It occurred to me that many people may not be aware that most good hosting accounts usually come with some kind of stats package. Used properly, it can give you all kinds of valuable information about how your site is doing, what you might do to improve it and what’s working well.

For anyone wanting to improve their site, or blog, that’s fantastic information.

I’ve created a very short video to show how to get to the stats package if you have CPanel. CPanel is available on so many different hosting packages that there’s a good chance you’ll have it on yours.

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Many website owners would almost kill to get a top 10 position on page 1 of Google. But Jon’s asked whether that’s actually good enough. His answers may surprise you.

It seems that most webmasters and internet marketers have the goal of getting their sites onto page one of Google. I admit that I, too, feel a sense of joy and satisfaction when my sites hit the top 10 for my keywords.

But is the top 10 good enough? Should you rest on your laurels once you’ve achieved page one ranking? Not according to the AOL search data that was compromised in 2006. Yes, that data is two years old, but I think it’s important to revisit those results and remind ourselves of what it revealed.

That compromised data gave us the following break-down of the percentage of clicks received by each of the top 11 search results:

“Wait,” you say, “those numbers barely add up to 50%!” That’s true. According to the AOL data, that’s because 46% of all queries resulted in no clicks — meaning that the user didn’t see what they were looking for and so tried something else or moved on.

There are a few points I want to make about this. First, this is data from AOL, and without being too unkind to AOL users, well, they’re not the savviest of searchers. That makes a difference. I would theorize that Google searchers would be a bit more prone to “dig” for the result they need, especially since in my own experience the figures aren’t quite so drastic as this data shows.

That said, though, this chart helps to demonstrate the vast difference between the #1 ranking for a set of keywords and all of the other rankings. Basically, the number one ranking gets the lion’s share of the traffic, and the other 9 of the top 10 just get the tricklings.

Number 11, the first result on page 2, gets virtually no traffic at all. I included it in the results to demonstrate how little effect a page 2 ranking has on your traffic.

This is one of the reasons I advocate trying to rank for a series of long-tail keywords, and not putting all of your efforts into one set of very popular keywords. Getting to #1 for a single set of competitive keywords requires an exponential amount more effort than ranking #1 for dozens of long-tail keywords. And, as demonstrated by this data, those dozens of “lesser” rankings will be far more valuable to the bottom line of your traffic than a #9 or #10 ranking for a competitive keyword.

Let me illustrate.

Let’s say that your niche has a set of competitive keywords that generates 10,000 searches a day. Sounds like a goldmine if you have a page one ranking right? Let’s see.

If you managed to get on page one, but only rank #9, based on the AOL data you would only get 150 of those visitors to your site (4,500 or so per month). However, if you manage to rank #1 for 10 keywords that each only receive 1,000 searches a day, you would get 226 visitors (6,780 or so per month). That’s 150% more traffic for the long-tail keywords. And I promise you, it’s dramatically easier to achieve (and maintain) 10 less competitive rankings than it is for one super-competitive one. In fact, in many cases you can achieve multiple #1 rankings for long-tail keywords with the same quantity of links needed just to get you on page one for the super-competitive keywords!

Just ask the happy 3WayLinks.net customer who recently posted at the users’ forum regarding their first $369 day in affiliate profits. Or another forum poster who reached his first $100+ AdSense day thanks to 3WayLinks’ ranking his sites for lesser-competition keywords.

So remember, when planning your keyword targets for your web site, don’t forget to target a variety of long-tail keywords. Even if you are planning on going after a competitive set of keywords, still keep the long-tail on your agenda, and give them at least as much of your time and resources. Do so and you’ll reap the rewards to be found in Google’s “low hanging fruit.”

Source: Search Engine Optimization

Related posts:

1. Is it worth ranking for single-term keywords?
2. Google neglecting your site? Add a blog.
3. Tips for writing a better article: Bum Marketing – Part 9

This content originally appeared in Jon’s blog and I thought it was interesting enough to share – with his permission. I hope you enjoy reading the post and please feel free to comment on it!

How long has everyone been telling you that Google loves blogs? Months? Years? Well, it’s true, and I wanted to share an experience that helps reinforce that truth to you.

The Blog That Resurrected My Rankings

I had a site devoted to a particular type of exercise equipment. The site was in the top 7 results for its keywords in Google for over six months. Unfortunately I had server problems and the site went down for a few days. Google crawled the site constantly because it was well-linked, and so big G knew instantly that the site was down. Since it stayed down for a few days, Google must have decided it wasn’t coming back up, and its rankings plummetted.

After the site did come back up, it reappeared in Google, but this time on the third page (ranking 25 – 28 for its keywords, on average). Its original page one rankings just wouldn’t come back. I shrugged it off as a lesson learned and basically forgot about the site.

Early last week, though, I was testing a tool I’m creating that helps you write and post blog posts to WordPress blogs super fast. I decided to setup a blog on the site that lost its rankings, just to test it out. I made a bunch of blog posts (they were post-dated so they would show up slowly over time), and sat back to see what would happen.

To my surprise, over the weekend my site jumped back onto page one for its rankings. I hadn’t touched that site in months, and now it’s ranking better than it ever was — at #4 for 3 great sets of keywords. This, of course, has spiked my AdSense earnings for the site.

Another nice benefit of the new blog is that the blog itself is getting some additional traffic from Google, even though the blog does not have any external links directly to it. Google is applying the authority of the site itself to the blog. Since the site is well-linked, the blog is given a bit of “trust” by Google and is appearing in the search results as well.

Scraper Sites Can Help You Rank

On a related note regarding blogs and traffic, I’ve recently setup a blog that automatically creates a bunch of posts each day based on a variety of keywords. This blog is a test for a larger idea I have in mind, and the test is working great, with the blog having achieved more than 12,000 unique visitors in the last 5 days. The vast majority of the traffic has come from Google.

As part of that same test, I setup a second, similar blog that does the same kind of thing. Despite the second blog actually having more content, it has (so far) received no joy from Google at all (it’s not even indexed yet).

The difference is in the scraper sites that are referencing the content. The keywords that I’m creating content around for my successful blog is a scraper magnet — hundreds of scraper sites are auto-posting content from my own blog to theirs, and giving a reference link back to my blog posts to try and make it more legit.

How do these scraper sites know about my brand-new blog posts so fast? Because the blog is indexed by Google’s blog search, and many scraper sites scrape results from that blog search to post to their own blogs. They also scrape many other blog search engines, and since my blog pings those search engines when I make a new post, the blog’s content gets picked up and spread around fast.

Those links from these automated scraper sites have resulted in my blog quickly gaining hundreds of backlinks from all over the web, and that means great rankings for the pages of my blog.

The second test blog I setup, however, has not attracted the scraper blogs and so hasn’t even been indexed in Google yet. It might seem strange that scraper sites can help you rank, but if they link back to the source of the content, they really can.

Trackbacks Are Your Friend

On a final note, I recommend setting up your blog to automatically post trackback links to the blog posts that you link out to. If you’re not familiar with trackbacks, it’s a simple concept: any time you link to an external blog post from within your own blog post, your blog posts a “comment” to the blog post you’ve linked to, letting the readers of that post know about your own post referencing it.

Now, not all blogs will approve your trackback link, but many will, and I’ve received literally thousands of visitors from a single trackback link appearing on a popular blog. So make sure you setup your blog to automatically post trackbacks to the blogs that you link out to — it can often result in a flood of traffic.

Have any more great blog-related traffic building ideas? Care to share your opinion about this post? Please post your thoughts in a comment below.

Source: Jon Leger’s blog

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For example, on your home page you could have the latest entries appearing – or some of the oldest if you wanted to breathe a bit of new life into posts that you wrote some time ago.

Of course if you install your blog directly into the root of your domain this doesn’t really apply to you because your posts will show up there anyway.

But if you have your blog elsewhere it’s a great way to freshen up your home page every time you make a new post. I’ve just added that to my own home page and it works a treat. I had to do a little reading up on it to find out how to do it and found this page quite helpful: corvidworks.com

I actually had to modify the example code a little because it didn’t work for me. I used <?php endif; ?>
rather than <?php endwhile; ?>

You can see the effect on my home page. I’ve set the display to show 3 excerpts with links to the full post. If you wanted you could put the full post, but it seems more sensible to me to give a taste of the post and then let the user decide whether to read more.

It’s not limited to the home page. You can display blog entries on any of the pages on your site, so if you focus on a particular topic you can point your visitors to other, pertinent information.

And last, but not least, there’s a definite SEO benefit to having regular fresh content on your home page. If you use the excerpt facility well and pull in a couple or three of your latest posts your page(s) will always look interesting

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Nichebot is a keyword research tool and Jim Morris regularly writes about the best ways to do keyword research and get better results for your efforts.

This particular blog post, which you can read here, is one that I’ve gone so far as to print out. It’s a basic primer on where to make sure you put your keywords. The list shows the top 15 locations. Rather than copy the list here, I would encourage you to read the full article for yourself.

For anyone who isn’t already optimizing their keywords usage, Jim’s article is a great primer. I’d recommend printing it out because it really is that useful.

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2. Tips for Article Marketing Success – Part 2
3. Bum Marketing Part 3

While the use of a description meta tag is optional and will have no effect on your rankings, a good description can result in a better snippet, which in turn can help to improve the quality and quantity of visitors from our search results.

A lot of people find Meta tags confusing (I won’t pretend to be an expert myself) and from what I see a lot of webmasters don’t even use them at all. Google’s post is a good beginner’s lesson on the different meta tags and what they do. It also shows which ones actually make any kind of difference in search engine results – and why which is useful to know. If you haven’t already realized it there’s a link at the top of this post to the full article.

From what Google say it’s clear that the description meta tag is still one that should certainly be present on your pages and given some time and effort when you’re creating your page. If you do manage to get a 1^st page placement in Google and your description is pretty poor, how many visitors might you end up turning away?

If you think about the times you’ve read a poor description and not even bothered looking at the site you’ll know how important this is. On the other hand if you remember the times you’ve seen a great description snippet you’ll probably remember you clicked on the link before you even finished reading it!

The description snippet you put in the meta tag is like getting a free advert in Google – don’t waste it – interest and intrigue your prospective visitors and you’re likely to see more visitors.

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1. Does Duplicate Content Get You Banned?
2. Google neglecting your site? Add a blog.
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Seems a bit odd when you consider how many sites syndicate content these days, from the BBC and CNN to ma and pa sites, everyone’s getting their content out there as much as possible.

Ezine articles wouldn’t even exist if there weren’t hordes of webmasters all wanting to take the duplicate content and publish it!

So, will duplicate content really get you penalized? Who should we ask? There are any number of self-proclaimed experts hanging out a various webmaster and internet marketing forums. Just spend more than a day at any one of them and watch the same discussion take place many times.

We can’t ask them, so who do we ask?

How about Google?

Here’s what I read from Google

The most important things to know about duplicate content are:

• Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show if your sites includes duplication. If you don’t want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.

If you’d like to read Google’s full post you can do so here.

So, does this mean it’s safe to just put up any old scraped content then? Well, no not really. You still need good content and their own advice makes it clear that unique content is always likely to do better than duplicate content, so it’s worth the effort to be unique. You just don’t have to spend sleepless nights that you’ll disappear from the search engine if you have some content that also exists elsewhere.

Of course, if your whole site is nothing but scraped content you might still have problems, but that’s a whole other post.

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Well, you can get a free backlink on a PR4 directory at the moment over at scskl.org

Gobala Krishan over at easywordpress.com has an interesting post about an automated directory submitter software and how to cut out some of the time it takes to work through 2000 directories.

I won’t repeat the full post here, but it’s well worth a read and he gives you the link to download the free software. You can read his post here.

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It does require that you have an existing website somewhere, as you’ll see. But it’s real easy to do.

You have to have an Adsense account. And as you may know, you need a website up and running before you can sign up for Adsense so you do need a little preparation to make the most of this. But many of you will already have an Adsense account. If you don’t you can set up a free blog at Blogger or WordPress and tie your Adsense account to that. Make a few posts and then apply and you should get approved pretty fast.

One you’ve got an Adsense account you can put the ads on any website you like. Just copy the code into one or more of the pages.

Now here’s the good part. If you put an Adsense code block on one of the pages on your new site Google won’t know what kind of ad to provide. That’s because it’s never heard of that site and has no information.

But if you keep refreshing the page, all of a sudden the ads will become relevant. Which means that Google now knows about your site. And while you won’t appear in the index the same day at least Google now knows your site is there and you will get indexed faster.

Of course it also makes sense to do your other SEO tasks, like getting links in quality directories, maybe adding a few comments to popular blogs.

But Adsense will wake up big G. and make them take notice of you. So use their own tools for your benefit!

Oh, you might find you need to refresh the page quite a bit before you start seeing proper Adsense ads. Once you see them you can relax. And if you want to take the ads off at that point you can.

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One thing that caught my eye was his templates designed for good SEO results. I thought I’d mention it here in case anyone would like to take advantage.

He’ll be adding to the list available so it’s well worth having a look back from time to time.

You can visit his page here.

He also has an interesting article here, about SEO and blogging, as part of the book he’s writing. I found some very useful information in there.

I was especially interested in another bootk, “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, which he recommends as a good introduction to the power of the Internet in social and business contexts. Sounds like something very much on target for all internet marketers.

Related posts:

1. Kevin sent me some articles

And that, which increases traffic, means more money in the bank.

Producing a site map can be done by hand – if you have the time. Or you can use one of the many tools available. Some are paid and some are free. I discovered a very flexible free one today and wanted to share it with you here.

Visit GSiteCrawler here.

You’ll see it’s a free download, but the author gives you the opportunity to make a donation. If you use it wisely this little program should result in more visitors to your site. With the extra money you make, why not send him a small donation?

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Well, Kevin practises what he preaches and he’s just offered three great articles which anyone can use and – get this – earn some money off. I’ve included the first article below, so you can see what kind of article writer he is.

And think about this too: articles are a great source of content for your blog or site. If you’re a newcomer to the world of internet marketing and article submission you can get up and running very quickly. Everybody will tell you that search engines love content. If you haven’t got much content well now’s your chance to change that – at no cost!

Article Marketing: Tips For Article Marketing Success -
Part 1 of 5

Article Marketing is certainly nothing new, but in order for it to be wildly successful; you must remember three things…

(a) Your articles have to be loved by the Article Directory Editors or they won’t be accepted. Take some time to familiarize yourself with each directories terms, you’ll be glad you did.

(b) Your articles have to be loved by the Search Engines in order for your articles to be found. Articles which are “keyword-rich” will be found much more often.

(c) Your articles have to be loved by the Audience you are targeting, (i.e. your readers). Providing useful, enjoyable content will increase your readership and the number of Publishers that will make your articles available on their sites.

If your articles meet the criteria, above, your articles will be accepted, found, read, enjoyed and most importantly…Will bring targeted Website Traffic to the site(s) you list in your Resource Box.

While it’s not difficult, there are a number of things you must know (and do) to ensure your success with Article Marketing. In this article, I will give you five tips to improve the effectiveness of every article you write. Here are 5 tips; more will follow in parts 2 through 5.

1. Make sure you’re submitting original content. Nothing will upset an Article Directory Editor faster than if you submit some Private Label Rights article found on thousands of sites.

2. Write your articles in the preferred formats. Editors like informative articles that share your expertise. Articles that include tips, strategies, how-to’s, case-studies, reviews, opinions and commentaries are well-received.

3. Write articles that give valuable benefit to your readers. Articles which are considered “hypey,” i.e. excessive self-promotion, a sales letter or even a press release won’t be accepted.

4. You must use decent English. It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, but be sure to use proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.

5. Articles must not contain information the editors deem illegal, immoral or promoting hate or violence.

In summary, if you’re writing articles that are loved by Article Directory Editors, Search Engines and your Targeted Audience, you’ll find a whole lot of success with your Article Marketing efforts.

Stay tuned, as we’ll be covering more proven Article Marketing Tips in part two of this five-part series.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kevin Koop is a Custom Cabinetmaker turned Internet Marketer. He is the creator of the Article Domination Method and the Article Writer’s Cheat Sheet. If you’d like to find huge success through Article Marketing, be sure to visit Kevin’s site for more information

1. Tips for Article Marketing Success – Part 2
2. Get clicking
3. 25,000 Articles