Screw You Google

Ok so this is the easiest step in the world and I probably shouldn’t even cover it, but I put it in my plan thus I will at least make a quick note about it. Tagging your posts is useful for several reasons 1) it helps places like technorati know what your blog is about, 2) it gives google several more pages of content to look through (even if it does contain duplicate excerpts), and 3) it increases your keyword density on every page.

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.

So I went through and picked out all the long tail keywords (I went with 3 or more words) that included my keyword, which have over 1000 searches a month (so like 30 a day). There were 44 such keywords, so if I can rank #1 for even 10 of these keywords alone it should send me 100 visits per day. This is the goal, ranking for a ton of low competition keywords is better than ranking well for 1 high competitive keyword. It’s easier and faster.

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.

Hey to anyone who stumbles (pun intended) across this blog, or one of the few people who have subscribed to the RSS feed.

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.

Wordpress is by far the best tool I have found for easily creating websites, and thus I will suggest as step #5 set up a Wordpress blog. I’m not going to get into all the details of how to set up a wordpress blog, you can read their 5 minute install guide yourself here: 5 Minute Guide.

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.

Ok so it’s no secret that the URL of your site is one of the most important factors in placing high in the rankings. Choose a URL containing your keywords.

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.

Ok so it’s time for Step one of how to build a good money make, high SERP ranking website. This step seems to “make sense” but it’s not always as clear as one would think.

First: PICK A TOPIC YOU KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT AND WRITE ABOUT IT. I have even been guilty of building sites trying to get into some higher paying niches, but the fact is if you don’t know about it, things will take you 10x longer to write, ideas will be 100x harder to think of, and your content will be 1000x more painful to make. I made a site about snowboarding a while ago and it was BRUTAL. I couldn’t write my own content and ended up just taking it off the product I was promoting’s site.

If you don’t know about a topic how are you going to find a niche? Using any search information software you’ll get screwed because they always have crappy not-real search terms in them. “OH WOW! ‘Forex for your mom with banana syrup’ gets 1000000 searches a day!” it happens and makes it very painful when you build a nice site, get a #1 ranking for your keyword, and then get 1 hit a week.

**Revised Aug 13, 2008 - Now Google is releasing search numbers so you can get much more accurate results about related keywords here; however, still write about stuff you know about.

Second: PICK A TOPIC THAT YOU LIKE. It can be a bad idea is blogging about your job (especially if you hate what you do). This is strange advice for me to give because I am a law student and I frequently make blogs about the law, but hey, I like the law, I talk all day about the law, and when I go home I watch TV about the law and think about the law.

If you have a hobby write about it. If you like it so do other people and you can make it work.

Today was sort of a touchy feely topic, which I don’t love, but it needs to be said. Check back over the next few days when I’ll write about “Keyword Research”, a topic that mystifies a lot of people.