I’ve set some rigorous goals to guide my online businesses this year. In perusing these goals it became clear that my productivity needed improvement. There are three areas of improvement: Behavior, Mechanical, and Mindset.

Starting work is never fun. Once work starts I actually enjoy myself. Finishing a project always feels great. The trick is making the start of work as easy as possible. These are some things I’m trying.

Behavior upgrades

Google homepage now has only task related items
Things like the news, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, and RSS readers have been moved to tab called “Time Wasters”. Up till now I’ve had everything on one page. If I needed to check my email or reference my calendar I was exposed to a lot of great headlines and interesting news. A five-minute visit soon turned into an hour of reading offbeat news. If I have time for that in the future I’ll click the “Time Waster” tab.

Shut down unused browser windows
As the day goes on my taskbar is filled with a huge amount of unused browser windows. By closing down the browser windows it helps me stay on task and see things through to completion. It will also reduce my distractions.

Clean up my workstation
I’ve also made an effort to clean my desk and declutter my work area. Time has been dedicated to organizing files and folders on my computer too.

Make sure everything works
Spending money on ink or toner cartages is the worst. For months I’ve put it off. In an effort to improve productivity, the toner in now full and I can print to my hearts content.

Getting Good Sleep
Trying to write good content or think through difficult problems just doesn’t happen when I’m tired. My mind can’t be tricked, coerced, or coaxed into thinking (but sometimes chemicals help). It’s a simple machine that runs like a charm if I give it a good amount of sleep. Personally, I’m a 9-hour-a-night person. 8 hours of sleep isn’t bad but my body and mind feel great after a full 9 hours.

Mechanical upgrades

Upgrade Internet connection
The extra money to go from 2 MB to 7MB per second is worth the investment. Waiting for my internet connections isn’t worth it anymore.

RAM upgrade
RAM (or Memory) is one of the best ways to make your computer run faster. Getting “under the hood” of your computer is easier than you might expect. You don’t have to have an electrical engineering degree to tinker with the guts of your computer. Each plug is unique and many things are color-coded. As long as you turn the power off and make sure you’re grounded you shouldn’t be able to do much damage. Look up your motherboard brand and find the RAM that fits the slots. All RAM is not the same so make sure you buy the right stuff.

Dual monitors
Most nerds like me have had dual monitors for years. I’ve finally made the jump and I love it. It’s actually really easy to get two monitors. If you have a DVI plug on your video card you can buy an adapter to add an additional monitor. Find your DVI to VGA adapter here.

Mindset Upgrades

Stop the time wasting cycle
My hands automatically type in the same five URLS whenever I get to a computer with an Internet connection. Even though I’ve checked my email 10 minutes ago I find myself pulling it up again. Throughout the day I will pull up the same five sites over and over. When I’m tired the cycle gets more frequent. While most of these sites are important I will limit my exposure to them. Most importantly, these are the site’s I visit last instead of first. Writing great content and business planning comes first.

Stop patting myself on the back
Once something difficult has been accomplished I find myself patting myself on the back. While that’s usually a good thing I tend to take it too far. Instead of jumping on the next big project I use my recent accomplishment as an excuse to relax. One big accomplishment will stop a week of progress. Do you know what I do with my time instead? I type the same 5 URLs mentioned above all day long. It’s sad, I know.

Think in terms of accomplishments
Using good ideas as a protection from working hard is a crutch I use regularly. Instead of buckling down and working I’d rather dream up new ideas. This is changing as I refocus on the work at hand.

An item on a list is a special thing
In the past I’ve had a tendency to make to-do lists and include some unreachable items. It feels good to include a massive undertaking on a list but it cheapens the whole thing. A few weeks after I add items like that the list is worthless. I don’t even want to look at it anymore. To be more productive I’ll only include things on the list that can be accomplished within the week.

If anyone has anything to add please leave a comment.

This is the last episode on building back links. It should be noted that these are areas where discretion is advised. Using these platforms to build links can be a highly successful but can backfire if not used correctly. Where does healthy promotion turn into SPAM. I think its fair to say that if you provide little to the community beyond a link its spamming. Most of these are relationship based. The regular users are protective and have certain rules to follow. Self promotion and random additions don’t cut it most of the time. Try following some of these suggestions when building backlinks with social media sites.

1-Don’t try to fit a square peg in a round hole. Join forums and look for social sites that are complementary to the theme of your website. If you have a motherhood blog sign up for motherhood forums and comment on other motherhood blogs.
2-Build relationships and gain friendships. Web 2.0 is more about interaction and less about broadcasting. When you find a few niche places where you fit in try building relationships and don’t piss people off.
3-Add value. If you have an article or nifty service that the community would benefit from try submitting it. Some site’s like Digg frown on self submission while Reddit doesn’t (for the most part). By knowing the community and having some friends I’m sure it would help to have them do it.
4-Make your links a side note instead of the main event.
5-Game the system within the boundaries. Social news sites have a core of very dedicated users. They submit and vote on content 8 to 10 hours a day. These users have a tight group of friends. Together they dominate what is voted up and what gets thrown out. They are gaming the system but Kevin Rose (the founder of Digg) actually counts on these users to weed out spammers and other less savory people. While social sites hate the idea of being gamed they’re whole system depends on it. The moral here is: gaming is okay if you’re not a jerk about it and everyone likes you.
6- Know what’s popular. If you’re an active reader and user of some of these sites you’ll start to get a feel for what the community likes. Helpful lists, development tools, funny pictures, amusing stories, valuable tips, and sensational news is some of the most popular things. If you can put together an interesting story or useful list try getting it in and see how it does.
7-All traffic is not equal. The type of traffic coming from different social vary in quality. Some sites provide visitors that spend more time on your site and other visitors consume and leave quickly. While many standard conversion goals aren’t reached (i.e. clicking on ads, signing up for newsletters, and subscribing) it’s possible to have other rewards from bad traffic. Backlinks are common in the coming weeks after becoming popular on these social sites.

There are some general rules with forums as well.
1-Remember to use your signature wisely. Providing a few meaningful links in your signature will provide a backlink each time you comment. Sometimes it makes sense to include an affiliate link as one of your links.
2-Whatever you do don’t piss of the owners of the forum. The same rules apply here in forums as on social sites. There are definitely different personalities in each forum. Find one the works good for you.
For blog comments:
1-Don’t SPAM. Most spam is filtered out automatically for having the wrong set of keywords.
2-Add to the conversation. That means reading the blog and reading the comments. If you can’t bear to read both don’t leave a comment.
3-Backlinks are getting less love - Many backlinks on blogs are automatically labeled with “no follow” and won’t do you any good anyways.
4-Again, find blogs where you fit in.

Hope this helps. If you have any further advise please leave a comment.

Paid directories and press releases are both excellent ways to get your website more backlinks.

There are some general rules to go by before you start paying your hard earned cash to paid directories. For starters, make sure you have enough content for the directories to make a fair judgment on your site. As a rule of thumb at least ten original pages but the more the better. Make sure your site isn’t under construction, partially finished, or have dead links.

The good paid directories use your money to hire someone to professionally review your site. The good paid directories will decline applications. Paying the money doesn’t mean your website will be included. This aspect of paid directories is what makes them more credible in the eyes of search engines.

Spending a good chuck of change on good paid directories is a good idea. If you only want to spend money on getting into one directory make that directory Yahoo. Yahoo charges $299 as an initial review fee and another $299 annually from that point on. It sounds like a lot but if you’re accepted into the directory it will one of your most important backlinks to your site.

These are the minimum criteria to be included in the directory:
• If the site is a commercial web site, the official business name must be visible to any visitor to that site;
• The site must clearly define its purpose, products, and/or services;
• The site may not appear in the Directory under a different URL;
• If the site is applicable to a specific geographic region, the address must be visible to any visitor to that site;
• The site must not contain any parts under construction;
• All links on the site must function properly;
• The site must be in the English language (or have an English version available);
• The site must support multiple browsers and capabilities (e.g., no Java-only sites);
• The site must be up and running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week;
• The site must not be dedicated to directing the user to another page;
• The page may not give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees.

From Yahoo Directory Terms and Conditions

To say the least it’s important to read the terms and conditions before you submit to any paid directory.

Here’s a short list of the top paid directories:
dir.yahoo.com
stpt.com/directory/
joeant.com
ezilon.com
botw.org
elib.org
directory.v7n.com
rlrouse.com
uncoverthenet.com
abilogic.com
sunsteam.com
alivedirectory.com
site-sift.com
wowdirectory.com
socengine.com
octopedia.com
massivelinks.com

For more directories visit: http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/web-directories.html

Article submission is a great way to bring traffic to your site and build backlinks. There are five key advantages to using articles to build backlinks.

• You are allowed 2-3 backlinks for every article you submit.
• You have complete control over the anchor text for each link
• Every backlink is a oneway link, many times from PR 6 sites
• Depending on how good the article is it can be picked-up posted in other places, thus, building more backlinks.
• Article traffic is a means to get traffic on highly competitive keyterms.

These facts make articles a very attractive way to get traffic and links. The only downside is that people can take your content and remove the links. The good news is that Google doesn’t count stolen or duplicated content as valuable. This should be enough incentive to deter would be thieves but there still is a good chance it will be plagiarized or stolen.

As a general rule it would be best not to host the articles you’re submitting on your site. The exception to this is if you post the article on your site, wait for it to get indexed, then start posting in article directories. I’ve done both and would suggest not hosting your articles on your site. Instead send them to your author page on one of these article directories.

When writing your article try to give some good information and submit your best work. Keep things simple and easy to read. Avoid run-on sentences. Don’t go crazy on the length. Shorter articles can be just as good or better than really long articles. A standard requirement is a minimum of 500 to 700 words. Avoid making your article a sales letter. You’ll seriously hurt the chances of having your article picked up and distributed by other people.

At the end of the article its common to have an “about the author” section. If I’m trying to get more keyword phrases in, sometimes I’ll use “Additional Resources” as the text before my links. That way I don’t have to work my keyword phrases into an awkward author profile.

If you have a really great article maybe you don’t want to submit it everywhere. If this is the case you might consider the alternative of posting it on your site and have social media sites look at it there. We’ll talk more on that in the next episode.

This is a list of article submission sites I’ve combed through and submitted to personally. Most of them are general-purpose directories. If you have a specific niche or type of business you may want to seek out topic specific article directories. If you want the Excel sheet subscribe to Premium Content and send it after the episode is published.

Since last episode talked about paid directories and this episode will talk about free directories I thought this excerpt from Matt Cutt’s blog was interesting. Even though he talks about reporting paid links most of the time he does provide this gem of knowledge regarding directories:

Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?

A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

Matt Cutts “joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000. He’s currently the head of Google’s Webspam team.” In other words, he’s the one in charge of natural search rankings at Google. He adjusts the alogorith to filter out “spammers” or people that are trying to take advantage of Google.

With that as an intro let’s talk about the next two ways to build backlinks.

STEP 3: Free Directories
It’s important to remember the role of directories in internet history. Back in the ’90’s directories were much more useful. Search Engines weren’t very advanced and the web was still relatively new. Directories were a way for to collect the best websites in one place. But today directories are on their way out. Links from directories aren’t as useful as they used to be. That’s not to say they aren’t important and you’d be wasting your time, it’s just important to know how they are viewed in the current environment.

With that said, you can find a big list of free directories here: http://info.vilesilencer.com/main.php?rock=seo-friendly.php . I found their Excel download very helpful. Click here to get the Excel file.

These are some of the top general topic directories:
DMOZ 8
Cyber Find 6
Info-Listings 6
Jayde 6
Campusti 5
CANLinks 5
Clarib 5
Classifieds 1000 5
Domaining 5
Free Website Directory 5
Illumirate 5
My Green Corner 5
Prolink Directory 5
Search Sight 5
So Much 5
Submission 4 U 5
Turnpike 5

If you choose only one directory choose DMOZ. It’s rumored to be corrupt now(Shoemoney was recently extorted by an editor) but you can at least submit your site. If you’re lucky you won’t get a corrupt editor and your site will be included! This is a good starter list to get your site some backlinks.

Good Luck,

Matthew Ryan

Reliable, Affordable Business Hosting from Bluehost.com.

Building backlinks is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Who, where, and how many all are important. This six step series will guide you through popular ways to get backlinks.

As we discussed before, don’t use automated, subscriber based services, or other shortcuts. There is no substitute for good old fashioned hard work!

These steps assume you’ve already made a keyword spreadsheet and have your top terms selected. If you don’t have your terms selected this tool will help immensely. SEOBook Keyword Tool.

STEP 1: Email Link Requests
Your competitors are on the front page because of their backlinks, age, and on-page optimization. You can’t do much about the age of your domain but you can change the other two aspects.

Type your phrase your competing on: “little dog clothes” The top result is www.gwlittle.com

Now take that domain and plug it into your backlink checkers. I like http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker because it provided the pagerank of the link. That way you don’t spend all your time chasing down low value links. I like this tool http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/ because it also gives you the anchor text with the page. Use both tools together to get a combination of anchor text and page rank.

After you get 10-15 quality links to pursue, write them a personalized email. Try not to sound like an automated spammer.

EXAMPLE:

Hi [Name – try to get a name if at all possible],

Your site on [subject] is very interesting. I found your list of resources on [url of page] helpful. I’m a small business owner of www.[websitename].com. We provide [describe services] and would be a valuable resource to your visitors. Please come check us out at www.[your website].com

This is my personal email address and phone number, [name@email.com]. Please feel free to contact me.

Regards,

[Name]

STEP 2: Submit to Paid Inclusion Directories
These directories are trusted directories and provide great backlinks quickly. If you have to pick just one, pick yahoo. An important thing to remember when submitting to most directories is that your site can’t be under construction or not have any content on it. Yahoo will decline your site if it looks like hell.

dir.yahoo.com/
www.stpt.com/directory/
www.joeant.com/
www.ezilon.com/
www.botw.org/
www.elib.org/
directory.v7n.com/
www.rlrouse.com/
www.uncoverthenet.com/
www.abilogic.com/
www.sunsteam.com/
www.alivedirectory.com/
www.site-sift.com/
www.wowdirectory.com/
www.socengine.com/
www.octopedia.com/
www.massivelinks.com/

For a more exhaustive list: http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/top-web-directories.html

This list is incredible. Reading through forums is okay but this list has it all with no searching.

As a summary this is these are the major factors for

On-Site SEO:

Good Factors-
1 - Keyword in URL - First word is best, second is second best, etc.
2 - Keyword in Domain name - Same as in page-name-with-hyphens. DON’T_USE_UNDERSCORES! *Note - As of this month
3 - Keyword in Title tag - Keyword in Title tag close to beginning - Title tag 10 - 60 characters, no special characters.
4- Keywords in H1,H2, H3 tags
5- Site Age

Bad things on your pages to avoid:
1- Over optimization penalty
2- Linking to bad neighborhoods
3- Excessive crosslinking among sites with the same c-class (or sites in general) Use this tool to check c class
4- Keyword stuffing (Don’t cram every keyword under the sun in your Meta tags and in the body)
5- Hiding or being sneaky with keywords and web pages (Cloaking, same color text of the background.
6- Changing a page too often too much.
7- Imbalance of code to text ratio.

Off-Site SEO:

Good Factors-
1- The anchor text of inbound links coming into you. When building your inbound links try to get your keyword phrase as the link. Example: Buy Small Dog Clothes here VS Buy small dog clothes here. Be CAREFUL with this though. Just like the Over Optimization penalty too many links saying the exact same thing can hurt you.

2- Age of link - If you buy a link or get a link on a page make sure its there forever. If you have links going up and down or changing anchor text Google will frown at you.

3- Link from Expert Sites

Sorry I haven’t updated for a while but I got a little Laryngitis and I sounded like Tom Waits.

At any rate, I’m here…and I’ve got a great episode for you. Here it is:

Now that you have your site up it’s time to write content. Content is king on the information highway. There is a balance of writing for people and writing for search engines. Some people say to disregard search engines all together and just write for people. They believe that writing for people will pay off in the long-run. They antisipate building links through the web with social bookmarking, linking to other blogs, or related websites. There is no arguing the truth of all these things. Writing for people is the best way to become a popular site online.

With that being said, should any SEO be thrown out the window? With most things it comes down to balance. There is a balance between writing for people and writing for search engines. That balance involves being very people focus with a dash of SEO technique always in the background. A food analogy might help clarify my point. All good food begins with high quality ingredients. Those ingredients add to the total flavor but just by themselves wouldn’t be anything special. Add a little spice and those ingredients (and the chef) become world renown. Great chefs use spices subtly. They also use spices to enhance the core ingredients. When writing content think of SEO like a spice. Don’t overdue it or people (and search engines) will see right through you. Keep it simple and maintain balance.

With that in mind lets review some good SEO practices when writing optimized content. These are the areas you will want to include your keyword phrases.

• Title Tag
• H1
• Paragraph Content (More keywords higher on the page)
• In the URL (remember to use dashes not underscores

There are other places to put your keywords but these are the heavy hitters for each page of your site. An important thing to keep in mind is Keyword Density. Keyword density is how often a specific term shows up on a single page. This number can found with a number of tools evrsoft tool, SEOChat tool, Ranks.nl Tool. Type in your URL then try the top three websites for a given keyword phrase in Google. Try to match their density with yours. For example, if they all have a density of 4-5% for a given phrase don’t try to out do them by having 15%. If you are out of range from everyone else you might be penalized or never be considered as a comparable website with the search engines.

Remember that pages, not websites, are spidered and show up in the SERPs (Short for Search Engine Results Page). This means if you are trying to optimize for 50 terms on your site don’t try to make your homepage and every page you write full of all 50 terms. Only focus on a couple phrases per page. This will allow for higher powered pages with more punch. If your pages are watered down with 50 keywords each you won’t rank for any of them.

In my next podcast I will discuss the technical aspects of on-site SEO. The little nit-picky things you might want to know when writing your content.

Until then, good luck!

The first thing you need to do is lay out your site and think through your landing pages. Every aspect of your site should lead to your conversion goal.

Some common conversion goals are:

• Making a sale
• Contextual ads being clicked
• Signing up for affiliate programs
• Adding a name to your mailing list or newsletter
• Getting subscriptions to your blog
• Having a visitor become a member of your forum
• Having visitors refer friends to your site

Ideally, you should have one conversion goal for your site. Recently, a lot of billboards promoting a certain company’s website popped up were I live. Out of curiosity I visited their site. When I got there, I tried to figure out what they wanted me to do. After a few minutes I couldn’t tell what they wanted me to do so I took a guess. They had a prominent image and message promoting their podcast. To my dismay their podcast hadn’t been updated for almost 6 months! Why are they spending so much money on billboards just to have a terrible conversion on the traffic that comes to their website? The odd thing is, is that this company teaches adult education classes for those wanting to better understand finances or real estate investing. I think a clear conversion goat for their website is generating leads.

I hope I didn’t spend too much time on that but the idea of guiding your visitors towards a conversion goal is important. Shooting for multiple conversion goals is risky. Its even worse to have ambiguous goals. In the book Good to Great (highly recommended) they discuss the hedgehog principle. A hedgehog only knows how to do one thing, curl up in a ball and wait. Even though the fox is more cunning and tries many things the hedgehog doesn’t lose to a fox. Time and time again its those companies that know what they do best a do it over and over again.

Next time we’ll delve into writing optimized pages and how to outline your entire site to be search engine friendly.

Good Luck,

Matthew Ryan

Building a website can be intimidating for the first time. There are many languages and programs that are used. A short list of these languages and programs include: Flash, Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Photoshop, CSS, PHP, HTML, Java Script, and MySQL. It would take years of training to understand and use these languages proficiently.

The question becomes, do you want to spend your time reinventing the wheel or working on strategic direction for your business? Most small business owners will try to learn the languages and the true entrepreneur will leverage other peoples’ skill and ability. Your ability to distinguish between busywork and leadership will have a huge impact on your future business.

These tips will help you publish a great website:

• Avoid 100% Flash website – Not only are they uncrawlable by the search engines data has shown that Flash websites convert worse than other sites.
• Use existing technologies – Wordpress and Joomla are free under the GPL (general public license). By using these types of sites you leverage thousands of programming hours instantly. Microsoft has a comparable CMS program for $25,000. If you use one of these hosting companies, Blue Host or DreamHost, they have one click installs for both Joomla and Wordpress.
• Try to find templates that are 100% CSS – Search engines love to crawl CSS websites. Traditional sites with tables are difficult for a bot to index. There are some free one’s available but purchasing a CSS template for $35 is worth every penny.
• Define your conversion goal – Every page on your site should lead to a specific conversion goal (i.e. complete a sale, lead generation, mailing list opt-in, subscribe to RSS feed, membership, or spreading viral content.)
• Don’t have multiple conversion goals competing on the same page. One page should point to one conversion goal. If you want multiple conversion offers space them out so they don’t conflict on the same path. For instance, after a visitor places an order then hit them up for the newsletter signup on the order confirmation page.
• Build for user experience. Defend your users experience over all other priorities. An ugly website that works is a hundred times better then a beautiful site that’s broken. Ads, selfish copy, and popups destroy user experience.

When choosing a domain, there are two schools of thought. On one hand, people say your name should be short and easy to remember with absolutely no hyphens. On the other hand, some people like to have a keyword rich domain with hyphens. So, which one is right and which one is wrong? To answer this you have to go back to your business goals. Ask your self the following questions:

• Will most my traffic come from search engines or word of mouth?
• How big do I want my website to be?
• Will I ever do any traditional advertising? (i.e. print, radio, TV).
• Will visitors come back to my website by typing in my URL
• How much repeat traffic do I anticipate

You can see that there is no absolute rule when choosing your domain. I admit that I’ve gone back and forth on this issue and haven’t come to any definite conclusions. I will say that I am leaning more towards the “short and sweet” domain over the “keyword rich” domain. One article that changed my mind is Brad Fallon’s Google’s new link trap article. In addition to that I think the “short and sweet” domain will be more valuable in the long run.

One hosting company can host multiple domains. If you want multiple domains One & One has the lowest private registration for domains anywhere. You will need to point your new domains to the hosting company so everything lines up. If there is enough demand/interest I would gladly record a video tutorial to post on the site.

Best of Luck,

Matthew Ryan

Tech Tags: home+based+business internet+business entrepreneur online+business small+business work+from+home opportunity internet+marketing online+marketing home+based+internet+business financial+independence make+money+online business+opportunity
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