What I Didn’t Learn At School

Every now and then I get asked how most of my traffic comes from search engines and not Twitter and Facebook. The answer to that question is Search Engine Optimization. I spend much time on Twitter and Facebook to get new feedback from readers and to connect with other bloggers and marketing gurus out there. But the real work of attracting readers is already done with SEO all through my blog.

I have given many SEO tips on this blog in the past but never really focused on the mistakes many people find them self doing. If you need a refresh on how to optimize your blog, take a look at my first and only episode of WIDLAS TV.

So what is the biggest SEO mistakes that I see people do?

1. To Many Keywords
   It’s important that you write blogposts for your readers, not the Search Engines. If you put to many keywords in one article you may end up with something we call Keyword stuffing and Search Engines punish you for that and will give you some kind of penalty.
2. Dont’ Use Link Networks
   You know the importances of linking to other sites and get links back. But all those big link networks that really don’t have any content just links is not really a good way to start. It can give you an unfair advantage so that you will get an higher Page Rank then you normally would but trust me, Google knows about them and have already punished a lot of sites linking up with them. So stay away from all kinds of networks like this and you will be good.
3. Unnatural Link Growth
   Building up links to your site takes a long time. Often years to get it to sit right. You may be lucky and end up on the front page of Digg.com but a link growth like that is calculated. Also a great backlink can make you an instant success. All that is good but it’s the “I have no time so I just buy 100 hard links in one day” methods that will make the Search Engines see red flags all over. So have some ice in your belly and let link building take it’s time.
4. Don’t Overkill Directory Submissions
   There is tons of directories out there where you can submit your site to. I’ve spoken to many people in forums that outsource this kind of work and pay for this job getting done. And probably with good reason too since it’s an important part of the SEO. But there is two big mistakes that often is done here. First don’t submit to many directories at once. Do a maximum of 10-15 a month. And what ever you do, you need to vary your anchor text for your URL. Don’t use the same anchor text in each directory.
   
   
5. Use Anchor Text The Right Way
   You should always use anchor text on images and all outgoing and internal links in your blogposts. But remember to diversify the anchor text at least for all the links and images in the same blogpost. I will also recommend to do this throughout the blog. Don’t just use SEO as an anchor text, use “How to Optimize For Search Engines” and various form of that. Get it? Look at Anchor text as asking many people to describe the same thing. You would get a lot of different answers wouldn’t you?

Learn from my mistakes and get it right the first time. And please give me feedback if you found this post helpful.

If you don’t know the importance of back linking you should go back and read my post about getting more traffic to your blog. One way of getting more traffic is to walk over to other websites and forums that you like and start commenting and leave your signature. Your signature should always link back to your own blog.

Many blogs and forums also give you something called a Do-follow link. This is a peace of code that tells Google and other search engines that they linked to your site. That again is called a back link. Sites that doesn’t offer a Do-follow link will kind of hide for the search engines and tell them that they do not link to you. Kind of a white lie don’t you think?

That’s why I find blogs that offer do-follow links very valuable. They give something back to you for commenting on their posts. And the more back links your site have, the more popular google think you are. So it gives you cred at the same time that they give you traffic. What more can you ask for?

So last week when I was stumbling around for great blogs to leave my comments on I found 2 great posts on a blog written by this 17 year old girl. She have gathered a list with links to 287 DoFollow Blogs and 120 DoFollow Forums so you can get started to build your back link farm right away.

BONUS: Right before posting this I found a directory of DoFollow blogs that had over 200 more blogs to comment on. Guess the 17 year old girl did a better job, but this DoFollowBlogs.com have some nice categorizing

Hope you like it and please comment here as well with your questions and experience with do follow and back links.

• 287 DoFollow Blogs
• 120 DoFollow Forums
• DoFollowBlogs.com

So it’s about time I wrote this blog post as we are in the middle or soon in the end of a traffic competition in Alex Jeffreys coaching program. I’ve been working on some other things with my blog so I consider myself out of the competition or at least not in the top 10 of who is getting the most traffic. Even so I have a a number of steps that I work on that I want to implement into my daily and weekly blog work so that I can raise the traffic to this blog to new heights.

Before I go into the steps I must say that there is no easy steps to get a lot of traffic to your blog like super fast. Well, if you don’t count buying 10.000 visitors for $45 that clearly isn’t targeted and will not stay on your site for very long. The success of a blog is based on the readers of the blog. The more people that read the blog regularly, the more contents of the blog is spreading, and then in the mean time it will develop your blog bigger and bigger. The key to success is to build great content and a core audience. That’s why my steps for getting more traffic to my blog is a bit slower then most of the students that is part of the competition. I’m going for targeted traffic and building a relationship with my readers. It’s part of a branding strategy and this week it really seams to work, so let’s get to it. read more

First of all what is a sitemap? It’s really similar to the table of contents of a book.  And why is this so important? Sitemaps are important because it guides web surfers to the particular part of the website they have a point of interest in. With it they would save time following links and get right to the point instead.

But you have an easy menu and categories in your blog you say? Well sitemaps are also where search engines look at if somebody is looking for a particular keyword or phrase. If you have a site map, you can most likely be searched.

But it sounds like a lot of work right? Well creating a sitemap, now with software technology surging in, is relatively easier than before.  You don’t need to be a programming guru to make one. All you need is a notepad, a program editor, and some patience. Here’s how you do it:

read more