The otherday I was toying with the idea of setting up a lead capture page for a local mortgage broker here in Perth Australia.

Becuase the volume of Google searches specificcally for Perth is low, the keywords that BigG gives back is not always true.

But, imagine if I could “peep” into one of the top ranking sites and see what is driving traffic for them. How valuable would that be?

Well its not actually that hard, and our old friend Alexa comes to the rescue on this one:

In the example I talk about above, I was targetting the keyword PERTH MORTGAGE. I wanted to know if more people searched for perth mortgage and than for mortgage perth

So I typed PERTH MORTGAGE into google, and saw the following :

So off I go to alexa.com and type in the domain name.

Wow.. check out those keywords. It shows that MORTGAGE PERTH is type in more offen than PERTH MORTGAGE, plus it has thrown up a few other keywords that I hadn’t considered. Now, if I repeat this for most of the sites on the front page of Google, I should have  great list of keywords and know exactly what to call my domain name and what sort of content to target.

Plus, I will naturally be checking out each sites backlinks to see where they got links from and try to get a link from those same sites to my site..

Let me know what you think about this idea..

These are white hat sites and the website owners are very happy to have your link on their site.

Still Interested ?

Ok here’s the secret..

A lot of people are constantly looking for new content to post into their sites/blogs.

And one of the more common ways of getting content into a WP blog is to join up with Uniqe Article Wizard.

This is a great service, but they have one “flaw” if you can call it that( and its not even their own fault).

So how can we capitalize on this so-called “fault” and get backlink for ourselves?

UAW sends a test post to new blogs when they first join up and most people forget to delete this test post. So all we have to do is find these test posts and compile  a huge list of blog owners that want your original content.

Simply send the author an email, asking if they want original content that is NOT in the UAW system (most will kill for unique content) and then send them the article to post when they say OK

It couldn’t be any easier !

So how do you find these UAW test posts?

We look for blog posts that look something like :

All I do is search for the text string :

“Congratulations on joining our community! The Unique Article Wizard is the best and easiest way to receive unique content for your site. Here is some important”

Click this link (it just opens up Google in a new window using the text string above) and see for yourself the websites that are returned.

So, now you have no excuse now for not getting backlinks to your website.

Let me know what you think of this idea?

And one of the first things I found was *a lot* of the ping sites I had in my wordpress ping list where not working anymore.

So I decided to go through my big list of ping servers and find out what was working and whats wasn’t.

A couple of things jumped out straight away:

1. Both technorati and Yahoo.com are no longer accepting pings.

Technorati has this announcement on their website (http://technorati.com/ping/) and the yahoo server, that most of us use for ping is no longer active.

So I would suggest you edit your ping list and remove those two sites, and all variations of them.

Even two of the Google ping servers (.ie and .in no longer accept pings)

So after many days of testing sites, I have eventually come up with a ping list that now contains sites that work (ie: the domains are still valid, and the ping servers report something meaningful).

Out of my list of over 150 ping sites, I ended up with the following list of 83 servers:

You can include Ping-O-matic.com if you wish, but I have found pingomatic to be unreliable at times, so I basically ignore it and post directly to the sites that matter.

Actually its pretty simple, becuase there is a really neat little plugin that will create a XML file from your posts (in a valid Google & Yahoo sitemap XML format) and then it will tell the search engines that this sitemap has been updated.

Its called : Google XML Sitemaps

And you can find it at : http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

Its really simple to install.

Just upload to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder

Activate it as you would any other plugin, and then follow the prompts.

I would strongly suggest you manually make your sitemap file, the first time you install it.

If  there are going to be any errors then this is when to find them.

If ytou get an errors about permissions etc, then I would suggest checking, using your FTP tools, to see if a file called sitemap.xml exists inyour  blogs root directory.

If the file is not there, then simple create a emply file on your PC using notepad, and FTP that file up to your blog’s root directory.

Make sure it has the name of sitemap.xml, and then change the permission on that file only to 777

Then, go back to the plugins administration page and try manually creating the blog again. Everything should now work just fine.

Using this plugin has really helped keep a number of my websites ranking higher and higher in the SERPs.

A plugin I would high recommend.

You can download the plugin here. Just unzip and copy up to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.

Once activated it works. To stop it, simply unactivate the plugin.

The plugin is simply a wrapper for the Javascript code that Steve Diamond wrote (http://stevediamondconsulting.com/), you can download the code at :

http://code.google.com/p/sidewiki-defeat/, or use it straiught from Google’s own site. I prefer having it on my own hosting as it “might go missing” on google’s hosting

There’s a lot of concern about Google’s new SideWiki “module” that comes bundled with the latest version of the Google Toolbar.

You may be wondering, “If I’m doing nothing wrong, what have I got to worry about?”

A good questions, but it wouldn’t take much for your competitors to leave “bad” comments about your website, and as well as dropping links to other peoples websites.

The following image is a screenshot from Google’s own toolbar site, see the comments down the side.

Now imagine the comments where left by your competitors, saying:

“Bruce Hearder is a scammer. He stole my money. Never buy from him.”

“This product is OK, but found a better product at www.xyz.com”

Already the spammers and “grey-to blackhat” brigade are jumping on the bandwagon.

See this video and Howie Swartz’s  PDF which show what might be in store.

So if your reputation is important to you, then think about Google SideWiki comments toolbar serious!

To get the search engines racing across to your website, we are going to employ a technique that blogs all over the word use on a daily basis.

Pinging!

It’s a silly sounding name, but it basically means it’s a way for one website to tell another website that its content has been changed or added to.

We are going to use 3 different pinging services (both 100% FREE) that will do the job very well for us.

Make sure you have read part 1, part 2 and part 3 before reading this section

1.Ping O Matic (http://www.pingomatic.com)

Pingomatic.com was one of the original ping servers that in turn notifies about a dozen or more other web sites that a website has new or updated content on it.

2.Pingoat.com (http://www.pingoat.com)

Pingoat is a newer ping server system that does a similar job to pingomatic but does notify other sites as well.

3.Pingler.com (http://www.pingler.com)

Pingler.com is one the newest ping servers to hit the web. They ping 90+ different websites, including Google, Yahoo and MSN directly.

So let’s start with www.pingomatic.com and show how easy it is to ping a website. The others, although looking different, all work on the same principal. So if you know how to use one, you then know how to use all of them.

Say for example you have made a post of Digg.com, and you now want to ping it…

So for our example, let’s say you have just written the following post on Digg

http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Didn_t_Make_It_To_The_Inauguration_Just_Pretend_You_Did

We are only going to use this as an example, nothing else.

So we copy the full URL of the post, and head on over to pingomatic.com

Put a title in for the ping, then the full URL of the Digg post.
Leave the RSS URL blank (or the default value of http://)

Then click the services you want to use, I suggest selecting all of them, and then hit the “Send Pings” button.

Once this is complete, then move onto the next social book marking site and, as they say in the TV ads, its simply a process of “wash, rinse and repeat”.

It’s that simple.

All you are doing with this process is getting links to your website and telling the search engines to visit these links and come visit your website.

Conclusion

I have tried to make this set of blog posts as “to the point” as possible and I have discussed the methods and strategies that I regularly use to get any website I create indexed in the search engines.

Do bear in mind that sometimes the search engines can be “fickle” and not behavior normally. So sometimes you can get a site indexed with a few hours and other times it may take a few 4-5 days before it will appear.

So, all you have to remember is to:

1.Get Links to your website (I have given 35 places to get links from)
2.Ping the links
3.See how fast you can get your site indexed.

Of course, this won’t guarantee you the coveted #1 search engine position, but at least you can have your site in the search engines and working for you.

Getting a better ranking position is for another blog post.

To Your Online Success!

Bruce

We need links from 5 to 10 sites. You can submit to more site if you have the time, but 5 to 10 will do nicely for now.

I’ve managed to put together a list of 35 of the best social bookmarking sites that will give you the quickest results.

So choose 5-10 sites, register an account at each of your selected sites, and post some content about your site to each site.

It doesn’t have to be a 500 word article that you write, but it must be worthy of inclusion. So aim for something between 50-150 words. Don’t go over-do the sales pitch for the site, keep in relatively low-key.

So here are the 35 sites and their PageRank as calculate in February 2009

Make sure you have read Part 1 & Part 2 before reading this section..

1.http://slashdot.org (PR9)

2.http://digg.com (PR8)

3.http://technorati.com (PR8)

4.http://www.furl.net (PR7)

5.http://www.backflip.com (PR7)

6.http://www.hugg.com (PR7)

7.http://www.mixx.com (PR7)

8.http://ma.gnolia.com (PR7)

9.http://www.connotea.org (PR7)

10.http://mystuff.ask.com (PR7)

11.http://www.reddit.com (PR7)

12.http://www.dzone.com (PR7)

13.http://www.folkd.com (PR7)

14.http://multiply.com (PR7)

15.http://www.searchles.com (PR6)

16.http://de.lirio.us (PR6)

17.http://www.dotnetkicks.com (PR6)

18.http://www.bloghop.com (PR6)

19.http://www.plime.com (PR6)

20.http://www.bibsonomy.org (PR6)

21.http://www.clipclip.org (PR6)

22.http://linkagogo.com (PR6)

23.http://www.spurl.net (PR6)

24.http://www.zlitt.com (PR6)

25.http://www.indianpad.com (PR6)

26.http://www.tumblr.com (PR6)

27.http://www.myvmarks.com (PR5)

28.http://www.listible.com (PR5)

29.http://www.bringr.com (PR5)

30.http://faves.com (PR5)

31.http://www.linkinn.com (PR5)

32.http://spotback.com (PR5)

33.http://www.mylinkvault.com (PR5)

34.http://my.xilinus.com (PR5)

35.http://www.bumpzee.com (PR5)

Next, we have to get the search engines to visit your new posts and come visit your website; we are going to do this via pinging.

See part 3 for the section on how to get the search engines to these new links and then get them to your website.

To get any website indexed and listed in the search engines you need two (2) major ingredients in the recipe.
1.Having enough content on the site for the search engine to figure out what your website is about.

2. Having a way for the search engines to even find your site and decide to even bother to visit it.

Make sure you have read Part 1 of this guide before readining this part.

Part 1:
I’m not going to go into a detailed explanation of website content, but I just want to say that your website must have enough text content, with your main keywords spread through the text.

Remember search engines can’t read images and videos. So a website with lots of pictures/videos on it and very little text will rarely if ever get indexed and appear in the search engines. So make sure you have enough text based content on your site.

Part 2:
This is the area that this post covers.

The best way for a search engine to find your site is via a link on another site -  preferably a website with high authority that gets visited by the search engines regularly – if possible dozens of times a day.

Then we need to tell the search engines to visit the links on these authority sites and then they will visit your site.

So this is how we are going to do this:

1.Get  5 to 10 one-way links on high PR social bookmarking sites (I’ll show you which ones)
2.Tell the search engines to visit these links , by pinging the links on the sites
3.Watch your site get indexed in the search engines in the next few days!!

It’s that easy, so let me show you which sites to get links from and how to ping your sites.

I’ll cover that bit part 3..

Read part 1 here first

You just spend days and days creating a great new website. You’ve agonized over the graphics. Checked the spelling and grammar of the site a dozen times and the site is now finished.

So you sit back and wait for the search engines to visit your website and start ranking your website in their listings.

After a day or so, you decide to check if the search engines have indexed your site.
So you decide to test Google first.

You type the following command into your web browser:

Site: yourdomain.com

And check the number of pages it shows up.

NOTHING!!So you wait a few more days, and do the test again.

Still nothing!!

A couple of weeks go past and still nothing!
You are now getting seriously dejected and want to give up on the site altogether.

All that work, time, effort and money invested all completely wasted.

It doesn’t have to be like that!

There’s no secret to getting a site indexed in the shortest possible time, you just have to do the right steps at the right time and things fall into place.

It’s a lot like making a cake.

If you don’t have all the ingredients mixed together in the correct sequence, with the correct quantities of each ingredient, you may or may not get a cake at the end…

But if you followed the recipe as written down, then at the end of the baking process you will have a cake.

Getting a website indexed is almost exactly the same.

So let’s get started …

But what most bloggers fail to realise is that their blog is creating duplicate content without them even knowing it.

So what is the duplicate content penalty?
The “duplicate content penalty” is a filter or penalty that is thought to be applied by search engines (such as Google, Yahoo etc) to duplicate that it deems to be a duplicate.

So the more unique your content is the better your website will perform in the search engines.
You may be saying, “that’s all fine and dandy, but I write all my own content, so I should be safe!”
Wrong!!!

Your blog might be generating duplicate content without you even knowing its happening!
Let me show you how this might be happening:

1. The same content on front/index page as well on its individual post page.
You might be showing the last X number of posts on your front page, but that same content exists on its own post pages..
Solution: To fix this, only display an excerpt on the front page for each blog post.
This can solve your problem of duplicate content on homepage.
2. Archive or Category Pages and Individual Post Pages Showing the Same Content:
Because your blog allows visitors to access information via category and date pages, it will show the same information.
For example :
www.yourblog.com/2009/07/some-post-name
www.yourblog.com/some-category/some-keyword
Serious duplicate content issue here.
Solution : Modify your robots.txt file, so that the search engines do not index certain parts of your blog.
Here’s a sample robots.txt file that can help :
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /date/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /archive/
Disallow: /rss/

3. Allowing both www and non-www version of your blog to show content:
This is a common one for a lot of bloggers.
They allow content to show for www.yourblog.com/somepost/ as well as yourblog.com/somepost/
To you and me they look like the same domain, but to a search engine, they are not.
Two separate domains, with the same content on it.
Solution: Download and install the Preference plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/enforce-www-preference/

This, according to the plugin makers will do the following :
“Preference enforces your yes-www or no-www preference as defined by your Blog URL setting in ‘Options – General.’
If you have http://example.com/, people who visit any WordPress-served URL staring with http://www.example.com/ will be redirected to the no-www version.
If you have http://www.example.com/, people who visit any WordPress-served URL staring with http://example.com/ will be redirected to the yes-www version.
The plugin will also strip off any hanging redundant /index.php”

4. URLS with and without Trailing Slash:
This is similar to #3, in that to us mere humans the pages look exactly the same, but to a search engine they are completely seperate.
I think the search engines are coming to grips with this, but just to be certain, lets make sure there is no confusion.

So, for example:
www.yourblog.com/somepost/ is not the same as www.yourblog.com/somepost

Solution : Again, a wordpress plugin called “Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin” saves the day.
Get it at:

http://scott.yang.id.au/code/permalink-redirect/

5. Duplicate Content in Your Blog RSS Feeds:
This is another issue most bloggers never think of.
www.yourblog.com/2009/07/somepost/
www.yourblog.com/2009/07/somepost/feed/
A WordPress Blog post feed is a duplicate of post content, so if Google is indexing the RSS feed, it may end up putting your website pages in the supplkemental index and leave your RSS feed in the main index.
Solution:
There is a WordPress plugin that can fix this.
Get it here www.seologs.com/wordpress/wordpress-duplicate-content-cure/
According to the plugin creator it does the following :

“Duplicate content cure is a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing wordpress pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages.

It does this by adding the noindex,follow meta tag on the problem pages.”

So, using the above blog suggestions and plugins, you can make your blog a lot more seo friendly and get a lot more pages indexed in the search engines.