Issue #11

Title: "SEO in a can."

Due to last newsletter, I receive this reponse:
"I have unsubscribed!

There is never any need to use obscene language, it
does not portray professionalism.

If you know your stuff, you don't need to swear!"
-- Anonymous

Dan Kennedy said, "If you haven't offended someone by
noon, you aren't a pro."

So do I want to stick with Dan Freakin' Kennedy, or the
whiney bastard?

I ALSO got this response:
"Palyn;

WOW
One of your MOST awesome ezines to date."
-- Ed, Los Angeles, CA

..I think I'll stick with Dan Kennedy. :)

If you would rather have some polished and slick "Corey
Rudl copy-cat" suckering you out of your money, then by
all means go do that. You have plenty to choose from.

I'm not trying to be an asshole here. I just want to
illustrate that this is the way things are with AIMN,
and it's not going to change. No fluff, no holds-barred,
and that WARNING at the beginning of every issue isn't
there to look pretty.

I'm trying to lift the veil of internet marketing for you,
bits at a time, so you can see the way thing really are.

The best sucker for marketing is a marketer -- remember to
look at HOW things are being said and done, and not WHAT is
being said and done.

That's the lesson there folks, and you'll learn it well
from me -- zits, spit, shit and all.

-=-=-=-

Here is my personal method of SEO. you may want to print
this one out.

I sent this out a while ago, so some of you may recognize
it, but I think it bears repeating.

- Have at least 2 keywords per page you are optimizing
for. the first keyword is your primary keyword, the
second is the secondary keyword. Make sure the primary
keyword appears first in your title tag. It's safe to have
just the keywords as the title, seperated by pipelines,
dashes or whatever...

- Put the primary keyword in an H1 tag, and both
keywords, or just the secondary, in an H2 tag. You
can change the size of the Hx tags using CSS or the
FONT tag. The search engines aren't going to
penalize you for it. I currently use H1 tags at a
size 5 font successfully. Feel free to use H3 and
H4 tags as well.

- Do and do not use meta tags. I like to alter
templates occasionally. so for some pages on a site
I do use meta tags, and other times I take them out.
I -mostly- use them though. Only the 'description' one
though... In underground testing the 'keyword' meta
tag seemed to increase the response of spam filters.
interesting. use 2 or 3 real world (e.g. readable) sentences
stuffed with kewords.

- there is no rule for keyword density. That term may
sell a lot of ebooks, but it won't get you better
rankings. There's been plenty of times where the keywords
weren't even in the "content" of the page, and I've
ranked high. Just use the keywords naturally. If you
don't use the keywords in the content, you may want
to reconsider what keywords you use, but that's up to you.

- i almost always include a page footer that has the
copyright, a link to the homepage using the primary
keyword as the anchor text, and the primary keyword again
in bold (not a link though, in a phrase or something), and
the secondary keyword in italics. That's also where I throw
any links for the sitemaps, Traffic Equalizer sitemaps,
link directories, blogs and anything else.

- use image "alt" tags. if you have more than one image
on the page, make the first one your primary keyword,
the second the secondary keyword, the third your primary
keyword again, etc. But don't overdo it and use EVERY image,
just a few will suffice.

- image names matter. if you don't want them to matter, name
them with numbers. don't dash them, just do it naturally like
'imagename.jpg' -- the search engine can pick out individual
words very well these days. don't alt tag them the same as
the file name keyword.

- when I create pages by hand, I of course have lots of
control over all of these elements. But when I use page
generating programs, I let the primary keyword be whatever
keyword is coming from the keyword source file, and the
secondary keyword be the most general keyword for the
niche. Like if my site was about about lawn care and
growing grass, my secondary keyword would just be
"lawn care", and I'd have that typed right into the
template in the appropriate places.

- With page generating programs, depending on how much
time I want to spend on generating the pages, I make
500 at a time, and change the template a teensy bit each
time. Like add or remove the meta tag and changing the
secondary keyword.

- file names have a very small influence. if you can name the
page file 'keyword.html', cool. If not, cool.

- be sure to have sitemap pages. You don't need just 1, you
can have 2,3,4, or even 50 of them on your site if you need.
Also, there was a rumour that Google won't spider pages with
more than 50 links, but on Google's own sitemap page there
are ~158 links on it. They often say "do what we do to rank
well," so they wouldn't put that many links on one page if
they didn't think it was ok to do.

- never hide text, or make it smaller than 3 points.
You can move it WAY down the page though.

- nofollow the fuck out of stuff. use it to your heart's content
to control the flow of google juice. nofollow tags tell google
not to attribute pagerank to the target of the link. they will
still follow it for spidering purposes, but it won't leak your PR.
nofollow your terms of service, privacy policy, and contact us
pages. nofollow any link that don't directly benefit your SEO
goals. here's how it's used:
<a href="http://www.domain.com" rel="nofollow">

That was all on-page optimization.

Next is off-page optimization.

- Links from other sites are very, very important. And
try to get the other sites to link to you using one of
your top 5 keywords, or your domain name if your top
keyword is in it. Sure, related sites linking to you
are best, but get as many as you can regardless. DON'T
swap links with porn, FFAs, gambling or "illegal
information" sites, in fact, try not to get one way links
from them either.

- reciprocal linking is a waste of time, unless you have
someone else do it. stick with faster and more effective
stuff like directories, social bookmarking, blog posts,
blog comments, article sites, web 2.0 article sites, press
releases, forums, paid links...

- link to your site using the full URL as well as keywords.

- don't stop getting links. The more you get the better.
but google also cares about your 'link getting profile' ..
stuff like how often do new incoming links appear, how
old are the links, how many links are disappearing, any
unnatural boosts in link quanity (thousands in a few days).

- generate a google sitemap and submit it to Google
Sitemaps. Just do a search for "google sitemap generator"
and pick one, there are lots available. Then go to
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

notes...

- your rankings will change all the damn time. they may
stabilize with age (as in months to years) if you
continue good off page seo practices, but google
messes around with their algorithm all the time. just
don't be stupid and do tricks. follow the rules and it'll
work out for the long term.

- long term seo rankings are slow to get. don't get
obsessed.

- give the search engines what they want: a page
with good content and a few 'hints' for the ranking
algorithm... and you can control it. make the content
about your keyword. make the title about your keyword.
make the meta tags about your keyword. make header
tags about the keyword. don't over do it, just do stuff
where it would naturally be, but be focused...

- try to seo a page for 1 main keyword, and use supporting
keywords as .. support. if you try too much on 1 page,
you'll fuck it up. just create more pages!

- the more 'famous' you are with google, the more attention
you get for page updates, which means you can play around
more... If your site is a 'nobody' it can take days.. weeks to
get noticed. you get famous over time through links.

- set it and forget it. once you get the on-page seo done,
you're done with it. there's no reason to go in and
tweak it. focus all your energy on the off-page stuff.

That's just about everything I do to rank well for the
search engines. Just remember, it is more art than science.
Learn the "rules," apply them and after a while you figure
out how to paint your own pictures.

John Reese said optimizing for the search engines is like
playing the lottery, and each page is a ticket. I
wholeheartedly agree. The secret is in optimzing LOTS of
pages, and varying your techniques throughout. Because
when some pages may go down in ranking, others may go up.

If you want to read a kick ass article on SEO, check this out:
http://www.highrankings.com/issue150.htm
(and sign up for her newsletter while you are there.)

That's it. I hope you enjoyed this email!

Peace, Love and Music to you {FIRSTNAME},
Palyn Peterson

John Reese's acclaimed monthly Internet Marketing Report.
For *serious* marketers ONLY -- Do NOT go here if you are
simply playing around. But if you are very serious about
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