Yet another reason to uninstall Internet Explorer! Here’s a very cool firefox extension that I learned about from Aaron Wall’s blog. This extension works in conjunction with the Google Webmaster Tools new Links section.

This is a really awesome tool that shows you the pagerank and link text of the backlinks that Google displays. Not only that but non-pr passing (NoFollow) links are displayed with a line through them so that you can tell at a glance who’s giving you that link love. Check out the tool here:

Here’s The Tool

Note it requires the Firefox browser AND the greasemonkey extension.

Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor

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When I’m looking for ideas to blog about, I often head over to PRweb and have a look at what’s new in my niche. You see, the use of press releases is an excellent way to get a buzz going about a new website or a new service or a give-away etc… So, PRweb is an excellent place to keep abreast of your Niche. Now, something else to consider, even though Press Releases have been around long before the web was in existence, the web did bring something new to the world of Press Releases…

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Trackbacks…
One aspect of PRweb that is often overlooked is the fact that many of the press releases will give you a trackback if you reference them on your blog. I’ve used this tactic quite a bit and see a reasonably steady stream of traffic coming from these press releases for sometimes weeks after I make the post.

Further, a look at the source code of these trackbacks reveals that PRweb is NOT using the fabled “NoFollow” tag. Which means, Google CAN follow these links and CAN give you a PR (as in Page Rank) boost. What’s more, PRweb is an authority site with a homepage Page Rank of seven; make no mistake, this is one of the trusted sites that Google spiders everyday!

Now for a real-world example:
Here’s an example of a Trackback I received for a post I did back in December:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/12/prweb486905.htm

The PRweb page above has a Page Rank of 4, if you follow the link through to my post you’ll see that my page has a PR 3 – most of the Page Rank has to be from my PRweb trackback since my Homepage is only a PR 2 .

…That’s all I’m saying on this one, use the technique if you want, tell your friends about it… Just please …speak kindly of me .

Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor

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I don’t know why but no one seems to be talking about this…

About a month ago, I signed up for several pay per post websites. My plan was to do a comparison of the major players for a series of review articles. However, almost immediately, I noticed something pretty interesting …I’ll tell you about that in a few minutes, first let me explain how these sites work…

These sites are pretty straight-forward. An advertiser (website owner) enters a post request. In this request, they specify the number of posts they want to buy, the minimum number of words they want in each post, some specifics on where they want their backlinks to go (including the link text) and the tone and subject matter of the post. They then set a price they’re willing to pay for each post.

Once the post request has been approved (and this can take a couple of days), it goes out into the system where it can be seen by the bloggers. The bloggers review the request if they decide to accept it; they make a unique post to their blog following the instructions of the advertiser. Next, they notify the pay per post website.

The pay per post website then monitors each post to verify that it meets the advertiser’s requirements.

Now here’s the interesting part, while doing my research I noticed something… There seemed to be a lot more bloggers then there were posting opportunities…

In fact, as of this writing, one of the major players in the industry has exactly 68 open posting opportunities. Another of the big sites doesn’t even seem to have enough to keep their existing bloggers …blogging.

…Can you say Supply and Demand.

Well, I quickly realized that the real opportunity here was in buying the posts —Not writing them! I like to experiment, so I quickly signed up as an advertiser for one of these sites, I threw together a request for ten posts about “affiliate marketing” at $5 per post. A few days later, I received an email telling me that my request was approved, by the following day all ten requests had been filled – I know this because I started seeing new backlinks in the “Incoming Links” section of my control panel when I logged in that morning. A quick trip to the pay per post site, confirmed this.

Here’s a couple of permanent links that I received for $5 each:

http://internetmarketingreview.org/blog/2007/01/17/affiliate-marketing/
Homepage is pr 4

http://onlineprofits4moms.com/2007/making-money-selling-other-people-products/ Homepage is PR2

Now just to drive the point home, for $50 (plus $16.25 paid to the post broker), I received backlinks from ten different blogs spread out all over the web. Each of these posts is unique and my backlinks are NOT buried deep within some reciprocal link directory – they are PR passing backlinks each nestled within a brand new blog post..

…And keep this in mind, I rushed through my post request. I could have put additional restrictions in to ensure that my posts were from blogs within certain categories or I could have denied posts from sites like blogspot or myspace, I could even have even specified the PR of the sites I wanted posts from. The point is I got some good results without really even trying…

Give this a shot, I bet you can get some sweet backlinks without the hassle of doing regular reciprocal linking and for a fraction of the cost of buying old fashioned text links.

Here’s two sites I recommend:
Choose one, create an advertiser account order some posts and see what happens.
Click Here To Try Blogsvertise
Or Try Payperpost here!

Good luck and let me know how you make out.

Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor

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Google recently updated their toolbar pagerank (January ’07). Immediately, webmasters from around the globe started posting in forums that either their pagerank (pr) stayed at zero or didn’t move even though they’ve been getting backlinks to their sites. Here are a few quick thoughts about that…

First pagerank is generated by Google and is always several months out of date - Google is just finishing up a new pagerank/backlinks update but even so, the data that they are showing is several months old. They do that on purpose, they really don’t want webmasters obsessing about page rank.

Next, if you’re still concerned about the PR of your site, I’d recommend signing up for Google webmaster tools (it’s free) Webmaster Tools In there they have a pagerank tool, under “Crawl stats” that tells you, in general terms, where your Pagerank is. Note: Google has said that this tool is much more accurate then the pagerank on the tool bar.

Now, just having links doesn’t mean you’re getting pagerank. Google is wise to most of the tricks that we (webmasters) have used in the past to boost pr and has discounted a lot of it. Also, lots of times webmasters use certain tricks that keep pagerank from passing to their link partners - (nofollow tag, using redirects instead of linking directly to the page) and unless you look closely you probably won’t see it.

Try the Google link query to see what Google is seeing as far as links go, use the following:

link:www.YourDomain.com

This query will return (some of) the links that Google sees pointing to your site.

Also use:

site:www.YourDomain.com

to see how many of your pages are indexed.

Lastly, try to forget about pagerank and just build good content for your blog –that’s what ALL the search engines want and they reward those sites that have it —-regardless of what their Pagerank may be.

Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor

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In the eight or so years that I’ve been an Internet Marketer I’ve managed to involve myself in a few stupid, money and time wasting scams. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent guy, but sometimes I can’t help myself and I just get a little too caught up in a well-written sales letter. I tell myself that I learn something from every mistake I make, I hope so. At the very least, I have enough experience to write this post. So here goes, here’s my list of five things every website owner should avoid.

1) Any of the “Make a million dollars today, by doing nothing scams”: It’s common sense that these things won’t work (c’mon if you developed a system that could make you tons money without doing anything —would you really tell people about it?), but we get so caught up in the dream that our common sense sometimes goes out the window. Earning a living is hard – being an entrepreneur is oftentimes even harder, there ‘aint no shortcuts!

2) Amazing traffic deals – get 10,000 hits for $9.95, or others like them. Listen closely to me —ALL of these “deals” are JUNK! You’re getting machine generated hits, in other words, people never actually visit your website. As with many scams, common sense would dictate that the traffic is junk, why would a company sell you so much traffic for so little money —wouldn’t it make more sense to use the traffic themselves?

3) Search Engine Submission software– Make no mistake, the multi-billion dollar search engines of the world do NOT rely on people buying some $49.95 submission script to find new content to index. Search engines like to find their own content, how? by sending out spiders that surf the web much like humans do —they follow links.

4) Link brokers – Now I’m not saying there is no value in buying links to your site – if done properly this technique can provide you with targeted traffic and maybe even boost your search engine rankings. Unfortunately, you’re often buying links on sub-par websites that never get any real traffic.

Tip: Buy links on pages that are related to what you’re trying to sell – the links you buy should be visible to the people that visit that site, remember – you want traffic – if someone sees your link and clicks through, that’s a targeted visitor that wants to see what you’re selling. Buy links for people to see NOT just search engine spiders.

5) Link Exchanging – Like buying links this is only effective when done properly. Most link exchanging campaigns are simply a waste of time, links that are buried 10, 20 30 pages deep –Never see the light of day, not by search engine spiders and certainly not by surfers. Unfortunately, that’s what 95% of link exchange campaigns are. Someone either buys a script or joins a paid service and starts doing automated link exchanges – in a few days, they can have hundreds of pages of links on their site. Search engines don’t like links pages, they’ve said so! Don’t you think the search engines are smart enough to see what’s going on? The engines can tell a links page a mile away and they know exactly what their worth: $ZERO. The engines want you to build websites for human visitors; a website with 5 pages of content and 50 pages of links is NOT what they have in mind.

Exchange links properly, do it on a one on one basis. Get to know other sites in your niche, link to the ones you like. Then (and only then), contact the owner of these sites and tell them that you’re already linking to them and ask for a link back. Some may not want to reciprocate – maybe they don’t think you have a sufficient amount of content on your site yet. Don’t get angry and remove their link from your site, if you think a resource is good for your visitors then leave the link up – remember you’re building a site for your visitors NOT the search engines.

So that’s it, five stupid things that I should have avoided but didn’t. Go forth now and make your own mistakes, just stay away from these five – they’re mine!

Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor

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Keyword research is arguably the most important part of the SEO process. It does you no good to spend months getting a high ranking if the keywords you selected do not reflect how your potential customers are searching for you. If the keyphrases you’ve targeted are too competitive and you may never even crack the first page of the serps – meaning your site simply won’t be found.

The Long Tail of SEO promises a better outcome. With the long tail, you’ll find that there is a virtually unlimited supply of ripe, low hanging fruit just waiting to be picked. But how do you find these keyphrases? Two online new tools promise to help.

The first tool is http://103bees.com/. This is free, you sign up and tell them about your site they then give you a piece of code to copy/paste onto your web pages. Every time a visitor hits your site it’s recorded, over time a picture of the site develops. You’ll see the top landing pages, the top key phrases and after you’ve received at least 100 unique search engine hits, you’ll see a chart that shows your search term popularity on logarithmic axes. This will tell you how well you are exploiting the long tail keyphrases. This site provides some good information and can be used in conjunction with the site listed below…

Hittail is another interesting free service. You create your hittail account and again you’re given a piece of code to copy/paste into your site. Hittail tracks your hits and provides you with some interesting information – most importantly, it gives you a list of suggestions for future posts, these suggestions are your long tail keyphrases. Here’s a video that explains hittail in greater detail the I can. See The Hittail Video Here

Try Hittail Here!

Try out these two free sites and post your experience here!

Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor

Don't forget to get your SEO Success Guide! My FREE Ecourse that Will Show you how to beat your competition on Google and the rest... CLICK HERE!