I just added a new offer to the end of this article that I wrote about a year and a half ago: How Much Does WordPress Really Cost?

Before I describe the offer, where I set up WordPress for you for free if you use my affiliate link and buy the web hosting from the web hosting company that I use and recommend, oh… wait… that was the offer.

OK. You can click on that link and go read the details now if you’re so impatient, Mr. Smarty Pants.

Tip: Take advantage of deals when you find them.

Random Chance

As I was saying, I want to tell you a story about that page.

I first wrote that article as one of many rants about the wonders of WordPress.

People read it and there was some interest and that was nice, but whatever.

It didn’t burn the house down.

Then some guy linked to it from his blog roll.

A “blog roll” is the list of links to blogs in your sidebar.

It’s used to link to people and things that you find impressive that you want to share with your readers.

“Look how cool I am! Check out all these other cool blogs to go read!”

So this guy puts a link to my page in his side bar.

Well, his site has over 3,000 pages on it, with the sidebar on every page.

That page now has over 3,000 links to it from this guy’s sidebar.

Tip: Write content that people find useful.

Google Notices

Next thing I know, I’m getting traffic from Google for people who are searching for how much WordPress costs.

There are variations on the search “WordPress cost” and “How much does WordPress cost” are the two biggest.

Apparently people are reading the article and it’s working for them.

It answers questions that they have.

It’s useful.

People read it and link to it.

Tip: Check your Google Analytics regularly for trends.

Still Top Ranked

Then I see that guy’s web site disappears. I think he was a politician and was using it for a campaign.

When the campaign was over, the site was gone, along with my wonderful, beautiful inbound links.

It doesn’t matter. It’s still ranked well.

Both “how much is wordpress” and “how much does wordpress cost” get a #1 ranking.

“WordPress Cost” gets it at #4 and #6.

I am, apparently, the world’s number ranking expert on How Much WordPress Costs.

Tip: Write with authority. Be an authority.

Surprise SEO Trick

You can steal this trick, I think.

The politician doesn’t link to me any more, but I still rank well, so I checked Yahoo’s Site Explorer to see if anyone else was still linking to the page.

I was surprised to see that there are 15 links from iStockPhoto.

Someone linked to it in response to a question in the forum.

iStockPhoto then translated that link into 15 different languages, one for each of their forums.

It appears that you can leave one link in the English forum and it will be multiplied into 15 links by iStockPhoto.

Tip: Write comments in forums, especially iStockPhoto.

Take Advantage!

I am currently getting 36% of the “page views” on my entire site on this one page.

The home page only gets 5%. Whatever the current newsletter points to gets about 6-8%. All the other posts get 1-3% or whatever.

I decided to take advantage of the traffic and put a special offer on that one page.

If you want me to install, set up, and configure WordPress for you, I will do all of that for FREE!

(It’s a marketing rule that you always have to capitalize the word “free” and use an exclamation point after it.)

I can do that if you use the special link to get your web hosting from the company I recommend.

If you want to take advantage of that offer CLICK HERE. Read through to the bottom of the page and follow the directions.

Tip: Take advantage of trends to create specific offers based on traffic.

You Can Make Money As An Affiliate

Every time someone uses that link, which contains my affiliate code, PowWeb records that click and writes a cookie to their browser.

If a sale is completed, they send me a referral fee at the end of the month.

If you want to make money as an affiliate, you need to go sign up with “them”, then use the special links they provide to pass your customers off to them.

Every time your users make a sale with them, using your link, with your code, you make money.

“Them” in this case is PowWeb, but there are a ton of other people that do this too.

If you want to check out other possible affiliates that might be more closely related to your niche, check out Click Bank or Market Bay.

Tip: Make money referring your readers to other sites.

Content Marketing

Did you get any good info from this post?

If you make a post valuable, people link to it and you end up with traffic, then money.

See how that works?

Can you write something of value that people will want to share with their friends and readers?

I thought you could.

Go make me proud.

Tip: Don’t just sit there! Put these tips into practice.

It’s the one SEO issue causes the most confusion and the most questions.

Here is the step by step method that I use. I’ll walk through the general process first, then work through an example.

Balancing Traffic and Competition

Lots of people search for keywords using search engines. Lots of web site owners create content on web sites. The search engines try to match them up.

The problem that we’re going to solve is finding the balance between general keywords that are too broad and everyone looks for, and narrow keywords that are specific, but no one looks for.

On the general side of the spectrum are words that are included in searches by a lot of people for a lot of different things. They may or may not be related to your specific product or web site. The amount of searches is huge.

On the narrow side of the spectrum are words that are very specific to your product or website and you want to absolutely own these keywords. The trouble with these keywords is that hardly anyone actually searches for them. The amount of searches is small.

A search for “car” is done 124 million times a month. There are 434 million web pages that mention the word “car’. That’s pretty general and a lot of traffic.

A search for “Toyota corolla tail light” gets 3,600 searches per month. There are 129,000 web pages that contain that keyword phrase. If you sold tail lights for Corollas, this is the keyword that you want to own.

You want to find keywords that enough people search for so they get decent traffic, but are specific enough that you don’t have too much competition.

Step One – Traffic

First, you start with your best guess. Pick the keyword that you want to be found for.

This should be the response to “What is this site really about?”

Go to: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Type in your best guess keyword and hit “Search”. If you are using a phrase of multiple words, put quotes around them to get the exact phrase.

The tool will list your keyword, along with all of the keywords that Google thinks are related.

Disregard the “Competition” column for now and just look at the number of monthly searches. In fact, if you click on the column header, it will sort by that column.

After you sort by Monthly Searches, the related keywords with the most amount of traffic will be at the top.

We’re going to try to pick maybe 10 that we think are good keywords to go after.

Try to do a good job here, because after we do some calculations, we might come back and go through this process again.

Pick 10-20 keywords that have decent traffic, but are not too general. This is going to depend on how much competition you have in your specific market.

I would look for keywords with between 2,000 and 10,000 searches per month to begin with. Adjust that range based on your specifics.

Write down those 10-20 keywords somewhere.

Write down the number of monthly searches (global or local, whichever you are) next to each keyword.

Step Two – Competition

This one is easy. For each of your keywords, go to Google and search for each of them.

At the top of each search results page, it will tell you “About NNNNN results”.

Write down the number of results for each keyword next to the number of searches for that keyword.

You now know how many pages you are competing against.

Step Three – Compare

This is where it gets tricky, because there’s math involved, but you’re strong and smart and, gosh darn it, people like you.

If you don’t want to do the math, use a spreadsheet. I’ve created one that you can download and use for your own keywords.

Click Here To Download Spreadsheet.

For each keyword, you want to divide the Pages by the Searches. For every search that’s made each month, how many pages are there competing for them?

What you end up with is a ratio. A ratio is comparing the amount of one thing to the amount of another thing.

When you use the spreadsheet, it’s really easy to see what the ratio actually is.

It’s usually between 10 to 1 and 100 to 1. You want to pick the keywords with the lowest ratio.

That means for every search, there are less pages that you have to compete with to make it to the top spot.

The ratio of 10/1 means that you have to compete with 10 pages for every search. The ratio of 100/1 means that you have to compete with 100 pages for every search.

Step Four – Pick

After you get all of your numbers into your spreadsheet, look at the Ratio column. Which keywords have the lowest ratios?

You may score really well for a keyword that gets very little traffic, so you may want to throw that one out.

If you are competing against a keyword with more than say 500,000 or so, other pages, you may want to throw that one out too.

You want the best ratio with enough traffic to have value, but not so much competition that you will never beat them.

Decide which keyword should be your primary focus. Then pick 3-5 secondary ones that you can work on also.

Review the numbers on these. Make sure there’s enough traffic and not too much competition.

Don’t to this strictly by the numbers. Google’s search numbers are estimates. Look at them all and make your best guess on what makes sense to you for your situation.

When you get to this point, you might be thinking, “You know, I may have another way to approach this, now that I see how it works.” Go back and try again with different keywords.

Rinse. Repeat.

Example – Sea Glass Jewelry

I worked on this one for a friend over a year ago. Here are the keywords and the numbers.

Immediately, throw out anything over 100 to 1. That’s just insane to try to compete with those.

Beach glass is the best ratio. I found out that “beach glass” is an East Coast thing, where “sea glass is a West Coast thing. I would try both of them.

Sea glass has a good ratio, but there are 1,350,000 pages to compete with. That will make it tough.

What’s with the misspelling of the word “jewellry”? More people search for that? Here’s my cynicism showing. I don’t believe Google’s numbers.

I think “beach glass” and “beach jewelry” are the best best here, based on ratio, but might not really be specific to the product of “sea glass jewelry”. They might include how to find beach glass and other kinds of jewelry to wear to the beach.

The balance of being specific enough to the product, and getting enough searches to make it worth while, and not too many pages to compete against, I think, would go to “sea glass jewelry”, even with the 70/1 ratio.

Secondly, I’d go with “sea glass necklaces”. That’s very specific with a decent ratio and not much competition. I think I could crush that one. Not a lot of traffic each month, but we could own that one.

Your Turn

There’s the theory. There’s an example.

You know how to do it, so grab your spreadsheet and start doing research.

If you have any questions, please leave it in the comments below.

Get out there and crush your competition.

5 Simple Ways to Look for Google Love in All the Right Places
By Conrad Walton

I’m very happy to feature a guest post from Conrad Walton on the blog this week. Conrad helps people get their sites found by search engines by helping them with SEO — Search Engine Optimization. In today’s post, he shares his top tips for making your website stand out. If you still have questions after reading this post, let him know in the comments. –Pamela Wilson

Read the entire article at:
http://www.bigbrandsystem.com/5-ways-to-look-for-google-love/

The 405 Freeway in LA on a Tuesday Afternoon

You want traffic to your site? I got your traffic right here.

Here are 17 places that you can get a link, for free, right now.

Click on each one. Some of them require that you set up an account. Some of them are difficult to figure out.

All of them are for “local” companies. If you work out of your home, or you don’t want to use an address, use a PO Box, if you have one, or the address to your city hall or something.

The critical part is to get a link to your web site.

Let us know how it goes in the comments.

Best of the Web

http://local.botw.org

DMOZ

http://www.dmoz.org

Local.com

http://advertise.local.com/search_buslisting.aspx

Yellow Pages – YP.com

http://adsolutions.att.com/internet-solutions

CitySearch

http://www.citysearch.com/corrections/enter_a_location.html

Localeze.com

http://webapp.localeze.com/extranet/add-modify-close-business-listing.aspx

Google Local Business Center

http://www.google.com/local/add

Infousa.com

http://www.expressupdateusa.com/accuracy/default.aspx

Yahoo Local Free Business Listing

http://listings.local.yahoo.com/basic.php

Superpages.com Free Listing

http://www.supermedia.com/

IBeginSource.com

http://www.ibegin.com/business-center/submit/

AllPages.com

http://www.allpages.com/about/listings-modification.html

Insider Pages

http://www.insiderpages.com/session/new

Kudzu.com Basic Profile

https://register.kudzu.com/packageSelect.do

MagicYellow.com Add Your Business

http://www.magicyellow.com/Add_Your_Business.cfm

Merchant Circle

http://www.merchantcircle.com/signup

Yelp

http://www.yelp.com/login

The book is done and now on sale.

You can get 50% off for a limited time.

Plus, you can sell it to your friends and make money yourself!

I’ve been working on updating this book to version 2.0, with all of the recent search engines changes to it.

As I wrote it, all of the questions that have been asked over the last two years came back to me and filled my head.

I kept writing and writing, until there is twice as much information in this book as the original version.

To read the product information and buy the book, please click here:

The Simple Guide To SEO

Discount Coupon!

For a limited time, you will 50% off when you use this coupon code:

seo41150

Put it in on the shopping cart check out page and it will discount the price below.

This coupon is good for two weeks, from now until Monday, April 18.

Don’t wait. Use it now while you are thinking about it.

I don’t want to get a phone call in two weeks to hear you all slobbering and crying about how you forgot.

Make Money Yourself!

This is a new affiliate program for me. Here’s how it works.

You sign up to be an affiliate and get a special link to the sales page.

Give the link to your friends, or post on a forum, or blog comment.

When anyone clicks on that link and buys the book, you will get a 50% commission.

That means that you get $25 per every sale that you are responsible for.

Imagine the places that you can put that link to make sales.

If you sell one to someone else, that means you got the book for FREE!

Click here to sign up to become an affiliate.

Please check it out. Click here to read the sales page:

The Simple Guide To SEO

If you have a question that you want to ask about SEO, this is the place to do it.

Learn how you can maximize the traffic from search engines easy, fast and without hassle

Tue, Mar 29, 2011 10am PDT / 1pm EDT

If you are interested, you can check all the details and signup at the link below:

http://www.eugenoprea.com/seo-webinar/

PS: If you would like to tweet about it, here is a template:

[Free Webinar] How to Get On the First Page of Google. Signup here: http://su.pr/2JOFBw w/ @eugenoprea & @conradwalton [Please Share]

Random, cool, unrelated photo that my wife took in Lone Pine, CA. Click to enlarge.

1. Leave a comment a day on someone else’s blog.
2. Write a blog post about each of the last 10 questions that your customers have asked you. (Schedule them out over the next couple of weeks. You’re done.)
3. Write a blog post describing the benefits and liabilities of each of your top selling products. Feels like you’re being self promotional, and you are.
4. Write a blog post that’s really bad. Too many people worry about writing great masterpieces, that they never get around to writing anything. 90% perfect and published always changes more lives than 100% perfect and stuck in your head. Write a bad one and realize that the world didn’t end. It’ll free you up to write good ones. Don’t worry about what people think. They don’t really care.
5. Write Compelling Headlines. Seriously. A week ago, my headline was “My Interview With…” and that post was stuffed with great information. This week, the headline was “Will You Be Hurt By These Google Changes?”. What happened? 122% MORE people clicked through to read that post from the newsletter. Literally, 222% of the first week. Over twice as many people. Two times more. A lot more. Spend time on your headlines. They matter more than you think.
6. Whenever you write a blog post, post a link to it on your FaceBook company page.
7. Join some online group, a forum or a popular blog, where people talk to each other and help each other out. Whenever you write a new blog post, ask them all to tweet it, “like” it, and comment on it.
8. I know you hate Twitter. I really do. I did too for a long time. But spend a little time on it. Find some people to follow. Get some people to follow you. When you write a new post, tweet about it with a link to the post.
9. Make a list of the top 10 blogs that your customers might hang out. Subscribe to the RSS feeds of those 10 blogs and read them every day, or at least skim them before you mark them all as “read”. Somehow, just reading other people’s blogs makes you more aware of what’s going on in the world and you tend act differently. You get more traffic as a result. It’s magic.
10. Advertise on FaceBook. It’s pretty cheap right now. You can targe what people “like” there, so your ads will only show up on people’s pages who “like” what you target. Don’t spend a lot, but it’s worth trying out.
11. Continue to work on your business, without spending any time on your blog. Focus on your day to day work and ignore the distractions of your web site. Once your site is set up, that’s all you have to do with it. It will run automatically and bring tons of traffic.

The title is “10 Simple ways…”, not “11 Simple ways…”. That last one won’t work at all. Your site will die a slow and painful death, bringing you nothing but heartache and sorrow.

Now go out there and do something. Pick at least one of them. Get started. They aren’t that hard.

What are you waiting for?

Over the past two months or so, various blog posts from Google, as well as posts from expert SEO web sites, have indicated that the old way of doing SEO is not enough anymore.

What Happened To Me

Evil Russell Hantz
Survivor: Redemption Island

My TV show fan site, Survivor.com, has been a solid #2 behind the CBS site for years (years!). When I started to read about these changes, I checked and I had fallen behind Wikipedia.

I do something a little different for that site than most people do. Because the show has seasons, I create a new site, at a new URL for each season. I then redirect “www.survivor.com” to whatever season site it is at the moment.

Currently, it goes to “redemptionisland.survivor.com”. Last season was “nicaragua.survivor.com”.

There is actually no site located at “www.survivor.com”, but it was always ranked as “www.survivor.com” in the #2 position.

Now, it doesn’t rank at all.

If you search for “survivor”, you only find “redemptionisland.survivor.com”.

I checked again after a couple weeks and it was up above Wikipedia once more. It seemed pretty volatile.

(Note: I just searched again. Now “tocantins.survivor.com”, and “samoa.survivor.com” are also in the top 10 results. I have 3 sites listed in the to 10. Wow.)

What Changed?

Ulysses as a metaphorical Google
What is that?

They have begun looking at other “signals”. If Google is a puppy that’s trying to figure out what it’s looking at, it’s learned to use new and different cues to determine what the value of a site is.

The big change that hit survivor.com is “exact match domain names” no longer count for as much value. Having keywords in the domain name is positive, but it’s not the killer that it used to be.

They’ve also devalued “content mills”. Those sites that just churn out information from whatever source they can get, just to get the keywords and content to rank well for a keyword. These are aimed only at ranking well and usually don’t have any good content in them.

“Duplicate content” has been hit. If you are publishing a lot of content from other places, without a lot of original content to go with it, then you won’t rank as well as you did 3 months ago.

Facebook and Twitter were not considered at all 6 months ago, but sometime in the last 3 months, they have begun to have value.

Google is looking at “domain authority” and “trust” as factors. That means that what people are saying about you on other sites seems to have an impact. Comments on other sites, reviews on ecommerce sites, and your profile information from other sites all seem to be counting more now.

Here are the conclusions that SEOMoz.org came too.

What conclusions can be drawn?

That Google seems to have understood that it has to come back to its origins and the base of its core business: quality of SERPs;

That Google has probably understood that old classic link-ranking factor can be so easily gamed that some other factors, as Trust and Domain Authority should be given priority;

That Social Media is so influencing the way people searches, that social signals must be considered as important ranking factors and that Trust and Authority must be translated to the Social reality;

That users generated content and users interaction with the websites is more active than ever was before, therefore that the users factors must be considered as relevant, at least as a litmus mirror, even though it has to be very well crafted into the algo, as elements like reviews can be easily gamed.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/deconstructing-google

What Should You Do Now?

SEO is a moving target and probably always will be. Search engines get smarter and more like a human every day.

You should let the experts chase all of the technical details and updates. Don’t worry about them.

You should concentrate on making your site the best it can be.

Use your keywords and make sure that it’s obvious what your site is about.

My Son, Matthew
He is ALWAYS the most interesting person at any party.

Write compelling and original content.

Write regularly, on a schedule.

Get involved with Facebook and Twitter. Comment on other people’s blogs. Leave product reviews. Get more “social”.

There should be a mix of good, high quality content, with some modest promotion.

In the grand cocktail party that is the Internet, you should be the interesting, cool, and friendly person that everyone wants to talk to.

Be who you’ve always been, be a good person, with good stuff to share, and you’ll be fine.

Now, get out there and share!

I recently had the honor of being interviewed by Sonia Simone for Third Tribe Marketing – Internet Marketing Strategies That Work (Without Being Obnoxious).

It’s a forum site with lots and lots of very smart marketing people and lots of great material. If you want to learn how to market, that’s a great place to find out specific information.

Click Here For More Information About Third Tribe Marketing.

Every month or sooner, they do an interview with an expert on some subject. This time around, they were looking for someone to explain SEO in simple terms. They’ve had “high end” experts on before, but they were difficult for some people to understand.

Conrad doesn’t focus on SEO ninja tactics, but on the essential foundation that delivers the lion’s share of the results.

In this seminar, you’ll learn:

• Why Google isn’t the dark overlord we all imagine (in fact, Conrad says they’re just a big dumb puppy)
• The essentials of keyword research
• Why Third Tribers have a giant SEO advantage over other sites
• Where 99% of sites go wrong with SEO (and why you’re not going to make this newbie mistake)
• The super-secret Copyblogger trick to creating content that works for people and search engines

Click the audio button to listen to the interview, or Click Here To Download The MP3 File.

The transcript is located in the post below.

The Transcript

Sonia: Hey everybody, how are you guys doing? This is Sonia Simone, with Inside the Third Tribe. I’m very excited, because today we managed to snag, despite a busy Survivor finale season, Conrad Walton, who’s the founder of Survivor.com. Conrad, welcome.

Conrad: Well, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Sonia: You’re on the other side of the Tribe today. And today we’re going to talk about SEO for normal people, because we have covered SEO for ninjas, and that was cool, and I think that many of us, certainly this was my experience, listened to the advanced call with Greg Boser and Brian Clark, and we said, “That’s awesome but I don’t think I’m there yet.” So we’re going to talk about SEO for real people, real businesses. The SEO for mortals, let’s call it that.

Conrad: Yes.

Sonia: Why don’t you talk about your background. I think you’re known for a number of things, but you’re probably best known for Survivor.com, which people are not necessarily going to connect with SEO. So what’s your background? How did you first learn about Search Engine Optimization?

Conrad: Well, I’ve been a web developer since 1995, and back when I was starting out, I had a friend who owned Survivor Software, and I told him, “Dude, let me build you a website for free so I can say I’m a real web developer, I did a website for a software company.” So we got Survivor.com and I built a little site, and it was getting like 100 hits a day or something. And then Survivor the TV show came along, and all of a sudden my hits went through the roof. My poor little server almost burned to the ground. It went from 200 hits a day to 125,000 hits a day. So we tried to monetize that, and put some ugly advertising up. So many people, back in the day–this was in 2000, I think–back in the day there was a lot of people just typing in a URL, so if you wanted to see a TV show called “Survivor,” you typed in Survivor.com. Boom, there it was. So that’s where most of the traffic came from back then.

And then about 2003, 2004, 2005, somewhere in there, people started using search engines to find stuff. So you go to Google and type in Survivor. So my traffic started falling off. I started making less money, and I thought, I better check out this search engine stuff. I was on the bottom of the second page, and this was part of my business. I had to make money on it.

So I started learning about SEO, and about links, on-site optimization, all this kind of stuff. Slowly over the course of about a year, I got to the first page, and within about a year, year and a half, I got to be number 2, and it’s been number 2 ever since, underneath the CBS official site. I beat out Wikipedia, I’m very proud of that.

Sonia: Yes, that is the Holy Grail. If you can beat Wikipedia, you’re pretty good.

Conrad: You rock. Absolutely. So that was my motivation for learning about it. The last couple of years, I do web development, I build websites. I’ve been trying to do more training and learn about this marketing stuff, so I wrote a book called The Care And Feeding Of Search Engines; A Simple Guide to SEO. I’ve been giving that away for free to people who signed up for my newsletter. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from that, so I’ve learned a lot in the last two years about SEO from the feedback and writing and working on stuff. What is SEO?

Sonia: Very cool. It’s always kind of useful to start off with definitions, and even though every Third Triber has an idea of what SEO is, why don’t you talk about how you see SEO. What it is and what it’s not.

Conrad: What it’s not is probably key there. A lot of forum threads I’ve been involved in, arguments and email comments, people say SEO basically equals more traffic. So anything you can do to get more traffic, that must be SEO. And that’s not exactly technically true, so I want to kind of slice this out a little bit. People come to websites for a lot of different reasons. If your URL is on a park bench, or a bus bench, they might just type it in. Billboards or advertising, there’s pay-per-click. There’s a lot of ways people get to your websites. So SEO is not advertising. It’s not social media, it’s not Twitter, it’s not Facebook, it’s none of those. We’re only going to talk about the traffic that comes to your site from the search engine. So that’s just a little part of where your traffic comes from. You get traffic a lot of different places, but we’re not going to talk about those, only search engines.

Sonia: And I think a lot of people get very black and white about it. They say, “Well, I get my traffic from SEO.” Or, “I get my traffic from social media so I don’t do any SEO.” Or, “I have the URL Survivor.com, so I don’t have to do SEO.” I think that, what you’re pointing at here is, I really believe it’s not a good idea, a lot of people don’t know why Copyblogger would do SEO, because we get so many links. But actually, we get a large chunk of our traffic, it’s probably close to half of our traffic from SEO, from search engine results. And so even though we get lots of traffic from links and lots of traffic from social media, we would be kind of stupid not to capture all the people out there who are interested in copywriting or SEO copywriting, or some of the other terms we rank for.

Conrad: Yeah, people use search engines. That’s just how people work in the world today. So if you’re not out there, if you’re not at least understanding it and kind of knowing the mechanism behind it, you’re missing out on some traffic.

Sonia: Yeah, definitely. Well, let’s talk about, it’s funny because my business coach is really useful because he’s a normal businessperson. Unlike all the people in the Third Tribe, we’re all kind of weird. But his understanding of SEO is so bad that I kind of despair ever getting him educated. So why don’t you talk about some of the very common misunderstandings people have about SEO? Because I think most people have it totally wrong.

Conrad: Oh, absolutely. I get a lot of people who come to me and they’re like, “Oh, you do SEO. Do SEO for my site.” They think that if I just give you $200 you’ll do SEO and we’ll live happily ever after. It’s like, they want to go down to Home Depot, buy a gallon of SEO, come home, use a one-inch brush and apply it evenly to your website, and everything will be fine. And that’s not really how it is. It’s optimization, which is kind of tuning. It’s what you do to a piano to tune it. It’s what you do to a car. It’s not a product you buy, it’s a better/worse kind of adjustment.

Sonia: Yeah, if there was a product you could buy, it would be pretty darned expensive, right?

Conrad: And there are products, and they are expensive. They do some stuff but that’s not really how we should approach it. You can do it for free for yourself a lot easier.

Sonia: Yeah, and if people want to simply pay dollars and have a guaranteed situation on Google, then that’s called pay-per-click. And it is expensive–it’s really expensive, for the competitive keywords–and that takes a certain amount of mastery in and of itself. So yeah, just throwing money at it, or for sure, hiring somebody who is a great salesman, and who tells you all kinds of wonderful things about SEO, is not necessarily going to get you what you want. Although there are some great SEOs out there. They’re outnumbered, as any good SEO will tell you, probably 99 to one by crooks, but there are definitely some awesome ninjas out there.

Conrad: But we can get 80% of that ninja value for like 20% of the effort doing it ourselves. So we’re going to do the basic stuff here.

Sonia: We’re going to do the basics. So why don’t you talk about some of the other things that kind of steer people wrong.

Conrad: I think the big thing that I see is a lot of people are just intimidated by it all. They think it’s really technical and really complex, and it really can be, and I’ve seen some videos and read some books that I didn’t understand. I guess I want to say right up front that I know that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there that know more about SEO than I ever will. Just to establish my credibility. And it is technical, but it doesn’t have to be.

We’re going to talk about some basic concepts and ways of looking at it. People look at Google and they think that Google is Godzilla and it’s a monster walking through the countryside crushing everything in its path. They think that it knows everything and can do everything, and the fact is that Google is pretty stupid. No offense, but the search engine itself, it’s just, in my book my analogy is that it’s just a puppy. It’s just kind of walking around, it’s really stupid, it doesn’t know what to make of this big bright world that it’s living in. It tries to figure stuff out, and it looks at websites and it tries to figure these things out. It doesn’t know everything. We’re way smarter than it is. We can look at a website and instantly know, oh, that’s a soulless corporation website, or this is somebody’s hobbyist website. We know all that just from the look and feel. They’re not so smart. We can do better than they can, and we can train search engines to do what we want them to do. Good Content is Essential

Sonia: Right. And I also, before we get into, we’re going to jump into some details. I want to talk about an insight that Greg Boser gave us that’s very applicable to the Third Tribe folks, which is, Greg talked with Brian and he said, “Well, the truth is, you guys who have more content focused websites, who have websites that people actually want to read, have done the hard part.” So the reason people need ninja SEOs is they don’t have anything on the site that’s really worth reading, and they need all these amazing tricks, or they need to go out and hire a bunch of writers to produce content that is worth reading. So people should know that they’ve already got a big jump. Just because of the approach that we take at Third Tribe, they’ve already had kind of a big head start. Because you’ve got relationships and you’ve got some kind of commitment to creating content somebody wants to read. Maybe you write it yourself or maybe you’ve got a partner, and we talked last month with Sean D’Souza about what do you do to do more in that. So if you haven’t listened to that seminar, go back and listen to Sean D’Souza’s seminar about how to create great content, because that’ll make the rest of this work a lot better, and that’s what lets you take the 20% effort and get really good results from it.

How to Choose a Keyword

But let’s jump into keywords. Let’s start to talk about keywords. I think that a lot of people would sort of rather have dental surgery than think about trying to use a keyword research tool. It just seems really boring and complicated and difficult. So can you make it less painful for us?

Conrad: I can try. This is probably the most painful part of it, but once you get it done, it’s over and then your tooth feels better. So keywords. The thing is, you’ve got to look at this as there are real people out there, a billion people a day on the Internet, and they’re sitting at a computer and their keyboard, and they’re thinking, oh, I need to find out about the starter engine for a ’72 Pinto. Or I want to find an anniversary gift for my wife. Whatever it is they’re searching for, there’s millions of people searching for stuff. So how do they search for it, what do they use, what do they actually type in when they hit Enter into Google? What are they looking for, what are they trying to find? Google’s trying to figure that out too, and we’re going to try to figure that out. What is that keyword?

Everything revolves around the keyword, because that’s where the search is. So we’re going to look at our own site, and you’re going to say, what’s my site about? What are people looking for when they look for my site? What do I want to be found for? Survivor, I want to be found for the word “survivor,” but I also want to be found for “survivor Nicaragua,” “red carpet interview with Fabio.” People type in all kinds of stuff. So there’s that whole long tale of longer phrases and less numbers of searches.

So I’m going to pick a keyword for Survivor and I’m going to call it Survivor. So we’re going to pick our keyword that we think our site should be found for, and we’re going to try to find some related keywords that Google says other people are going to search for when they’re searching for your keyword. So we’re going to go to a keyword tool, we’re going to find some related keywords that we think are good, we’re going to take a guess at it.

Then we’re going to compare the number of searches with the number of competitors and figure out what the best odds are for the keyword to attack. So let’s walk through that real slow.

Sonia: First off, what tool do you like? There are a number of tools; some of them are free, some of them are paid. What do you use?

Conrad: Actually, personally, I use the Marketing Samurai, which is a paid tool, which does rockstar stuff, and most people don’t need that. It makes it fast and easy to do a big bulk, but you’re not doing that. We’ll do the fast easy stuff that’s free. I would recommend the keyword tool from Google AdWords. If you do a search for Google AdWords keyword tool, you’ll find the link to it. And the Yahoo Site Explorer is another good one. So there’s three steps to this. First you pick your keyword, or five keywords. We’re going to compare five different keywords. For each one of those, we’re going to find out how many people search for it each day, then we’re going to find out how many competitor pages there are out there in the world. So if you do the searches, you go to the keyword tool, you put in your keyword and AdWords keyword tool will tell you that there’s 300,000 searches a day for this, or 5,000 searches, or 20 searches a day. So write that down next to your first keyword. And go through all five of your keywords and write that number down. How many people search for this every day? How many people sit down at their computer and type in that exact phrase?

Next step is, we’re going to find out how many other pages there are in the world. Who are we competing against? Are we competing against Wikipedia and CBS.com? I would not want to compete with Copyblogger for anything, for any search.

Sonia: It’s going to be tricky, because we’ve got a ton of links coming in, and also the site is about five years old, so it has a lot of authority. So yeah, if you’re trying to rank, at least you know a number one, number two spot for copywriting, that’s going to be tough.

Conrad: Yes. So there’s some really competitive niches out there, and you’re just not going to win those. But let’s do some math, and I know math is scary.

Sonia: Math class was hard.

Conrad: Yes. So I did a couple quick examples in my book that we’ll run through. I compared the term “handmade jewelry” with “handmade earrings,” and I found out that “handmade jewelry” there’s about 300,000 monthly searches. I guess that’s daily searches. 300,000 people each day search for “handmade jewelry.” And you look at “handmade earrings,” and only 18,000 people a day search for that. So 300,000 versus 18,000. Huge discrepancy there.

Sonia: Right. One thing I wanted to interject here is, I think sometimes people get a little hung up on the searches because they think that’s like–

Conrad: Gospel.

Sonia: Yes. And I look at number of searches in relative terms. I need to go relatively. But you can’t, there’s no promise that really, 300,000 people are going to show up every day and search on that. So people get hung up and they think, okay, 300,000 people are typing that in, so I can sell to 1% of them, so that means that I could sell each one of those $50, and I’m going to make–no. You cant’ do that. You can’t take the number as gospel, and of course, 300,000 people search but not all of them are going to click on even the number one listing. They’re going to click on the listing they find most appealing. You don’t know what they’re there for. So don’t take that number as gospel but do look at the relative number. So it’s the 300,000 versus the 18,000 versus any kind of hard number.

Conrad: And then the next step on that is you look at the competition . There are 6,000,000 pages out there that mention the phrase “handmade jewelry” and there’s 3,000,000 pages that mention handmade earrings. So if you do the math on that, which is for handmade jewelry, the ratio between the number of searches versus the number of pages is what we’re looking at. So 300,000 searches, 6,000,000 pages.

That comes out for every search there are 20 pages that exist. Does that make sense? 300,000 searches, 6,000,000 pages, do the math, divide one by the other, 20 to one. If you look at handmade earrings, there’s only 18,000 searches, 3,000,000 pages. There’s half as many pages, but there’s like one-fifteenth the number of searches. So that comes out to 200 to one. For every search there are 200 pages out there. So I would rather compete in search against 20 pages instead of 200 pages. So if you do that math, you kind of come up with some keywords or phrases that are more vulnerable than other keywords or phrases.

Sonia: Yeah, for example, when I did this, I found that “email marketing,” forget it. Not only is it owned, but it’s owned by AWeber and Constant Contact. Forget it. But “email newsletters” is much more in the real world. Now I could probably, with the resources of a Copyblogger, I could probably make a run at “email marketing,” and “email marketing” gets a lot more searches. But for my little business, as Remarkable Communication on my own, “email newsletter” was much more in the land of something I could actually get done. So it’s kind of being realistic about how many bodies you have to get over.

Conrad: Exactly. And that’s worked out. I did the whole niche marketing thing, and did a bunch of research, and I actually do have a phrase that I wont’ tell you that I actually rate number one for. It took me about three months, and I rank number one for it, I get like 80 hits a day on that site.

It is possible to do the math, find a vulnerable keyword. But even if you’re not looking for a vulnerable keyword, at least get one that’s got a better chance. Something that will be better for you. You Have to Stick to It

Sonia: Okay, so all right. So we’re going to pick our fight and we’re going to stick to it. And that’s the other thing, if you kind of get bored and wander off, it’s not going to work, unless it’s really not that competitive. When I did the 30-day challenge a couple of years ago, I ranked for Free knitting patterns. But it turns out you can’t really do much with free knitting patterns. So that was fun and it was interesting to do, but once we found something that’s actually–since I don’t have a knitting store, if I did, I could do a lot with free knitting patterns, actually. And anybody who has a knitting store who wants it, go forth, and conquer it. Once we’ve identified our keywords that we want to go for, you’ve got to stick with it. You can’t just kind of work on it. That’s the other thing we didn’t talk about, but people think that, okay, I’ m going to do some SEO magic and then, because so many of the hype-y SEO product guys will tell us, oh, you can dominate your niche in 48 hours. Well, you can do that if you’ve got free knitting patterns. But if you’re going for something that has a little more competition, it’s not going to take 48 hours. It’s going to take some time.

Conrad: Right. And another thing people tend to do is, like you talked about email marketing versus email newsletters, well maybe you start talking about marketing newsletters, or Internet marketing, and all of a sudden you get different phrases in there, and you forgot email newsletters and now you’re doing something else. So you’ve really got to stick to that keyword. Tape it to your monitor and every day write a post that uses that phrase. How Does a Search Engine Work?

Sonia: Well, and we’re going to talk about how to actually do something with these keywords. Do you want to just touch on how search engines decide what goes on those top–you’ve got ten spots. It’s essentially a zero-sum game. Because as you mentioned earlier, being at the top of page 2 does you very, very little good. So you’ve got to be on page 1. There’s ten spots. How does the search engine figure out which are the ten winners?

Conrad: If I knew the exact answer to that, that would be great. I’ll give you a general answer, and also I want to say that the search results, what is it, SERPS?

Sonia: Right, SERPS. Search Engine Results Pages.

Conrad: Yes. I love saying the word SERPS. I’m going to try to stay away from TLAs, the three-letter acronyms that nobody knows, but SERPS, I’m going to use SERPS.

So what the search engine does, it sends out a robot, a spider, and it crawls all the pages on the Internet, and it looks at each one of them. Now remember that the spider is like a little puppy. A little puppy doesn’t know how to infer things. It’s very literal.

And it’s not even looking at a web page. It’s actually looking at your HTML, the code behind the web page. It’s trying to figure out, it’s trying to get hints from that code, what is this really about? How many words are on it? What words are there? What’s highlighted? How many other pages link to it?

It’s going to look at this literal world of code and try to analyze something from that. So let’s look at the factors that it’s going to look at and try to analyze. It’s got a list. There’s a huge algorithm of factors that are involved in this. But it’s going to look at each page, and it’s going to say, okay, I see the word survivor on this page. So I’m going to score this one, it’s going to give it some rank, call it a 35 for survivor. I’m going to look at the free knitting patterns. I’m going to give it a 98 for free knitting patterns.

It evaluates all these factors and it gives it a score. So then when you do a search for survivor, it says, okay, I’m going to look through all my pages that have scores for survivor. The CBS site, that’s got a 12,098 score, and Survivor.com, that’s like a 802 score. So I’m going to rank that one higher than this, and it puts together those scores and evaluates it.

So I found that interesting. When I learned that, I was kind of shocked. I figured it actually looked at the page, remembered the whole thing in its memory, did an analysis and all that. But it doesn’t, it just gives you a score for that page. For a key phrase.

Sonia: Right. And there’s all kinds of little factors and only the Google engineers really know, because they mix it up of course, to keep SEOs from ranking for stuff that they shouldn’t rank for. Which does not mean Google doesn’t want you to rank for the page, they just don’t want you to rank for it when you’re really selling porn or casinos.

They’re trying to give people, that’s the other thing I think people don’t understand about Google. They’re just trying to give people who use the search engine what they want. So if they type in pills, porn, and casinos, that’s what they want to give them. And if they type in Survivor red carpet interview, they want to give them that. They just want to give people what they want.

Conrad: So they’re going to look at these factors and try to figure out what is really the most accurate.

Sonia: Right. Is your site really what you say it’s about?

Now let’s talk about one thing that I’ll kind of interject here, and we mentioned the spiders. A spider is a little tiny computer program, it’s a little piece of code. It goes through and it analyzes other pieces of code, and so one thing that is helpful with SEO is that your code not look like a dog’s breakfast. If there’s lots and lots of custom code, particularly if that custom code was written by your brilliant ADD 8-year-old nephew who thinks computers are cool but isn’t a master yet, if the code is ugly and confusing, that can confuse the spiders and keep them from looking at what they need to look at. So you want to use–and this does not mean you need to go out and hire a brilliant programmer to write your website, it just means use something you know has clean code, that’s SEO-friendly. A premium WordPress theme; WordPress in general tends to be pretty good for blogs. But sometimes if you go too custom and the person who did the customizations isn’t that skilled, or if you go with a static HTML page, and for some insane reason people still do this. They go out and they hire bad web developers who create bad pages on something like Dreamweaver, and the code is horrible. So use a good tool that’s known to be SEO-friendly. Training the SEO Puppy

Conrad: Yes. Yeah, I do pretty good business converting those kind of sites to WordPress. And I think the real thing to remember here is this is a little puppy looking at your page trying to figure it out. It’s not a human being; it’s not as smart as we are.

Sonia: And it gets confused easily. So how do we train the puppy? How do we give it hints to tell it what the site is actually about?

Conrad: I think the most obvious is, you’ve got to use your word. You’ve got to have the key phrase on the site. You’ve got to talk about what you’re going to talk about. I don’t want to hear about or read about a universal solution to all of your blah blah blah. Buzzwords, that doesn’t mean anything. You’ve got to say, “This is Survivor, the CBS TV show.” You’ve got to be blunt. You’ve got to be out there and say, this is what I’m selling, this is what the site’s about.

I had a client that came to me and said, “I’ve done everything in your book, but I look at my competitor and they’re still rated higher than me.” I said, “Okay, give me your URL,” and I looked at her page, and I’m reading this and I’m thinking, what is this about? I have no idea what your site’s about. It’s the best and it’s the most wonderful and it’ll solve all my problems but I don’t even know what my problem is. I said, “Pick your keyword, actually start using it in the title, in the copy, in the URL. Start using the keyword.” I think that’s the biggest, most fundamental mistake people make.

Sonia: Yeah, and I’m going to include a link with this to the Scribe SEO copywriting report, because that talks about where you put those hints. For example, your title tag. Your formatting. Things like that, links. And of course Scribe SEO is a tool that helps you get that keyword balance right. Because of course, the first thing a bad SEO will do is put your keyword phrase in so many times that it’s no longer English, it’s just gibberish. And not only is that bad for the people who are reading your page, but Google’s wise to that. It may be dumped.

Conrad: Yeah, you can’t just say lawnmower blades, lawnmower blades. We sell lawnmower blades, and if you want a lawnmower blade, here’s where you get your lawnmower blade.

Sonia: Yeah, nobody wants to read that, and Google doesn’t want to serve that. So you use your keyword phrase and you use it the right amount. Not too much, not too little. That’s one of the things that Scribe does for people, helps strike the balance. Search Engines Are Like High School I know that you talk about search engines being like high school. This is a really big factor. So do you want to talk about that?

Conrad: I think officially we’ll divide SEO into onsite and offsite. So onsite is everything on your site that you control, which is titles, URLs, keyword density, bold, the links on your site. All that is onsite. But what’s really important is not what you say you’re about. It’s what everybody else says you’re about. It’s like being in high school, and it’s like you’re cool because everybody else says you’re cool, not because you say you’re cool.

So how that works in the SEO world is, who links to you? What kind of authority do they have? How many links do you have? What kind of anchor text do they use to link to you? If they use the anchor text “bicycle seats,” best bicycle seat in the world, then your site’s probably going to be about bicycle seats. The little puppy looking at this is going to say, oh, he’s got 45 other sites out there, and they seem to be about bicycle seats, and they link to this site, and they use the words bicycle seat, so I’m going to score this page over here really high for the phrase “bicycle seats.”

Sonia: Right, and the anchor text is just the, when you’re putting the link together, it’s the words that are underlined, for those of you who are really not that SEOsavvy. So somebody else writes about, I just did this marathon bike race and I just had the most amazing bicycle seat, and they underline that link, and that’s the hotlink to your site, that’s the anchor text.

Conrad: Right.

Sonia: And that’s, again, where the Third Tribe has an advantage, because of the approach we take, because it’s not only about SEO but it’s about the big picture. It’s about social media too, it’s about relationships, it’s about cultivating your reputation, which is so important. You’re just going to get a head start on links as opposed to one of the SEO gurus, who’s trying to rank for a term like “Styrofoam toy spiders,” and he doesn’t have any of those things, and so he’s just got to do it kind of by brute force. You get a running start because you know other people in your topic, you cultivate the relationships, all those things that, if you go back in the Third Tribe archives, we’ve talked about. SEO is About the Page, not the Site Okay, so people, I think that’s the other problem with SEO, is people think that SEO is about your site when it’s about your page. So site, no site ranks for anything, it’s always an individual page. It might be your home page, so it might be, Copyblogger.com ranks for things. But it’s really an individual page on the site that ranks, and it’s an individual page that we optimize. So can you talk about how you figure out what page you want to focus your attention on within your site?

Conrad: I guess we’ll go back to the Survivor thing. If you look for the phrase “survivor,” you’ll get to Survivor.com. If you look for “Survivor Nicaragua,” you get to Nicaragua.Survivor.com. If you look at “Red carpet interview for Fabio for Survivor,” you get to that individual page. So you can optimize an individual page for individual keyword, with the title, the formatting, bolding, menu links to it, and all that kind of stuff. All that kind of all rolls up under the domain name, or underneath a larger category page. Does that answer your question?

Sonia: Yeah, I think so. I’m also going to give folks a link to a Copyblogger article that talked about how you can actually create a page that’s just designed for that, to kind of pull things together, and give you something to focus your attention on.

Conrad: Yeah, and it is important to note they do rank pages, not sites. There’s a cumulative effect there, too, the ranks for the site.

Sonia: Yes, that’s right. Your site has authority, so your site is either kind of a trusted site that Google says, “This site seems to be doing good work and has a reputation, people link to it,” or sites that Google says, “This seems to be run by some kind of credit card hacking company in southern Romania, and we don’t think it’s very trustworthy.” So Google trusts or doesn’t trust your site or domain name, but it can only show a page, even if it’s your home page so it seems like it’s your whole site, it’s really showing a page at a time. What to Watch Out For with SEO Well, given that SEO creates a lot of anxiety, what should we be worried about? What should we be concerned, or where can we go wrong, or where can we screw this up?

Conrad: Yeah, this is all an art, it’s not a science. When you get into any technical field, there’s all those guys who know all the details, and how much horsepower a certain car has, or what a keyword density should actually be, or all that stuff. Don’t worry about all that stuff.

The big things you should worry about is, what is the search engine looking for? Keep going back to that little puppy looking at your site, going “What’s this site really about?” So the content on your site, all this onsite stuff, the content, the keywords, the titles, formatting, what do you use in your menus to link to other pages? If you have “about” or “contact us,” that can really tell you a lot. But then the big thing is building links. If you can start building links, if you have a decent site and do nothing else, if you can build links on there, and links are going to come from, you actually do have compelling content on your site, people are going to read it, and go, “Hey, that’s all about that! I’m going to link to that. That’s cool.” I wrote an article for my own site at WaltonWebDesigner.com, my web development site. I wrote an article about How Much Does WordPress Cost? About a year ago or something. Some guy linked to it, thought it was great, and linked to it, and all of a sudden I had 800 pages using How Much Does WordPress Cost? as the anchor text, all linking to this one page, now all of a sudden I’m the number one guy for How Much Does WordPress Cost? It’s not even what my site is really about, but it has so many links that I got ranked really high for it. So compelling content, try to build links. That’s huge. And if you use Twitter and Facebook, and any kind of social interaction, reputation and relationships, all that stuff, the more people who are aware of you, the more people who are linked to you, if you just work on that, just bring cool people to you, and you’ll be fine.

Sonia: Yes, and we covered this before in Third Tribe, and there was a lot of controversy. When we in the Third Tribe say cool, we are not talking about being like Bono. We are talking about being a good person, who is chill with other people, and other people like you–

Conrad: Because you’re cool.

Sonia: Because you’re cool. Not cool like high school cool, but cool like be a good guy kind of cool, or be a good gal. Just be nice, make friends, one of these days we’re going to do everything you need to know about Internet marketing you learned in kindergarten.

Conrad: Which is true. Or high school.

Sonia: Yeah, don’t do the online equivalent of picking your nose, and be nice to people, and you’ll get a lot.

Conrad: And all the cool kids in high school, everybody else hated those people.

Sonia: Right, exactly.

Conrad: So be one of the common people. Just hang out with people. And when people like you, they link to you, and the more links you get, Google is really trying to mirror an organic world. The cooler you are, the more friends you have, the more authority you have, the more people link to you. If you’re the cool person at the party, people want to talk to you, and people want to talk to you because you’re the person that people want to talk to. Everybody goes there because that’s where everybody goes. Headlines Matter

Sonia: Yes, exactly. And the other thing, I’ll just give people, it seems ridiculous but it works. The better your headline, the more people will link to it. It’s goofy, but I think it’s just because the better your headline, the more people will read it. And then when people read it, they say, oh this is actually–so if you have a garbage article with a great headline, I don’t think that’s going to get you links. But I’ll go ahead and put in a link to the headline resources on Copyblogger, because I’ve got to tell you, Copyblogger built its reputation and its links by having good content, well-written, it was useful; but a lot of people have that. Kind of the secret sauce on Copyblogger is, Brian put a ton of thought into really good headlines, and that gave it that extra bump over the many, many other copywriters out there who were also producing good stuff. So there’s a reason that there’s thousands, tens of thousands of very strong sites about copywriting, and the reason we do so well for the term “copywriting” and other terms related to that is headlines, if I had to name one factor. So I’m going to give you a link to that so you can brush up on your headlines.

Conrad: I guess I want to say, one of the things I personally have been learning, in my own life, is as good as a product you have, if you have all the wonderful compelling content on your site, no matter how good you are, there’s still got to be an element of the marketing and selling, and headlines is part of that marketing. You’ve got to connect with people, you’ve got to have a relationship, you’ve got to make them like you. You’ve got to have a little bit of a push behind it.

Sonia: You do. And for those people who are listening to the call who kind of throw up in their mouth a little when they think about marketing, my definition of marketing is simply how you communicate with people who might do business with you, or who already do business with you. That’s all it is. Marketing is just communication. It’s not like some special kind of activity. Marketing is how you talk to people, marketing is what you say on Twitter, marketing is what you say on Facebook, including all the stuff you say that’s not about your business. It’s what you do, it’s how you conduct yourself, it’s how you talk to people, it’s how you answer email. It’s the whole thing, it’s just communication. So don’t make it a mystery.

Conrad: And more than that, I’ve even told people, people that hate marketing and the concept of it, if you have a good product that you believe in, and I assume you have a good product or otherwise you shouldn’t be selling it. If you have a good product that’s going to change people’s lives, marketing is just giving them the opportunity to have a better life. You’re trying to make people’s lives better. You’re trying to change the world and do good things. So you’re doing somebody a favor if you market to them.

Sonia: Yes, and if you don’t believe that about your business, change what you do until you do believe it. That’s probably the most important marketing tip there is. There’s a very off-color Frank Kern example, but I’m not going to give that. Applying Basic SEO Okay, so we’re going to review the site for the basics. Things like our title tags, and you can go through the SEO copywriting report and find out what those are. We don’t have to cover that a million times. We’re going to work on those relationships with other people who have websites, so we’re going to bring in those inbound links. What else should people be doing just to cover, again, the 20% of effort that’s going to get 80% of the results?

Conrad: One of the things Google likes is a lot of pages. All other things being the same, a site with 20 pages is not as authoritative as one with 200 pages. So blogs are wonderful for that. They also look at how often is the site updated. If the site hasn’t been touched since 2002, then maybe it’s not so valuable. So if you blog once a week–or just regularly. I’ll use the phrase regularly. You’re adding pages, you’re adding content, you’re adding keywords, you’re adding links, Google loves that stuff. It’s like candy to the puppy. The other thing to watch for, you should grow this organically. You should get a couple new links a week. If all of a sudden you’ve got 4,900 new links, Google’s going to raise their eyebrows, and think you’re probably trying to cheat here. I think it’s important not to try to cheat. Don’t do any black hat stuff. Sooner or later you’re caught, and it probably won’t work for you anyway.

Sonia: Right. We don’t have the budget to really go serious black hat. And if you do you’re not listening to this call, because you’ve got your own game you’re playing, and bless you, it’s not my game, but use it to do good.

Conrad: And sooner or later you’re going to get crushed anyway.

Sonia: Well, that’s the thing. And I think the people who enjoy the black hat game, they kind of like being the outlaw. They want to be the Bonnie and Clyde. They enjoy that aspect of it. Google employs thousands of people to sit there and figure out what you’re doing to cheat them, and to cheat the game, so they can make that stop working. So that’s why the black hat techniques, and usually by the time they filter down to the cheesy guru product, it’s because those techniques don’t work anymore. Because the ones that do work, they’re not going to share with you for $49.

Conrad: It’s true. And I think the other key phrase here is that you should write for people. Don’t get too hung up on SEO. Keep an eye on keywords, keep an eye on title tags and all that stuff. Think about that in the back of your head, but you’re writing for people. You’re writing for humans, you’re not writing for machines.

Sonia: Right. My favorite way to get people to understand that is that Google robots don’t have credit cards, so they cannot buy from you. Even if you rank number 1, because somehow you managed to trick the robots, if no one ever reads your content and buys from it, you didn’t do yourself any good.

Conrad: Absolutely.

Sonia: Well, do you want to talk about kind of the couple of things that people might want to do as they go forward? Continuing Steps

Conrad: Yeah, I think, after you initially do your site review, and you’ve got that under control, and I think we’ve talked enough about that, ongoing you want to start building links, and we’ve talked about that. But then, in your little control room, inside your office when you’re trying to rule the world, you want to track numbers. You want to have Google Analytics, you want to look at your traffic sources, you want to look at your keywords, and see, I think this site might be about this, but people are really searching about that. So keep an eye on that. As you go on, dynamically track what is really happening to your site in the real world. So Google Analytics is good for that. The other one is, Google webmaster account, and you should go get one of those, and I think it’s Google.com/webmaster, and that’s going to tell you how often your site gets crawled, it’s going to tell you the number of links to your site, and it’s going to give you another bit of information about what’s going on with your search engine. You should also be searching for your own site with your keywords and tracking where are you. Are you at the bottom of the second page? Are you number five? You’ve been at six for the last three months, and now you’ve dropped down to the second page, what happened? So just keep an eye on that stuff too. One metric that I like to watch is the number of inbound links, and I use the Yahoo site explorer for that. It’s just fun to watch who links to you, why they link, what’s the anchor text, try to figure out who these people are and why they’re linking to you. Gives you an insight into what other people are thinking about you, so it’s a good tool also. SEO Quick Tips

Sonia: Cool. Well, we’re coming up on, we’re kind of close to an hour here, so I want to make sure people don’t spend all their time hearing about SEO and get out there and start actually creating some content, and optimizing some content. Do you want to leave people with any kind of quick tips, or quick tricks that they can put into place?

Conrad: Yeah. One of the interesting techniques that I saw is that if you use the Yahoo site explorer, and you look at the inbound links, go look at your competition, that guy you’re trying to beat, the person that ranks number 1 to your number 2. Go find out who links to them, and find out why they link, and then go talk to those people and get them to link to you too. It’s like if you’re in high school, and you want to be one of the cool kids, you go find out who likes the cool kids and have them introduce you and get the cool kids to like you too. That’s a pretty cool trick, I like that.

Sonia: Yeah, it’s simple but it works and most people don’t do it.

Conrad: Yes. And then I think the biggest secret to SEO, I had this one lady, she read my book and got all excited, and said, “I did everything in the book and I’m still way down there.” It’s like, yeah, but you just did that last week. Give it a little time. This takes some time to do. If you just pop up on Google, theyr’e like, “Dude, who are you? I don’t know you.” It’s going to take a little while and some reputation, some age, to do that. So the big secret to SEO is that it’s a lot of drudgery, and it’s hard work. I know that after listening to this, you’re going to rush out and spend the next four hours updating your site, and email all your friends and say, link to my site. In three weeks if I were to email you and say, “Hey, how’s that going?” you’re going to say, something came up, and you get discouraged but you’ve got to keep going. Three weeks from now is when you need to be working on SEO, not today. So that’s probably the big trick.

Sonia: Yeah, and this is truly a slow and steady wins the race kind of a game. You make a point that I think people don’t realize, if you rank quickly, you can unrank just as fast. So Google will rank a Twitter tweet for a few hours. You can rank instantly, but you don’t get any lasting value from that. You get the lasting value from creating the cookie content as we’ve talked about before, the trusted content, and that’s what you really want to do. It’s not how fast you get there, it’s how long you stay there.

Conrad: Yes. On that niche site that I mentioned a while ago, I published the thing and within two days I think I was number three. I was like, “All right! I scored, this stuff really works, it’s magic.” And so I watched it, and a week later I was number four, I think. And within two weeks, I think I was off the first page, and for a month I wasn’t even on the first page. It was like, what happened, where am I? Then I didn’t do anything, and then slowly I made it back to number nine, then number six. And after about three months, all of a sudden I’m number one, and I’ve been number one ever since. It’s probably been a year and a half now. It moves around, and it does take a long time.

Sonia: Yeah. Okay.

Conrad: Final tips?

Sonia: Final tips, yeah.

Conrad: Get listed in Google places. I use a PO box for my web development business, so I use that for my local, if you’re looking for a location, it’s my PO box. But it counts as a link, Google sees that, and you get points for that. Twitter and Facebook, big controversy with that. Does that really help or not? In the past, I don’t think it has officially, is it SEO or not, whatever. I think recently they’ve come out and said, yeah, Google actually is starting to use those as indicators. That little puppy trying to figure out what’s going on in this world, they’re starting to use that as a signal. Even if technically it’s not SEO, you’re still going to use the social relationships to drive links. Getting people to know you, people are then going to blog about you, and there’s a secondary result that’s SEO. And I think the basics on this are going to get you pretty far. Most of the people I’ve talked to, most of the people that freak out about this, they haven’t done the basics. And if you just do some basic stuff, you’re going to do really well. Maybe you’re not going to be the ninja, but you’re going to do that 80%, and you’ll be fine.

Sonia: Absolutely. Well, this is cool, thank you so much. I’m going to give people a trick, since we’re doing tips and tricks, that we use on Copyblogger that people don’t think about, that’s applicable to bloggers, which is, there are times when your title is, not necessarily the best title for the search engine is not necessarily the best headline for your readers. And so there’s two things you can do. One is you have a title tag, that’s the HTML tag, and it’s a pretty significant element that Google uses to figure out what you’re about. So if you have any good SEO-friendly WordPress theme, or the SEO tools that people use for WordPress, that lets you alter the title tag. So you can put in, if your keyword is “naked molerats,” but your headline is, “16,000 ways to be more popular, have shinier teeth, and live forever,” use that as your headline and then put in “naked molerats, 16,000 whatever” in the title tag. And the other sneaky thing we do on Copyblogger is, we will put a post out that has the most human-friendly headline on it, and we will optimize it for people and we will maybe write an intro that’s got a really good hook, doesn’t use the keywords at all, because it’s just a great hook for readers. We’ll get all that good stuff, then we go back and we optimize it later. So we’ll go back in and we’ll put in a more SEO-friendly headline. We’ll put in the keyword phrase in the first paragraph.

Conrad: Really?

Sonia: Yeah.

Conrad: That’s tricky.

Sonia: It’s tricky. So you can get both. Because most of your reader traffic comes the day you post and the day you email. You get all the goodness, you get all the links, you get all the social media love, and then you can go back in after the fact. You don’t do it for everything, but you do it for a few key posts, like our Third Tribe posts. We didn’t know there was even going to be such a thing as the Third Tribe. That was just me on a rant. But we went back in after the fact and optimized that for Third Tribe, and so yeah. There’s no law, there’s no ethical rule that says you can never go back in and edit blog content. You certainly can. There’s nothing wrong with it. You wouldn’t do it to trick somebody. Again, you’re not going to go back in there and put in all your links to your pills, porn, and casinos. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re just talking about going back in and putting some things in to teach the stupid little puppy what it’s about.

Conrad: That’s really good. I’m impressed with that one. I’m going to try that. A lot of my clients I build websites for are like, “Oh my gosh, once we publish this, it’s set in stone, we can never change it.” It’s like, no, you can change it tomorrow. So get your big pop on people today, and lay it in for the SEO later. I like that.

Sonia: Well, Conrad, thanks. This has been fun, thank you.

Conrad: Yeah. So my website is WaltonWebDesigner.com, and I’m going to be updating my SEO book. I really like this explaining technical things in simple terms stuff, so we’re going to try doing that for more people. So come by and see what I’m doing on my website. I’m going to say the last bit of advice on any of this stuff, is don’t freak out over any of it. Just try stuff, if it works, it works; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and tomorrow you can do something different. It’s all adjustment. It’s an art, it’s not a science, don’t freak out. Just put out a little bit of effort and you’ll be fine.

Sonia: Yes. Slow and steady, don’t freak out. Those are really good watchwords. Well, Conrad, thanks for your time. We will include lots of links; we will go ahead and put a link in, if you want some more detailed advice about SEO, because it is in the details. We’ll go ahead and give you a link to Conrad’s book, so thank you again. I guess you’re going to get a little bit of rest, now that the Survivor finale has taken place.

Conrad: Yeah, as we’re recording this, it was like yesterday we did $100,000 in business on my website. The day after the finale, it was wonderful.

Sonia: Nice, we love that. Okay, everybody, well thank you guys, for your time and attention, because you know I never, ever take that for granted. This is Sonia Simone and Conrad Walton, with Inside the Third Tribe. What Now? Make sure you download the Next Action worksheets for this seminar! The worksheets are where you’re going to translate the ideas and concepts from the seminars into actions that will get your business moving. Feeling stuck or confused? Jump over to the forum and we’ll get you rolling again.