$5.99 Domains & Another Google Web Based Rank Finder Tool Surfaces

Time and time again I get emails from readers who think they rank in position x for their keyword in Google and wonder why they are not getting any traffic. Often times I come to find the person does not actually rank where they think they rank. This is because the rankings they see in Google on their end are influenced by the searchers IP address, the language of your computer, past search history and other factors linked to the new "Google Personalized Search" feature. Now true rank finder tools are nothing new, but a another free one called Scroogle has surfaced that gives you a clean, unbiased search to truly see where you rank in Google for certain keywords. The site is not new, just one that has resurfaced over time. It is fun to play with, especially if you do not use the Rank checker plugin offered up for Firefox. Play with it yourself and see how it fits your need.

Also one final note. Name.com has $5.99 .COM & .NET domains for sale today only. July 1st, all registrars are going up as I previously reminded you. This is for new registrations only and you need to use the coupon code in the blog post before checking out. This is sort of like a last call at a bar. Take advantage of it.

Cutts Talks Nofollow On Internal Links - I Am Alive & Well

Finally back to moving around but still a little groggy. Procedure went well today and now I am being referred for a bowel exam. Sounds worse then what it is. Thanks for all the nice emails I received. I will post the recent Matt Cutts video for you today in which Matt says no to using nofollow on internal links on your site. This reaffirms that indeed page sculpting is dead and it might even hurt your site getting some juice in instances.

Out Of Action A Few Days

I am having my second colonoscopy performed on Tuesday to look for a source of problems I have been having lately. Tonight is the clean out the colon night before hand and I can tell you it is none too fun. I do not dare venture too far from my office bathroom. If you have an email in to me, I doubt I will get back to you tonight or Tuesday as I am pretty miserable right now. I may or may not be able to post on Tuesday depending on how I react when I come out of anesthesia. Last time it took a full day for me to get back in my own head. Anyways, should I not post on Tuesday, I assure you I am not dead, although I might wish I was. Oh well, back to the crapper as nature is calling me again.

Windows Movie Maker Tutorials

I received two emails in regards to the Saturday post on using Windows Movie Maker. The request were for instructions on what I meant as far as making videos of images with Movie Maker. This is a free program likely already on your computer and you can read some detailed tutorials here on creating a photo montage with Windows Movie Maker as well as a video I found from 7 Dollar Video Store as well. Both of these tutorials should easily bring you up to speed on making these videos for free. Keep in mind you can also search Youtube for more tutorials on both Movie Maker or the GFX Video Writer program.

Stop Ignoring Video & Youtube

I went on a video spree a few weeks back to see what kind of effect a full out video blitz would have on a site. I made quite a few videos using both the Windows Movie Maker and the GFX Video Writer. I concentrated on 3 sites of mine during this blitz and uploaded the videos to several video sites including Youtube. Several people still do not know that in their Youtube Channel profile, you can add a link to your site that is actually dofollow. Now imagine adding 10 niche related videos to each niche specific channel. If you SEO each video submission with keywords, tags and a savvy researched keyword title, you will be amazed at the places it will show up over a short period of time. Several webmasters highly automate sites that post videos daily. WP Robot is a perfect example of this and there are several others that do it honestly as well. Over time, your channel page will gain some authority and be a solid backlink to your niche sites. In addition, depending on how good your videos are, you will get some targeted traffic as well. These videos do not have to be long or anymore than just pictures stitched together with background music or spoken word audio. Be creative, mine sucked at first but got better over time. Start today and stop ignoring video.

Website Magazine Now Podcasting

I have been a subscriber to Website Magazine for quite a while. It is an excellent industry publication and I would recommend it to anyone. Today it was announced that have begun a weekly radio show, which really turns out to just be a weekly podcast, but you get the picture. The first episode has been released here and you can download it to your mp3 player or phone here. In this inaugural podcast, they discuss the upcoming August Website Magazine issue, including a discussion on creating immersive content, link buying and SEO for WordPress. They also address topics that include an e-mail marketing study by GetResponse and Twitter's new advertising system. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast feed so you are notified when ever a new podcast is released. This is a great way to end a Friday. If you have it in your budget, make sure to subscribe to the magazine as well.

ReviewAZON Update for Wordpress 3.0 Now Available

A little under the weather this evening thus the late post because I have been zonked out a while, but wanted to let everyone know who owns ReviewAZON that an update for Wordpress 3.0 is now available. For some reason this dumped in my spam folder so I imagine it may have happened to a few others as well. You can obtain the latest updates by simply going to the ReveiwAZON support forum, logging in and downloading the latest release from the ReviewAZON Member Files section of the forum. Check your spam folder if you have not gotten this email as it will have all the instructions of who, what, when and where.

SugarRae Hoffman Addresses Affiliate Sites & Google May Day Update

The well respected Rae Hoffman (SugarRae) has a great new post up today on addressing affiliate sites that use feeds in relation to the recent Google May day update. If your site suffered losses in longer tail organic traffic, Rae has some great tips and theories to try. As you can imagine, more unique content is suggested as well as changing up the order of anything default. If you are running sites that are nearly 100% automated, she suggest changing up the order on things. Also suggested is watching your internal linking structure and try to keep pages 2-3 clicks from anywhere on the site. As we long have known now, page rank sculpting is dead. You should arrange the navigation for the end user. One of the last suggestions is of course deep linking. Whenever building backlinks unnaturally, you should be mixing in as many deep linking backlinks varied with rotated anchor text. This is not a new practice by any means, but one that can lift a page. All in all, you can see what the May Day update was designed to do. Anyone can can aggregate several long tail phrases on a page, but the winner after this update is the webmaster who can effectively target 2-3 long tail phrases per page via proper content and SEO instead of trying to build aggregated, scraped pages that try to catch all. Great post and two thumbs up to Rae for a well thought out post.

Cutts Clarifies Frequency In Relation To Blogs & Google

I am skipping out for the evening as my Rotary club is having it's yearly banquet dinner tonight so I do not know what time I will be back home. i while make this short and sweet. In the latest Google webmaster video, Matt Cutts clarifies how much frequency does or does not play into SEO and PageRank for blogs & other dynamic sites.

Get Article Content Ideas With Wordtracker Keyword Questions Tool

A great way to brain storm ideas for article content for your niche site is to use the Wordtracker Keyword Questions Tool as a starting point for your research. You will be both filling a need and targeting long tail keyword phrases in the process. This tool works great as a starting point and I would not get too hung up with the volume of searches it returns. What I do is to use it in conjunction with either Micro Niche Finder or Market Samurai to dig a bit deeper into both competition and volume. The type articles you produce that answer common questions in a niche, the more likely they will get linked to naturally. These types of backlinks are gold. Often times you can address several of the questions in just one article as well and target the phrases SEO wise by using h2 header tags. You do not have to limit your self to one question per article. Often times several of these phrases are commonly linked together in a way that just one article can address several of them as well as open your site up to several other longer tail organic keyword phrases on top of it. Give it a whirl and run some through either MNF or MS tools as well.

Happy Fathers Day - Twitter Closing In On Google?

I hope you are enjoying your Fathers Day if you are indeed a father or are enjoying it with your own father. I took my brother and father up to the Indian casino today and am taking my self some down time to spend with family. Just so I can deliver you something to read on this lazy Sunday, I point you to this post on Twitter Getting One Step Closer to Google on the Website Magazine blog. I will be back full force on Monday and hope everyone had as great of weekend as I have had.

One Last Domain Name Price Increase Reminder

Sorry for the late post as my baby brother is in town and I took him out in the boat fishing. With the way the oil keeps coming, it might be his last chance to do so. Any ways in checking my late email, I had a reminder from name.com about the forthcoming price increase by VeriSign on .com & .net domains that takes effect on July 1st. The price for .COM registrations will increase by 7% and the new price for .NET registrations will go up by 10%. The price increase as explained will apply to new registrations as well as renewals that occur on or after July 1st. I highly advise you renew any of your domain names that are even close to expiring before June 30, to take advantage of the savings. If you own as many as I do, this can save you quite a bit of money. The same goes for new domains as well. Nothing wrong with letting them stay parked until you can build on them.

StatCounter Global Stats Report & IE6 Users Declining

Happy Friday everyone. I ran across the StatCounter Global Stats Report the other day and was floored at the amount of traffic that Facebook, StumbleUpon and Twitter send to websites that use StatCounter on their sites. I knew the three were growing, but the Facebook numbers are astounding. Hopefully you are embracing social media as it is here to stay. You can play with the sorting of statistics in 9 different categories and also by country/region and date. A good little bookmark to have as a quick glance.

Another quick fact I came across is that the usage of the web browser Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in the US and Europe fell below the 5% mark for the first time in May. Good riddance to that piece of crap. Worst browser version ever made in my opinion.

WordPress Version 3.0 Now Available

If you are using Wordpress as your CMS, you will likely notice in your admin dashboard that WordPress 3.0 is now available. As always, I suggest giving a little time before upgrading all of your sites and would concentrate on just one or a small handful of sites to make sure it plays well with everything. Make sure to check all of your plugins installed and extra functions you might have installed after upgrading and make sure everything is as it should be. Wordpress continues to lead the way as a superior content management system and is great to use to build niche sites, especially with the PHPBay and PHPZon plugins. It is all I build with now and I suggest you make the move soon, if you have not already.

Matt Cutts Comments On Video Sitemaps

If you remember back about 10 days ago, I touched on sitemaps for videos for sites that implement them. Matt Cutts has now chimed in on it in an interview with Mark R Robertson of Reel Seo. Below is the video interview with Matt addressing the subject. I am working on a newer project myself that will make use of quite a bit of video and thus this topic as been quite important to me.

Google’s Fairly New Reasonable Surfer Patent

I ran across a post by Bill Slawski from SEO by the Sea on the newest Google patent termed the Reasonable Surfer patent. It is intriguing reading in itself and yesterday Eric Enge took it a bit further on Search Engine Land. After reading both I came to the same conclusion I have always had going into reading it in that Google wants great sites linking to great relevant sites. It wants a more reputable, spamless web so-to-speak. The algorithm keeps getting tweaked, yet on the back end so many find ways to cheat it. There will always be people and ways who can trick Google, it is what makes the search engine world go around.

Aggregation has its place on the web, but I have been in the corner for a while of trying to get away of from thin sites that are 100% aggregated. Do I still have some of those sites myself? Sure. Do I still spin thoroughly articles and use them off site? Absolutely. Do I strive to put better content on my own sites and give the surfer a better place to come to? Yes, I do. Especially over the first half of this year. I can tell you it has paid off greatly too.

When trying to trample through all of this, just look at the rankings. Look at the top 10 to top 20 sites. Look at their backlinks, look at their content, look at their user experience. Spam still gets through as do aggregated sites, but it is getting less and less. I will close with the final paragraph Enge had in his article as it sums all of this up nicely in my opinion:

The concept of how a reasonable surfer would behave appears to have a lot of merit, and the search engines are investing everything they can in better ranking systems, and ones that reduce the impact of spam. But ultimately, basic usability guidelines still apply. Understanding how a user sees your site and their behavior when they interact with it has always made sense. Now consider the idea that this can influence the ranking of a given page, but also the value of the links it provides to other web page.

Why You Should Be Using The W3 Total Cache Wordpress Plugin

When Joost de Valk speaks, I listen. I have learned so much in regards to Wordpress from him over the years as he is one of the authorities on it. In a recent post he illustrates why everyone should use the W3 Total Cache Wordpress plugin. Yoast as he is called, says the plugin is the best caching plugin for WordPress out there at the moment. Youtube video is below:

You Can't Put A Price On A Great Content Writer

I hated to write. I never dreamed one day I would have a blog with almost 1000 post that I would post almost daily on for almost 3 years. I found I like to write, no matter how bad it might be, about things I like, in niches I like. Does that mean I write 100% of my own content for my huge stable of sites? Absolutely not. I pay great writers. I have 4 solid writers I use at a moments notice now. It all depends on the niche and the content I need written. 250 word product blurbs? I have a great writer on Textbroker and an independent I found on a forum. Articles? I have 2 great ones I use on Need An Article. It took me a little while to find these writers that fit my style that I look for and I just can't put a price on them. They are indeed worth every penny I outsource to them. Do I still write some of my own stuff? Sure I do, but I find myself trusting my writers more and more plus money is not an issue. I am coming out of period of revamping 20 older thin sites into power packed niche authoritative sites. It was time consuming keyword and product research on my end, but translated well into easily outsourcing most of the writing. 12 of the completed revamped sites are already producing eye popping conversions on Amazon and 4 of the other 8 have seen their organic long tail traffic increase almost daily as the backlink building is taking hold.

When working out writers of your own, make sure you clarify the rules up front of what you are looking for. It will save tons of time and communication. Explain you do not want keyword stuffed generic articles or product descriptions just trying to meet the word quota. Provide them links to other works when you can for research and factual info. With product descriptions, I look for 250 or so words full of features, benefits and specs. Yes, it can be done in less than 300 words and not cost you an arm or a leg. These type of works only run you around 5 bucks each. What? 5 bucks for a page that can easily earn 20 times that in month? Yes. It is true. Now are my 4 writers the only 4 writers out there? No, it may take you some time to find a few that meet your own needs, but when you do, you can't put a price on them. Make sure to treat them good and keep them busy.

Free SEO Friendly Images Wordpress Plugin

The last quick post I have scheduled while away in New Orleans deals with another useful and yet free Wordpress plugin. As you can see by the post this week, I wanted to keep it nice and simple and focused on Wordpress, which I believe everyone should be using or at least trying to learn to move away from BANS and other type platforms. Wordpress continues to amaze and excel in all facets of content management systems. Back to the plugin though. SEO Friendly Images Wordpress plugin by Vladimir Prelovac is an optimization plugin which automatically updates all of your images with the proper ALT and TITLE attributes. This is often a forgotten task by many Webmasters, but can have an effect in both the SERPS along with getting traffic from the image side of the major search engines as well. If you are building product review sites with pictures of the products in post, this plugin is a must. Give it a try. I will be returning Saturday night from our getaway and will be back posting live on Sunday. I hope everyone had a great and prosperous weekend.

Broken Link Checker Wordpress Plugin

Continuing on with the Wordpress plugin nature of post this week, I will close this weeks post with a very simple Broken Link Checker Wordpress plugin. This plugin is free and does exactly as you would think the name implies it does, as it monitors your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. It also will Also run detection for redirected links as well. Once you install the plugin, it will begin parsing your posts and blogroll looking for links. Depending on the size of your site and the number of post, this can take from just a few minutes to several hours so be warned. It is a pretty straight forward plugin and a great one to have in your toolbox. I hope everyone had a productive week as you should be reading this on Friday evening if it post as scheduled.

GD Press Tools Wordpress Plugin

I am keeping the post nice and simple while I am away and pretty much focused on Wordpress plugins. This should get to you by 6:45 central Thursday evening and a plugin that is both free and highly useful in keeping Wordpress running clean and sharp. This GD Press Tools Wordpress Plugin will especially make a difference on larger sites you have, but has other features you can use on smaller sites as well. They have a Pro version, but I have yet to buy it. Make sure you read the tutorials before using so you know and understand what function does what. I like the optimize, remove overhead and repair all tables if needed function along with the abiolity to remove all revisions for published posts and pages to save room and clean things up a bit. This truly is a great plugin and I am sure you will agree.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator Wordpress Plugin

By the time you read this, I will be on my way out of town to New Orleans, but I have recently started back using the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator Wordpress Plugin to add to some sites. This should not be confused with an XML sitemap plugin as this is an onsite sitemap for both surfers and search engines alike. It is not make or break that you use it mind you, but it is an easier way to shoot link juice down to every page quickly as I list the sitemap link in the footer usually. It also easily links to the sitemap.xml file as well. Once again, it is not a mandatory to succeed type plugin, just an addon type, but many might not be aware it was out there. You can read more about it at the official plugin page here.

SEO Link Vine Back Open For Limited Time

Brad Callen has opened back up the doors to SEO Link Vine for an unspecified time once again. It had been closed to new members for a few weeks as he reached his maximum capacity for opening. It is unclear how long he will keep the doors back open, but I suggest you only sign up if you are serious about using the service. I luckily got in at the introductory site of $47.00, the rate is now $67.00, so you can see why I suggest this for those that are serious about using the service and know how to spin and submit several articles a month. If you are new to all this, you do not need this yet, but wanted everyone else who missed the opening to get a chance at getting in. I use it to the tune of 30 plus submissions a month and it has helped sites rise in rankings and built hundreds of backlinks. Especially for deep internal pages on sites I am promoting hard and heavy for long tail results.

I will be in New Orleans the rest of the week per my wife's demands of shopping, eating and gambling, so post will be written in advance and I will try to get to all emails as soon as possible. Have a great weekend.

Catching Up With The Matt Cutts Videos

I have been meaning to post one or two of these for a week or so, but got sidetracked with other post. Regardless, Matt Cutts has been busy posting more Google Webmaster videos that are pretty informative. One in fact addresses the recent "Google May Day update" as it has been termed which is causing several long tail keyword shifts in rankings. I am including 4 videos in this post with the latest being posted just today. I am posting from oldest to newest for your viewing pleasure.

Video Sitemap Wordpress Plugin

Just as your website should have a sitemap, Mark Dulisse makes a great case for a video sitemap should your site utilize much video. If you have used Wordpress for a while, you no doubt use the Google XML Sitemap plugin on every site you build. The Google Video Sitemap plugin is built the same way. Let me say that you will need your videos to be in FLV format or mp4 extensions, but that is not a problem if you use the GFX Video Writer I have talked about in the past. Mark also uses the JW Flash player plugin for his videos. Now there is a free alternative in the FLV Embed plugin that has a video sitemap feature if you choose to play with it. I will tell you though that the plugin no longer seems to be supported and does not work with Youtube videos any more. I used this plugin for a while on one of my sites and never knew the sitemap feature was there. Which ever way you choose to go, make sure you watch this video. I bought the plugin as I use a ton of video and wanted something proven, tested and supported.

The Momentum Plugin

Ok, while not really a REAL site plugin, it is a mental plugin of sorts that is often under utilized. Many that email or submit questions here or on the forums suffer from lost momentum. Now I certainly understand not everyone being blessed with the same time they can commit as I am, but I also see a lot of "wait and see" mentality going on as well. I have mentioned several times in the past that this business of building niche sites offers instant results in some areas, like content and backlink generation and other areas you can not see like ranking improvements and earnings. Can you jump up over night? Sure. Does it happen all the time? No. Many people waste so much time reading what does not work, that they fail to get ANY work done at all. How much work have you done to your own sites this past week? What about the week before that? Often times many lose the blind faith because the money is not in the account when they check the stats every 10 minutes. Are you in that class? Sadly many are. People refuse to believe that there are no secrets in addition to techniques. Many confuse the two. Build sites that do not suck. If you have to start thin, start thin. The thick/thin battle will always exist. I choose to stay on the thick side though as I have more bank account deposits that show it has worked better for me. Regardless, you must keep your momentum up and keep some sort of log of what you have done and are trying to do. You can drive coast to coast without a map, but why would you? You wouldn't stop every mile either, would you? Install the Momentum Plugin today and your bottom line will improve quicker than you think.

Matt Cutts Google I/O 2010 SEO Site Reviews Video

Just got word that an hour long video from the 2010 Google I/O has been posted that includes site reviews and SEO advice from Matt Cutts, Greg Grothaus and Evan Roseman. If you have never seen these before, you can indeed learn a thing or two during the reviews. Video is below.

Yet Another Commission Junction Wordpress Plugin

Thanks to the PHPBay forum, I stumbled across yet another Commission Junction Wordpress Plugin for you to play with. I am a long time user of the plugin put out by LoraGi, but it never hurts to try others along the way. You can try a free version of this MoneyPress plugin as long as you stay logged into whatever site you install it on. You and only you will see the output. You can then decide if you want to shell out the large sum of 5 bucks to have the full version of the plugin. I like to use PHPBay, a Commision Junction plugin and either ReviewAzon or PHPZon on all my niche sites in tabs as it gives my surfers a huge variety of places to buy from.

New Yoast SEO Wordpress Plugin Coming Soon

If you have read my blog for any length of time, you know I am a huge fan of Joost de Valk. He is a master when it comes to tweaking Wordpress especially when in comes to SEO. He has created several plugins over the years along with several great tutorials as well. In a post a few days ago, he mentioned 2 WordPress SEO Plugins you should NOT be using and takes a knock at a 3rd, All in one SEO pack. He claims the automatic generation of meta descriptions is a drawback of the plugin. Now I use Light SEO myself without problems, but do look forward to his own new SEO plugin that he mentions is forthcoming at the end of the post. There is also some great banter in the comments going that I have been keeping track of. Make sure you follow along as well.

Sexy Bookmarks Wordpress Plugin Revamped

I used the Sexy Bookmarks Wordpress Plugin a while ago, but found it was a bit buggy at times. As did several others come to find out. I recently read an article some where that said the plugin has been updated and now works pretty flawlessly. There is only one way to find out, but I have run it through several test on a site of mine and so far so good. It is always good to easily give your surfers a chance to share your post or pages on the multitude of web 2.0 social sites. I believe there will come a day when the popularity is measured on sites like Twitter and Facebook and used in ranking. Some say we are already seeing sights of that, yet I have not seen it proven for a fact. Regardless, sharing is sharing and any extra traffic you can get is golden. Especially if it is targeted within a user group or network. Give this free plugin a first or second look.