of search engine optimization, but it holds very true. Search engines are all about helping people to get what they want out of the internet. And if your content is what people want, the search engines will do everything they can to send people your way.

So remember: quality content is king!

If you want to get search engine love, share great content and the traffic will follow!