ChrisKilber.com

Health · Wealth · Freedom in a Modern World

Tag Archives: SEO

Fast Indexing Software…

August 30th, 2010

Link building can often become quite a long and laborious process for some of us that may not be so advanced as others with SEO. However, this is not the only thing that needs to be done in order to increase your position on the search engines. Once you have built your links you then need to make them actually start to work for you. This is where indexing comes in. If your links are not indexed, then they are practically worthless to you. There are two good ways to get your links indexed quickly. The first is Meta Indexing and by doing this to all of your links, you can gain hundreds, if not thousands of link backs to your main site/profile etc. The other way is to ping to all of the top RPC ping sites which will inform the search engines such as Google and Yahoo that you have new content out there to be crawled over. You need a proper link strategy in order to do this properly and this can take a long time when done manually. This is why the latest craze of indexing software has come to light. This software claims to be able to speed up this process incredibly, getting your URL’s indexed in under 2 hours for you!

The only reported downside to this software is that it may not be extremely user friendly for anyone other than the experienced internet marketers. However, there are many different kinds of this software available, all doing almost the same job. Therefore, it is simply a matter of discovering the method that works best for you and sticking with it until you have perfected the technique required. This software can be found on many forums such as the Warrior Forum etc. and a lot of these you will find offering free trials too!

Using RSS Feeds to Boost SEO

May 5th, 2010

RSS Feeds are a Super Way to Attract More People to Your BlogRSS Feeds
There are 101 uses for RSS feeds as well. I can’t necessarily give RSS feeds their due in this limited space but I can give you a background. RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication (it depends on who you ask). RSS is a XML format specifically designed to share content. Netscape originally developed RSS to distribute news headlines and then abandoned the concept due to the lack of popularity. In recent years RSS has become the standard for content syndication. RSS syndication has allowed for smaller content providers to gain exposure and increase their news and content distribution. The increased exposure has evened the playing field for content providers.

Curiosity is Cool for a Marketing Cat Like You

October 27th, 2009

coolcatOne way you can get traffic to your blog is to get people returning to your blog over and over. You should have a heavy emphasis on your returning visitors. After all, they took the time to visit your blog before and if you can keep your content valuable there is no reason they won’t come back. Yes, people like the valuable information that you provide, but they also enjoy you. Gary Vanerchuck says in his latest book, CRUSH IT, that we have to admit there is a bit of voyeur in all of us. I’m not sure about that but I do know people are curious.

My Mistake
One thing that I may be guilty of but have remedied recently is letting people know more about me. I was remiss in stories about “me”. These stories are the things people like to read. They do it for many reasons. The number one reason in my book is curiosity.

Welcome Curiosity
Curiosity may kill the cat but it will not kill the sale and this is why. If you look at the experience of someone visiting your site, they not only look at the content but also try and make formulated hypothesis about the characters they read about as well. The truth is that people love stories. They like to relate to the story and the characters they read about. They like to read about preferences, history, culture, and practices. They want to be a part of the plot. They do this by finding and reading information about you and those who leave comments on your blog. See http://www.chriskilber.com/using-psychology-to-sell/. The better you are making yourself someone that your readers can relate too, the more they will return.

Curiosity Raises Questions
Curiosity also makes people ask questions. These are usually not questions verbatim to others but questions they ask themselves. If you can figure out what they may be and answer them you then positioned yourself as someone who has great insight and can be considered an authority in your potential customer’s eyes. If you are clever you can also craft your writing to lead people to ask questions to themselves and then answer them. Not only will this build insightfulness into your writing but they will also gain their trust.

Focus on Readers
An aspect of using curiosity in your marketing is that by focusing on the curiosity of your potential customers, you can use it to provide value to your readers that are based on their questions and needs. It will help you hone in on value. Traditional sales and marketing has you always focusing on getting the sale, the closing, or qualifying. These tend to devalue the customer which is the farthest thing from what you want to do.

Respect
Using curiosity helps reinforce that it’s the relationship, not the product that sells. It may surprise the potential customer in a positive way by re-framing their expectations and view of you. It shows the potential customer that you can focus on things outside of yourself and your product. The customer or prospect will also realize you have a process that respects the customer. By using this approach you will always have a reasonable and best possible excuse for a follow up call. Finally, you will gain enormous respect.

Summary
So you see curiosity can helps both the potential customer and you by staying focused on the customers internal and external questions that they may have. You can use this to come across as being insightful and an absolute authority in your niche.

Questions
Have you use curiosity to help attract customers or clients?
What was it specifically?
Do you have any examples that you particularly like best?

48 WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without

October 21st, 2009

pluginsDown below I have the forty eight or so plugins that I use on this blog. I have a little blurb about what they do. Because wordpress is so customizable and most of the themes are different, there may be reasons to include one that are missing here and reasons I have some others don’t. But for the most part these are essential. I am almost positive there are new one’s out there that I should have but these have been serving me well. Feel free to suggest others.

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

All in One SEO Pack
Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.   As a fan of SEO, I think it’s like putting together a three dimensional puzzle, I like this plugin and it is one of the mainstays of SEO for wordpress.  Of special interest is the “Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page:” option.  The plugin even has it’s own forum if you’d like to learn more.

(http://semperfiwebdesign.com/forum/)

CommentLuv
Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.

Comment Relish
Increases your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short ‘Thank You’ message to users when they first comment on your site.

Contact Form with Captcha
Simple Contact Form with Captcha Enabled

Custom Field Redirect
This plugin will do a 301 redirect on any page where you set the “redirect” key in a custom field. The value you set will be the URL to where the plugin will redirect you.  In the dashboard when you create a post you have the ability to enter a custom field.  If you create a “redirect” key is will go to the location designated.

Dewplayer
Insert Dewplayer (Flash Mp3 Player) in posts & comments.  There are a lot mp3 players.  This happens to be the one I’m currently using.

Disable Revisions
Disable revision functions in WordPress and delete all entries of revisions in database. It is extremely important to back up your database before install this plugin.  I always hate when there ends up being 8 revisions of the same post.  This should be a custom option built into wordpress to begin with.

Exclude Pages from Navigation
Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.

Facebook Sharecount
The Facebook Sharecount plugin shows the number of shares on Facebook your posts get and allows users to share it themselves.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

FeedBurner Widget
Adds a sidebar widget to easy customize and display your FeedBurner subscribers stats RSS button.

Get Recent Comments
Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.

Make sure you configure this plugin after activation.

Google Friend Connect Integration
Easily integrate Google Friend Connect with WordPress. To get started, please enter your Google Friend Connect Site Id number in the GFC Integration admin page and choose whether to turn on the social bar or not. You can add Google Friend Connect gadgets to your sidebars by visiting the widgets page.  For help and support see the official Google Friend Connect integration for WordPress page.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

Homepage Excerpts
Homepage Excerpts are great when your theme doesn’t provide this functionality.

LinkWithin
Displays recommended stories and associated thumbnails from your blog.  This is at the bottom of all my single posts.  It provides nice pictures you see below.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin.  The reasoning behind this is your blog will ping technorati and many other ping services.  If you edit your blog, let’s say a typo or misspelling or indentation etc, every time you hit publish you are pinging the services.  You may be banned and didn’t even know it. When this goes, so does your SEO.  Visit plugin site

One Click Plugin Updater
Upgrade plugins with a single click, install new plugins or themes from an URL or by uploading a file, see which plugins have update notifications enabled, control how often WordPress checks for updates, and more.

ONW Simple Contact Form
This Plugin creates a simple contact form.

Popularity Contest
This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the Popularity Values and View Reports. You can also use the included Widgets and Template Tags to display post popularity and lists of popular posts on your blog.

Random Pages widget
This is a widget that displays a list of random pages/posts on your widgetized sidebar.

Recent Posts
Returns a list of the most recent posts.

Robots Meta
This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

RSS Shortcode
Makes it easy to display an RSS feed on a page

SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.

SEO Super Comments
Use your blog comments to get more traffic.

SexyBookmarks
SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts.

SimplePie Core
Does little else but load the core SimplePie API library for any extension that wants to utilize it.  It is needed for the Single RSS Colleague plugin found below.

Simple Tags
Simple Tags : Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3, 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags !

Single RSS Colleague
A plugin to feature a colleague or tribe member for syndication.  You will find it under by social badges on the right hand side bar labeled “Visit My Colleagues”.  I will be making this available to everyone sometime next week.

Subscribe To Comments
Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

Translate
Adds a sidebar widget to display languages into which you can translate your blog.

TweetMeme Retweet Button
Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

Ultimate Google Analytics
Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.

What Would Seth Godin Do
Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.

wp-cache
Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. Once enabled, go to “Options” and select “WP-Cache”.  One note of caution.  TURN this off anytime you are changing anything.  Then when you are done, turn it back on.

WP-Cumulus
Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress

WP-DBManager
Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

WP-PageNavi
Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.

WP-Print
Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.

WP-Sticky
Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog. Modified from Adhesive by Owen Winkler.

WP-UserOnline
Enable you to display how many users are online on your WordPress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots).

WP Security Scan
Perform security scan of WordPress installation.

Discover How To Create Irresistible and Tempting Titles

September 25th, 2009

I had a few questions about titles this weekend. I’ll bring this old post out front and center once again in case you missed it.

titleWhat’s in a title?
How you title things make a tremendous impact on whether people will read or consider reading content. In this context, content is in the form of emails, blog posts, tweets, Ezine articles, and other forms of communication that you want others to read. In all cases the main goal is to get people to open, click, or otherwise save or bookmark for reading later. Let’s examine some of the forms of communication.

Email Subjects
The title is contained as what in email parlance as the subject. Subjects are treated a little bit differently based on who the email is coming from. The difference is based on one thing. That is trust. If the email is coming from someone they trust, friends and family for sure, they will open. But there is also information that was requested and comes in the form of newsletters, RSS feeds, and other aggregations of information. If someone doesn’t recognize the senders name they are typically going to look at the subject and make a determination as to what they are going to do. What the subject contains will determine the reader’s next actions. If it’s from you, you want to have as an inviting subject as possible.

Blog Post Titles
A blog post title works in the same way as a subject line in an email. Your objective is to get people to read your post. Hopefully, when your blog post is syndicated throughout the Internet via Twitter tweets, Facebook notes, blog backlinks, email bodies, and other forms of electronic communication it will compel people to open and read it. Another factor that has to be considered in blog post titles is the SEO factor. Your title should both contain a keyword or two and also be relevant to the content that is contained in it. If you have a title about cars, your content better not be about plants. I’ll talk about some of the psychological factors below.

Ezine Articles
Titles should work the same way as blog post titles but should probably have more of an emphasis on keywords than actions or questions contained in the title. Most people simply do not search Ezines. They use Google and Google recommends the Ezine articles to them. The more SEO friendly the title, the better the ranking and higher it’s possibility to be towards the top of the search. I also recommend your resource box contain a link to your blog.

Twitter Tweets
Now tweets per se don’t have the concept of a title but it should be contained some where in the 140 characters. Having important attention grabbing phrases that are contained in the actual article with the title in your tweets will help people feel compelled to click them and follow the link over to the source. Using certain psychological keywords will raise the probability of the tweet being opened. They will grab the attention of the readers.

In all these examples, if you understand underlying psychological impulses and urges you can use them to your advantage. So if we ask the question, what do people want?, what do people respond to?, what do people have an interest in?, and are people interested in?, this should provide us with some clues to help formulate a title. Here are some different types of titles that you should strive for?

Types of Titles

  1. Tell them something true about them and then tell them to take action.
  2. Create compelling curiosity.
  3. Make claims that are almost unbelievable.  (Be able to back them up)
  4. Create something of high interest to target direct interests.
  5. Use humor.  If you can make them laugh they will click.
  6. Inspire and motivate them.  If they feel good about themselves and they will act.
  7. Make them mysterious.  People like mysteries.
  8. Appeal to their logic.  Restate something they believe strongly.

So these are the categories or types of possible titles or subjects that can be used.  Now that we know what it is we need to formulate what words can we use that will compel people to act.  We need to use words that influence, persuade, and motivate people to act, (click, read, signup, etc…).  This can be accomplished by using words that can help people image something.  They are words that describe things in ways that make them bigger than life.  They are words that evoke emotion.  Here are some words that will practically compel people to their natural predispositions to investigate things that are curious, humorous, mysterious, logical, interesting, and bold.  This of course is not an exhaustible list.  They contain:

Words to Use

irresistible untold boggle double
triple quadruple unstoppable potent
banned phenomenal willing calculated
psychological seduce spell binding unable
magnet effortless insatiable secret
record-breaking amazing cutting edge incalculable
absolute thrilled legendary boost
enhance improve benefits enjoy
reduce release loosen combat
discover achieve counter increase
how-to discover master create
generate optimize enliven improve
advanced cultivate progress revamp
refine upgrade align balance
cheerful enthusiastic inclined zealous
attract allure induce invite
tempting follow substitute uncomplicated
simple agile knowing powerful
able clever straightforward intricate

Conclusion

The list could go on and on. Using these words in your titles and subjects along with a keyword will work wonders for your traffic. Take the time to craft titles that will draw people into your world, get them to click it, and then read it. Spend more time on this aspect of your writing and you will be guaranteed to see results.

What other words do you like to use?
What are some titles that you’ve used that have worked for you?

If you enjoyed this article I would appreciate if you click the link below to tweet this post. I’ll use these concepts as examples to craft the tweets for this post.

CLICK HERE PLEASE TO TWEET WITH A CUSTOM MESSAGE

Thank you.

WordPress SEO Extrodinair

July 9th, 2009

SEO, Search Engine Optimization, How-To, Tips-n-Tricks, Traffic, ConversionThis is everything you want to know about SEO for your blog from a site I highly recommend, http://yoast.com

This Guide and Video are simply awesome. the video does run nearly 55 minutes but sometimes it’s easier to watch and do. You have the ability to pause the video and optimize in a different window. If you are just starting out, this is fine tuning. Make sure you are comfortable with all other aspects of your blog before attempting this. Additionally, I would like to add, make sure you back up your work before you attempt modifying any code. I have already paid the price for you on that one. If you don’t know how to backup, don’t do it till you do.

You can read it or watch it.

Content Is King – Learn What To Write About

July 6th, 2009

Content, SEO, Writing, Blogging, Value, How-To, Tip-n-Tricks,TrafficI know a lot of people out there are getting online to somehow start making some money because they have aspirations of firing their boss, staying at home to raise their own kids, supplementing their incomes or retirements, and to nurture their entrepreneurial spit that hides in each and everyone one of them.  If they’ve done their due-diligence they should know there’s a lot more than meets the eye and have partnered up or found someone to emulate to teach them the ropes.  Even then, the bottom line on how successful anyone is going to be in this industry is how much traffic they can generate and how they convert that traffic into sales.

I just noticed that what I’m about to say rhymes but maybe it will help to remember.  That is “The number ONE thing, is that CONTENT is king”.  I heard it said just last week by an online millionaire.  Content for me means, blog posts, ezine articles, videos, reviews about others content, and comments on others content.  I know a large part of the landscape in social media is Twitter, but it may be possible to convey some content, but 140 words won’t cut it in my book.  Twitter is used as the communication channel to tell, educate, and inform others about content that is educational, interesting, and teaches something.  It is merely the communication channel.

Content does not have to be eloquent prose.  It simply has to state some facts, why you agree with or not, why you think it’s important, and what YOUR perspective about them.  The exact same topic should be different than what others write because it will be from YOUR perspective.  If you’ve discovered something that really helped you, write about it.  You have a different perspectives and the people who read your material will appreciate it because they may be just learning, just like you are.  As we speak there are tens of thousands of people a day coming on to the internet to find their fortune. You can be their guide.

So another way I come up with content.  Whatever your niche is going to be, come up with 75-100 keywords about it.   Keywords are going to be your nouns and verbs of the nomenclature of your niche.  As an example I’ll use a niche called marketing.  Here are ten keywords that would be expected  to find  for this niche.  (affiliate, article. auto responder, back link, banner, blog, business model, central hub, and content).  So with those 10 words mathematically I could write about 90+ combination of those  keywords.  Here are about 10 titles you could use from those 10. Attracting Affiliates With Back links.  Do I need An Autoresponder For Affiliate Marketing? Using Back links In Your Article Marketing.  Can Blogging Attract Affiliates For You?  What Kind of Banner To Use On Your Blog.  Using Keywords On Your Blog.  Using Keywords In Your Article Marketing.  The Key to Your Business Model – A Central Hub How To Write Blog Content.

So there I came up with 10.  You get the idea.  There is no reason you can’t come up with 75+ keywords for your niche.  Think them through.  Go to ezinearticles.com and pick the 10 most read articles in your niche and look for them there.  Use a thesaurus and find them.  Then think of as many combination of key words as possible.  An advantage to using multiple keywords in a title is Google will rank them higher.  Then sit down and write.  Step away when your done.  Reread it and check for grammatical errors then post it.  Your done.  I did this one in about 20 minutes.  Went down an had a drink of water and chatted with my daughter, came up to my office and proofed it.  There is no reason not to have content.  Now have at it! Content is king.  If you found this useful consider clicking the Tweet and Face book buttons next to the title.

Are You Tracking?

June 23rd, 2009

Remember, the internet is just one large conglomeration of computers. If you have a web site it is imperative to track everything about your visitors.

So…

* You can see where customers came from (Global, down to the city)
* You can see how long they read your ad for
* You can see what they clicked
* You can see if they use a new or old computer
* You can see how big their monitor is which will tell you how they see your ads
* You can test product prices by making similar offers and tracking results
* You can put up 2 pages and see which one sells best

You first sale will easily pay for the time and money you invest on learning how to do this.

Latent Semantic Indexing and Google

June 16th, 2009

Introduction

The term ‘Latent Semantic Indexing’ seems somewhat daunting but really is simply an algorithm that Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines use to group like words for their relevancy. In order to have the highest relevancy possible you need to use keywords that are related to your web page title, blog post title, or article title. If you have an article related to ‘Health Care’ you should use the terms hospital, clinic, health, medicine, doctor, nurse, x-ray, shots, HMO, orthopedic, holistic, insurance, etc. If the article is about the costs, politics, philosophy, culture, or needs of ‘Health Care’ you should appropriately title is so. Google first looks at the titles and that is what determines what Google will then look for. The closer the title is to the keywords the better off you will be. You will be able to better target your potential customer and drive traffic to your promotions, advertising, and sales funnels by using relevant keywords peppered throughout your published blog, article, and web page content. The SEO for this content will be optimum.

Keyword Relevancy

How can you make sure that your content is relevant to the title? There are three basic strategies I like to go about doing this. The first is simply brainstorming terms that are similar. It’s like the old game show called ‘Password’. What do you think of when I say, colors… mist… sky…? A rainbow of course. So depending on the Niche in your titles you can brainstorm a bunch of ideas. Here is a hint that I like to use to help me with this. I like to use an online thesaurus to help; dictionary.com is one that works well for this. The second method is to actually type in the title or parts of your title into Google or Yahoo and see what the results are. Open each of the first 3-5 links that your search provides. Each of these links should be laden with keywords that Google loves. Read each of the articles and not only will you find rich keyword content, but you will also learn about the topic you want to read about to begin with. And finally, there are keyword tools that you can use. There are many out there but the basic one is actually the one built into Google Adwords. There is online help on to actually use the tool and it can provide some gems that you might have missed with the first two methods.

Summary

What you should end up with is a group of hopefully 60-100 keywords that are all related to your topic or niche. The existing content you used in the second method should validate any of the keywords you came up with in the other methods. Write them down on some index cards and as you do so, think of ways you could naturally use them in a sentence. Now with your three index cards in hand, a great title in mind, you can start writing. Google is smart enough to know that if you are loading your content with the same keywords over and over and it does not sound natural, you will be penalized. Don’t use a keyword to many times and make your copy flow. If you’ve done your homework you should try and use at least 20 or more of the keywords in your article. Again, it should flow naturally and Google will reward you with good placement. It may rate some content that contains many relevant keywords and I’m talking about 10-15 here, but if your content has 25-30 don’t be surprised if Google rates your content on page one or even number one overall.

ChrisKilber.com

Health · Wealth · Freedom in a Modern World

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