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..

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.

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.

This technique works so well that I have had GoogleBot (Google’s own spider) hit a newly developed website with 2-1/2 minutes of launching the site..

Not bad hey!!

The technique is very simple, and all we are doing is borrowing a technique that bloggers use every day, except its all automated for them so they don’t even think about it..

It called “pinging”

To do it for a static website simply go to :

www.PinGoat.com (funny name, great FREE tool)

Then at the onscreen form, simply type in your websites name, and full URL (remember to include the “http” bit) and then hit the submit button.

PinGoat.com will then “ping” dozens of other ping servers all for you. The search engines index these ping servers hunderds, if not 1000′s of times a day, looking for new blog posts.

So once your “pings” go out, within a few minutes one or more of the major search engine bots is visiting your website.

Of course, juts because a search engine visits your website it doesn’t imply that the your site will start to appear in their listing. This is a seperate process that can take either days or up to a week before your site is found in the search engines.

At least you now know how to get the search engines to your new website quickly and easily.

Of course, like all FREE search engine optimization tools, please don’t abuse this and try to ping every couple of seconds or minutes. This won’t make them come any quicker and you are likley to get your IP address banned form the ping servers. So use this amazing FREE service responsibly and properly.

Another ping server worth visiting is :

www.PingOMatic.com

To find other just search Google, or you can post your favorite list here as a comment.

Article from website secrets 101 (web site secrets)

So links are the “glue” that binds websites together.
Obviously though not all links are of equal. A genuine interesting link found in the text of a high profile web page, will bring in more traffic than a link situated on an page totally unrelated to its topic.
This is the very important rule that most junior Webmaster forget. Web visitors are more likely to follow a link if it’s related by topic.

Most search engines have now started to rank the importance of websites by the number of quality websites that point to it. Gone are the days where the search engines would rank site based solely on their “on-page” factors (such as keyword density, placement of H1 tags etc).

The more the number of links that point to a website the more important the search engines start to view that site as. But as we have shown above not all links are of equal importance.

Currently the search engines are placing more importance on one-way links than on reciprocal links. Reciprocal links are done between sites where the Webmaster of one sites says “I’ll give you a link, if you’ll give me a link” These are great to get your sites initially listed in the search engines, but they do not seem to have a great effect on the long-term success of a site.

One-way links are definitely needed to make a site last for the long term. But getting quality sites to give you a link can be very hard and extremely time consuming.

A good way of getting quality one-way links is via link directory submissions. Here you submit a site to quality link directories and if your site is accepted, they will give you a one-way link from a quality site. Just the sort of link the search engines are looking for.
The problem with this concept is that there are nearly 3,000 link directories out there, not to mention the specialized directories, which come in a league of their own.
Submitting manually to all these directories is almost impossible. Finding the really good ones may take even more time still. The good news is that you will not be the first to experience this sort of drawback. There are semi-automatic submission programs out there that can do the job.

As a warning though, please try staying away from those that make the entire process automatically. Many link directories require a human touch to get you enlisted. The best programs use automation only to a certain degree and prompt you to fill certain information at times. This strikes the best balance between speed and proper submittal.

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Bruce Hearder owns and run http://www.WebsiteSecrets101.com

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