One thing I did notice on this video was the “keyword stuffing of google webmaster tools”, i am teasing, not really a keyword stuffing as you think, but the google webmaster tools is being promoted quiet a bit, guess why?

I have categorized this post under seo tutorials as I believe from this video you will be able to learn some new things, they aren’t explicitly pointed you (and most of them are) and if you can read a bit between the lines you will get some valuable information’s.

If you finish watching the video entirely, let me know what are the new things you learned from this video that you didn’t know about earlier.

Perhaps the title of this article should have been “How to determine the quality of sites from which we want links” but heck that would be a really long title, but you got the point.

Sooner or later you WILL realize that your site does need some sort of promotion, would that be promotion to improve your search engine rankings for your keywords, would it be a promotion of a product or service you offer it doesn’t matter, what matters is that you do need to promote your site, not once, but constantly..especially at the first years of your site that will require some heavy promotions to get the word out and let people know that your site DOES EXIST.

Every single link to your site is welcome

True, every single link pointing to your site (or a inner page of your site) is a good thing, it shows that your site can be a good reference, a good place where someone can solve its problems, but what happens when you do need those links but you are not getting them in the natural way as Rae Hoffman does, and you are forced to go out there (yeah, Google) and look for links for your website, where you actually will be investing your time (if not, even your money) for those links, will then still the old say “Every single link to your site is welcome” be valid? To simply answer, NO. And here are two reasons why:

1. Your business doesn’t have time to waste
2. Your competitor won’t wait for you to learn the lesson

You have a business because you want to sell products/services so you can earn money, and every wasted hour is a – for your bank account. While you wasting time on low quality (aka low authority) sites related to your products/services your competitors is already looking at strong and authoritative sites to promote his website/product (gosh, I hate slashing like that, I will just try to concentrate and use one single name to define your business) and after an hour of research you will achieve to get 10-20-100 of low quality links, while your competitor has invested the same time and has got 1-2-3 high authority (high quality) links to his site. At the end of the day, you see him outranking you and you keep wondering why. And the answer is simple, the sites that ‘reference’ your competitors product have a greater authority over your 100 gibberish sites.

Imagine it this way

I want to buy a computer, but I don’t know which one would be good for me. What I need is a computer with good performances but nothing extreme, that will last long and won’t cost much. I decide it is time to ask for others opinion to clear up my ideas and figure out what I need.

Then I find 100 regular people that don’t work as tech support or have deep knowledge of computers (aka, zero references) and one of them is a posh girl that does her nails all day long (why a posh? because I want so, its my story). All of them would recommend me to buy a Sony Vaio (and their answers would be,

• it is a good computer i recently bought it and had no problems
• oh its much better then the previous old computer I have, now I don’t wait 10 mins to load a page
• oh my sony vaio is pink, its so sexy, just like me. (I know you got it, this was the posh girl)

While walking to the store to buy me a sony vaio because it: has no problems while its new, won’t make me load a page for 10 minutes and it is sexy, I end up seeing an old friend of mine which happens to be a computer geek, works in a big company that offers tech support and knows what a computer has better then what is in his sandwich (no offense guys, it is a compliment) and previously many of my friends had told me he has fixed their computer so I should better ask him (what a coincidence). I tell him what my intentions are and his answer is: dude, sony vaio costs over 1k with only 2gb of memory ram, 250Gb of hard disk and a 2.0 GHz processor speed, with that money or less you can get a nice HP Pavillion with at least 4GB of ram, 600GB of memory with a 2.6 GHz processor and the quality of their hardware is much better then a sony vaio.

(Note: This is just an example, I am not saying that sony vaio sucks and that HP is much better (which could be, or be the opposite scenario). My knowledge over computer performances can be a paragon with Mother Theresa and bodybuilding scenario, kinda..

Which product do you think I will end up buying after I got 100s of references for sony vaio by people that don’t know the subject and have not been referenced to my by nobody or that one reference I received for HP Pavillion by a person who has been referenced to me by several other people that he knows the subject well? I don’t know about you, but after the reference from a tech support guy for who many of my friends told me I should ask, you still want to buy a pink sony vaio over a well configured HP Pavillion for the same price it is up to you, but let me tell you, in that case you got issues, and if search engines would act that way they would have been out of business for a long time now.

To put it simple and cut off this long article (which kinda slipped out of topic with that story) when you look for a site, which you would want to refer your website/product/service you want that site to:

• Be referred by others (aka: have good amount of inbound links)
• Be a point of reference (aka: authoritative on the subject)
• Has been for awhile now in the market (aka: is established site)

If a site has the above 3 qualities I mentioned then your benefits would be: Better rankings since you get a reference from an established authoritative site on the subject. Have new visitors to your site since old established sites have a good amount of visitors already which will then lead to sales and income on your end.

If you are using FireFox browser you might consider installing Aaron Wall’s SEO Toolbar addon which will give you all the needed information’s regarding the quality of a site.

Another great feature the free microsoft seo toolkit has built in is comparison between reports, which helps you see how your sites optimization is improving after the changes you have done. I will let you watch this video to get more information’s, and then you let me know what you think.

Note: To install the Microsoft Search Engine Optimization Toolkit is free and it requires IIS version 7 or higher.

Microsoft SEO Toolkit Download links & More Information’s
WebPI | x86 | x64 | More Information’s

Have you installed the Microsoft free SEO Toolkit already? Let us all know what are your thoughts of this seo tool.

But before I continue further, let me explain to some what old style seo methods actually are. One of the oldest, cheapest and easiest ways to get inbound links to your site is by submitting your site to free web directories. Many SEO’s will argue about this for the long run, but regular readers of this blog know that the tips I share here are for beginners and those that do want to make the first steps into search engine optimisation (SEO) and gain some visibility for their new site or even blog. However it is true that if you base your link campaigns only from free web directories your site will not last for long in the SERPs but still it will give you that needed time frame to gain new visitors and perhaps even new links if they do like your content.

But enough of that, let me tell you about my test and the results I had. I took a brand new domain, a keyword rich domain. The competition for that keyword was almost 4million results as broad search and around 200.000 results for the exact search. In the first page were ranking websites of 5+ years old and with PageRank of 3-7, half of which were DMOZ listed and some also had a listing on Yahoo directory as well, few of them only also had the keywords in the domain name.

The only weakness these sites had was their on-page optimization. My idea was, making a website with a better on page optimization and gaining slappy links to see where the site would head to, the only links that I was thinking to get were from free web directories and hired a regular guy to do that for me (cost was roughly $50 USD for that), aside the title and the description which were supposed to be different for each submission the guy had one strict rule that he needed to follow, the submission to the directories was supposed to be made gradually, roughly 100-200 directories a week and the total amount was around 1000 directories.

Within the first weeks I didn’t expected any kind of results, and so it happened, as soon as the directories were crawled and the links to my site were found I started to see the site moving gradually up through the SERPs, from 40th page down to 30th and so on…within two months I could already see my site solid on 6th page of Google SERPs for two different terms. Now all I have to do is compete with less then 60 websites to reach the first place in the first page, and the toughest one would have been the 10 sites that are in the first page of the SERPs.

So I decided to use another old style SEO, link exchange. My luck was that webmasters of this certain niche are not very SEO oriented so getting a link from them it was not hard, from time to time I would hit into a SEO webmastered website and would get refused a link because my site did not had any PageRank (but don’t ever let that bother you, remember..they WILL one day come back to ask a link from you). The links I exchanged with were ONLY with sites that were in topic, no slappy links anymore, straight in content links. All it took were 20 new links pointing to my site, and within the first four months my site was already ranking 12th in Google SERPs with only $50 investment for the directory submission and the cost of the writer of $80 a month to provide me with articles. It took me only $370 USD and four months to rank 12th place on Google SERPs (and already on first page on Bing), it would have cost me even less but since the site was already earning around $50 a month I felt greedy and optimized the site for several keywords and not just one.

I could have already stopped since I had made my point clear, I can still rank (for less competitive keywords) by still using cheap and old style seo methods but I became greedy and the site was already earning good money for a test site, so I decided to go on. My next move was article directories. Hired the same writer to write me another pack of 10 articles and submitted it to the biggest article directories and these next 10 articles got sphinned and stumbled and spread around naturally that brought me even more links that pushed my site on first page of Google SERPs for two main keywords without any hassle at all and the earnings of the site have doubled.

With just unique content, proper on page optimization and few links which I gained in the so called old style seo my site is outranking 5+ years old sites in less then half a year. Old style or not, it might work..you just have to try it by yourself before giving up just because someone says “hey that’s old style”.

The latest news in the SEO industry tell that Google will give great value to faster loading sites, even in your Google webmaster tools under Labs you will be able to see how fast your site is. In essence, the faster a site loads the faster it will be crawled and indexed, also a fast loading site will prevent that visitors find a result on Google, wait for a longer time to load the site that they found, give up and go back to Google to perform another search, what this could mean for Google is that the site that the visitor found first (most likely in first page) does not have the needed information’s for which a visitor performed the search and yet it ranks in the first page (if their algorithm had brain it would move that site into deeper page, or at least..i would).

Why You Want to Decrease Load time

There are three main reasons why I find important to decrease the load time of my website, and they are

• Keep the visitors in my site (i don’t want them to give up and find another resource)
• Save as much as possible bandwidth on my server (for heavy traffic sites this could mean loads of money saved)
• Have the search engines crawl and index my site faster

Speed Up Your WordPress blog in 3 simple steps

Now that you know why I would want my wordpress blog to load faster let me show you three small tips that can be done and for how much you can decrease your blogs load time by simply implementing these three steps.

Optimizing My HTML Files

When I first tested the load time of my classic muscle cars website with a free web page analyzer my site had the next load time report (in seconds):

• 54K connection: 205.97
• ISDN 128K: 67.52
• T1 1.44Mbps: 11.71

now that is not a load speed I would be happy with. Not being happy with that load time I had to check my HTML and make sure there aren’t any unnecessary codes like comments or even empty space between HTML codes. Once I cleaned up my code from all the empty spaces and the unnecessary HTML comments (which I didn’t needed at all) the load speed of my site changed into this:

• 54K Connection: 190.63
• ISDN 128K: 61.85
• T1 1.44Mbps: 9.93

very well no? Well i wasn’t satisfied so i wanted to decrease the load time even more, so what I did was…

Optimizing My Images with Smush.it

Each and every time users load a page it has to load everything, CSS, javascript and images. Some images are bigger, the reason could be the size of the image, the amount of pixels a image used etc. Yahoo developers not long time ago developed a tool called Smush It, what their tool does is optimized the image and removes the unnecessary pixels to reduce the size and yet keeps the same quality of the image (on some more graphic heavy images tho the quality difference can be seen). If you have a website that has tons of images it would be a real pain to go through all the images and smush them one by one, with the WP Smush It plugin all this becomes easier. You can smush the images as you upload them in your media gallery or you can even smush images in your media library with a single click.

With the smush.it plugin I saved around 15% of the overall size from all the images and after I smush’ed my images the load time of my site decreased into this:

• 54K connection: 171.06
• ISDN 128K: 55.85
• T1 1.44Mbps: 9.41

Compressing My JavaScript and CSS files

With the above two tips I managed to gain little over 2 seconds of load time on T1 connections and much more on 128K and 54K, but there is more to do. Every time we install new plugins we get a new CSS file that the plugin uses. Most of the times we don’t really even need these new CSS files so simply edit the plugin (if you know how to do that) and remove the functions that injects the javascript inside the <head> of our blog. The other method is to compress our javascripts and css files through the Minify Engine or you can use a wordpress plugin called WP Minify which actually grabs all your .js and .css files, sends them to the Minify Engine, compresses them and replaces the old codes with the new ones (safe to use).

After I compressed my javascripts and css files my load time decreased even more, and this are the results I have now:

• 56K connection: 160.17
• ISDN 128K: 52.11
• T1 1.44Mbps: 8.54

Impressive no? Now my site load time dropped to 8.44 seconds from a heavy 11.71 (more then 3 seconds gained). There are few more times that can be done to decrease your website load time but since I haven’t tested them yet I won’t mention them (perhaps I will update this post with the results). There are other factors that influence the load time of your website, such your web hosting. There is a good list of hosting comparison here at Astrit’s blog.

Now that you finished reading these 3 simple ways how you can decrease the load time of your site, go over and apply these techniques to your wordpress blog and come back, let me know about your results (I am eager to know), then tell your friends about it so they can benefit too. How much seconds did you gained?

If you have WP Super Cache installed then most likely you know what the function of that plugin is, but since many others might have not heard of it yet..let me explain first. The WP Super Cache plugin it creates cache of your pages in static HTML and then shows those pages to your visitors (until the cache expires, which you can setup in your admin panel). This way your wordpress blog doesn’t have to query the database and show the content to the visitors, nor it needs to make other php functions so it saves your bandwidth usage, which is a good thing.

The bad thing that users have reported about this plugin is that it creates duplicate content in your site, and you have yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com/index.php indexed in the search engines, so all your efforts to eliminate duplicate content on your wordpress blog is useless at this point. The only fix for the moment known is to uninstall the plugin and wait for the search engine crawler bots to re-crawl your site and remove the duplicate pages from their index, or you can 301 redirect the duplicate pages to the original URL in meanwhile the authors of the plugin find the bug and make a fix for it, in meanwhile avoid to install this plugin.

Do you use WP Super Cache? Have you checked your site by querin site:yourdomain.com in the search engines and see if you have duplicate pages created from this plugin? Let us know..

Google removes PageRank data from Webmaster Tools

Have you recently logged in your Google Webmaster Tools? Under Crawl stat there use to be a bar which displayed pagerank distribution for your site, well its no longer there. Wonder how long will take for Google to stop exporting public PageRank bar and discontinue all the PageRank toolbars. Haa panic? Yup, you are in complete panic, how will you now find quality links? Well if you haven’t learned yet to determine a quality site without the pagerank…then you are done. Big time trouble?

SEO for BING

The so much advertised new search engine operated by Microsoft, BING, has been almost on all the blogs and news medias for the past few months. Personally I haven’t been watching MSN closely enough as search engine, nor I have done the same with Yahoo, but recently I did showed some interest on BING when their search market was slowly increasing. Peter D has blogged about optimizing your site for BING over at Aaron Walls SEOBook blog and it contains some useful information’s. Pretty much whatever you have done to optimize your site for Google you should do for BING.com too. I will try to blog about my attempt on optimizing one of my new sites for BING in near feature.

Google Analytics now more Powerful, Flexible and Inteligent

I rely on Google Analytics very much for tracking purpose. ROI, Goals etc…everything new I learn about my site and visitors of my site is thanks to Google Analytics. Now, there are new features integrated with Google Analytics. Watch this video to know something more.

Guest Bloggers

Yet another reminder, as i know I won’t be blogging often as I used to (almost daily). If have a SEO blog, internet marketing or a make money online blog and would like to guest blog here register now. It’s all automated, so make sure you check your email to confirm your account. If you don’t receive the email contact me to activate your account.

There are two tool options I did notice there, or rather 2 groups of tools. One is SEO and the other one is for PPC, and since all the reviews I read were about the SEO tools and my interest was to check the SEO tools only I will limit my review on the that only.

SEO Tools that you can find on ShoeMoney’s membership

• SEO Checkup
• Backlink Analyzer
• Domain marketplace
• Backlink Finder
• Keyword Density Tool
• Most Linked
• Related Blog Posts
• SEO Competition 2.0
• Text Optimizer
• Outgoing Links

These are the tools you can find on ShoeMoney’s SEO Tools and I checked them one by one to see if they justify the membership fee or you can just simply find these tools on the web for free or if you could find even better tools then those for that price. So lets start reviewing all the tools.

SEO Checkup

The SEO Checkup tool was something I really did liked. It is one of the last tools build from his team and is something really useful if you want to learn more things about your competitor and how come he ranks #1 and not you. You have to just insert the keyword for which you want to rank and your URL (note, URL is optional) within few minutes (yeah takes a bit longer to make all the analyzes and it is obvious as it has to check several sites). Once the report is generated you will be able to see details of the top 10 sites ranking in the first page for that keyword, in addition with domains PageRank, Yahoo linkdomain, Yahoo links, Alexa ranking, age of domain, titles that your competitors use including the keyword density in title, number of words in title, as on page optimization it also counts the number of first three headings that your competitors have within the page with which they rank, keywords that are used in headings.

Other on-page factors are included within the SEO Checkup report such as,

• body text and keyword density within the body text
• URL and if keywords are present in URL
• sitemap and robots.txt analyzes
• meta description analyzes
• links (well this isn’t really a report since it asks you to run another backlink checker report)
• html code and page load time
• Images (no report even for this section, it just gives suggestions on what you should do)
• Meta keywords

Overall, the SEO Checkup plugin is sweet and a time saver, i liked this one since the moment i got the report. But lets pass over on the second tool.

Backlink Analyzer

With the backlink analyzer you get a lovely report (have to wait couple minutes for the report to complete) of keywords that your competitor has, amount of keywords that use certain anchor text, sites from where those links come and sites with which competitor has made reciprocal link exchange. Interesting and helpful tool, but definitively not something you can’t find online for free. Webconfs anchor analyzer tool is one of those free ones even tho it limits to 65 backlinks its report.

Domain Marketplace

This is another interesting tool. It has a marketplace of domains (name of domains is hidden so all you will see is xxx xxx xxx xxx.tld), but the domain names listed in here are classified based on Inlinks, .gov links, .edu links, .mil links. Even tho backlinks from .gov, .edu, .mil give a great value as far as it regards SEO, to me this tool is useless since I can’t see the actual domain but all I see is xx x x x xx x x x x jibberish stuff. However, for those interested in flipping sites and making easy profits it is a good tool to track down expired domains with decent backlinks already (saves you time building those links, someone else has done it for you).

Backlink Finder

An unknown error occured. Please wait a few minutes and try your request again.

Thats the message I got since I signed up when I try to get report on backlink finder based on my keywords.

Keyword Density Tool

With this tool by inserting your site URL and desired keyword you want to check you get a report of the keyword density in your body text report. Thing which you can get for free on many other websites, just perform a search on your preferred search engine. With WebCEO this tool is already build in.

Most Linked

This tool runs a report (based on site URL) on pages that have most incoming links.

Related Blog Posts

Now this is a interesting tool. Say you have a blog post regarding SEO Tools, write down the keyword on this tool and it will generate a list of related blog posts based on that keyword. Copy then the URL list and paste it into the send trackback to ping those blogs.

SEO Competition 2.0

A tool to have fun with in your spare time, because it gives same results as the SEO Checkup tool and gives even less information’s.

Text Optimizer

You have your text ready to put in your website but would like to check on keyword density for your desired keywords before publishing and make sure that you have it optimized well? With this tool you get the keyword density report for your text before publishing it. Yet another tool that you can find for free if you search right through the web.

Outgoing Links

If you want to measure the outgoing links from your site (or from your competitors site) then this tool will give you report on that. Pretty simple and straight forward.

My Opinion on ShoeMoney’s SEO Tools

As far as it regards shoemoney’s seo tools, and only the seo tools, i am not very pleased, with exception of the SEO checkup tool which is something really lovely and useful if you want to learn more about your competitors. The other tools are really something you can find online for free (WebCEO’s free edition has most of those tools included for free, and even more), all you have to do is perform a search query on the search engines and the tools will be there.

Personally, after this 10 days promotion I won’t renew the membership with shoemoney’s tools as I do not see those tools justifying the price nor it makes me work easier. If i’d have to subscribe one day it would be just to use the SEO Checkup tool, but I doubt I will pay that price to use one tool only.

Have you used Shoemoney’s SEO tools? What do you think about them?
If you have used these tools I would love to hear what do you think about, you liked them? Felt they are waste of time or they helped you more then you expected? Let me know through the comments please.

I bet that every time you have crossed over a similar discussion you have put your own knowledge in question too, Does it really affect rankings? What if he is right, he seems so convinced. Well this kind of discussion can really get you confused, waste time and money by trying to hunt out those magic high PR sites and try to grab a link from them.

The reason why I decided to blog about this topic is the recent case that happened to me during this weekend. A client of mine from my wordpress development site for which I had build a site has been constantly asking me questions regarding seo, a topic which I love discussing often. Weeks later I had build his site I decided to check out if he has done anything to improve his sites ranking or his questions were just out of curiosity. Well i found out he had worked out pretty hard, and very wrong too. He had spend so much time to find high pagerank sites and grab a link from those sites even tho the content of those sites had nothing to do with his site. WRONG. Later the same day, i ended up in one of those threads that do spread disinformation’s and thought…hell, my client must have read one of these threads and that most have convinced him that he was doing the wrong thing.

See what happened to my client by reading those threads that concentrate only on nonsense discussions and spreading partial information’s (that often happen to turn into disinformation’s) with the sole purpose of protecting their business model? Well that is the reason why I am blogging about that subject now, I want to try and explain you in the best way I can how and when PageRank will affect your website rankings.

What is PageRank

PageRank is a metric, a numeric value representing votes casted for your site. All the links that are pointing to your site are giving a vote in eyes of Google, and with PageRank as tool Google can determine how trustworthy your site is and how many votes it has.

Explained that we have to go one step backward to better understand, how search engine spider bots work. Its pretty simple to explain for the part that we need, search engine spider bots crawl a site by following links that they find on a site that they are currently crawling. So again, those votes (i.e. links) pointing to your site do play an important role, the more links you have pointing to your site the more often your search engine spider bot will be crawling your site and yet the higher your page rank becomes as the number of incoming links increase.

PageRank Doesn’t Affect Rankings, Links DO

Just in case someone didn’t got the point while reading this post. PageRank is a metric that calculates votes/links caste to your site, nothing more nothing less, as such it can’t affect rankings at all. What actually does affect the rankings are the incoming links that have your specific keywords as anchor text.

From other point of view, incoming links from higher PR sites that are content related with your site do give a better boost to your rankings, but that is not because of the PageRank it is because the site is trustworthy enough (i.e. site’s vote weights more because of its status/credibility/trustworthiness).

Say yours

If you have anything to say/add regarding this topic please take your time and comment on this post. Comments will be closed after 14 days. Subscribe via RSS to follow my SEO Blog and be updated when new posts get published.

Many readers of my SEO blog have previously stated they use WebCEO, most use the free edition (with limited functions) and some have purchased one of the paid licenses. Well I wanted to let you know that you have time until 22 August 2009 to buy WebCEO at incredible low price, 50% cheaper. This is a one time offer and as stated above it lasts only until 22 August 2009, after that date prices will go up to normal again.

Discount Price Comparison

• Web CEO SmallBiz Unleashed: Discounted price: $129 Normal price: $339 (included: Professional Training and Certification in Internet Marketing)
• Web CEO Professional Unleashed: Discounted price: $229 – Normal price: $479 (included: Professional Training and Hardcopy Certification in Internet Marketing)

As you can see the comparison above you save $210 USD if you purchase Web CEO SmallBiz Unleashed until 22nd August, and you save $250 USD if you purchase Web CEO Professional Unleashed license. Both licenses are included with professional training on how to use Web CEO and search engine optimization secrets along with a certificate in internet marketing.

If you ever wanted to own a license of this software but the price seemed too high, then this is the right moment to purchase Web CEO as I doubt you will ever get lower price on this seo software in near feature.

Which SEO Software do you use?

Do you use a SEO Software to optimize your website? Tell us which SEO software (or combination of softwares) you use and what makes you chose it over the other seo softwares in the market.