I have had the SEO for Firefox plugin installed for a while now, but not until I cam across a nofollow article written by Aaron Wall  over at SEOBook, did I realise how to really use it.  This article will explain a little bit about what it is and what it can do in relation to nofollow to save you a lot of time (and clicking) to get the relevent data. I will do another article to explain the full functional use for the SEO extention for Firefox, for now you can find one of the SEO extention for Firefox link at the bottom of this article.

Mostly, I installed the extention a while back to gather some useful information such as Alexa, Google and Yahoo! ranks, but little did I know that the extention also has an option to highlight links that have the nofollow attribute which is something bloggers and blog owners should take seriously.

The attribute nofollow is a tag that was invented by Google in an attempt to help illiminate comment spamming a few years back that Google has since flip flopped on. The concept was that when comment spammers placed a URL to get a backlink (to help their PR), that a no follow attribute was assigned to the link so the search engines wouldn’t follow it. Sounded good, except it didn’t work because spammers simply didn’t care and a link was still present in the browser that visitors can follow.

Now, Google seems to be punishing some webmasters that have excessive comments using nofollow tag, which Matt Cutts talks about in the following video:

So what can we do? Well when it comes to Google we just have to go with the flow, because with one little algorithm change we can go from hero to zero almost over night. A #1 ranking can go to #1000 just because of something as simple as excessive use of nofollow like what matt talks about. But with the use of the SEO extention for Firefox we can easily find the website that have dofollow so we are not flooding blogs with nofollow links that appear to be spam. First you will need to download the extention and next to set the option to display nofollow. You may want to watch Aaron’s video below the download link on the page before returning here.

You can download SEO for Firefox here.

Set nofollow in Options

Once you have the extention installed and you restart Firefox, you are going to a bunch of data that display below each search result, this data is useful to get PR and other rankings which Aaron Wall explained, but for what we are doing (in regards to nofollow), we are only going to be concerned at this point with the Option to set for nofollow links.

1) right click on any open page in Firefox

2) Select SEO/PPC

3) Select Options

4) Under the Settings tab, tick off  Highlight ‘nofollow’ weblinks in webpages and select a noticable colour. I have select bright red as most websites won’t use this.

Next do a search of blogs/forums that are relevant to your comments you want to leave to create a backlink. Websites that have nofollow will have a box in your selected colour around them. It will be up to you now, if the site is relevant if you wish to leave a comment with your URL.

WordPress and nofollow

Now that we have gone over nofollow and leaving comments, lets look at nofollow on your own blog website. Specifically, WordPress

WordPress, which is what Prozilla 2.0 is based on, automatically has the nofollow attribute programmed in that many webmasters are no aware of, however there is a WordPress plugin at allows for dofollow which we have installed. The reason why we did this, is that nofollow simply isn’t needed, in my opinion anyway, because if you are properly managing your blog website, then dofollow can be something that works for you because it gives your visitors some link juice for their comments that in turn increases the value of your own website. Here are the steps to getting it done:

1). Install Akismet: Akismet is a comment spam plugin for WordPress. Using an API key, Akismet will cut down or even illiminate the amount of spam comments. It can be downloaded here.

2). Install DoFollow: DoFollow is a plugin that removes the default WordPress setting of nofollow and replaces it with the attribute of external. It can be downloaded here.

3). Moderation settings: In the WordPress admin area under Settings, go to Discussion where Before a comment appears is displayed, tick off: An administrator must always approve the comment

That concludes this little article on nofollow. Feel free to post your relevant comments below and enjoy the dofollow backlink

A Ranking Dropkick From Google … From #1 to #1,000

In November of 2003 Google did a major update to their search relevancy algorithms, which was known in the SEO community as the Florida update. That update marked the day that SEO became hard. Prior to that point in time, on page optimization tips from many SEOs would have sounded something like this “use your keywords heavily everywhere.” But that update changed how on-page-optimization works.

“Over Optimized” = Spammy

Keyword density is an ineffective measure of relevancy, so excessive repetition is not an effective SEO strategy. Many (formerly top ranked) pages and sites that use keywords too aggressively end up getting completely filtered out of the search results.

Google’s Matt Cutts described the type of pages that disappeared in this video

Mix Up Your Keyword Usage

Your on page SEO strategy should use semantically related phrases and mix up your keyword usage. If your page title is “Chicago Dentist & Dental Care : Business Name” then your on page heading tag should be something like “Your Friendly Dentists in Chicago”.

4 Ways to Include Variation in Your On-Page SEO Strategy

• Singular vs plural forms of a keyword
• Use synonyms
• Add in relevant keyword modifiers
• Change word order

Visualizing a Keyword Map

A cool tool called Quintura helps you visualize related phrases. For instance, if you search for cookies they might return a cloud like so

If you visit their website you can type in some of your keywords and find out what keywords and keyword modifiers they think are related. (Quintara’s results are provided by Yahoo!)

Google also offers a similar word relationship tool, and Microsoft’s Bing shows common related keywords directly in the upper left of their search results. In addition, most search engines offer a search suggestion feature (on their homepage, on search results, on search toolbars, and in the browser search box) which recommends popular related keywords directly in the search box.

Read more…

Prozilla 2.0 is a website that is based on WordPress. If you don’t know what WordPress is, you should as it is a content management system that seriously helps your SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages).

First, by using WordPress, you can enable visitor’s to make comments on your posts which keeps your content fresh which SE robots like which in turn increases your value as a website.  Sounds good? It’s great! But not only can having your own WordPress based website be great for your SEO campaign, but other websites that are Wordpress or blog based, are great for you to use to create backlinks to your own website. By posting good, post related comments, you create a link to your own website that SE robots index.

To check it out, members can use our SEO tools, or enter your URL with Yahoo’s Site Explorer: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Visit the members forum to find out how and where you can create quality backlinks with keyword optimization.Members click here

Backlinks are very important to the impact of internet marketing, although sometimes programmers put too much focus on developing them.  The key thing to remember with backlinks is that they should be the result of your activity rather than the purpose.  Producing high quality content should be your biggest concern because it can potentially afford you a productive, lucrative business.  It will also lessen the amount of work you have to put in, which is definitely appealing to any growing business owner.

There are three aspects to high-quality content that will help you to develop it.  The first characteristic regards how “remarkable” it is:  your content must be interesting or important enough to draw attention to itself, and if so, this attention can generate energy (or “buzz”) leading to more viewership.  The second feature is that of “specifics”: your subject matter should speak directly to a particular audience, in a relatable, identifiable vernacular that can transfer easily between different demographics.  Third, your text needs to be “dynamic”:  unique in both content as well as form, inviting readers to come back for updates and challenging them with insightful arguments.

These three components are the most important aspects of high quality content, but they are not the only facets that you need to remember.  This is where the backlinks come into play because, of course, your overall intention is to motivate the most traffic you possibly can through your site.  From this point, including a persuasive article from a high-visibility blogger that commands a stable audience will guarantee an inordinate amount of new and return visitors.

This benefits you because when you create high quality content, your newest, most excited viewers will comment about it directly on your site, at Digg, or at outside forums and this creates more exposure.  More exposure is like free advertising!  As you build a larger subscriber base, your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) improves, which in turn boosts your site reliability and furthermore your brand equity.  All of this can result in not only improved viewership but also in the quality of visitors.  Your site will start to direct itself towards your specific niche market which will give you higher ratings.

At this point you can actually step back and let the power of the worldwide web work for you.  The global community that has formed around your content will continue to grow even without any prompting from you!  Because they can add their own thoughts and comments and link their own websites and ideas to yours, your growth quickly turns exponential.  With more links directing users to your site, your SEO again improves and increases your page ranking.  Suddenly you will no longer need to concern yourself with backlinks as they will basically generate themselves.

The bottom line is that it will be far more beneficial for you to focus on generating high-quality content than it would be to strategize maximum social network penetration.  Original, intriguing, and exciting (even controversial) are the keywords to successful business.

If you aren’t already aware, Search Engine Optimization went through a massive overhaul in 2009.  Most of these changes apply to how your results are currently related to the amount of links and keywords are in your article.  The new format is more personalized so you may need to make some changes to your web or blog content in order to assure you have the same traffic as you did prior to this year.

Now, past search history will factor into personal web searches, meaning that the web will become more customized as per user behavior than ever.  This, of course, affects SEO because it is no longer a strictly keyword density-based objective.  It actually makes market penetration harder for the marketer because user customization makes the populace less predictable.  Google and other search engine companies will now be looking more at location based SEO to cater your searches to more accessible results.  They can do this by looking at the cookies you have saved on your server or at your individual IP address to get a static global location.  Users who like the personalized touch can keep their cookies and location status available to the search engines, while those who would prefer a more familiar format can simply erase their cookies (and history).

As we make the transition from blogging into social media, video is quickly becoming the new preferred web content.  In order for you to maximize visibility for your site, you will want to include embedded video which the search engines will recognize and boost your rating.  Google is actually in the process of developing new programs that can determine the effectiveness of your text and video content, which, when market-ready, will be able to help webmasters know what is working for them.  Right now, meaningful content is still more important than superficial videos, and sites that can generate accessible text will still perform better than those based on random videography.  Time will tell, however, how Google’s current developments will change all that.

One reason this is good is that more people will be rewarded for providing quality on their sites.  Gone, will be the bulk-spam companies who can generate “hits” for you in order to boost your rating.  SEO will depend on the unique traffic your site brings as well as how your content rates among your visitors, which will reenergize creativity and make the web more personally engaging for each user.  Accordingly, scape text and dummy sites will see a drop in their ratings (and in their ability to increase ratings).  Links that are listed in a search engine will actually take someplace where you want to go!

If you are a webmaster or the owner of a website and you are concerned about the coming changes, hopefully this will help give you some perspective on what you can do to grow your business.  If you rely on these methods, you probably need to get moving on a plan.  However, if you genuinely create engaging content, you probably only need to start instituting a few of this philosophies on top of what you are doing and you will continue to grow.

Many people have learned how to make money utilizing their blog popularity.  Because of search engine optimization, effectively understanding how to blog for market penetration can indeed generate a significant income for the right blogger.  Employing the proper marketing strategies can make this a simple process.

One such strategy is the use of the e-book.  Easy to distribute due to its common PDF format, they are not necessarily the biggest money makers (unless you charge fees to read them), but make powerful marketing tools to draw people to your site, boosting your SEO ratings.  However there are several more reasons why e-books are perhaps the best method to market your site through SEO statistics.

The internet is not a volatile market for published content (like the physical literary world)—anyone with something qualitative to talk about can publish an e-book.  With the right spirit and a focused agenda, you can generate a solid audience this way.  Again, the .pdf format is the most popular (because it is recognized by both Windows and Apple users) followed closely by .exe (which is only readable by Windows operating systems).  Which one you retain is up to you.

Free software (and now with xml and the shared content initiative) makes it extremely easy to create and publish your e-book on your site.  This software is occasionally ad-supported, meaning that the company who designed it markets for outside firms (benefiting you because you don’t have to pay to use it) through the distribution of its product.  However, in exchange for your dollars, they will remove the ads.  This is a great way to get started (with ads), and you can shift your credibility later once the money starts rolling in (without ads).

Making money through e-books is very simple.  Focus on a product or service that you can market through your content.  Develop an idea surrounding it and promote it with keyword density and subtle marketing that can direct your visitors to either your store or another site that pays you for traffic.  At the same time, avoid specifically mentioning internet marketing and business as the web savvy can smell a gimmick.

Finally, the big money makers behind e-commerce is subscription based content.  If you can get enough followers behind your e-book it might make more sense to give your book away as an incentive for your readers to subscribe to your blog or newsletter.  Repeat business is the key to all commerce and by guaranteeing returning eyeballs you will only expand in viewership increasing your brand equity at the same time.

E-books can be made quickly and deliver even quicker on their return.  There is little-to-no monetary investment and since most digital content is based on hours spent in development the better you get at creating them, the more efficient you will be and therefore the more your time will be worth.  This is the infinite earning potential of e-books.

Welcome to part three of this three part series on SEO tools and resources. In the last two articles we discussed the variety of Firefox extensions used for SEO as well as an assortment of other free or affordable SEO tools. In this article we’ll discuss some of the resources you’ll want to access on a regular basis to keep up to date and informed on the goings-on in the search engine and SEO realm.

We’re doing to cover a few different types of resources below and I’m going to try to keep this article to a reasonable length so let’s begin …

Read more in the members forum

Welcome to part two of this three part series on SEO tools and resources. In the last article we discussed the variety of Firefox extensions used for SEO. In this article we’ll discuss some of the free and affordable tools you can use to better your organic optimization efforts. To make sure that when I say affordable I mean for virtually everyone I’m going to set the bar at $100/yr or ownership. Admittedly, we use tools that cost more than this but many of those tools will be out of some people’s price range.

Here are some of the key tools you need to use to help insure the successful optimization of your website.

Read more in the members forum

I got into search engine optimization from a writing angle and not, like many, from a web designer angle. I think this gives me a unique viewpoint and perhaps a certain strength. My primary focus when I accept an SEO job is on what I think is the best strategy: creating good content and copy.

Concentrating on your site’s written content is one sure-fire method to increase your search rankings. As the search algorithms change and adapt to the newest SEO tricks, and as the tricks adapt to the new algorithms, one thing will stay constant; good content is good content, and eventually it will get noticed. It may not happen immediately; in fact it may take quite a bit of time in some cases, but eventually the cream will rise to the top.

Giving people useful, relevant, entertaining and well-written content is the only long-term strategy that’s going to work. You might follow other good approaches to generating traffic, like keyword optimization or generating links, but then what? You have to have something to keep them there, or to make them come back, or to make them want to do business with you. There has to be value.

Crafting copy for SEO purposes is akin to writing for two audiences at once. You’re writing for your normal, human audience and, kind of in-between the lines, you’re writing for robots. A search engine robot is just another audience to write for. Addressing these two audiences at once is the art of SEO, and the following steps are a broad overview of how I approach the task.

Your first pass at your copy should just be getting all the important ideas out there that you can. Write the copy as if there is no SEO involved in it at all; just write it for your audience like you normally would. If you know you’re not the best writer, get help; hire someone who will ask the right questions, like – Who is your audience? How do they want to be communicated with? How can I make this content informative, entertaining, and relevant to them?

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to take the time to really think about your content and what it is communicating to your audience. I constantly see people skimping on this step – everything from just putting up boilerplate content to hiring people with low English skills to design and write their website. If you had a bricks and mortar location, would you spend a lot of money on the outside of your store so that it looked amazing and then leave the inside shoddy and unappealing? Probably not. But this, to me, is the equivalent when people focus on the graphics and feel of their site and don’t put the effort into ensuring that it will add value to people’s experience of the site. (I wrote some tips for writing promotional articles that included some effective strategies for brainstorming content.)

Next you implement keyword optimization. Long story short: you use SEO tools, like Google’s Keyword Tool and others, to find what are currently highly ranked keyword searches. You write down the top keywords and keyword combination, and you find related terms that are highly relevant to your audience.

Part of the art of crafting good content for SEO is determining when a search term is much too popular to try to compete for. If you’re in the business of selling acai berries, god forbid, and you see that there is a monthly search volume of 2.5 million searches for that term, and a search returns 7 million results, then you’re going to have to start with some alternative ways to rank in search results. Maybe you concentrate on ‘acai berry research’ or ‘acai berry benefits’; you’ll have to pick search terms not on the straight and narrow. Of course these search terms contain your main product, so they are good choices. The point is that trying to rank high just for ‘acai berry’ would be an exercise in futility.

Then you begin the careful process of editing. Place the top keywords you’ve chosen into your existing copy, taking care that the copy remains readable to humans. Being readable to humans is much more important than being readable to robots. But if those important keywords and keyword phrases are in the copy, and it still flows well, then you’ve accomplished something.

Once you get to a point of being content with the content (using two heteronyms in a row http://www-personal.umich.edu/~cellis/heteronym.html – just an example of the kind of thing you don’t want to do), you will edit the copy. If you have done all of this process by yourself up until this point, then you really want to get a second set of eyes on the copy. Even the best writers in the world benefit from having someone else proofread their work. No one is perfect, and having your work checked for clarity and grammatical mistakes reduces the chance that any problems will stand in the way of a potential connection with your audience.

You can find very differing opinions on keyword density; a general agreement is that around 3% is pretty good for your top keywords. All in all, I don’t believe that this is a very important element; I’d just make sure that your dominant keywords have the highest percentages for your page’s keyword density .

Another basic strategy is crafting individual pages to be strong for different keywords or keyword phrases. For example, I did a site recently for an investment firm, and my research showed that ‘investment firm’ and ‘investment advisor’ were two of the top searched phrases for that industry. On their site, I made one of their pages very strong for the first phrase and another phrase very strong for the second phrase. I also found several unobtrusive ways to fit their geographic location on the page without making it seem like they were too local.

One last bit of advice: study what works. You would think this would go without saying, but I’ve seen many people perform SEO without even checking out the competition. Referring to the investment firm I worked for recently, I spent several days just taking notes on similar companies to theirs, both in their market and in the markets of larger cities. This time spent may seem like a hassle, especially if you’re in a hurry, but trust that this research will pay for itself many times over. There is no need to reinvent the wheel if someone’s already done it for you. Of course, it should go without saying that you cannot copy their content – you are just perusing what keyword combinations have worked for them to attract traffic.

All of these strategies I’ve gone into are rudimentary. Only with practice (and sometimes trial and error) can you see how your SEO content choices have fared. It is a rapidly changing SEO world, and I believe that the only sure-fire long-term strategy is one of asking what it is that your audience wants to know, and giving it to them.

By Zachery Elwood
Chief Editor/SEO
Via Regia, Inc

Search Engine Marketing claims to be a set of techniques, which allows promotion of your website in a way that visitors stream into your site, almost in a seamless manner. If the credentials of Search Engine Marketing are to be believed, they ought to be something people should invest a lot of time on. After all, any asset on the Internet wants one thing for sure – Traffic and more traffic.

More than 96% of webmasters on the Internet want incremental traffic to their website and in huge volumes. This statistic is enough proof of the fact that SEM is something any individual would love to learn more about.

If you are associated with the Internet in some form of the other, some concepts of SEM may be easy for you to understand. Some of them though may make no sense to you when you hear them first. Nevertheless, we have summarized some key concepts for your easy understanding.

• Black Hat techniques – Black Hat techniques are illegal SEM techniques that promise quick traffic to a website, but could also run you the risk of getting banned by Google. Once that happens, it could be a serious question on the credibility of your website.

• White Hat techniques – Any SEM guy working to get traffic to a website would love to have the traffic for good. This obviously warrants the use of techniques that are more suited to a website from a long run perspective. And that is where White hat techniques come into play. Techniques like tagging, adding descriptions to the web-page, content optimization, directory submissions and others form a part of White hat techniques.

• Social Networking – Some years ago, social networking was considered to be a platform where people could meet and chat with each other. In the recent past though, a lot of Internet Marketers have realized the gold-mine potential of social networking to benefit their business. One of the biggest benefits of social networking is in the ROI (Returns on Investment).

Here is an example illustrating the benefit – Assume you have a contact list of 1000 people on a social networking site like Facebook and you wish to launch a product, which caters to the needs of most people in the 1000 strong list. The chances or percentage of people buying your product would be as high as about 30-40%.

That is a high enough percentage or a conversion ratio for any SEM technique!

The flipside of this though is you need to have a laser-focused contact list on social networking sites. You may get to building one, but that would take time and a lot of effort.

• Search engines – These are the behemoths of Internet Marketing. Any individual who wishes to know about a certain subject gets into the search engines, types some keywords and gets the required results. Search engines like Google.com and Yahoo.com are ranking at the top in Alexa rankings, which goes to show that they are the ones most frequently visited by people.

Here’s what the search engines do – They send spiders or crawlers who crawl the whole of the Internet for finding content according to the keywords supplied by the visitor. Search engines also do the rather complex function of assigning Quality scores or Page ranks to the web-pages, after considering a lot of factors.

• Directories – These are the Online Yellow Pages, if you are referring to Business Directories. And Article Directories make up the content database on the Internet. Both these forms of directories are different in structure and functionalities.

While business directories offer firms and Internet businesses to get listed with a slew of other businesses, content or article directories allow people to publish their content on their platforms. These articles can then be read by people who desire to seek information on a specific subject.

Both business and article directories are considered excellent means of generating back-links to your website.

• Forums – These are platforms where you could find a topic of your choice and also find how people react to a certain subject. If used properly, forums could be an excellent method of asking people to get to your website. To use forums effectively, you need to ensure that your comments on a specific post make sense to the entire thread.

Remember – People will only click on your website if they find you adding something worthwhile to the discussion, else they would at best ignore your website and your post.

• Blogging – It is no secret by now that Google and other search engines place a high amount of importance on fresh and unique content. And one of the best ways you could accomplish that is by Blogging. Get an account with Blogger.com or Wordpress.com and you would be able to upload your content in absolutely no time at all.

The biggest benefit of Blogging is the easy content-management mechanism on offer. Within no time, you would be able to upload your content on the Internet and visitors will be able to see it.

• Link Building – When you are a new business on the Internet and desire to establish your name in the market, one of the easiest ways to go about is to tie-up with reputed companies in your niche. You don’t have to build a JV with them! Just exchange links with them and you will see the popularity of your site soaring in no time.

Not to mention – The quality score of your web-pages will also get a major boost.
And many more – You will find that Search Engine Marketing has so much to talk about that we could fall short of words. But in terms of effectiveness and using the techniques to the best effect, the methods and concepts explained above should be a good starting point for you in SEM.

More on SEM can be found in the members forum.