2009 Best SEO Semmy Award Winning Post

Came across the 2009 first place SEO Semmy award winning post today, while making my blog rounds and thought I would recognize it. The Semmy awards is an annual award honoring the best articles and blog posts from the search marketing industry, as voted by the industry. The 2009 SEO Winner was a post by Gyutae Park of Search Engine Journal. His winning post was entitled, 12 Steps to Complete Search Engine Domination - From Zero to Hero in Just 6 Months. It is a very thorough post and one that should be bookmarked and referred to on occasion. It would also benefit you to browse around the Semmy site and look at the winners and runner ups in all of the categories.

Blogs I Like To Read

I got a request via email the other day to give a list of blogs I read on a daily basis. Well being as I am a little under the weather tonight, I thought this would make for a great no thinking post on my end. So in no particular order from my bookmarks, here is a list of blogs I read on a daily basis.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog
http://www.wolf-howl.com/
http://www.problogger.net/blog/
http://www.searchengineguide.com/
http://www.seobook.com/blog
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/
http://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/
http://yoast.com/
http://www.shoemoney.com/

Free Htaccess Tool

I was running through some bookmarks today and wanted to make sure everyone had this one listed. It is a free htaccess tool. This tool you will enable you to create .htaccess commands for hotlink protection, password protection, or blocking of hitbots. You can also generate error documents and block certain IPs as well with this tool. Make sure to bookmark this tool.

A Few Good Links

Well I got a good bug going today. In between the trips to the bathroom, I thought I would post a couple of good links for you to bookmark.

SEO Tools

Internet Marketing Handbook

Both of these you will definitely want to bookmark.

Some good news today, is I am getting a ton of PHP code reading done today, which is a plus. The bad news is I am not getting a lot of web work I had planned for today done.

As the saying goes... SH!T Happens!

HTML For The Newbies

This is another post geared at the newbies of Build A Niche Store or newbies to webmastering as a whole. There are tons and tons of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) html editors out there. Even Build A Niche Store comes with one as well. Although these editors are easy to point and click and have easy menu items, you are going to have to learn basic HTML at some point. There are two great sites for learning HTML. One is Html Goodies and the other is Web Monkey. There will be times where knowing code will help you in so many ways. Just because these editors make it easier on you, does not mean you should not know how to adjust what is under the hood. HTML is very simple to learn and there are tons of printable reference sheets on the web as well. Mix this learning into your routine and learn it. Once you have gotten HTML down, you need to move on to learning CSS with stands for cascading style sheets. Knowing CSS will help in editing your own templates and code for your BANS stores as well.

eBay Category Changes Blog

Here is a great bookmark to stay on top of all of those pesky eBay category changes. I highly suggest you check in on this blog at least twice a month so you can be ready for any category changes that may impact your Build A Niche Stores.

Go Deep With Articles, Blog Comments & Social Bookmarking Post

As we talked in the past about directory submissions, most only let you submit the root domain as a link. Over time you need to be getting as many backlinks as possible to interior pages of your Build A Niche Stores as well. If you are submitting an article to an article directory, most allow 2-3 links in the about/bio section of the article. Make sure you take full advantage of these and link to pages inside of your niche store with relevant keywords for the anchor text of the page you are getting a link to. Make sure with all comments on blogs you try to link to interior pages as well. A good tool when submitting to Social bookmark sites is Bookmark Demon. This tool will help automate this process and help in getting those deep backlinks out there in a hurry. I recently bought Bookmark Demon and have been very happy with it and it has already paid for itself with the results it produces. You never know when one of those backlinks to an interior store page might get a higher PR love from Google when then in fact helps pass that love throughout the rest of your store pages. It also helps in the overall backlink process and appears natural if not overdone.

***Bonus Post*** Everyone Twitter

Thought I would also add a bonus post that I slowly am becoming accustomed to Twitter. It is good to use to keep in touch social network wise and even post about a new BANS store you have. I am not a huge fan of tinyurl, but have been using it with Twitter. You can follow me here.

Google Stop Words

Google uses a list of stop words that are pretty much ignored if you you use them in a search with another word. Here is the list. Now I am not saying do not use them in the title of your niche store, but if Google ignores them and you need the character space, do not worry about leaving them out. I do however use them in my meta description tag as I have more characters to work with. This is not a major concern for SEO, but one you should be acquainted with none-the-less.

US Free Ads and your Niche Stores

I am a big fan of US Free Ads. Let me say first, they are nofollow, but if written correctly your ad can sore to page 1 of Google for a long tail keyword. Instead of hashing other info out there, I thought I would share this tutorial in tips. I really suggest you make your ads as eye pleasing aspossible and suggest you use the html function to really build a nice ad. Ad pictures if at all possible and lots of keyword driven ad wording as well. US Free ads is really worth the monthly fee.

Back to building niche stores

After about a week or so of doing some BANS tutoring and building a few custom BANS niche store templates, I am getting back to business of building some new niche stores. I highly suggest you register a domain for use of experimenting with new templates. It makes it very easy to tweak some of the templates for niche store use. I also may mention that you may want to brush up on your css codes as well. I will share a must have bookmark with lots of great resources for webmasters. There are a ton of useful sites here that will help with your niche store customization.

Tags explained and how they help in SEO

I thought I would make this post about clarifying what some of the tags do in relation to search engine optimization for your Build A Niche Stores. There is a great article here on a breakdown of everything and it is a very good read.

The Magic of Thinking Big with your Build A Niche Store

Now that we are past the EPN eBay update for Build A Niche Store. I wanted to turn you on to one of my favorite books that I think should be in every BANS owners library. The Book is called "The Magic of Thinking Big".

There is so much negative in this world that you have top constantly equal it out with positive thinking or as some call PMA (positive mental attitude). This book does the trick and should be read and re-read at least 4 times a year. Let me tell you that BANS works, but it is up to you to work it. This book will help release some bigger thoughts in your head and will translate into bottom line profits for you as well.

Now go get this book.

SEO Tips & Techniques for newbies

I wanted to pull out an old bookmark for some brushing up and some good stuff for new niche store owners as well. It is a link to the high rankings forum. There really is some great reading in this post with links to other things as well.

On another note if you have installed BANS 3.0 please check your error logs and look for multiple 302 redirects. Let us know in the forum if you are seeing them.

SEO fast start book and another tool

Posting a little early today, as I intend to watch the Daytona 500 and take the rest of the evening off. I came across a well written SEO fast start ebook I thought I would share. While this is not the end all do all, it will give newbie niche store owners something they can hit the ground running with. I do suggest the SEO book from Aaron Wall when you are ready to get serious about optimization.

The next little free BANS tool is by Only Wire, it is another great social bookmarking tool I suggest you use for submitting links. Have a great Sunday.

Over 125 Link Building Strategies

Came across this page a few days ago and bookmarked it. It is slightly outdated, but still very relevant as far as building links. It really stresses building backlinks slowly and very naturally. Some of the links are broken, but this article needs to be in your bookmarks.

I can not stress enough the need for original content as well. You will gain backlinks over time just by people linking to your content.

Happy reading!

A must have Free BANS Tool

I was going through my bookmarks and came across a link I think everyone should have. EBAY keyword tool of auctions that have ended on EBAY. You should really take a little time to play with this and learn how to drill down on some of the keywords. Last night alone I found a great keyword phrase to build my next store around. You always want to look back and see if there are constantly enough products you are focusing in on being listed as well. This tool is not a secret, just one that probably is lost in your bookmarks, as it was mine.