For a long time, I simply gauged my efforts by typing in the search term that I was targeting and hoped against hope that I would at least be ranked within the top five pages (preferably the first).  Then, I would go into Google Analytics and determine my top incoming links, top keywords and so on. While this approach isn’t overly complicated, it isn’t entirely intuitive for non-tech folks who are interested in sprucing up the search engine rank of their personal website.

Here at MUO, we strive to bring you the best tools to help with your SEO efforts. I recently listed 10 SEO mistakes you need to avoid – both Part 1 and Part 2. Dean listed some excellent SEO tips for Blogger blogs, and of course Karl hit on 3 excellent Wordpress SEO plug-ins.

In looking for a standalone app that could help with overall SEO analytics, I was pleased to discover Traffic Travis. In the highly competitive world of SEO, not much is free. Most services will analyze your site or provide monthly Search Engine ranking stats for a high monthly fee. At best, you may find a 7 day free trial somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong, the premium version of Traffic Travis is fairly pricey commercial software – but the makers of this software figured out the secret to creating positive buzz for their product. That is, offer a truly free product that is useful and powerful.

Today I will review the free version of Traffic Travis and show you how you can use it to analyze your own website and significantly improve your search engine page rank.

A Feature Overview Of This Free SEO Management Tool

Once you download and install the app, you’ll discover an application that has a nice clean, easy to understand layout. The major navigational buttons are on the left and more details about each are on the right.

The general features the software offers includes:

• Keyword Tools – To conduct your keyword research, and very limited in this free addition (see below).
• Search Engine Tools – An extremely useful feature that shows you how your site ranks and where your top backlinks are coming from (very cool, and very useful).
• PPC Analysis – Shows you where you should focus your PPC ad efforts based on top sites and top keywords.
• Page Analysis – Lets you analyze the SEO effectiveness of individual pages on your site.
• SEO Analysis – Specifically analyzes your site based on the keywords you’re trying to focus on with your blog or website.

The Keyword Tool research section is severely limited  – no competition data. However, you can type in general keywords you want to target and the tool will show you what phrases draw the highest organic searches on three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN).

Using The Search Engine Tools Can Improve Your SEO

To show you how effective this tool can be in analyzing your own blog, no matter how small or new it is – I’m going to utilize the SEO analytics features on my own young blog Top Secret Writers. Now, on this blog I often just post content without spending any time at all on SEO efforts, and other times I do. Lately I’ve been wondering what I’d need to do to go back and fix those things that I did in such a rush at the beginning.

Under the Search Engine Tools, you can define a whole list of keywords that you consider as your website’s core focus. In my case I listed things like advanced technologies, top secret government projects, UFOs and things like that. These are all fairly popular search engine phrases, but as you can see so far my blog doesn’t even make it on the radar.

Don’t give up! For new blogs, you need to focus on the other tools for now, and eventually you’ll start appearing under the major keywords that are more competitive.

Instead, click on “Top sites for keywords,” and you’ll discover which major sites do rank highest for the keywords that you would like to rank highly. You’re going to find that these are sites that are much older than yours (but not always). Other sites are just very competitive under those keywords – they have a lot of content that search engines rank as high value.

Considering how important incoming links are from highly ranked sites like this – where do you think you should be spending your time posting, writing and otherwise fraternizing with like-minded individuals like yourself? The best thing you can do for the rank of your site is to spend quality time reading, commenting on, and participating at the websites of your top competitors (this is the irony of SEO), linking to your own site whenever and wherever they allow it (just don’t spam!).

Now you’ll see why I really love the Search Engine Tools section. Click on “Backlinks to site” and you’ll discover all of the sites that have linked to you the most. Even if you’re new – if you’ve been writing interesting and useful content to your site, in time you’ll get followers and linkers, it’s inevitable. Also, if you’ve been promoting your own site from other sites (as you should be), you’ll notice those here as well. These other sites that link to you are essentially your fans, so you should go down this list and visit their site. Participate, comment and have valuable exchanges with the people there – this is what the blogosphere is all about!

Very Detailed Targeted Keyword Analysis

Another thing that I feel Traffic Travis does very well is the level of detail that it provides in analyzing search engine trends and statistics for the specific keywords you want to target. Here’s another TopSecretWriters example – at one point I wanted to write an article about Gravionics, a very weird fringe science concept. So, I actually did SEO optimize that article as much as I could, considering that the blog is still very young.

If you take Traffic Travis, go into the Keyword Research area and type in “gravionics”. It then provides you with a breakdown of the current top sites that rank highly with that term.

Traffic Travis will show you the sites that rank the highest on the term that you’re writing about. I did pretty well (ranked 13) considering that it’s a very small blog that just started up – but the more important information is the list of sites that rank above you for that term. Once again – here is valuable information you can use to improve your own ranking for that particular keyword phrase.

In this case, I should go to Barnes and Noble, Amazon and BiggerBooks and comment on that page, linking back to my blog entry (if it’s allowed). I should go to Yahoo Answers and answer or comment on the question and link back to my blog entry. Basically, the information from Traffic Travis will help you target your social networking efforts to more effectively improve the specific keyword rankings that you’re shooting for. And if you’re a glutton for punishment, you can even let Traffic Travis grade the SEO level of your page.

Hey, a B – not bad! But trust me – plenty of other pages I analyzed with this software got an F! When you blog, it’s hard to take the time to do all of those SEO techniques that you know you should – but in the long run, it will result in a stronger growth rate and a much higher quality blog drawing in large volumes of organic traffic every single day.

Share your own opinion about the Traffic Travis free SEO management tool, or let us know what other free SEO tools you find effective in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Most people think that to have access to this data you need to spend a lot of money on SEO services and analytics. The answer is HELL NO! We can do all of this for free using Google’s own tool called Hot Trends located here. This will give you access not only to the top 20 searched for keywords on Google from today but you can also use it to go back in time (sadly not forward yet!) to view the top twenty keywords for a specific date.

Now if you couple this with a little bit of analytics you can see how these keywords can help you improve your Google traffic. Let us take a look at the site and see how it works.

I started off by visiting Google Hot Trends and I saw this:

Listed on this page, from the top to the bottom, is first the search trends box. By adding some search keywords and hitting search trends you will see something similar to this:

This will show you the search volume for your term over a specific length of time or across specific regions. This is great for helping you nail down a search term to associate with your website.

Below that you have today’s date that you can change to view hot trending topics for recent dates or long ago. You do this like so:

Click on the change date link as shown above and you will then be able to change the date. I changed mine to February 1st 2010 and then saw this:

Sweet! Now you can add this module as an iGoogle Gadget to your Google homepage by clicking on the iGoogle Gadget button at the top right of the search term boxes next to the RSS link and icon.

When you click on this you will see something that looks similar to this.

After clicking on the Add to iGoogle button the widget will be added. If you are not logged into Google it will create a temporary page that you might or might not see the next time you log in. So log in first then add the widget. When you are finished, it will look like this:

And then finally the way I track Google’s hot trends and most popular search terms is by RSS feed (we covered ways to use RSS feeds here). That looks like this:

Yours may look different depending on what RSS feed reader you use to view the feed. I just clicked the link and allowed it to open in Firefox but you could plug this atom URL into your RSS reader. Clicking on any of the search terms will open a Google search for that specific topic!

Do you use Google Trends on a regular basis?  Or do you use another SEO tool?  If so, which one do you use?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

• (11)Traffic Travis – A Free SEO Management Tool To Check Your SEO Rank
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So what’s the big deal about your online identity? Why should you even care about online identity management? As the Internet has evolved into a massive research warehouse of data on almost anyone in the world, employers and background researchers often turn there first to quickly learn whatever they can about a potential employee. Anything they discover could either work for you or against you. So, how can you make sure that the Internet is working in your favor?

One option is certainly to use tools to hide from the search engines, going so far as to mask your IP whenever you’re on the net, or use disposable web tools to hide your identity, as Aibek described how to do. Doing this will protect you for a while, until someone else decides to publish something unflattering about you online. If you have a unique name, then you can be sure that the single page that the search engine can find about you – the unflattering page – is the one that will come up at the very top of the search engine results. Not a good thing.

One of the best ways to deal with online identity management, particularly if you are a prolific online writer, is to take control of your online identity by owning the domain for your name and then by dominating the SEO niche for your identity.

Create An SEO Optimized Biography Site

While it might come across as disgustingly vain, or as tooting your own horn, if you’re serious about online identity management as a blogger, a writer or otherwise – you need to look at what most authors do. If it isn’t already held hostage, they capture the domain for their name and then create a website to let their readers and fans know what they are working on and what work is coming down the pipeline.

I’ve enjoyed visiting StephenKing and DeanKoontz for years, as these two authors always served as my inspiration for writing. It’s nice to have such a personal and direct touch with the author that you love to read.

In order to do this, I needed the domain for my name. I thought the odds were pretty good I’d never get it, but then again, what kind of name is Dube, right? So I checked, and sure enough, I was able to register the domain for RyanDube.com. Sweet!

With that out of the way, the next step was to choose a good free Wordpress theme. Now, I opt for Wordpress because I’m most familiar with it as a blog platform and I use it for all of my domains. You could choose any blog platform you wish, just make sure that the theme you choose has:

1. Plenty of widgets that allow you to insert a very visible bio on the main page.
2. Plugins for your social network accounts like Twitter.
3. Of course, the ability to tie in RSS feeds from all of the online locations that publish your work.

For my purposes, I chose the excellent “Scarlett” theme by Jinsona Designs.

I love this theme as a bio page because it’s clean and professional, it features all of the items I listed above, and best of all there’s an amazingly cool photo slideshow feature at the top of the page. The theme is one of the easiest to customize that I’ve seen, with most features accessible from the Wordpress Appearance – Options menu. Using the 3-step approach I’ve outlined earlier here at MakeUseOf, I loaded up this theme onto my newly registered domain.

Next, all that was left was loading content. Now, for most blogs, this would seem like an overwhelming task when you’re faced with an empty blog. But in this case, I have countless articles across the net to choose from. All I want to do is provide a few short blog updates with reviews of those articles with links, and then embed feeds from my many article sources in the sidebars and on all of the widgets. Below, you’ll see my blog with four such “review” style articles added.

Loading up the top slideshow is as easy as typing the word “screen” into the name field for custom fields, and include the URL to the photo for that article. Your articles should highlight some of your best work. If you’re not an author, they should simply highlight the best things about your life – your favorite recipes, some of your most significant accomplishments – things that show people that you are a good person, a professional, or whatever it is you want your online identity to convey.

Of course, the more powerful aspect of this particular theme are the items I listed above – incorporating all of your online activities into one central location so your fans (or anyone researching you) can see all of your best work in one place. In this Wordpress theme, you configure those widgets in the options menu (this is the case with most Wordpress themes).

Configuring the Twitter, FlickrRSS and About settings lets you populate what appears in the bottom widgets for your bio blog.

However, for adding your RSS feeds, you may need to go into the Appearance -> Widgets area of Wordpress and add the RSS feeds to your sidebar widgets, either as an RSS Widget or Text/HTML, depending on the code requirements at the originating source for your articles.

Now your readers have a central place they can return to in order to check out all of your online content and activities – in a format and a positive light that you can define and you can control.

One of the most effective ways to control a keyword phrase in the search engine rankings is to own the actual domain name that matches that phrase. If you own the domain name that’s identical (or at least as close as you can manage) to your own name, then over time you’ll quickly rise to the very top of the search engine results any time someone searches your name.

When it comes to the Internet, you can’t effectively protect your identity by hiding, because eventually someone out there is going to have something bad to say – that’s life. However, if you take a proactive approach and dominate the search results for your name, you will be better placed than anyone else to decide exactly what the search engine says about you to future employers, landlords, people you date and otherwise.

Better yet, if and when you do become famous, you won’t have bottom-feeding domain-squatters trying to overcharge you for the domain of your name, because you’ll already own it.

Have you ever registered the domain for your own name? If not, do you have a similar one? What have you done with your name domain? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Now, when you have to make a living doing this, the only way to survive is by learning what actually creates positive traffic growth. When many people think about search engine optimization, they don’t consider the possibility that by attempting to optimize, you could actually be doing more damage than if you’d done nothing at all. This is because Google has had to deal with unscrupulous characters attempting to “outsmart” the Google algorithm, so now that algorithm is arranged to penalize anyone attempting to use those tactics – whether it’s intentional or not. If you happen to make one of those top SEO mistakes, your website rank will actually drop and you’ll see much less search engine traffic than normal. So how do you avoid those pitfalls?

The following tips will guide you through the process.

SEO Mistake #6 – The Cardinal Sin – Keyword Spamming

There is nothing that Google hates more than a website that attempts to hijack the crawler with an overabundance of particular keyword phrases. You can be certain that if you are targeting the phrase “make money online,” and plaster the phrase all over your article a dozen times (this is known as keyword “stuffing”), you may actually see an immediate short term spike in traffic to that page. However, you can also be certain that in time, not only will that traffic drop off quickly, but your entire domain will struggle to rank very highly (if at all) in Google search results under every keyword phrase you write about. An example of keyword spamming is shown here, from Team-Schuman.

On this single page, I counted the occurrence of the keyword phrase “make money” a whopping total of 30 times. This approach may achieve temporary success, but don’t be fooled. Before long you’ll be wondering what happened when your site is nowhere to be found on Google. Don’t get me wrong, distributing high-value keyword phrases is essential to quality SEO, but it needs to be done in a measured and careful way.

SEO Mistake #7 – Spamming for Backlinks

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve always preached that you should post on forums and blogs in order to generate quality backlinks to your own site. This is what I described in my recent article on increasing blog traffic when I mentioned engaging the blogosphere every single day. However, simply posting for the sake of achieving a link back to your site is a major social networking no-no. A somewhat humorous example I saw take place was on a MakeUseOf article on how to remove false information about yourself online. It appeared that one of the folks posted repeated comments was trying to hijack the comment area into an area for self-advertising.

Some folks even “stage” conversations within the comment areas of blogs to generate interest. If your only purpose for posting comments to a blog or forum is to generate a link to your site, don’t bother. It won’t win you any fans within the industry or niche that you’re trying to target, and secondly, the transparency of the effort will make most readers skim right past your comment, or even worse you could get banned.

SEO Mistake #8 – Not Optimizing Images

In 2007, on the Google Webmaster Central blog, Google’s own Ríona MacNamara provided a very important clue to SEO enthusiasts with the statement, “As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate on the information provided in the ‘alt’ attribute.” So, what does this mean for your SEO efforts? It means that you better start taking advantage of your image alt-text tags if you want to have some advantage over your competition.

In the example above, this is an upcoming article I’m writing for my blog, FreeWritingCenter. As you can see, the entire phrase that I’m targeting is “writing a research paper,” so I’ve inserted that as the alt-text for my first image. However, you’ll notice that the title is simply a description of the picture itself. You only need to target the alt-text picture tags for your keywords, and only add them to a few pictures, otherwise you’ll run the risk of getting labeled as a spammer. As always – distribute the keywords carefully and sparingly.

SEO Mistake #9 – Producing Stupid, Poorly-Written Content

One of the worst symptoms of black-hat SEO scammers trying to outsmart Googlebot’s crawl algorithm is the evolution of “content-mills.” Now, given just about every blog out there is a content mill to some extent, at least when there’s a certain level of investment and quality checks in place, you know that the articles you read are going to be written using proper grammar, offer a decent style of writing and provide useful content. However, there are countless blogs and writers out there who simply churn out 500 word blocks of text as fast as they can with the hopes of capturing search engine traffic. If you want to see an example, just review any of the major free article directories, such as EzineArticles.

Now, I’m not knocking EzineArticles. I’m a registered author there, and whenever I need to publish something online quickly and there’s no other place to do it, I’ll publish it there. However, there are countless authors who just publish the first draft of whatever mindless drivel comes out of their heads. There’s no editing, no spell checking and in most cases I’m pretty sure there’s no writing background to speak of. This phenomenon is leading to an Internet that’s cluttered with some of the most atrocious writing imaginable.

What does this have to do with SEO? The SEO lesson to learn here is this: Yes, Google prefers websites and blogs that are fresh and constantly updated with new content, but that doesn’t mean you should ever overlook quality just to get your content published quickly. Focus on producing high-quality, valuable content that people will want to link to and return to again and again.

SEO Mistake #10 – Submitting Your Website

Do you remember the days when trying to get your website noticed online meant submitting your URL to as many search engines as possible? The fact is, these submission forms still exist on many of the major search engines even though they are completely outdated and unnecessary.

In fact, if you look at Yahoo’s own submission page and read the text carefully, you’ll find that Yahoo makes the case that you’re really wasting your time. The page reads, “The Yahoo! Search index, which contains several billion web pages, is more than 99% populated through the free crawl process.” Now, with 99% chances that the Yahoo crawl process will discover your website (especially if you’ve properly optimized it), do you really think you need to fill out these silly submission forms?

SEO experts unite! What lessons have you learned during your own optimization efforts? Do you have any of your own tips for MUO readers? Share them in the comments section below!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

• (74)10 Common SEO Mistakes that can Destroy Your Website [Part I]
• (61)How To Start A Blog That Gets Instant Traffic
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I initially stumbled upon the industry while I was struggling to win contract bids at freelance project bidding sites in order to earn extra income for my family. I took on a very underpaid role with the owner of a small interior design business who wanted to use a blog attached to his business website in order to draw in potential customers. He wanted what just about every blog owner out there today wants – highly optimized content that would draw in crowds from the search engines.

The SEO Learning Process

Here’s the first thing that I learned the moment I jumped into the SEO pool – the industry is full of sharks and “gurus.”  Often, I would find advice from someone who seemed to know what they were talking about, but it turned out the advice was 1990’s-era SEO, filled with common SEO mistakes and no longer an effective technique in today’s Web 2.0 world. And the sharks, – there are some SEO experts so fed up with the bad advice and the SEO scam artists that there are now entire blogs devoted to exposing bad SEO and revealing those common SEO mistakes – such as the aptly-named bad-seo.com.

I pity the folks that make the hit list of a blog like that! With that said, blogs like this serve an important purpose – they educate businesses and blog owners about the serious dangers of hiring an SEO “expert” who either (a) doesn’t really know what they’re doing, and/or (b) makes use of “black hat SEO” techniques that can gather significant immediate traffic, but will ultimately destroy your long term ranking with Google.

The Top Ten Most Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid

In the process studying SEO techniques over the years, I learned that many of the older techniques and myths from the 1990’s are not only ineffective anymore, but in some cases they can seriously hurt your website or blog search engine ranking.  So I would like to share a few of those SEO mistakes and help you avoid driving your blog or website straight off of the information superhighway and into the ditch.

SEO Mistake #1: Packing Meta-Tags Full Of Keywords Will NOT Optimize Your Page

During the 90’s, the extent of “SEO optimizing” for many webmasters was simply to insert relevant keyword phrases into the meta-tags for a page. Here’s an example of a site that’s heavily focused on the meta-keywords:

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with adding keywords into this field that represents valid information on the page itself, but placing a long list of similar phrases with duplicate words (reaching 10 or 12 phrases) is a major SEO faux pas.

And as of this year, September 2009 to be exact, due to many years of webmasters constantly using meta-keywords to spam keywords, Google no longer even looks at the meta-keywords in order to rank your website.  This doesn’t mean the meta-keywords are not useful for aligning the page with particular valuable search phrases – but it certainly is nowhere near as valuable as it used to be, and overusing it can put your site at risk for a lower ranking.

SEO Mistake #2 & #3: Not Using The Keywords In Your Title & Permalinks

When you visit MakeUseOf, you’ll notice that not only are the titles descriptive and relevant to what the article is actually about, but the URL link (otherwise known as the permalink) is as well. Every SEO guru worth his salt knows that the two most effective areas of a webpage that you can get the most bang for your efforts is the title and permalink.

They don’t always necessarily have to the be same, but they do need to focus on the a primary keyword phrase that you’re trying to target with your article. If you don’t target that phrase in your title and permalink, you’re wasting your time and you’ll only reach a small fraction of your intended online audience. In Wordpress, you can set up your permalink to be descriptive like this.

As you can see, I’ve set up my blog TopSecretWriters to use the month/name and post title.  Never set it up to use some nonsense numbering system.

SEO Mistake #4 & #5: Using Javascript Or Using Only Flash/AJAX

I would never suggest that a web designer shouldn’t make use of the latest and greatest website scripting languages that offer a more interactive online experience, but to use scripting to serve up all or a majority of your website content is SEO suicide. Take the website of fashion entrepreneur Marc Ecko for example.

The site is completely written in Flash. It is actually touted by most web design experts as one of the best-designed Flash websites on the net. Flash and AJAX websites are aesthetically superior to most traditional websites, however they struggle when it comes to search engine ranking because there’s virtually nothing for search engines to crawl. The same goes for websites that utilize Javascript to generate web pages on-the-fly depending on user interaction. Search engine crawlers cannot touch those script-generated pages at all.

The creator of Marc’s website tried to make up for this by listing about half a page of keywords in the Meta-Keyword tag – but how much will this help now that Google no longer looks at meta-keywords to rank websites? These sort of sites are excellent, but there should always be hand-coded primary HTML content that you can optimize even though there’s Flash on the page.

Build Your SEO Optimized Site From The Ground Up

The fact is that SEO optimizing should begin from the moment you lay down the first stone of your website’s foundation. That’s not to say that an existing site can’t be “fixed,” but you’ll see far more success if you get your website off on the right foot from day one. The tips above focus on how your website is built, and the elements that identify each web page to the world. In part two, I’ll discuss the actual content of your page and how you can optimize your site without ruining the quality of your content.

Do you have any SEO tips of your own? Did you make any mistakes that you’ve learned from? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

• (23)10 Common SEO Mistakes that can Destroy Your Website [Part II]
• (61)How To Start A Blog That Gets Instant Traffic
• (9)Control Your Online Identity With An SEO Optimized Biography Site
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Most people hear the tasks they need to do to optimize their site and they get scared off. I am here to tell you that any ordinary person can perform Search Engine Optimization like the big boys. All you need to do is grab a few plug-ins. I currently use 3 plug-ins to help me with my websites. I will run through them with you and show you how they can help you automate your blog SEO.

First up is SEO Friendly Images – as you can imagine, it helps you automatically optimize your images so search engines can see them. Search engines are not real people and they cannot see images. To index images they rely on Alt Image Tags which in plain English means Alternate Image Tags. You tag them and the search engines read them. Now if you have a blog with thousands of posts already what do you do? You install SEO Friendly Images as a plug-in, activate it and rock and roll! Let’s check it out.

First off go to your blog and right click on an image.  You can also mouse over the image and the alt tag will appear. This is the text a user who has images blocked will see as a place holder.

Wordpress uses the file’s name as the alternate text. This is good if you use crazy descriptive names – but it’s bad if you are lazy like me. So my alternate text is mini1. That doesn’t mean much! Now download and install the plug in. Activate it and watch the magic.

After activating it, refresh your page and right click and check out the image’s properties again. Now it is using the title of the post! Sweet! This will bring in boatloads of traffic.

All in One SEO Pack – All in One SEO is a blog owner’s dream. It tries to cover most of the big issues users see with SEO. It allows you to, easily and in a SEO friendly manner, rewrite the Home title of your Blog as well as your meta description,  keywords, post titles, category titles and so much much more. Just by activating it and filling in a few fields you are on your way to SEO heaven!

If you do not know what one of the fields means or will do, simply click on its heading like so:

Google XML Sitemaps – and last up in my SEO plug-in arsenal is a sitemap tool. A sitemap is very important because it shows the search engines how your site is set up. The title eludes to the fact that it will only work with Google but as far as I know the site map generated worked for the other search engines including Bing and Yahoo.

Go ahead and download and install the plug in. And then activate it. You will have a new control panel under settings that says XML Sitemap and the control panel looks like this:

By default it will notify the search engines when you update your blog. It will rebuild your sitemap and it will add the sitemaps’ URL to your robots.txt file automatically. If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry, the plug-in has you covered.

Do you have another must-have SEO plug in for your blog? Please share it with us in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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As he discussed here in How To Start A Blog That Gets Instant Traffic, it’s vitally important that you write content that is SEO optimized for search engine traffic. Yet there is one SEO trick that is overlooked quite a lot by Blogger users which could boost their traffic; how they appear in the search results. And I’m not talking about where they appear, but how they appear.

Below is a screenshot of my new blog in the Google search results next to MakeUseOf in the search results. Notice anything different between the two SEO-wise?

It’s in the titles. You can see that my blog’s title is NovelInThirtyDays. Now for some reason I can’t see many people Googling that anytime soon. However, look at the MUO title: ‘Cool Websites, Software and Internet Tips’. Many more people will Google things like that, thus driving more traffic to the site.

So in short, my advice is to change how your blog’s title appears in the search results. One of the best ways to do this for a small to medium blog is to reverse the order in which the blog title and post title are displayed so that the post title comes first. This will SEO optimize every post.

Here’s how.

Log into the Blogger dashboard and select your blog. For demonstration purposes we’ll be breaking out the MUO test blog again. By the way, it has changed significantly in appearance since my last blogger post, because I used it to test coding and themes.

Select your blog and then click ‘Layout’ along the top. Underneath this, select ‘Edit HTML’.

Using CTRL + F, find the following piece of HTML code:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

In most templates it’s around 5-10 lines from the top. Replace that code with the following code:

<b:if cond=`data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;’>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if>

Once you have pasted that into the HTML as shown in the above screenshot, your Post titles should appear first in Google search results (not immediately though, Google will have to crawl your blog first before it changes).

However, the SEO optimized results will be noticeable immediately in the tab along the top of your browser.

So now when people search a phrase that appears in the title of a post on your blog, your post will appear higher in the search results. This is a much more likely scenario than someone searching for the actual title of your blog.

For more tips about how to SEO optimize your blog so it gets more traffic, see Ryan’s post entitled How To Start A Blog That Gets Instant Traffic.

For more ‘Blogger’ tips see my recent article entitled 4 Easy Tips to Improve Your Blogger Blog.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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With millions upon millions of websites on the Internet, and with potentially hundreds of thousands focused on the same subject or niche that you are – developing an audience can feel even more overwhelming than trying to start a blog from scratch in the first place.

I’ve been working on the Internet long before it became wildly popular in the 1990s, and in the process of watching the evolution of the Internet I’ve come to realize and appreciate something amazing about the current incarnation of the Internet, known as Web 2.0. That something is this; If you know the rules of the game, then it is possible to start a blog that gets instant traffic from day one – and maintains that traffic into the future. Today I’d like to share 3 powerful techniques you can use to accomplish this.

Tip #1 – Write Optimized Content The First Day You Start A Blog

Many people who start a blog do so because they love writing. That’s one of the reasons I started several blogs (horribly neglected) of my own. The problem is that most writers enjoy writing for the love of the process – not for the purpose of “optimizing” the content for search engines. The process of optimizing makes writers feel stifled, non-creative and cheap. Sort of like not wanting to go to Wal-Mart to save money even though you know that things are a heck of a lot cheaper there.

Writers know that optimizing is important to gather search engine traffic, but they either really understand the rules – or they simply don’t care. Optimizing can take years to learn how to do effectively. Many bloggers suffer low blog traffic because they believe if they simply write amazing content – people will love it so much they’ll keep coming back for more. This may be true – but it’ll take you years to accomplish, versus months if you use SEO effectively.

Abhijeet offered a fantastic list of SEO tools that you can use to come up with high-value keywords for your posts. One of those tools that I would highly recommend to all bloggers is the Google Adwords tool. Using this tool the right way, you’ll be able to start writing your very first blog posts that target exactly what people are searching for online.

What’s the “right way” to use Google Adwords? It’s very simple, just brainstorm general topics that you want to write about and enter those, one at a time, into the “Descriptive words or phrases field.” When you click “Get keyword ideas,” you’ll see a very long list of keywords and statistics appear at the bottom. Next, click on the blue column header “Global Monthly Search Volume” to sort the results by how many searches occur for each term every month.

If you find your keyword doesn’t have a lot of traffic, scroll down to the section titled, “Additional Keywords to Consider.”

Here’s the basic SEO rule #1 that I’m going to share with MUO readers. Most bloggers see a keyword with very high search traffic and think, “oooh, a goldmine!” They then proceed to expend tremendous effort writing up a brilliant post using that phrase, only to end up on page 25 or 30 of Google results for that search term. Why? Because the secret of success when choosing keywords where your new blog (or even professional blog) can compete is choosing keywords with very low competition (that cool-looking blue bar graph on the left). Choosing keywords with very high search traffic each month and very low competition will bring traffic to your site the moment Google next crawls your blog. Speaking of which, did you take Karl’s advice and submit your site to Bing and Google yet?

Tip #2 – Engage The Blogosphere Every Single Day

If you want to get a lot of traffic to your new blog from day one, you’ve got to give people who are interested in the topics you write about a good reason to visit your blog. One of the first things that I noticed when I started using Facebook is that it’s human nature for people to check out your wall if you take the time to post on theirs. The same is very true about the world of blogging, but on a much larger scale.

When you post a thoughtful comment on someone else’s blog, not only will the blogger probably check you out, but so will readers who like your comment. To do this effectively, you should use a tool like Ratingburner or Technorati to find the most popular blogs on the net within the niche that you write about.

Using Technorati to find similar blogs to my own blog FreeWritingCenter, I discovered one high-authority blog, AListApart, with fresh content just waiting to receive a good comment. You may need to sift down the list for blogs that are relevant to yours (I did).

Visit the other blogs, and if you aren’t already a subscriber then become one. Your new blog will not take off unless you’re ready and willing to engage the blogging community and contribute to other blogs as much as you want other people to contribute to yours. When you post a comment – don’t do it without reading the post you’re commenting on. Don’t be one of those annoying spammers – you’re trying to engage a community, not get free marketing for yourself.

The general rule of thumb here is to only post on blogs that allow you to include your URL, be positive and always compliment the blogger, and finally always reference one or two important points in the blogger’s post – this proves that you actually read the article and found it interesting. A well written comment can go a very long way toward immediately attracting interested readers (and fellow bloggers) to your own blog.

Tip #3 – Becoming an Active Member of the Forum Community

The third most effective way to get instant traffic to your blog is to engage forum communities filled with folks who share an interest in the topic that your blog covers. Either generate a new thread, or comment on an existing thread that covers something you wrote about.

Finding a forum based on the topic of your blog is usually as simple as typing it into Google as something like, “writing forums.” Although, I would highly recommend taking Darko’s advice and use forum search engines which are often far more effective since they specifically target forums. Using BoardReader, I found a great webmaster forum post about writing at the V7 Network.  When you register, don’t forget to include your URL in your forum profile (most forums have a field for this).

Forum etiquette is to avoid posting your own URL in the very first few posts. Simply engage in a conversation with forum members. Once you prove to the forum administrators that your goal in engaging the forum community is to have a conversation and not just advertise yourself, they’ll be far more willing to let you quote (and link) from your own blog every now and then. But the first step at any forum is just to get engaged in a quality conversation with other folks.

Forums can help in a lot of ways. Readers who find your comment interesting may click on your profile to check out who you are – and there, they’ll find the URL to your blog. Additionally, many forums (such as the one above), allow you to post a link in your signature after you’ve made a certain number of forum posts. This assures the forum administrators that you’re not only there to market yourself, and it eventually allows you to have a link back to your blog on every single post you make – which is a very powerful way to get a lot of traffic to your blog.

Forget about all of the silly instant marketing gimmicks that you find online from “SEO experts” that claim they can get you thousands of visitors a day. The unfortunate fact is that these are typically scams that use spamming techniques that’ll get you penalized by Google in the end. The most effective way to “grow” your blog in a very organic and long-lasting way is to make sure all of your content is optimized, and then start spending an hour or so a day just engaging the online community that shares your interests.

Do you have your own unique techniques to draw instant traffic to a new blog? Share them with other MUO readers in the comments section below.

Image Credit : Mike Licht

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

• (74)10 Common SEO Mistakes that can Destroy Your Website [Part I]
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By submitting your website to a search engine, you are making sure they include you in their indexing of the web. It can’t be a bad idea to get this done quickly and while the site is still getting its act together.

How To Submit Website to Bing

First things first, just like all Microsoft products, if you want to interact with it you will need a Windows Live ID. Then, you will need to visit this site:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/WebmasterAddSitesPage.aspx

All you need to do is fill out your website’s complete URL in this format: http://www.asktheadmin.com and if you have a sitemap, you can insert its URL in second line. Next, you need to input your contact email address and select if you want news updates for webmasters.

That’s it! It is as simple as that. While you are in there, you can have Bing verify that your Robots.txt file is being read properly as well as a website verifier and keyword research tool.

After you have submitted your site, you will apparently see an influx of traffic from Bing in as little as 48 hours! If and when you do submit your site, come back and let us know in the comments, how it has improved your site’s traffic.

How To Submit Website to Google

The process is almost identical to Google, as we will see now. To submit your site or blog to Google, you would visit this website:

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

There, you will need to log in with your Google ID.

Once you are logged in, you can type in your site’s address and click on Add Site like you see below:

You may also add a site map and get it verified. Verification involves adding some code to your Index.html so that Google can crawl it and make sure you are who you say you are!

Have you submitted your blog or website to these or other search engines? Which has brought you the best results? Share them with us in the comments!

Tried Bing? Not sure it’s better than Google? Find out by reading my post on Bing vs Google.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

• (6)How To Check The Top 10 Search Keywords On Google
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These are tough requirements but I’m always up for a challenge. So here are “5 Free Ways To Promote Your Website” – starting with Google.

1. The Best Free Search Engine

It is no secret, Google is the most popular search engine. From the novice to the expert; young and old; millions of people use Google to find what they are looking for. So getting your website indexed is very important. The best part, submitting to Google is free, fast and easy. However, before you submit you should search Google to find out if your website is already in Google’s index. To do this:

1. Go to Google.com and enter your domain name into the search box.
2. When entering the domain name type it exactly as it was registered. For example, if you wanted to find out if MakeUseOf was indexed in Google you would type www.makeuseof.com
3. If your site was indexed the first result will be your domain name. In this case you do not need to resubmit.
4. If you site was not indexed, submit using the form above. It may take up to 3 weeks for your site to get indexed. Don’t keep resubmitting during that time. If your site is not indexed after 3 weeks, resubmit it.

2. The Best Free Directory

The next place to promote your website is Yahoo!  Although it is not as popular as Google, Yahoo! is the best directory. It is also free, easy and fast to submit your site to Yahoo!.

Just like in Google, you should check to see if your website is already in the Yahoo! index. If your site is listed you do not need to resubmit. However, if your site is not found make sure to add your site to Yahoo!, rechecking in a few weeks to make sure it has been indexed.

3. Email Signature

At the bottom of your email, add a signature that includes your domain name. Just in case you need help with adding an email signature I’ve added some information for the most popular applications:

• Adding an email signature to gmail
• Adding an email signature to outlook express
• Adding an email signature to outlook
• Adding an email signature to entourage
• Adding a HTML signature to Mac’s Mail

4. Yellow Pages Directory

Yellowpages.com has a free listing that will remain active for 12 months. This is a good place to promote your site – and it is free, fast and easy.

5. Google Local Business

Last, but definitely not least – Google Local Business. When you submit your website to Google Local Business, it is eligible to rank in the local business section. The section is displayed before the organic search results, toward the top of Google. For example, I did a search for: dentist in dana point ca. Local business search is displayed just below the sponsored link section, with a map inserted to the left of the listings.

If you are going to submit to Google Local Business you will need either a business phone number or a business mailing address. Toward the end of the submission process you will be given a PIN number. You will need to use this PIN to complete the submission. If you opt for a postcard, the PIN will be mailed. However, choosing the phone option, the PIN will be displayed and an automated phone call will be made. Importantly, if the number is not a “business line” you will have to take the postcard route.  Either way, it is free, fast and easy.

If you have promoted your website using a free, fast and easy method other than the ones listed here, let us know. Also, if you’ve enjoyed this article, check out what Mark wrote on getting your blog noticed.

How did you find this article? Did it boost your site’s traffic? Share it in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

• (24)How To Submit Your Website To Bing & Google For More Traffic
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Chart Chooser from Juice Analytics is an innovative tool that lets you create Excel and Powerpoint charts and choose what characteristics you wish to highlight in your data; Comparison, Distribution, Composition, Trend, Relationship and/or Table, and it will filter the selections highlighting the possible charts for your needs.

Once you have decided on your selection, Chart Chooser will display options to download templates for Excel and Powerpoint. The downloaded files will have random data filled for you to get an idea of how the data is presented and where you will be able to enter your own figures.

The good news about this service is that Juice Analytics doesn’t seem to be stopping with the current selection of graphs available on the site. Users are encouraged to suggest different charts to be added to their website and even design bespoke versions for organisations. Juice Analytics have also endeavoured to make all their charts Tufte-compliant (clean and minimal) whilst remaining visually aesthetic.

Juice Analytics also operates an analytics blog that focuses on free tools and open source code. Here, you are able to find a wealth of information on how the Juice Analytics team tackle different projects, including this project inspired by the New York Times.

One tool that the team recently released was Concentrate, a search analytics tool for SEO and paid search professionals who wanted to make sense of search keyword data. Concentrate works by connecting to your Google Analytics account and helps to visualize keyword relationships to see connections and performance of common word combinations. All data collated by Concentrate is automatically formatted and information such as categorized search phrases and pattern groups can be downloaded to CSV format for off site analysis.

Juice Analytics is a great source of Excel and Powerpoint information as well as providing open source code, most of which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. If you need to impress the board, your boss or your peers at your next meeting, a visit to these guys, even just for the Chart Chooser, should be your first stop.

Do you know of any other sites that offer templates like these? If so, let us know of your recommendations in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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There are two types of sitemaps – a HTML page or a XML file. A HTML sitemap is a single page that shows visitors all the pages on a website and usually has links to those pages. The XML type of sitemap is used by search engine crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed. A XML sitemap isn’t meant to look pretty for the website visitor.

XML-Sitemaps is a free sitemap generator. XML-Sitemaps will index your website and create a XML file that you can upload to the root directory of your website. There is nothing to download or install. Just use the XML-Sitemaps website and they will do all of the work.

4 Easy Steps for Creating a XML Sitemap

1. Go to xml-sitemaps

2. Enter your full website URL. Choose your other options:

- Enter the frequency your website is usually updated from the drop-down list.
- Choose an option under ‘Last modification’. This is the time the URL was last modified.
- Leave the Priority at Automatic.

3. Click ‘Start’. Wait while your sitemap is being generated.

4. Click the link to download the .xml file.

Now you can upload the sitemap.xml file to the root directory of your website and you can submit your sitemap URL to Google Webmaster Tools.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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But all it provides in terms of actual search ranking is your position for the queries that land the most people on your site and your position for the top queries in which your site appears. What it doesn’t give you is a way of easily checking your search position for any search terms you want. That’s where the Google Position Checker comes in.

Simply enter your website, the search term you want to check, the region if your site is geared toward a particular country (or choose ‘world’ if country doesn’t really matter) and how many of the top results you want to check (you can go up to the top 1000 results, but for a faster check you can go as low as the top 100 results).

This way, you can easily see your ranking for any search term, without having to do the search yourself and look through the results for your own site.

They also have a similar tool for MSN and another one for Yahoo (although I’ve never met a single person who uses Yahoo or MSN for web search – have you?).

What do you think about Google Position Checker? Do you have a better tool for the job? Tell us your thoughts in the comments!

(By) Blake Elias is a computer addict, always learning about new technologies and figuring out ways to do things better. He writes about his thoughts and activities regarding Linux, Google, useful programs, web development and computers in general on his personal blog, The New Geek.

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We decided to list the best of the free tools which can help you research different keywords specific to your site and optimize the site.

1: Google Adwords Research Tool

Although this tool is primarily meant for Adwords bidders, this is also widely used by webmasters and publishers to measure the popularity of different keywords based on their Google search volume.

2: Wordtracker’s Free Tool

When it comes to finding the right keywords, Wordtracker is definitely a name you can count on. They primarily provide paid keyword research tools but they have a free tool too, which, for a particular query, can generate up to 100 related keywords and an estimate of their daily search volume.

3: Google Suggest

Google Suggest also offers a nice way to research keywords. When you start typing a word in the Google suggest box, it starts showing the related most popular search queries in a drop down menu. Therefore you can immediately come to know about the related keywords / sentences for a particular search query. Even Google Toolbar has this feature but it doesn’t show the number of search results for the keywords.

4: SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Although different SEO related sites have developed their own keyword research tools, the one by SEObook.com is worth mentioning. It is powered by Wordtracker and provides results which are much more comprehensive than the free tool provided by Wordtracker. It’s worth a try.

5: Good Keywords

Good Keywords is another handy tool for researching keywords. It is a tiny 500kb program which offers several features when you start it. Mark has already described it in detail here.

6: Keyword Discovery

This free search term suggestion tool by Trellian is a nice one too. Although it only shows the first hundred related keywords in its free edition but it still could be useful.

Have I missed anything out that you use to get the best keywords for YOUR site? Let everyone know in the comments.

By- Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog

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• (46)30+ FREE Desktop Applications for Bloggers
• (6)‘Good Keywords’: Get Your Keywords Right

Desktop Blogging Clients

Post to your blog straigth from the desktop.

Windows Live Writer – One of the best. Plugins can be added to increase its power. Check out our review here.
w.bloggar (Windows only) – Available as a full and portable version (can run from USB thumbdrive).
AIRPress (Windows, Mac) – Adobe AIR based blog editor for WordPress blogs. AIRPress requires Adobe AIR beta 2 to work. If it’s not installed already, it will be auto installed with AIRPress.
Thingamablog (Window, Mac, Linux)
Qumana (Windows, Mac)
BlogDesk (Windows) – Optimized for WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Serendipity and ExpressionEngine.

Statistics Tools

Monitor websites traffic and other stats.

Google Analytics (AIR) – Check detailed traffic stats from the desktop. Works both on Mac and Windows PCs. Google Analytics account required.
Snoop (Mac, Win) – Track website visitors in real time staight from the desktop. Stats provided by reinvigorate.net
SERPs Finder (Win) – Find where your page lists for a particular keyword on Google, Live and Yahoo! Search.

Screen Capturing Tools

Snippy (Windows) – System Tray Tool for screen capturing. Mark out the region of the screen that you want to copy — and Snipp it.
Clip2Net (Windows) – Take screenshots, add notes and arrows, and save them online.
WebShot (Windows) – One more screesnhot grabber, free version is quite limited, but still does the job.
Camstudio (Windows) – Capture screen activity (vide+audio) and save it in AVI or SWF format.
Windows Media Encoder – Capture audio and video content and encode video captures to WMV format.
SnagIt 7 (Windows) – Powerful screenshot capture and editing tool. Normally it costs $29 but version 7 is available for free. Unfortunately, the promotion period is over.

Image Editing Programs

GIMP (Win, Linux) – Free Photoshop alternative. Also see Gimpshop which even looks like Photopshop.
Paint.NET (Win) – Another open source software tool for your image editing needs.
IrfanView (Win) – Worth a mention here, it’s an image viewer with a few editing capabilities.

FTP Programs

Filezilla (Win, Mac, Linux) – Open Source FTP Client. Read MakeUseOf review here.
FireFTP (Win, Mac, Linux) – FTP extension for your Firefox browser.

Keyword Research

Good Keywords (Win) – Excellent too for finding suitable keywords for your article titles. MakeUseOf review: Get Your Keywords Right.

Microblogging Tools

Pwytter (Win, Mac, Linux) – Cross-platofrm Twitter client.
Twitbin – Firefox Extension for Twittering
OutTwit – Twitter client for Outlook. If you’re interested check out more Outlook addons here.
Pownce Client – Official Pownce clients for Mac and Windows. [What is Pownce ?]

Task Management

Rainlendar (Win) – One of the best desktop calendar apps for Windows.
Essential PIM (Win) – A free personal information manager.

Offline HTML editors

First Page (Win) – Two paned windows HTML editor.
KomPozer (Win, Mac, Linux) – Extremely easy to use and ideal for non-technical users.

Miscellaneous

WordPress Comment Moderation Notifier – Get notifications when there are comments that need to be moderated.

That’s about it. Do you have a must-see program that’s not on the above list? Let us know in comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Website Grader – Free seo is a tool that measures the marketing effectiveness and popularity of a website. Find out things like website traffic, its popularity on social bookmarking networks (Digg, del.icio.us, …), incoming link count, and lots of other relevant factors. It also provides some basic tips on how the website can be improved.

Just type in your URL, primary keywords, competing websites (shhhh! you can check up on them too) and the email address where you want them to send the Full Report!. And a FULL REPORT is exactly what they will send, too! It’s very informative, and gives you a ton of ideas on how you can make your site better. So, pour yourself a stiff one, then sit down and check it out!

And while you’re at it, you may also take a look at their report on SEO Capabilities of the Top 20 Bloggers.

SEOMOZ -Page Strength – Similar to WebsiteGrader but takes a slightly different approach. Instead of giving the effectiveness of the website in comparison to other rated websites, it does a thorough SEO check and grades the website (from 1 to 10) based on the actual stats. Extremely useful at tracking website’s performance over time. Take a look at MakeUseOf report here

How Much is Your Blog Worth ? – Exactly does what it says, find out how much $$$ the website is valued at. This tool uses the same the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc. deal. The only problem, it pulls link count from Technorati, which unfortunately doesn’t work well anymore.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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I used to find it extremely tiring researching keywords. I’d be sitting in front of Google or Yahoo for ages typing in random phrases and seeing what popped up. I’d be looking at places such as Technorati or Google Blog Search and I would still be clueless as to what keywords I should be using to make my blog more accessible to the discerning web surfer. But then I discovered a neat free little program called “Good Keywords” which takes all the stress out of the process. It’s such a great program that Search Engine Watch called it “a keeper”.

The website that offers “Good Keywords” also offers various other keyword-related programs such as Keyword Pad (for managing long lists of keywords) and Keyword Explorer which analyzes keyword phrases. But the real jewel in the crown is “Good Keywords”.

“Good Keywords” is a tiny 500kb program which gives you several options when you start it. The main feature – and the real goldmine in my opinion – is the “Keyword Suggestions” box. This links to Yahoo and Overture and when you enter a keyword in the box, it goes to Yahoo and Overture and instantly brings back LOTS of variations of the keyword along with the number of search engine queries for those keywords over the past month (the most popular keyword phrase being at the top).

By entering your keywords into this program, you can find out right away the search query habits of internet users so you can know which keywords to include and which ones to exclude. Not only it can make your titles more Google / Yahoo friendly, but also can make a financial difference for the better if you are running an Adwords campaign where the wrong keywords could end up costing you a lot of wasted money.

Other options that the program gives you includes possible misspelled variations of a keyword, a keyword phrase builder, a website analyzer (which tells you the site’s PageRank as well as the number of other sites that link to it) and a keyword organizer.

“Good Keywords” is freeware and it never nags you to register for anything and it never asks for an email address. It is simply just a great little tool which fills a big need. This is most definately a keeper on my PC.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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