I’m too lazy really to figure out what keywords I want to use to tag my posts, so I use a super nifty plugin called simple tags. With simple tags I just click a button (click the yahoo one the rest suck) and it scans my content and gives me a list of clickable suggested tags. Look for good longtail tags, not short one worders.

Simple tags has the added bonus of automatically giving you a related posts plugin built in which is great for internal linking which SEO Zombie talks about at his blog.

Anyway I know this one was short but every little bit helps in this game.

Keyword Density: I don’t REALLY worry about keyword density. It’s a good idea for sure to have a keyword you are targeting at least once, you can put it more just make sure it doesn’t look spammy. I personally would aim for using the keyword 3-5 times in an article.

Original Content: Google tries to beat down duplicate content, but it doesn’t do a great job by any measure. Grizz talked about using a content scraper successfuly in his post Duplicate Content is Google’s Weak Link. The one thing that is for sure is that you shouldn’t straight up copy an entire page from a site.

Writing content is one of the biggest time expenditures for a web entrapruner. Don’t waste it.

The google sandbox is really a penalty a site gets when it’s doing TOO well (getting too much search traffic), and it is a new site. This is a major reason why Vic @ blogger unleashed heavily recomends buying pre-owned domains. What I’ve generally expiranced is that your site will hit around 200 search visits a day then get dinged down to 40-50. The sandbox MAY only affect competitive niches. The sandbox MAY only affect sites that build up links “strangley” quickly. The truth is no one knows for sure but these are a couple of theories. I had a site about the upcoming election that was getting well in excess of 1000 search visits a day and it never got sandboxed, it had a TON of crappy links.

Grizz is planning on doing some expiramenting with the sandbox which God willing will be very benifical. He talks about it in his post about flipping pre owned domains.

Anyway the real point of this post was to SHOW people what it looks like to be relegated to the sandbox. A picture says 1000 words so here it is:

The sandbox is a couple things for sure 1) it’s painful 2) it’s real. Other than that not a lot is known for sure.

For everyone of the keywords you found that will be a post. Use your keywords as your post title, if you are selling an affilaite product feel free to tack on a sales word like “buy” or “for sale”. I have a lot of success writing reviews. Before buying a product it’s suprising how many people search for [product review].

Using your keywords as your title does two main things. 1 – It get’s your keyword into your URL and 2 – it gives your post internal authority for that keyword (internal anchored links).

Don’t feel the need to get too fancy with this step, it’s important but an easy one to fix (by coming back and making a new post) if you screw it up lol.

Anyway I will be posting here to complete my tutorial, and hopefully any of you that continue to read will bring the pressure on me to keep writing. 1 because I need something like this to make me think and 2 because I need somewhere to complain about how maddening the quest for position 1 is by times (a lesson a lot of people learn after 6 months and then give up).

Take all my old posts (before this one) with a grain of salt. I’m going to make an effort to go back through them and check for accuracy, but if in doubt about something I’ve said please leave a comment and I’ll address it.

–DaMan

First off I’d like to apologize for not updating in forever. I’m hard into exam period and for that reason my time has been severely limited. I finish exams on April 23 and after that I am taking the summer off to work on the net full time. Look for me to get back at writing and finishing my guide to building a site then.

I wanted to make this post to tell everyone something, I am a joke. Can you learn anything here at ScrewYouGoogle? Yeah, sure you can. About a lot of things I know what I’m talking about. I’ve done a lot of reading and watching of the SEO masters Vic, Court, Grizz (In fact Grizz found his way to this site one day, a fact which I am very proud of), and most recently Justin. They are the ones that know what they are talking about, and anything I know is 90% from what they have told me, and the other 10% from doing things completly WRONG.

I wanted to let everyone know, in case anyone with any interest in SEO doesn’t already know, about Vic at BloggerUnleashed. I like to say that Court made me fall in love with SEO, but Vic was the one who slapped me up side the head and showed me how to do it right. Vic teaches people how to Make Money Online and doesn’t spare any words doing so. When you watch your first video I bet you will say to yourself “Man this guy is an ass, but he knows what the hell he’s talking about”, and he no doubt does. Since starting to read Blogger Unleashed my knowledge of SEO has grown ten fold.

Vic made a vlog post the other week that completly rocked my world. He talked about color schemes of blogs and how that can have a great effect on CTR. I thought ok this might be worth a shot and boost me 1 or 2% at best but it has essentially tripled my CTR on some sites. I simply made a black (#000000) background with a gray (#666666) font then put adsense with the same format except blue (#000066) titles. On one site my CTR went from around 5% to 17% in a week, it was ridiculous.

It’s little things like that that Vic teaches you on his site that make all the difference. God willing Vic will drop another piece of knowledge from heaven and I will see the same results again.

Vic’s mentee, Justin (who I somewhat ironically share a name with) just stared a blog called Blogging Zombe about Make Money on the Internet. Every time Vic talks about him he is so proud and I hope some day maybe I will be to the same point. I can’t wait to get back at blogging, and I’m excited to be able to work at it full time this summer.

I hope you keep reading here to get my second hand knowledge, but I insist you keep (or start) reading (watching) Vic at Blogger Unleashed. Don’t be put off by his swearing or occasional rant. If you’re not you might as well be burning your money.

Setup – There are few things you need to change on your blog which are VERY important. First go to the options tab and change permalinks to “custom” and use the following:

/%postname%/

Next you should have your keywords in your title and tagline.Theme Selection – There are TONS of themes out there to choose, but I always find mine at Courtney Tuttle’s SEO Wordpress Themes. I personally LOVE the Keyword Sniper theme (and it comes with a few directions). It’s easy to edit yourself (and I’ll show you how to get a ridiculous CTR on it once I’m done this guide). If you are planning on doing adsense in my opinion a theme with 2 columns on the same side is a must. Court’s SEO themes will give you the best bang for your buck.

Plugins – There are a few essential plugins for your blog: all-in-one-adsense, all-in-one-seo, global translator, simple tags, xml sitemap. I’m not going to go into how to set all those up, you can read the FAQ yourselves. There are other good SEO plugins, but this should give you a good start for sure.

Anyway it’s as easy as that to set up your SEO Wordpress blog, so go ahead and give it a shot.

(Added March 28th/07) 1000 appologies, I promised to comment on Blogger blogs (not that there really is a lot I can tell you). I know they can do very well (as good as any other site) but can’t really tell you how as all I use is WP. Blogger is owed by Google so it has the advantage of being indexed very quickly. Anyway the place to go if you want to learn about using a Blogger blog is: Grizz’s Make Money Online for Beginners.

TOP LEVEL DOMAIN (the .com part of your URL)

Generally choosing a generic  top level domain is a good idea. .com is the most popular but from everywhere I read using .org, .net, .info or whatever.  People generally want to get .com, and I would recommend that as my first choice, but getting another generic one is fine, just harder to sell if you ever want to flip it.

**REVISED Aug 13, 2008 – Google is now heavily penalizing .info domains due to them being spammed heavily so stay away.

If you are going to target a niche in a non-USA country using a country specific top level domain might be beneficial. for example: in Canada using a .ca URL might be beneficial (as it will rank higher at google.ca).

DOMAIN NAME (the screwyougoogle part)

This should contain your keyword string. If you want to target ranking high for  “why turtles operate quickly” then getting the url “whyturtlesoperatequickly.com” is your best option. Generally (at least for me) if you want a keyword(s) that are searched regularly all the URL’s are bought up so I’ll add on a word that makes it sound like a magazine or paper like “today” or “daily” to get “whyturtlesoperatequicklytoday.com”. Alternatively think about better targeting what tye of visitors your want, if you’re selling green widgets use “buygreenwidgets.com” instead of “greenwidgets.com”. Adding the word “online” can also be a good idea.

Basically the important thing is to realize that a lot of domains are bought up and it is hard to find one that fits you sometimes. Just keep looking and don’t get discouraged, and MAKE SURE YOUR KEYWORD STRING IS IN YOUR URL.

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