Blogatrip.net | Discovering the secrets of top bloggers |

Okay, if you run a website, even a small one, sooner or later you will reach a point of no return. Search engines in general (Google, more specifically) are enormous source of nearly free traffic, you simply cannot let yourself to ignore them at some point.

As always there are two separate ways you can go!

You can either pay a certified individual or a SEO company and ‘outsource’ this problem out of your sight, expecting a result. Or you can do all the dirt work yourself, using some of your free time.

All terms and solutions related to SEO are enormously big amount of content, so, for obvious reasons I’m unable to put this altogether in one post. I will however, post smaller chunks in a series of blog posts very soon.

Today we’ll focus on choosing a SEO company or hiring an assistant.

To begin with, as you can imagine, there’s a huge diversity in the SEO market. There are either small companies or freelancers that generally offer lower price of their service – quality also is a matter of discussion, because very often you can find incompetent or under skilled people offering their services for small prices. You can also find people that offer highly competitive price for good quality of service.

On the other hand, there are big companies which offer your very professional help, surely, their prices are also very professional indeed.

There’re also other options, like the SEO master from Pakistan, who will do everything they do, but only for 20 bucks! But let’s be serious.

This also points us out to the main point. How to verify skill of SEO person? How to check if the price offered by company or freelancer is relevant or not?

The first and the most important thing is experience, preferably in the same projects. It’s unacceptable to let someone learn or test their skills on our site. There’s too much to lose if for example our site will be banned in google due to the spam links.

Everyone who’s into this business should have a portfolio of their previous clients. Go ahead and check them. If there’re still high in the Google listing on given keywords, it means that the guy did good work.

You can also mail or call companies listed in portfolio and ask them for them opinions/experience with the company or freelancer. People are generally very eager to share their views – both positive and also negative – if they’re unhappy in some way, they will tell you.

From my experience, this can be the best source of information and I very often used to change my mind, if the guy turns to be incompetent or not trustworthy. [...]

If you write or prepare to write a blog, probably one of your motivation is earning some money with it. Here’s a few tips how to do that.

Most of the people associate making money on-line with ads, such as Google AdSense. It’s wrong. AdSense is great way to make some additional icome on-line, but when it comes to blogs like mine, it usally won’t work very well and will fail at fullfiling your expectations. If you know anything about on-line marketing or advertising you probably know Google AdSense’s ads and you’re perfectly aware that it’s not genuine content on my site and cliking them will bring me few cents.

GA would be great for some site about pets or some lady’s stuff – the most important part – people shoudn’t realise that link isn’t genuine part of your site. Sometimes it’s very useful to observe how some older people browse the web. I’ve seen my mom one time, browsing some random page on the internet. She just clicked all AdSense links on some page and when I asked her, she thought that these links were simply part of this site.

This is how it works. If your readers aren’t aware that GA is advertising, you’re on a win position. People hate advertising. So one of the most important factors that you should spend your time on would be ads placemanet.

Let’s see some good examples of good ad placement:

That’s SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com made by some well known blogger – Pat from smart passive income. The red stroke is obviously added by me, notice how well these adsense links are placed – at first look, they look like a genuine part of site’s menu. I bet that some people click them because they simly not realize they click on ads. Also it’s worth to notice that adsense links use the same color that other links on the site – unexperienced user won’t see a difference here.

The same thing goes here:

Links having exact same font-size look just like a second line in site’s menu.

Let’s see another example of 600x120px ad perfectly fitting the site:

and another from the same blog:

As you can see, the ad space is relatively small, but their placement is perfect. 120×600 on the left is small enough not to be ofensive, but it’s in the first place that people look after they open this page. 468×60 at the bottom is great because when people finish reading article, they usually expect to find some related information afterwards. Some adsense links may be viewed as it.

Backlinks to your site are important. Google’s search algorithm takes into account how many other sites are linking to your site. Your site will rank higher if more sites are linking to you. (There are lots more variables to take into account, but this is the general idea).

However, it’s not really that simple. The Google search algorithm is constantly tweaked and if you just created thousands of backlinks overnight, then Google knows you are trying to game the system and your site will probably be removed from its search engine results.

So instead of getting the high ranking that you think you will get, you might not get any ranking at all!

But here’s a tip. What you need to do is create outbound links. This means that you link out to other sites. This is counter-intuitive to the usual strategies that you will hear… which is why it works. While everyone else is busy building vast numbers of backlinks to their site in hopes it getting their site to rank higher, you can start creating outbound links to other sites.

The easiest way is to start with about four outbound links – not affiliate links. These are are just plain links. Link to a really good authority site about your subject that is ranked very high for a general keyword. Or a site like Wikipedia, or a government site or a YouTube video.

Putting those links on your WordPress site is easy. Login to your WordPress Admin panel and expand the “Links” menu item on the left. This reveals a few options so you can easily add some new links. Then go to the “Appearance->Widgets” Admin page and simply drag and drop the Links widget to your sidebar.  Real easy.

Or just write some short blog posts that contain those plain outbound links. You can decide the best way that you want to do this. Notice that I am sprinkling a few of those plain links in this post?

Another simple place to get a backlink is to is create a lens at Squidoo. Don’t make it spammy. Just make it simple, straight forward and informational and only include one link to your site. You also want to link out from your lens to regular authority sites with no commercial intent, so you look less like a marketer and more like someone who is just creating an informational site.

You can also do the same thing with HubPages.

A great site to experiment with is Fiverr. This is a site where you pay people $5 to do simple tasks. Go there and do a search for “backlinks”.

For example someone posting on Fiverr says they can create five .edu backlinks for your site for $5. That’s a good deal and worth experimenting with since .edu sites are generally worth more because they are higher quality links.

While you are at Fiverr, explore what you could use other people to do for you. For example you could get someone to setup a WordPress blog for you, or do some keyword research, or some Twitter promotion etc. There are a lot of possibilities there, so it’s worth checking out.

This is one thing that we all share in common – we’re have not enough time. I’ll share with you some of the tips I have applied in order to have more time doing my favorite things:

Don’t watch television

I used to have a television at my apartment but not any more after I realized how it drained a lot of my my time. I used to enjoy watching shows like “Reba” (anyone with me?), F.R.I.E.N.D.S and others. I really missed those shows. However, in order to have time to work on my side projects, I had to say bye-bye to them.

And guess how much time I have saved? Over 700 hours a year. Let’s do a calculation. I watch TV 2-3 hours a day, multiplies it to 365 days a year and you yield an amount of total 730 hours. What a dang!

So, if you want to get serious about making money online, you literally have to stop watching TV today!

Stop social networking

Facebook should be blamed (or I  ) for a huge drain of my time. Just like other young adult, every time I sat on the computer, I had to log in to Facebook to see any new updates from friends. Then, I had to play a bit of social games on Facebook like Farmville and the most recent game I played was  Tropical World.

But that’s all the past. Now I don’t do a lot of Facebooking any more. Just want to let you know, I save 2 hours for not going on Facebook

Getting more things done by focusing on it

I realize when I focus on a specific task and do it, I can do it pretty fast, and I believe you have an ability to do the same.

Every time I study, for example, I isolate every thing that can interfere me. I close my laptop and put it away. I move my chair to show a gesture that I am doing something and please don’t disturb me (I live with another friend), and finally, I put every thing that I need to on the table so I don’t get any second losing my focus.

It really helps! Instead of spending a whole night working on a homework, I can free up myself for other activities if I focus on it. Now I got myself an extra hour to blog!

Be organized! Use a planner!

I swear that I just use a planner for only 4 months, but I already amazed about how it works. No more missing tasks! No more missing assignments! Every thing is done sweet and nice.

I use a planner as a guide for which work should be put on the top of the priority first and which work should be second. For example, in this morning, I have finished a video for one of my class and now, I got myself some more free time to blogging.

Use outsourcing for non-important tasks

Delegating is a big part of your online business. If you don’t know how to delegate your tasks to other people, no matter how hard you work, you will never find yourself more time to do the things that you want.

Imagine this! Would it be better off for yourself if you can hire another person to do a task for you at lower cost and free you up to do another high rewarding task? I’m sure it does!

For example, I have hired a person to do several tweaks for this blog. It took him just an hour while I was struggling for 3 days. I just wished I had hired him sooner.

Keyword rank dropping happens to every one. Sometimes, your page position can drop one. Other times, it can be disappeared for a long time and come back. No matter what kind of online marketing techniques you are using, you will observe rank dropping several times. So, why does it happen?

There are 2 commonly reasons why your keyword rank drops from the search engine results page:

1. Google Dance

Google dance is a common SEO terms to indicate the time when Google changes its ranking algorithm. When Google changes its algorithm, several unknown ranking factor may be taken into account while others are removed. Remember that Google has upto 70 unknown ranking factors to people and it’s reasonable to think that Google team and spam team are working every day to improve their ranking algorithm; to remove ranking factors that are too easy to manipulate and add ones that help users to find what users are looking for.

So, when Google dance happens, results are rearranged. Your page may be pushed to page 5, or it can be pushed out of 100 results, all depend on marketing methods you are using.

2. Fierce competition

It’s always easy to hunt in a jungle with few hunters rather than with 100 of them. It’s also true in search engine optimization.

The more competitors you have, the more you will see your keyword ranks up and down a lot of time. Your competitors are trying to build backlinks and so do you. Don’t be too upset if you see your page goes to 40th position because that did happen to me when I optimized for a keyword. But, after a lot of effort, that keyword has ranked #6.

How to get your rank back

The only way that you can get your rank back is better optimizing your content and build backlinks.

Optimizing your on-page content

There are a lot of ways to optimize your on-page content. I have mentioned a few in my blog. Basically, there are two important factors that you should care about. Only 2, in my experience, are matter most!

1. Your SEO post title. I need to emphasize that there are still many people make a mistake between normal post title and SEO post title. Normal post title is what you name your post. For examle: I name this post “What To Do When Your Keyword Rank Drop? Not For a Day, But a Week!”. This normal post title should be used solely to capture reader attention because it’s more important than SEO. SEO post title is what you type in SEO plug-in to change the <title> tag of your post. If nothing is specified, normal post title will become your SEO post title. For example, with this post, if you look at your browser header, you will see “What To Do When Keyword Rank Drop”. This title contains keywords “keyword rank drop”, which I’m optimizing for.
2. Keyword density. Second important factor in on-page SEO. There are many plug-ins that you could use to make sure you have good density of keywords like what I have introduced in “9 WordPress plug-ins you can use increase your traffic and income”.

Continue building backlinks

There are is other way to get back your rank than link building. Link, until now, is still the most important ranking factor in search engines. The more quality links you get, the better your keyword rank. So, in what way you can enforce your link building campaign?

• Building backlinks with comments. Commenting is a surefire way to build backlinks. But, the only problem with blog commenting is you can only link to your home page. So, if you have a blog with lots of inner page, you probably need a little boost of CommentLuv to make link building more effective.
• Building backlinks with article marketing. I have showed you how I achieve #1 Google position with article marketing in the previous version. In next few post, we will go into more detailed about this link building method.
• Building backlinks with social news site. Submitting your blog post to niche social new sites like BlogEngage, MMOSocialNetwork, Blokube can earn you not only backlinks, but also targeted traffic from search engines as well.

Over to reader

Have you ever tracked your keyword rank? Have you ever experience rank dropping? Were you panic? What did you do?