If you’re in the SEO business you know that writing articles is the day to day routine. And you know how important it is to have unique content to spread across a plethora of sites, and how labor intensive creating each unique article can be.

Luckily, in the last few years a number of “article spinners” have popped up. These tools allow you to enter an article you’ve already written and turn that into a completely new and unique article on the same subject. However, as with most products, not all article spinners are created equal.

The best tool I’ve found so far is aptly named “The Best Spinner.” This tool has an easy-to-use, intuitive interface and a great built-in thesaurus that allows you to save your favorite synonyms. You can spin individual words, full sentences, or full paragraphs at a time. The tool creates up to 1,000 unique articles from your one original article and allows you to check those articles against others on the Web to make sure they’re unique. I was never been able to achieve this with any other tool in such a short time period, it is just amazing.

Speed

One reason that The Best Spinner outweighs the competition is its speed – you’ll be able to create tons of unique articles with little effort in the time it would normally take you to produce a handful of well-written, unique articles.

Updated all the time

Another factor that sets this tool apart is the sheer volume of words in the thesaurus. Instead of being limited to a certain set of static words, as you’ll find with some other article spinners, you’ll have access to an ever-growing list of words, as The Best Spinner’s thesaurus is consistently updated by users.

The Best Spinner also has its own API, meaning it can easily be integrated with other Internet marketing tools. In addition, f you ever run into problems, the support team will get back to you within 24 hours, meaning you won’t have to deal with much of a lag in your work. And The Best Spinner is constantly being updated and improved, so expect it to get even more intuitive as time goes on.

Of course, as is the case with any tool you’re not used to, there are a few negatives (but those are easy to get over considering how great the tool works). The biggest hurdle is getting used to the set-up of The Best Spinner, which is easy to do if you just consult the Help & Support tab or watch one of the many video tutorials that come with the product. After that you can start rocking!

All in all I would recommend The Best Spinner to anyone I meet(my friends are already hooked on it), this was one of the best investments ever made.

Hope you will have a play with it and speed up your work day by at least few hours. Don’t we all strive for shorter working days?

Get the spinner here: The Best Spinner and good luck with your SEO tasks.

There are some people out there who don’t see the benefits of learning more about their competitors. The only thing I have to say to that is; “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Granted, there is enough buying capacity to go around, but you have to take the proper steps to get a piece of the action.

Let’s discuss why competitor research is so important:

Why do it?

When you’re starting a business online, learning from companies that are already successful is one of the keys to your success. People have been doing it for years with brick and mortar companies. However, there is a lot more competition on the Internet, which makes this strategy even more essential to your business.
Probably one of the biggest competitive markets for backlinking purposes has to do with article directories. There are tens of thousands of them out there, and some are much better than others. For instance, Ezine Articles is almost always the first directory that comes to mind amongst Internet marketers and SEO specialists. They have millions of authors, millions of content, and make thousands of dollars each day on Google Adsense alone.
If you’re starting an article directory of your own, the last thing you want to do is go against the grain of what Ezine has done to become successful. Instead, you want to do the research on them and figure out what has made them so popular. Will you reach their stature overnight? No. In fact, you might never get there. Then again; their strategies can still help you become successful in your own way.

Finding Competitors

Keywords are the secret to finding competitors in your niche. If we stick with the article directory competition, here are a few that will help you find the competition:

• Top 10 article directories
• High ranking article directories
• Most popular article directories
• List of top article directories

These four alone will provide you with plenty of answers. The most notable are:

• Ezine Articles
• Go Articles
• Squidoo
• Hubpages
• Buzzle

One thing I have always done is opened the source code on a competitor’s main page. Here you will find what is in their <title></title> tags, meta tags (keywords and description), as well as their <H1></H1> through <H6></H6> tags. Implement their strategy into your own site and gain all the SEO benefits they do.

How to Find who Links to them

You definitely want to know what type of people your competitors are attracting. Finding out who links to them is extremely beneficial. One of easiest ways to look this up is by visiting Alexa.com. Here you can provide their website URL, click on their total links, and look over the top 100 places that are linking to them.
There are several other ways to do this, but looking over the first 100 will take some time. I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much information.

How to get Links from the same Sources

Some of these sites will be web directories, and you will be able to submit your website URL to them. Others will come from blogs, various websites, and places like article directories. If you want to get the same benefits from these sources, then you will have to contact them. A few them will be vary willing to help, but most will require a link exchange which is not so good of an option for you, so to save time just skip them.

I don’t want to get too deep into this subject, because I’m going to go into more detail in my next entry. For now, understand the importance of doing competitor research. It could have a VERY positive effect on your efforts to get your business to the next level. Good luck!

Since its fresh on the mind, I wanted to spend a little time going into the specifics of link building. I know I’ve gone over it a little in previous blog posts, but the information today will make a huge difference in your approach to link building in the future.

What is it?

I want to keep this as simple as possible. Link building is a way for website and blog owners to make their sites more relevant on the Internet. It’s the easiest way to explain it, and I always like using www.alexa.com as my example with link building. If you type in a website url on their site, you will see a section marked “Sites Linking In.”

When the search engines see sites linking in to your website, it believes there is some sort of relevance there. However, the website with the most sites linking in doesn’t always have the best relevancy. In fact, whenever you’re link building, it’s important to think; “Quality over Quantity.” For instance, if links are coming from 10 popular websites, it will be much better than 100 links coming from sites that have no online authority. The latter could even hurt your own authority on the Internet.

What it comes down to is; “Links = Relevancy” if you build them accordingly.

Get Links from Related Sites

If you have the money to invest, I highly recommend hiring someone to do the link building for you. It’s tedious work, and you don’t see the benefits initially. However, I understand if you’re on a limited budget or want to do everything for free. In this case, you will need to set aside time for research.

I could write a dozen articles on link building alone (probably I should one day write a book about that!), but for now I have to bunch it all together in this short tutorial. So, if you’re just getting started, here are a few things you can do:

• Add a link to related forums – Probably the easiest option is adding links to your signature in a forum. Just remember to make sure that if your site is about automotive repair, the topic of the forum is relevant. After all, a baseball card site doesn’t have any business adding a link in an auto repair forum. Plus, it will only hurt your relevancy in the long run.
• Article link building – This technique is most commonly used on Ezine Articles, Go Articles, Squidoo, and Hubpages. These four sites are extremely popular, so avid Internet Marketers will use them to build links back to their site. This is called article marketing, and it’s another way to get some good “link juice” as we call it. Keep in mind; article directories like the ones I mentioned above are not the only place you can market through content. Places like Digg, Reddit, and other similar bookmarking areas can be helpful as well. You could also create Press Releases anytime something new happens with your site (deals, mergers, etc.).
• Comment link building – If a website or blog allows you to leave comments, it’s possible they will also allow you to leave your website or blog url within it. This does take a little more time, because some of them do not.

The most important thing to remember with comment link building is that you leave an informative and helpful comment. If the site is about travel deals, add the contents keywords in your comment. Here is an example:

“I love to vacation, and I’m always looking for travel deals. Thanks for the information. I found the bit about hotel and airfare discounts to be extremely helpful.”

Since most comment areas are monitored, they will be checking for spammers. If you leave something helpful for their site, they will usually allow you to leave your url. Again; make sure the url has the same topic as theirs.

A Little More Help

I always get caught up in the moment when explaining things. There are 4 other areas I want to cover, but not extensively:

• Deep Links – This is when you hyperlink something to direct people to your site. Anytime you do this, make sure its done with the appropriate keywords or phrases. Never use “Click Here.” It worked years ago, but you won’t benefit from it now when link building.
• Steady Link Building – Create a schedule and do 10 to 20 link builds a day if you are doing it yourself or get way higher if you have a budget and can hire someone who can do it all day long. The main thing is to build links steadily, if you see Google has hit you, pause for a bit and then resume link building. It’s never ending story with links, just don’t overdo it.
• Paid Links – If you’re focusing on Google, paid links are a big no-no. However, there are some search engines that don’t pay any attention to them. A paid link is pretty much a website that farms links for profit. It might cost you $10 to place a link on their website, but it’s not relevant to your topic, which can eventually hurt your site or blog. Another thing with such paid links is that you’r basically wasting your money as those sites usually has so many links. And what you have paid for one link or two on such a site could be spent on buying yourself a cup of tea (I don’t drink coffee) and had a wonderful time doing something else.
• Permanent vs. Temporary Links – Always remember that permanent links are better over the long haul. Temporary links are more like running pay per click ad in Google Adwords. It’s only there for as long as you spend the money to keep it there. So those links are for driving traffic temporarily, without much appreciation from search engines.

Okay, I’m done ranting for the evening. I hope you found this helpful and it provided you with enough information on what are main link building ideas and how to start link building properly. Next time we’ll get into the more advanced stuff…

What is it?

Offsite SEO is when you’re utilizing different SEM (search engine marketing) strategies to bring traffic to your website. All the search engine optimization you’re doing is in other locations around the Internet.

Importance of offsite SEO

When a webmaster is struggling with their site’s SEO, they are usually failing at their offsite seo. While onsite optimization is geared to show the relevancy of your website, offsite SEO is designed for traffic and higher rankings throughout the search engines. In order to make this happen you need to either learn how to do it all yourself, or hire a professional SEO company to do it for you.

I highly recommend outsourcing this work to a professional team. Without the proper offsite seo, your website will never become a major authority in your niche. You can have all the optimization on your website, but if you don’t have organic traffic coming in, the end result will be a disappointing one. If you’re not familiar with the term “organic traffic,” it’s simply a way to bring traffic in without paying for advertisements. I’ll explain this more in the backlinks area below.

How to Get Backlinks

Backlinks are urls you provide in other locations to gain traffic “back” to your website. Here is some of the places people use for their offsite SEO:

• Article Directories – Here you simply add your url to the bottom of an article and submit them to various article directories around the Internet.
• Blogs – A lot of people will ask other bloggers in a related niche to add or exchange links. Usually to get backlinks from blogs is to add comments and have your name set as keyword(i.e. Kid shoes ), as that keyword will be linked to the site you enter during the comment submit.
• Forums – Add your website url (or a different page on your site) to the signature link area of your profile. Every time you post, it’s like a free advertisement.
• Social bookmarking sites – Places like Digg and Reddit are great backlinking communities.
• Social networking sites – Facebook and Twitter are the two most popular networking sites. I don’t consider Twitter to really be an organic backlinking strategy. It’s more of a short term benefit. You have to time your url release when it will be visible to the most people, so then those people visiting your site can link to it from theirs.

There are other places like Hubpages and Squidoo that are a cross between an article directory and a landing page. Either way, they both command authority with the search engines, so you definitely want to add them to your backlinking list. These are all ways to get backlinks. You can also add your url to web directories.

However, always make sure you focus on quality over quantity. If anyone tells you; “The more backlinks you have, the better,” they are lying. Focus on high authority sites first. Places like Ezine Articles, Facebook, Squidoo, Digital Point, Warrior Forum and alike. Do you remember when we went over Page Rank tutorial? Well, when using offsite SEO, it’s something you have to consider.

RSS and Web 2.0

These two go hand in hand, because RSS feeds are an easy way to build traffic to your website through a list of subscribers. This can be a huge offsite SEO strategy, but it does take time to develop. If someone from another site decides to utilize the RSS feature, they will be gaining content anytime you publish on your site. In return, your page links will be on their blog or site, which makes this a very lucrative approach to gaining backlinks.

I could spend hours talking about RSS feeds, Web 2.0 submissions, and a variety of other offsite SEO strategies. Unfortunately it would be wasting your time. Just stick to the basics and create a backlinking schedule.  Eventually you will see a plethora of backlinks being directed to your website. It all just takes time, so be patient and outsource more, to make it happen more quickly. Just don’t overdo the backlinking, don’t go crazy with all the tools possible and blast thousands of backlinks in one day. Other than that, no links should be missed for Offline SEO, so get your hands dirty and start the backlinking fun.

I apologize for not getting this information out to you sooner, but I’ve been under the weather the past couple days. Even today my body aches and I have some sort of infection, so this is coming to you straight from my bed.

Individuals, who are just now grasping seo urls, probably don’t have any knowledge behind static and dynamic urls. Don’t worry, most moderate seo specialists aren’t too familiar with the terminology either. So, what I want to do today is help you understand each one. This way you can get a better understanding of how to setup your site pages accordingly.

What is a URL?

I’m not placing this information here to offend anyone. I simply want to make sure we all understand what a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is before I go any further. It’s simply a web address we type into a browser to access a certain page.

Just like we all have residential addresses, the URL is an address for informational topics and sales platforms.

Understanding a Static URL

The easiest way for me to explain a static URL is that it will always stay the same. For instance; I just finished doing a little article marketing at http://www.contenthangover.com, which happens to be the static address to their home page.

When you click on any one of the articles in their website, each of them will have a static address.  Here is an example of a static address directing you to one of their articles:

http://www.contenthangover.com/article/how-can-a-kid-make-money-online-for-free

No matter how many times you look at it, it will always have that static URL.  This is because the main content won’t ever change.

Understanding a Dynamic URL

A dynamic URL is used when the page always seems to be changing. They also look a lot different than a static URL. Here is a good example:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/product.php?categoryid=1&productid=10

In most cases, you won’t find dynamic URLs in the search engines. Google, Yahoo, and Bing don’t want to deal with trying to index a URL that will be changing over and over again.

Static vs. Dynamic: Which is better?

When you’re building a website, your seo urls should always be static. They are seo-friendly as opposed to their dynamic url counterparts.  Also, they will rank better and get indexed quicker. In fact, Google has stated in the past that dynamic pages are a lot slower.

If the urls are being promoted around the Internet, viewers will find them easier to read. This means they will be more likely to visit your site if they understand what type of information it is targeting.

Changing Dynamic URLs

Okay, it’s time to go take some flu medicine, but before I go, let’s talk about changing your dynamic urls. Most people believe once they are in place, you can never change them. However, this is just a myth.  Here is an example of how you can do this manually:

Dynamic URL – http://www.yourwebsite.com/product.php?categoryid=1&productid=10

New Static URL – http://www.yourwebsite.com/product-categoryid-1-productid-10.html

You will notice the “?,” “=,” “.,” and “&” symbols have all been replaced by hyphens.  Also, the end of the file is now .html, but it could be .htm, .php, or any other language. But you need some programming done or to use already existing software like wordpress to do all that for you.

I know this is a lot of technical information to absorb in one setting. I tried to keep it as simple as possible, but someone might struggle with it a bit. In the end, when considering seo urls, always use static urls. They will be much more beneficial for your website, especially when getting indexed and seen by people on search engines.

Next time I’ll be discussing off-site SEO. We’ll be discussing what it is, why it’s important, backlinks, RSS feeds, and web 2.0 submissions.  For most of you, it’s going to change your current marketing strategies. So until next time.

And again, if you find this tutorial useful, please don’t be shy and hit some love with sharing the tutorial with others

What is page rank?

I’ve spent the last few hours trying to figure out the best way to describe what Page Rank (PR) is, and why it’s important for anyone that owns a website or blog online. In short, PR rankings are used to determine whether or not your website is relevant and/or popular. Since I love using analogies, take a moment and think back to your high school days. Can you name 3 of the most popular people in your graduating class? Can you name 3 of the least popular people?

Well the three most popular people would have a PR 10. Everyone knows who they are, their name seems to be everywhere, and they can pretty much do whatever they want and be successful. When it comes to websites, Page Rank is set up the same way (without all the technical details). Here is a list of companies with PR 10 sites:

• Google
• Adobe
• Apple
• Macromedia
• NASA
• Welcome to the White House

(update: Actually all those sites I have checked are now PR 9, whereas they were PR 10 just before last Google PR update.)

There are others as well, but it’s very hard to become a PR10. In fact, the last time I checked (its been awhile), Yahoo had dropped from a PR 10 to a PR 9. If that doesn’t give you an indication of difficulty, I’m not sure what else to tell you. One thing to keep in mind is the highest PR rankings are not updated very often. However, as a website owner, the chances of you attaining a PR 10 rank are pretty slim, so don’t worry about it.

On the other hand, your three least popular people would be considered PR 0 in the Internet world. No one really notices them, what they say or do has no bearing on anyone, and it wouldn’t even matter if they were even enrolled at your school (I know that sounds mean, sorry). Websites with PR 0 rankings on the Internet are either start-up sites or they haven’t been able to establish traffic or relevancy in their niche.

Who uses PageRank?

This is a great question, and it has several “correct” answers. Since PR rankings are more like a popularity contest, everyone that has a website should use it. Then again; it’s not something you should base all your work around. The rankings come out every 3 to 6 months (sometimes longer), so working towards a higher Page Rank is not the proper approach.

You should spend your time making your website more visible on the Internet (build traffic). You should also make sure it is jam-packed with informative information (good content). Eventually your PR O will turn to a PR 1 or 2. Eventually you start realizing that you’re working on a PR ranking indirectly. This can be done several ways, but the main focus is on backlinking strategies.

How to raise your Page Rank

I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours reading over all the Page Rank information. I’ve watched videos, listened to podcasts from experts, and even purchased a few eBooks covering PR rankings. Some of it is very good and helpful content, but other material could be deleted or thrown away. Here are a few quick tips to help you start raising your PR ranking over the next year:

Backlinking – I’ll be discussing this later in my Offsite SEO tutorial, as well as my Link Building tutorials. For now, it’s important to understand that Page Rank used to believe the more links being directed back to your site, the more popular or relevant your site was in a niche. Today, it’s all about quality backlinking and the “less is more” scenario. The more quality sites links to your site the more weigth in PR is transfered on to your site.

Since backlinking is the main component, this is a good stopping point. Your goal right now should be to increase your PR ranking by one (PR 1). Good content and increased traffic will be enough to do the trick as people start linking to your site and your PR will start going up. You just have to use the right strategies. I’ll give you plenty of them in my future tutorials.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to find the appropriate keywords for your SEO strategy. We briefly touched upon this in our last segment, but today I want to focus on explaining more about keywords and why they are crucial to your search engine optimization. The main goal is to help your website reach the first page of Google based on the keywords people use.

Understanding Keywords

A keyword is something you type into a search engine like Google, because you are looking for something. If I ended up coming across this article, some of things I might have typed into the search engines would be:

• keyword importance
• importance of keywords
• keywords and seo strategy

It is statistically known that clicks in top Google positions are distributed in this way(figures are approximate):
#1 place gets – 36% of the total clicks that are happening when people lands of the Google result page. 2nd place – only 12%, and 3rd place only 9%.

So you can see the importance of being at the very first spot!
The only way you can do this is by doing a little tactical keyword research – sounds scary but when you know what tools to use and where to start it is quite easy.

Keyword Research

Listen; there are several keyword research strategies on the Internet. If you’re just starting your journey, I recommend putting more time into your keyword research than most people do. What they do is use keyword tools to figure out what phrases are being searched for the most, but don’t have a lot of competition.

There are several different keyword software tools out there (e.g. Market Samurai, Micro Niche Finder, Google Adwords etc.), and all of them can be helpful. Even though most Internet marketing gurus will tell you that Google Adwords is all they use, I recommend investing a little money in a software tool. If you decide to, there will be FREE information at the bottom of this article that will have a major impact on your search engine optimization.

Broad Keywords

Understanding broad keywords is pretty simple. Here is a quick example:

Let’s say your primary keyword phrase is “youth baseball bats”. If you search Google and just type in: youth baseball bats, you will get broad results. If you type the phrase into Google with quotes around it you will get phrase matches. This is very similar to how broad keywords work.

When you are doing keyword research, you can select the “broad keywords” option. Anytime Google Adwords keyword software or another version is hard at work, it will produce some options that do not start with your keyword or even have it in the phrase. So, if you typed in youth baseball bats, some of the broad keywords might be:

• little league youth baseball
• kids baseball gloves
• adult baseball gloves
• 2011 demarini voodoo

It’s basically a way to help you learn different areas where you can use your primary keyword (youth baseball bats) and sprinkle some broad keywords on your website content or for article marketing purposes (I’ll explain these in future SEO tutorials).

Exact Keywords

If you need exact keywords, then you’re trying to find information on one keyword; “youth baseball bats”. To find exact matches of your phrases on Google add brackets around the keyword like this: [youth baseball bats]. (Try it and see what the results are)

Phrase Match Keywords

I like to consider phrase match keywords as the “in between” status. They are a bit more flexible than exact keywords and more targeted than broad keywords. If you need something that has a little flexibility, this should be your choice. Here are a few examples:

• youth baseball bats 2011
• youth baseball bats for sale
• adult and youth baseball bats

Even though your keyword phrase is in it, there are additions to the phrase.

FREE Secrets

The information here today should help you understand the importance of keywords. I also want to give you some advanced information in an easy-to-learn format:

Tip 1 - When searching for keywords for your industry (niche), look for ones that have over 1,000 searches per month and under 50,000 “exact phrase count”.

Tip 2 - Check the Strength of Competition (SOC) in your keyword software tool. Find keywords that only have 200 or less in their strength of competition.

It might take longer to do your keyword research, but you can reach the first page of Google faster if you take this approach. I’ve been doing it for years and it has always been very successful, even with all the search engine algorithm changes. I hope you take this opportunity to do this when performing your own keyword research.

In the next tutorial I’ll go into detail about Page Rank and why your website needs a high one.

If you like it, please spread the word and hit some likes or shares on the social buttons, thanks

SEO – Search Engine Optimization.

Over the years I’ve seen several different explanations regarding search engine optimization. The majority of them are quite confusing. This is because they want you to feel like SEO is too complicated to understand. It convinces you to purchase an eBook, membership, or some other product.

Well, I’m going to make things a little bit easier. The truth is; you don’t need to know all the facets of search engine optimization right from the start. The best way to understand SEO is by breaking all the information down into smaller segments. Begin with the basics and once you feel comfortable with them you can move on to more in depth discussions.

In short, search engine optimization is used to make a website more popular on the Internet. You can perform SEO strategies within your website or around the Internet.

Why to use SEO?

All successful websites use SEO strategies. In order to get your website and web pages indexed, search engines like Google will use a spider software to scan the coding (e.g. HTML, PHP, etc.) of the site. It looks for keywords and other terms to categorize what your website is about.

Without this information in your coding, it will be difficult to reach the top of the search engines. Sometimes you won’t be able to get indexed at all. This is just one of the many reasons why you need an SEO strategy in place.

Importance of SEO

The biggest reason website owners need search engine optimization is so they can create traffic portals from various locations. For instance, one might come from adding SEO keywords to your website content. Another could be adding them to your HTML coding. There are also off-site SEO needs that will create additional traffic.

Any profitable business has to have longevity. When it comes to websites, longevity is found through pre-planned search engine optimization techniques. The bad news is; SEO is a never-ending process. I have personally hundreds of hours just utilizing SEO practices. It’s not to discourage you, but to help you understand that this is not a “one man” or “one woman” job.

Who uses SEO?

Nowadays, the only people who do not use search engine optimization are people who don’t know they need it. Then again, they might not know how to get started. Either way, it only makes the process longer and your ability to even see a sale from your website.

One thing I should point out is that SEO isn’t just for blogs, forums, and websites. A lot of individuals will use these practices to help their content become more popular on other websites. Yes, I know it might sound confusing, but it will all make sense in a second.

What are the differences of onsite SEO and offsite SEO?

Anytime you hear someone talking about on-site SEO, they are discussing the website coding or the domain name (domains will be covered at a later time). Here are a few things to consider within the coding:

• Title tags
• Meta Description
• Meta keywords
• H1-H6 tags

You will read more about these in future lessons. Now, off-site SEO is everything from social media and social bookmarking to create backlinks. Don’t worry about understanding them at this moment. The goal today is to realize what search engine optimization is, why it is important, who uses it, and what strategies you will be using in the upcoming weeks.

Absorb this information and it will be the perfect stopping point…for now.

If you like it, please spread the word and hit some likes or shares on the social buttons, thanks