We started this blog a few weeks ago in effort to help maintain and gain our web presence for our main website Astonish SEO.

We figured that we might as well throw some adsense ads on it to help maintain the blog. Now the site currently makes a steady $7 dollars a day. It may not seem like much, but it’s $210 a month for doing something that we were going to do any ways, for free.

Fresh content gets indexed quickly with Blogs!

All of the content on our blog is fresh and written solely by us. This allows us to have totally unique articles and posts that are usually indexed by Google within 3 hours. We currently run Wordpress with the All In One SEO Pack and Sitemaps plugins. We also have inputted a custom ping list. Wordpress gets priority indexing with Google, especially if you link your domain (and as many others you can) to your blog. If you can run it off of a /blog/ folder on your site, it is preferable.

There are many custom and free wordpress adsense templates out there. The majority of them are very intrusive with the ad placement they use. Be careful which on you choose, remember the less they feel they are on a site solely for adsense clicks, the better chance they will click.

There is so much talk about content being king, when there are many websites out there that have tons of unique content and rank very poorly. Why is this? Is there a new King out there thats more powerful than content.  There always has been, In bound links.

In-Bound Links blow content away in the SERPs!

Having good quality in-bound links from separate IP addresses will out-weigh good quality content any day, when it comes to ranking well in the search engines. But why only have one of the two?

The Key to better search rankings

The key to obtaining top rankings is to serve up fresh useful content on your website, as well as obtaining good quality in-bound links.

If your unfamiliar with the term Image ALT Tag, its a piece of code that describes an image on a website. This description is embedded in the website’s coding Here is an example of html code, where it says “insert text here” is where you want to place descriptive text about the image or important keywords from your site.

<img src=”../../images/picture.gif” alt=”insert text here”>

If your site was about Search Engine Optimization, your image alt text would look like this

<img src=”../../images/picture.gif” alt=”Search Engine Optimization”>

Don’t over abuse the img alt tag!

Many website’s abuse this alt tag, stuffing it with keywords over and over again. The way you want to gage your image alt attribute density (meaning how many times to use a keyword in it), is buy the overall density of the keyword on the page. So if your keyword is “SEO” and the page density is 4.0%, then try to have “SEO” present in about 4-8% of your image alt tags.

If your on the market for a new seo tool you have to check out SEO Elite. This is a fairly new search engine optimization tool, that also functions as an article submitter, backlink analyzer, ranking checker, link builder, etc…

SEO Elite’s Ranking Checker

The ranking checker on seo elite is scans google, yahoo and msn very quickly. It has a decent report creator that can export .csv files, as well as html pages.

Problems: Its difficult to have separate website ranking profiles, if its even possible. All the website rankings you check get jumbled all together. This makes it very difficult to run ranking reports for clients.

SEO Elite’s Backlink Analyzer

SEO Elite probably has one of the best backlink analyzers available today. It scans very quickly and is usually very accurate. It will tell you where the link comes from, what text they are linking with, page rank of site, age of domain, as well as many other functions. This tool alone makes seo elite worth it. Aaron Wall of SEO Book developed a similar tool simply called, Backlink Analyzer which is FREE and functions almost the same. You can use this tool very effectively to see how competitors rank well, and who links to them.

SEO Elite’s Article Submitter

SEO Elite has a built in article submitter that is very basic but effective. The selection of article sites to submit to is very basic, there’s maybe 30-40 article sites in the list. One benefit of it, is that it tells you which sites allow you to submit html code. This will allow you to add keyword rich links to your site in the article. Once search engines your links, you’ll have many links to your website, with a keyword as the anchor link text.

SEO Elite can check indexed pages in Google, Yahoo, and MSN!

This is a cool feature that a lot of seo software does not have. This tool will check Google, Yahoo and MSN to see what pages from your site are cached in there index. This is very useful to see if new pages you created have been crawled and indexed.

SEO Elite is definitely one of the top seo tools on the market today. It has a lot of useful functions and can serve as a stand alone seo tool that will generate very good rankings and alot of traffic for your site.

When you place a link on your website make sure to give it a title. Doing so gives search engine spiders one more spot to find your keywords. Make sure to describe whats on the other end of the link, using keywords from your site as the title text. Make sure you don’t overdue it (use keywords to many times), switch it up a bit. Many WYSIWYG editors allow you to add a title to a link easily, but if you you have to do it manually here is the code.

Here is a sample link without the title tag

<a href=“firefox.html”><u>Firefox</u>

This one has the title tag of “Firefox”

<a title=“Firefox” href=“firefox.html”><u>Firefox</u>

Run through your site and title everything

It would be in your best interest to run through your website and place title tags on all of your links. It just gives you one more advantage to use to your benefit, why not!

The way that page rank works, is it flows from page to page and site to site through outbound links (”rel=nofollow” tag can stop this). Outbound links are like the pipelines that page rank flows through. Think about websites being connected together through plumbing pipes and water flowing through them in Page Rank. Every time you link to another site your letting this water (page rank) flow out of your site. There are some sites that you may want to give page rank to. If your website is new you don’t want to give out to much of your page rank value.

So how do you solve this, use “rel=nofollow”?

You can easily block your page rank value from going to another website while still having a link to them. You do this by adding a rel=”nofollow” tag. This way you can still add links that will be useful to your visitors, while keeping all your page rank trapped in your site.

How to add the rel=”nofollow” tag

Here are two examples one link doesn’t have the rel=”nofollow” tag the other does. In the end you want you link to look like the 2nd one.

Example 1.)

Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/”>discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.

That link would be transformed to

Example 2.)

Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.

By utilizing this “rel=nofollow” tag you can maintain all your page rank, without giving any away.

Following this guide will help you start up and rank a fresh domain on Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you do everything we say in this guide, step by step you will rank in the top 10 for most of your keywords (med competition) within 3 months. Search Engine Optimization can be very tedious and time consuming, but if you follow these steps you can be off to a having a great web presence very quickly.

Eventually you will need all of these seo tools to continue, so its better off to get them all ready before hand to make it easy. Some of them are free, others you must pay for, most you can get a free trial and use it to its advantage(buy if you like).

SEO Tools Needed:

(we are not affiliated with any of these companies)

Go to SocialMarker.com

http://www.socialmarker.com/

Do not register or submit yet, you must optimize your website first. We will visit this site later on.

If you can, buy SEO Elite (http://www.seoelite.com) if you are running low on cash download Aaron Wall’s Backlink Analyzer for free at http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/. These tools will allow you to see what other sites have links pointing to yours. With SEO Elite there are many other useful seo tools and functions. You will also be able to see what text they are using in they’re out-bound links to you (this is very important, discussed later on).

Download a free version of the search engine rank checking software you choose. Some good ones are Web CEO (at http://www.webceo.com) and Internet Business Promoter (IBP) at (http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/download/index.htm), these are used to see where your website ranks in Google, Yahoo and MSN (as well as others, but who cares about them).

You will also be submitting articles about your services or products (to build backlinks to your site) so you will need an automated Article Submitter (http://www.submitsuite.com/products/article-submitter.htm), this one submits to over 500 directories. So unless you want to do this by hand we suggest getting a copy. There are other article submitters out there, but this one is very easy to use. There is a new version of article submitter called Article Submitter Pro, but we find that this one works fine and is a lot easier to use.

Now that you have the tools you will need to optimize, lets begin with the on-page seo optimization process.

Step One: On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO Optimization

We will begin with your meta info. If you don’t know the meta info is contained in the <head> area of your page. This meta info tells the search engines what your site’s pages are all about. Having these tags properly configured will allow you to change the way your listing appears on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Before setting up Meta Info choose your Keywords, Bruce Clay offers a great tool for finding out the number of searches performed each day for a certain keyword. The tool is located here:

http://www.seotoolset.com/cgi-bin/checktraffic.cgi or Keyword Traffic Tool

Use this to choose good keywords that get a lot of traffic. Once you find some good ones move on to the next step.

TIP > Try to optimize for no more than 5 keywords on each page, optimizing for 1 or 2 is using the best tactic. This allows you to really focus on one topic.

How to edit Meta info

The easiest way to edit meta info in a standard HTML page is to open the page with notepad. Look at the top info you should see something like this, but with your info instead:

<html>
<head>
<title>Affordable SEO Services | Astonish SEO</title>
<META NAME=“KEYWORDS” CONTENT=“SEO, Services, Affordable, Search Engine Optimization, Tools, Organic, Small Business, Ma”>
<META NAME=“DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=“Affordable SEO Services, Organic SEO, Free SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization Information, Consulting, Training”>

</head>
The info between the red head tags is where the meat info is contained. Notice the title tag, the keywords tag and the description tag these are what your going to edit. If any of these tags are not present copy and paste them from here to your website in notepad. Enter a short, to the point title tag. Avoid using words like “and, a, of, or any 3 or less letter word. These are called stop words. Use your the pages main keywords here, most important starting first. Arrange your keywords in the same order, most important first and fade to the least important. Your description should be a sentence including the keywords from your title tag and keywords, try to make it one sentence only.

This is how your title tag is displayed in the search engines:

So you want to try to make this tag sound catchy. The better it sounds the more likely potential prospects will click on it.

Your description tag will usually appear here:

Sometimes when a search is done and your site contains more relevant content about the search term elsewhere, it will display that content and surrounding text where the description usually goes.

Once you have these tags set up for what ever keywords you are targeting you can save the document.