This article is a guest Post by Jon Waraas. Jon runs an affiliate marketing and SEO blog at www.jonwaraas.com.

Lets get some backlinks for your site so you can start ranking for that term you always wanted and make some cash money.

In this blog post, we will be going over a two different ways to gain backlinks such as blog comments and Wikipedia links. These two methods work the best for sites with less competitive keywords in Google, the reason is because it takes some work to get these links.

Before I begin, I want to remind you yet again that you should focus on having your website content building the natural backlinks more so than working on building backlinks to an average website. When making a website, you should focus on content and then once you get great content you should start working on your link building campaign. Let us take a look at this image I made:

The chart reflects the traffic you will be building. As you can see, you wont be building much traffic at all at first, you would be focusing on the quality of the content and making your website better than the competition. Once you done with the content you will focus on building links. Since your links will be sending you a little bit of traffic your traffic will obviously will go up. Then once you get the necessary backlinks to your website you will start ranking for the search terms you are trying to rank for, and that is when your traffic will start taking off.

Once you website does start ranking for the search term, more and more people will find your website and see how great the quality of it is, and then they will build the links for you, and those are called natural backlinks. Sadly, you get the most natural backlinks once your site ranks for the keywords your after. Because people will search for the keyword, see your site, and then blog about your website or something along those lines. But, you will also be building natural backlinks from people stumbling onto your website the whole time.

I tell everyone this, focus on the quality of the content… then work on building backlinks. With that said lets get started.

Blog Comments
Blog comments are a great way to get backlinks to your website, heck I even sell them. But, they aren’t too powerful and you need a lot of them to make much of a difference. But if you just need like 200 backlinks to rank for a keyword than they are great way to get there. You should never rely completely on blog comments to help build backlinks, they tend to get less powerful over time.

A few things about blog comments:

• You need a lot to make a difference.
• Great for ranking for smaller terms.
• Sends less weight over time.

I personally use blog comments a lot, but only when my website is brand new. If you have a small term that you want to rank for that only needs a few hundred backlinks for your site, then Blog Comments are the way to go!

It’s pretty easy to get the blog comments, and I will be telling you the exact same way my comment writers use for my company. With blog comments you need to make sure that your website is very very related to the website you are commenting on. To find thousands of blogs to post relevant comments on, we use Technorati. To find a list of blogs about your niche, all you have to do is a search on Technorati. So, say you need comments about “apartments”, simply enter “apartments” into the search text box.

You will then see pages and pages of blogs talking about apartments (or whatever your blog is about). You then have to find blog posts that are related to your niche, that’s pretty easy, all you have to do is read the description about the blog post.

Once you find the blog post you want to comment about, simply go to the blog post, then read the blog post, and then make a decent comment about the blog post. Don’t make it too spammy looking so the blog admin wont delete your comment. A little trick I like to use so the admin won’t delete my comments is I make two or three blog comments per blog on different blog posts to make it look like I read over a his or her blog a little. On my own blog, I generally never delete comments from people that make a few at a time, they always seem to be readers of mine. I find that to work in a lot of cases. You should also use a web proxy when writing comments. I have gotten my own IP banned from WordPress, and so have many other SEO experts I know. The best way is to buy your own cheap VPS and get like 29 IP’s and then put 3proxy on it. That’s the least stressful way to get proxies.

When you write your comments, make sure to save the blog post where you write the comments in a text file or something for later use, you may want to comment that blog post later to help boost your ranking a little.

Wikipedia
Good ol’ Wikipedia! These links help SO much! The links are nofollow, but I feel like Google gives special attention to outbound links on Wikipedia. When you get some Wiki links, you will be feeling the Wiki love.

But how do we get the Wiki links? It’s total pain! And to be honest, I fully haven’t mastered this yet. I don’t think I ever will. I only get Wiki links for my bigger sites that make me money. I don’t work on building Wiki links for websites I don’t really care to much about. It’s a lot of work, and most of the time your links will be taken off, so its a big pain.

The best way to get Wiki links is to put a lot of work into your Wiki account. Go over some topics you know and edit them a little bit. What you want to do is get some history behind you, get some trust behind you. When you first get your Wiki account, don’t just dive head into spamming wikipedia and hoping the mods won’t delete all your links – because they will.

When you first get your account, find some topics you know about and edit them. The amount of articles you edit is up to you, I think I have done only 20 articles in about 2 years time. So not much at all, but enough to get enough history behind me as I have about 8 Wiki links on that account.

Okay, after you edit some articles, you want to first find rare articles with a high page rank that don’t get edited to much at all. They take some time to find, but there out there. One way I find the rare article is I do a Google search on my niche, and then start at around page 5. I then look at the history and see when the article was last edited on, I try to find articles that where last edited around 2006 or before that.

Here is a Google search for the niche “apartments”.

Once you find your rare article, edit the content and then add your link somewhere on the page. I usually add mine to references. I also link to a subpage of mine, I think that linking to just the www.domain.com looks too spamy for wikipedia.

After you add your link its just a game of luck. Hopefully, the mods wont see your link and take it off. But, like I said before, Wiki links are a pain. However, once you get some they are worth it! Trust me.

Wiki link process review:

1. Edit topics you know.
2. Build your history.
3. Find rare article on your niche.
4. Edit the content and add your link in the references.
5. Pray the mods don’t take your link off.
6. Repeat.

Alright, I hoped you enjoyed this guest blog post. Now get to work building those backlinks.

About Jon Waraas
Oh you know, I do SEO and affiliate marketing. You can read about my adventures on my blog here. I also run Buy Blog Comments and Buy Answers Links at which I sell backlinks and traffic for your website.

Many of you know that two weeks ago, I finally moved into a house (pics coming soon). In case you didn’t read that, it basically outlines why I so grateful to have finally moved out the tiny apartment and finally into a big house again. Well, that same weekend, I also found out that Google finally granted me an “authority listing.”

What’s an authority listing?

When I first started blogging, there were no other “Nate Whitehill’s” who ranked for their names in Google. Within a month, I ranked #1 for my name. Now, not only do I rank for my name, but I have been given an “authority listing” in Google for my name.

Similar to an “indented listing” (see below), an “authority listing” is a site which has received a significant of natural backlinks, total number of daily searches, and high quality linkback “authority” from other high PR sites, over a long period of time. Many of you know that I have been blogging since January of 2007, so, it took me about a year for my name to receive an authority listing on Google.

Not only does an authority listing appear as the first result, but it also has 4-5 other links directly under it pointing to other high PR pages within your site. I am sure that Google listed my “23 Things I’ve Learned After 7 months” post only because it is probably the most linked-to post on my blog.

What does this mean for the future?

Well, for one, I will start to receive more traffic for my name than previously. In this Google Analytics chart, it shows the number of searches per day for my name over the past year.

As you can see, search traffic spiked in late September, but has also been steadily rising over the past month.

Why is it good to rank high for your name?

On the Internet, your reputation is a lot more important than your resume. Anyone can start a business online or make money, it doesn’t take any special degree or incredible resume. However, online reputation can help tremendously when it comes to effectively networking or marketing online.

Not to mention, if a potential employer really wanted to find out about you, they would Google your name and not just look at your resume. Just as long as you have surrounded your online reputation with positive and noteworthy achievements, then it can only benefit any online OR offline new job opportunity.

Any other “Nate Whitehill” who wanted to rank #1 for his contact would have very difficult time doing so thanks to my new Google Authority listing.

What do you rank when you type in your name? Do you have an authority listing?

Why is the PageRank so beloved and cherished by all that is Geek? Basically, when you have a higher PageRank, you can sell your text links on it for more money. There is also a bragging factor that comes with saying “I have a PR 8,” for instance. The higher your PR, the easier it is to sell links and make money from your blog. Also true is that the higher your PageRank, the more Google considers your site to be an authority or relevant for given search terms.

Last April, I experienced my first PageRank update. Wow, was it exciting! First of all, there was probably a period of two weeks where everyone was expecting the PR to hit any day. I encountered many sleepless nights in anticipation (JK). Finally, the PR hit, and everyone seemed to be able to breathe again.

Before the last PR, I never had any sites above a PR 2, so I knew that with all the work I was putting into my blog posting and networking was bound to pay off. To my pleasant surprise, my blog was awarded with a PR 5, which I was VERY happy with. Many, if not most new blogs with a decent number of links only only hit a PR 4 on their first update. When I got my PR 5, I was able to almost instantly sell out of my text links.

Have You Been Preparing For The PageRank?

Anyone who has experienced one PR update before knows that they could have better prepared for it. What do I mean by prepared? Preparing is done by building links from other high PR sites to ensure you receive as high of a PR as possible. I have learned a lot about SEO in the past few months, and I am now more efficient at building high quality backlinks and optimizing my sites for high search rankings and relevance. Where are some good places to build links?

• Blogroll Exchanges
• Forums and Message Boards
• Free Directories
• Social News Sites (like Digg, Del.icio.us)

It’s What You Know AND Who You Know

It’s very important to have a super solid understanding of SEO in order to begin an effective link-building campaigns. This is best accomplished by reading the SEO Book from Aaron Wall. Aaron pretty much covers every single detail you need to know to be able search engine optimize any web site. I hope I made that clear – you must first fully understand SEO before just aimlessly building links.

When I first started my blog last January, I did not know anyone online. Consequently, I didn’t know where to build links and I didn’t know anyone to do link exchanges with. Thanks to my blog, I networked with and some amazing SEO folks. Several people have helped me build high quality links and provided me with great advice on how to better rank for given search phrases.

What am I saying here? Make an effort to get to know someone who is experienced in SEO or SEM. There is a lot to learn from these experienced individuals and many are happy to share their knowledge with you in exchange for link exchanges.

It’s Not Too Late

The PageRank update is still a few weeks away, so still have time to do those last minute link exchanges and directories submissions. Remember, the more links from higher quality sites, the better! Good luck!

This post was sponsored by PhotoshopStar – Free Photoshop Tutorials.

By the way, sign up for my newsletter! (See top of right sidebar.)

I just read an interesting article at Search Engine Journal claiming valid source code helps spiders better index your site. I’ve known about the importance of validating, but I had no idea it affected how your site was indexed.

What is Validation?

According to the W3C:

Validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard, such as those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for HTML and XML-derived Web document types, or by the WapForum for WML, etc. It serves a similar purpose to spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax, but is much more precise and reliable than any of those processes because it is dealing with precisely-specified machine languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language.

The article gives a few tips including:

• Use W3C to make sure your site is viewable in major browsers, especially Firefox & Safari
• Test your site on mobile browsers
• Check for all errors in HTML coding and fix them when possible

If you are interested in learning about the benefits of valid source code and how it could help SEO, then read SEO & Importance of Valid Source Code.

Are you ready to learn proper SEO, once and for all? Create Business Growth is conducting a seminar called the SEO Boot Camp at their Raleigh, North Carolina offices.

One of the great benefits about the SEO Boot Camp is that there will be 1 instructor for every 2 students. The class is only limited to 6 people too.

The SEO Boot Camp includes:

• 6 class members
• 3 expert instructors
• 1 information packed Saturday – 9am to 9pm
• 2 Sunday one-on-one sessions with instructors
• Lunch and dinner included
• Transportation to and from RDU airport included
• 2 night hotel stay included

The Instructors

• David Williams – NC Statewide Speaker & SEO Consultant/Trainer
• Fred Wood – 20 Years of Technology & SEO Consultant/Trainer
• Noah Boswell – Google Certified Adwords Professiona

The curriculum includes:

• Keyword research
• The secrets of using keywords effectively
• Maximizing ROI on Google Adwords
• Big box of free SEO tools and how to use them
• Quality link building strategies
• Advanced level link building tips
• Anatomy of effective link bait
• Leveraging social media sites
• Press releases
• Distribution articles
• Blogging for bucks

Reserve your spot now. The price is $2,495 per person, but if you consider that also includes hotel accomodations, travel, and lunch and dinner both days, it really is an excellent value. Other seminars from industry professionals, such as the Elite Retreat, cost $5,000 per person, and don’t include hotel accommodations.

Referral Program

The Boot Camp has a referral fee payout of $495 per student. That’s worth thinking about who you might know that may be interested.

Creative Business Solutions is also holding a drawing for anyone who signs up for their RSS or email subscription. If you email telling that you signed up for either RSS or e-mail, they will enter your name into a $25 VISA check card drawing.

For More Information

For more information the SEO Boot Camp, call Creative Business Growth at 888-839-3641 or e-mail David@CreateBusinessGrowth.com to receive a call back and more information.

Other Upcoming Classes:
Saturday, August 11th, 2007 & Sunday, August 12th, 2007
Saturday, September 22, 2007 & Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 & Sunday, November 4th, 2007
Saturday, December 15th, 2007 & Sunday, December 16th, 2007

Whenever I start a new web project for a client, I ask them to choose 10-15 desired keywords and/or phrases they would like to rank well for in the search listings.

Since I am in the process of optimizing a few client web sites, I thought it would be fitting to write about how to rank well for specific keywords.

In this article I will show you how I select certain phrases based on search volume, how to check search competition, and then what web sites I use to build links.

Tools to Check Search Volume

Some search terms are not even worth ranking for because they are never searched, but others are searched quite often and have low competition, so they are relatively easy to rank for.

When deciding what search phrases you would like to rank for, there are a few tools that can help determine daily search volume and search competition.

The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool shows you the approximate daily search volume for Yahoo, Google, and MSN. Depending on the niche, a phrase that is searched more than 50 times per day is worth trying to rank for.

Check Your Competition

The best way to check competition is to do a search for your desired term and then check out the PR and backlinks of the top 5-10 listings. I recommend using iWebTool’s Free Webmaster Tools to check the PR and the number of backlinks using.

Generally, any search phrase with less than a million results is not super competitive and is relatively easy to rank for (assuming your onsite SEO is on par).

Building Links for Specific Terms

When you are building links, always make sure the anchor text is one of the keywords or phrases you are trying to rank for.

For example, instead of using “Nate Whitehill dot Com” as my anchor text, I would use “Business Development.” Several top commentators on John Chow’s blog use this technique and it definitely helps with SEO.

There are many places to build links. Paying for links using a service such as Text-Link-Ads is ususally the fastest route, but if you are on a budget, here are your main options:

• Free Article Distribution Sites (i.e., GoArticles.com, Ezine Articles, ArticleCity.com)
• Free Directories – here is a list of free web directories. Some may require you to become an editor to submit a link.
• Blogs (i.e., Try appearing in their Top Commentators or ask for a link exchange)
• On forums that allow you to post links in your signature, make sure you use a keyword-rich link to your site.

There is a fine line between building a large link campaign and link-spam, so make sure thay any link you leave is not out of context on the site and that is under the acceptable terms of use policy according to the web site owner.

Assuming that your onsite keywords are present in the title, META tags, headers tags, and the body of your web site, after you have a solid link campaign, you should eventually start to rank well for your desired search terms or phrases. You can learn more about onpage optimization from my recent SEO case study.

I finally finished the redesign for my web development and SEO consulting company, infinFX. This is the first version of infinFX that I coded entirely in transitional XHTML and CSS.

After the site was finished, I validated all of the source code using the W3C’s XHTML Validator.

What is Validation?

According to the W3C:

Validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard, such as those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for HTML and XML-derived Web document types, or by the WapForum for WML, etc. It serves a similar purpose to spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax, but is much more precise and reliable than any of those processes because it is dealing with precisely-specified machine languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language.

Why Should You Validate?

Non-valid pages rely on error correction by web browsers. Since not all web browsers are the same, while your page may look fine in one browser, it may appear smugly in another. By validating, you are ensuring your web site is fully web standards compliant and will appear (mostly) uniform across different browsers and operating systems.

Once your site has passed the validation test, you are awarded with a little validation badge that you can place on your site to show off to your readers that your page is standards compliant.

Optimizing infinFX for Search Rankings

Last week I posted an SEO Case Study highlighting some of the ways a page is made more search engine friendly. The company owner asked me to remove the company name from my blog as she doesn’t want visitors to visit my blog before her site, so that is why I reposted the article. The company web site, which was previously in Google’s supplemental index, is now ranked #2 for a search for the company name (which interestingly, is somewhat competitive as there are many companies of the same name).

Anyway, I have been working on better optimizing infinFX for the phrase “Scottsdale web design” as that is where my business is based and the local market is very competitive. I am happy to report that if you type in “scottsdale web design” into Google, I am now fluctuating between the bottom of the first page and top of the second page of SERPs. In the next few weeks, I am sure I will be ranked within the top 5 listings, consistently. On MSN, infinFX is ranked #1 for “scottsdale web design.”

Most of our business comes from referrals, so it will be provide for an influx of new clients when we start to rank well for local “web design” search results.

Coincidentally, today we received our first call from someone who found our company through Google. Apparently they typed in “e-commerce design in scottsdale” and found our web site and proceeded to call us. I quoted them a great price on an e-commerce setup and it looks like it will result in a new client. That is the benefit of SEO pure and simple – more people can find you.

Integrating a Blog into infinFX

Perhaps the biggest reason I wanted to redesign infinFX was so that it would be easy to turn a portion of the site into a WordPress template as I plan on integrating a company blog very soon. The company blog will cover general marketing and web development tips. However, I will still be posting the majority of my web development articles on this site. The blog will actually feature a few guest bloggers, so if any of you are interested in guest blogging on the infinFX Web Dev blog, please contact me.

Rewriting the Copy

The final step for the infinFX web site will be rewriting a majority of the copy so that it will lead to higher conversions. I plan on installing Interspire’s SendStudio email marketing software here soon so that I am able to follow up with prospective clients on a regular basis and distribute a company newsletter.

Premium Web & Blog Design + Guranteed Satisfaction

Finally, if anyone is looking for web site and/or blog design, infinFX offers competitive rates and and guarantees client satisfaction.

Visit www.infinFX.com for more information…

Recently I took on a new client to assist in some search engine optimization. The site was receiving ZERO search engine traffic. For a specialized business, such as an industrial and insurance job recruiting company, search engine traffic can be very beneficial because it is so highly-targeted.

After taking a look at the web site, although it looked nice and was easy to navigate, I noticed it had some fundamental flaws that were preventing it from ranking well in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Please note, I did not design this web site – I am only recoding parts of it so it will rank better for particular search queries.

In this case study, I will outline the SEO flaws of the web site and present the solutions to these problems. On a side note, it makes no sense to me why a web developer would create a web site only to have it be completely ignored by the search engines.

If you have any basic understanding of the benefits of SEO, it is relatively easy to design a well-optimized site from the start by using proper tags and integrating the keywords into the page copy. However, it seems quite often lately, I come across existing corporate web sites which are so terribly optimized for search engines that they not only contain major design and usability flaws, but are listed in the supplemental index and do not even rank on the first page for a search query of the company name!

Current Status of Search Engine Rankings

As of a few days ago, the company, which specializes in job recruitment for the industrial and insurance industries, was not even present in Google’s main search listings – it was being listed in the supplemental index.

For those of you who don’t know what the supplemental index is, it is basically Google’s trash can index where it deems pages as not search-worthy. An SEO’s worst fear is to have his or her site listed in the supplemental index. Luckily, if you understand the basic principles of SEO, you never have to worry about this.

What are the implications of being listed in the supplemental index? Well, a few days ago, if you typed in the company name into Google, the web site was not even listed on the first two pages. My goal is to get the site in the top 3 for that query and several other queries for various other keyword phrases.

It is no surprise, however, that the site was listed in the supplemental index, because based on its source code, Google probably had no clue what the web site was about. Here are the problems and solutions to better optimizing that web site, or any web site, for that matter, for search engine relevance:

Problems with the Original Page Design

• No text-based copy on the home page. All of the page copy was image-based. Unless you write ALT tags for the images, search engines have no way of being able to read text embedded within an image. Besides, even ALT tags do not carry as much weight as actual page copy.
• Image-based navigation needed to be converted to text-based. Again, search engines have no way of figuring out how to read image-based text. Not only that, but from a useability perspective, image-based navigations are not scalable when someone enlarges the font size from within a web browser.
• Poor use of title and header tags. These are key HTML elements that search engines use to figure out the relevency of a web site. On the web site, there were no header tags used and the titles contained no keywords. The home page even contained the word “welcome” – a redundant word for SERPs. On a side note, I recently wrote an article about why the page title is so important.
• Non-existent META Keyword and META Description tags. This is another no-no if you want a page to rank well in the SERPs. Although the META keywords tag is not used by Google, it is still used by some search engines. However, Google does take into account the META description tag when it shows SERPs for a query containing a particular keyword. You want to make sure you incorporate your keywords into your META description tag.
• No backlinks. A web site needs a good number amount of backlinks for Google or any other search engine to trust the site and believe it is a credible source of information. This can be fixed by adding the web site to free and trusted directories such as DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory.
• Keywords not present in any page copy. Of course, the first thing to do is figure out what keywords you want the site to rank for, but after that, if the keywords are not present in the page copy, you will have a tough if not possible time of ranking for those keywords.
• No sitemap. A sitemap is what Google and other search engines use to figure out what pages to crawl on a site. Every site needs a sitemap. I wrote a post a while back about why a sitemap is your blog’s best friend.

These were just a few of the issues that were causing to not be ranking well in the SERPs. I have already fixed most of those major problems, with the exception of the header tags.

I expect that within the next couple of weeks as I add the site to more targeted directories and further refine the page copy to contain the desired keywords, the site will receive even more search engine traffic and start to rank very well for the desired keywords.

I will keep you updated over the next few weeks as the rankings for the company continue to improve.

If you are interested in learning more about SEO, the best place to start is by reading Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Aaron Wall is basically known as the Michael Jordan of SEO and his eBook is truly one of the only ebooks worth reading. SEO really is not that difficult and every web developer should take it into consideration when developing new web sites. Learn more about the SEO Book…

Update 4/13/07 – A week ago the company’s site was listed in the supplemental index. Now, it is ranked #2 for the company’s name in Google’s listings. SEO rocks.

All web sites can be reached from two URL addresses: one with the WWW and the other without the WWW. For example, you can reach this blog by typing in http://www.natewhitehill.com and also http://natewhitehill.com.

However, it is imperative that you pick one address and stick with it for maximum search engine results and PageRank. If, generally, you use the version with the WWW and someone links to your site and they do not include the WWW, the search engine spiders will index that link as a separate domain from the one with the WWW.

For example, my good buddy, Matt from Take More Risks, recently had 2 separate PageRanks for his blog. His blog URL with the WWW had a PR 3, while the URL without the WWW had a PR 2. In other words, Google indexed that same domain as 2 separate ones. Most likely, he could have achieved a higher PageRank if he had set his preferred domain earlier. If you don’t quite understand PageRank, read this article about the upcoming PageRank update.

Which Preferred Domain Should You Choose?

Well, first you need to pick which version you rather use. I chose to go without the WWW, so my preferred domain is http://natewhitehill.com. There is no one reason to pick one instead of the other – it is purely a matter of preference. I chose to go without the WWW because having a longer domain name (13 characters, in my case), I thought it would make it easier for people to remember the URL if they just saw the natewhitehill.com and not the www.natewhitehill.com. John Chow, on the other hand, chose to use the WWW. Just to reiterate, there is no definitive reason to pick one over the other.

Setting the Preferred Domain

After you choose your preferred domain, you must now create a 301 Redirect to forward one address to the other. If you are hosted on a Linux server, you do this by editing your .htaccess file. You may first need to create one and to do this you must:

1) Create a simple text file and name it .htaccess
2) Modify it with the proper code (details below)
3) Upload it to the root of your server

Here is the code you should use if you want people to redirect from non-WWW to WWW:
(for example, if someone types in http://domain.com, it will forward to http://www.domain.com)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Here is the code you should use if you want people to redirect from WWW to non-WWW:
(for example, if someone types in http://www.domain.com, it will forward to http://domain.com)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://domain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

In both cases, make sure to replace “domain” with the URL of your domain.

By setting a preferred domain you are ensuring that Google and all the major search engines will only index links from one domain. This will help your PageRank the next time around and also you receive more weight in current search engine rankings.

If you have not set your preferred domain yet or have been putting it off, DO IT NOW. You will thank me later when you get a higher PageRank.

The other day I finished a new web site project which I forgot to mention. This is a web site for a retail store in the Fiesta Mall located in Mesa, Arizona. The company is Clearburst Wireless and they specialize in wireless and cell phone accessories.

The store owner, Carl, recently purchased the retail operation and was looking to have a web site developed to link to their online affiliate store. Please note, I did not create their online store, only their company web site which links to the online store. Another goal for their web site was to bring in new local customers to the physical retail location.

This site only took me a few days to create, as it is a one-pager, but I have been working on optimizing the on-page content so that it will receive as much search engine traffic as possible. I also have been adding the site to targeted web directories to create more linkbacks.

Optimizing for Search Engines

When optimizing for search engines, the goal is to use the keywords in the RIGHT places within the source code. One way that I have done this is by copying the basic home page (which contains all the relevent keywords) and creating separate pages that contain a specific keywords in the URL address, keyword as the header tag, and keyword in the page title. These pages are not linked to the home page, but to the Site Map, so that Google knows to index those pages.

Implemented the Google Maps API

Another cool thing I did to this site was use the Google Maps API to create an onpage and fully navigable Google Map that people can get a better idea of the physical location of the store.

Why Do I Mention My Projects?

A few people have asked me why I mention all of my finished projects on my blog. There are a few reasons.

1. I like showing my community the work I have been doing.
2. It creates another linkback to the new site.
3. Google crawls my site almost everyday and new sites get indexed faster if they are linked to mine.
4. It provides a little bit of PR for the company.

If any of you need wireless accessories for your cell phones, you can shop online at their store. Tell them Nate sent you! Thanks to Carl Krawczyk for the opportunity to work on this project.

Visit the web site for Clearburst Wireless.

How would you like to increase your search engine traffic easily and significantly? My site receives around 30-40% of its traffic each week from Google and other search engines.

As you probably know, Google is the most widely used search engine, and if you are not in Google’s index, you are missing out on a significant amount of traffic.

Today I will explain why a sitemap is so beneficial to blogging and how it can easily increase the amount of search engine traffic you receive.

What is a sitemap?
In a nutshell, a sitemap is an XML text file which contains all of the links on your site and their respective priority. By using a sitemap, you are showing Google that your site is well organized and ready for indexing.

When a search engine spider, such as the Googlebot, gets ready to crawl your site, it first looks for a sitemap. If it does not find a sitemap, it crawls your site manually and has to determine for itself the most relevant pages. The advantage of having a sitemap is that Google will take less time to crawl your site, crawling will occur more frequently, and the Googlebot will automatically know what pages are the most relevant.

How does Google know when to crawl your site?
Everyone should use Google Webmaster Tools. By using Webmaster Tools and adding a sitemap, you can boost the chance that Google will crawl your site more often.

The first step is to verify you are the owner of your web site. You do this by adding a meta-tag to your site which shows Google that you own that particular site. Upon verifying site ownership, you can add a sitemap.

Google Webmaster Tools also contains a variety of other useful tools that show you how you rank for various keywords and what possible 404′s Google has found in your site structure. Here is a picture from Google Webmaster Tools showing the last time my site was indexed.

How do I create a sitemap?
Luckily, there is a very handy WordPress plugin called Google Sitemap Generator which will automatically build a new sitemap everytime you publish a new post. The great thing about WordPress is that it is already very SE-optimized as far as onpage structure and source code. If you use this plugin in combination with Optimal Title, you are virtually guaranteeing that your site will rank well for a variety of different keywords. For more information about Optimal Title and its benefits, see this post.

The other advantage of using the Google Sitemap Generator plugin is that it will automatically ping Google telling them to reindex your site when you submit a new post. My site is now recrawled by Google almost everyday. This plugin also gives you the ability to set the priority of pages and posts on your site.

In conclusion, all bloggers should build a sitemap. Every post you write contains a variety of keywords people search for everyday. Wouldn’t it be nice to get more targeted traffic for free? The combination of Google’s Webmaster Tools and the Google Sitemap Generator WordPress Plugin make it is very easy to increase the amount of SE traffic your site receives.

For more information, please see:

• Google’s Webmaster Help Center
• Google Sitemap Generator WordPress Plugin Download Page

All hail democracy! No, not the system of government. I am talking about the new AJAX WordPress plugin, Democracy.

Democracy is a sweet little plugin that lets you insert a poll into your blog. It is compiled in AJAX, so it looks delicious, is easy to work with, and performs miracles. You can test it out on the sidebar of my blog. I will be adding a new poll question every month.

My first poll question is: Is domain parking dead? Read my post on Our Meeting with a Domain Investing Mogul: Domain Parking Is Dead to learn more about why it seems like domain parking is going to soon be a thing of the past.

New technologies are emerging that are allowing unique, high-quality web sites to be created automatically based on a few keywords. We first heard about this concept with WhyPark, a new company which allows you to easily replace your traditional parked-domain pages with full content-driven minisites. WhyPark also allows you to use your own advertising code, which will increase your income compared to Sedo, which splits the ad revenue with you.

However, WhyPark is only at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to creating unique content sites for parked pages. Searchmarketing LLC, a company in my hometown of Scottsdale, Arizona is in the early stages of forever changing domain parking and web development as we know it.

For more information:

• Download the AJAX Polling Plugin “Democracy”
• Read more about my meeting with a domain investing mogul
• Learn more about WhyPark’s new content creation technology

Everyone’s favorite dot com mogul, John Chow, has published an excellent article on the top linking strategies he has used to generate his blog over 7,218 links from 1,952 different blogs (according to Technorati).

I have implemented several of John’s linking strategies over the past month and have gotten some great results. My blog is now ranked in the top 100,000 on Technorati after my first month of blogging. Specifically, visiting your fellow blogger’s blogs and leaving comments is a great way to make friends and form connections in the community. I am even in talks with several of my fellow bloggers about starting up a network of niche blogs that will appeal to a much larger audience.

According to John Chow:

Links are the backbone of traffic. The more links you have coming to your blog, the higher your traffic level. Search engines, like Google, place an extremely high value on links. Google’s PageRank system is largest based on how many sites are linking to you – the more links, the higher the PageRank. …read more.

What is something we always want more and can never get enough of? Web traffic. Traffic is the best indicator of Internet popularity. If you do not have traffic, no one is hearing what you have to say. And isn’t that the point, to be heard?

Over the past month I have been researching how to increase traffic. I have read dozens of blogs and many eBooks on the best methods to generate traffic. However, one book has stood out from the rest as far as tried and tested knowledge – Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.

Aaron Wall is a professional Search Engine Optimizer (aka, SEO). SEO is the practice of working to make your sites appear in the top search results. It is generally a two-stage process: developing a web site which is “search engine optimized” and then building as many backlinks as possible to your site. The more high-quality links your site has, the more weight the search engines will place on your site, giving you better rankings. Over the past few years, SEO has become an extremely lucrative business.

The SEO book is 328 pages and includes free lifetime updates. The fact is that SEO is not hard. Anyone can be successful at it with the right information. The book is very well laid out, and will instantly bring years of knowledge to anyone looking to increase traffic to their sites. Aaron even guarantees that you will see 3x your normal traffic in 90 days, or else he will refund your money.

To anyone looking to increase traffic to their site, I highly recommend the SEO Book.