ChaseSagum.com

2 Free Tools for Batch HTTP Header Checks

Chase — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:52:49 +0000

There are two free tools I like to use for checking HTTP headers on multiple domains. Ironically enough it took me nearly 3 months before I could finally find these tools. When it came down to it, I was searching for the wrong information with the wrong search query in Google. I kept searching for “301 redirect checker multiple domains” and variations of it and couldn’t find what I was looking for.

Then with one of those “ahhaaa” moments I decided to use the word “batch” in my search query and boom. I found the tools I was looking for. Here are the two free tools for checking HTTP headers on websites/domains, and for doing it with multiple domains at the same time.

1. SEO Book Server Header Checker

URL = http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker

2. SEOConsultants.com Check Server Headers Tool

URL = http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers-batch

Why Would You Need A Free Server Header Checker?

There are many reasons behind why you would need a tool like this. The basic idea with these tools is for you to be able to verify HTTP status codes for certain domains. The biggest reason you would use these tools is for checking the Redirect Type and ensuring the redirect is working properly. This is a huge SEO thing that SEO professionals check to ensure that 301 redirects, 302 redirects, and many others are not only working properly, but are registering properly in the HTTP headers.

You may find many other purposes for these 2 tools. Both essentially do the same. But I thought I would point you to both resources in case you prefer one above the other. Enjoy!

Also: if any of you know of a windows/mac/linux desktop application that can do this on a bulk/batch level I would be interested to know about it.

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5 Essential Modules for Running a Drupal Powered Affiliate Site

Chase — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:31:51 +0000

Drupal is a fantastic open source content management system for all types of uses. A particular use that I like to use it for is for all of my Affiliate Marketing websites. While I love using Wordpress for my blogs, I have found Drupal to much more efficient and flexible for me with my affiliate websites. So with a couple years worth of experience with using Drupal for this purpose, here are the 10 Drupal Modules that I found to be essential to my affiliate marketing success.

1. Administration Menu

This module for Drupal adds a simple javascript dropdown menu that shows up when you as the administrator logs in to edit your site. The biggest reason I love this module and use it so often is because it allows you to quickly access every administration item within one click. This speeds up management time tremendously.

2. Page Title Module

This module basically gives you more control over the head title tag of all your drupal pages. This is a huge SEO benefit being that you can customize each individual page’s page title to improve SERP’s with specific pages. And since SEO plays such a critical role in Affiliate Marketing, this one is a must have!

3. Global Redirect for Drupal

When you enable the Paths module for Drupal, you are given the opportunity to change your URL’s from something like this… yoursite.com/node1 to something like this… yoursite.com/about-us. Doing this however can cause a Duplicate Content issue with Drupal which can cause you some SEO headaches. This module eliminates this problem by auto creating 301 redirects from the /node1 type URL to your new revised URL.

4. XML Sitemap Module

This module creates and submits a Google friendly XML sitemap to Google from your Drupal site, helping you ensure that all of your content is being crawled and indexed by Google. It also helps Yahoo! And Bing of course. I would never build a Drupal powered website without this plugin. A must have!

5. Image Captcha for Drupal

This is in my opinion your best protection against spam with Drupal. You can create a custom image captcha for your comment form and other contact web forms to help keep the spammers and bots away. Wordpress has Askimet which let’s you tie into their cloud (servers) for filtering of Spam which is something Drupal does not have. This is why this module for Drupal is so important.

Other than these, Drupal can pretty much take care of itself. There are so many features and customizations that can be made with Drupal that are by default built into Drupal which is what makes Drupal such an amazing content management system. On top of that, stick with these 5 modules and your Drupal powered website will impress you with the amount of things it can do!

Captcha Module for Drupal

Chase — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:12:36 +0000

For those of you out there who use the Drupal content management system for any of your web projects, I would like to share with you the open source Captcha module that I use frequently. It’s quite simply called ‘Captcha’ and it works perfect for both versions 5 and 6 of Drupal. Installing this module will help you fight off spammers who are trying to spam you through your contact and comment forms.

There are a ton of features with this module. If you have multiple web forms on your Drupal powered site you can enable Captcha for some forms while disabling it for others. You can enable/disable Captcha depending on if the visitor is a logged in user or not. And you also have option of using an Image Captcha by enabling the Image Captcha module that comes with this module.

With the Image Captcha you have all sorts of options for customizing your site’s Captcha. You can specifiy what font to use. What characters (letters,numbers etc.), the length of the code and many other options.

With one of my Drupal powered sites SpreadBluehost.com, I was getting around 500 spam messages per day through my contact form on the contact page. It was getting way out of hand. So I installed this module and have not received a spam message since. If you are running a Drupal powered site, I highly suggest this module. It’s definitely one of the best!

Google Analytics Tip: Understanding Your Blog’s Following

Chase — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:57:11 +0000

Been using Google Analytics a lot lately and thought I would share with you a quick tip on some data I like to look at often for measuring progress on my blogs. As you are aware one of the most important standards we hold ourselves by as Bloggers is that “following” factor. How big is our following?

Traditionally this has been measured by the number of total RSS subscribers we have. While this can be a telling metric, it’s not the only measurement to look at when measuring your Blog’s true following. That’s where the Returning Visitors metric comes into play. It’s easy to analyze this data in Google Analytics. Let me break it down for you.

Segmenting All Visits vs. Returning Visitors

One of my favorite features inside Google Analytics is the quick and easy ability to create segments of your data on the fly. This is important when you want to see metrics based of certain types of data. For example it’s nice to be able to see all your Google Analytics data just from Organic Search Engine Traffic. This is just one example as there are many segments already built into your Google Analytics account.

Here’s what you do. Locate the Advanced Segments dropdown located near the upper right hand corner of your Google Analytics interface. All Visits should already be checkmarked, now add a checkmark to the Returning Visitors option then click the Apply button.

After letting Google Analtyics take a second to think, you are now presented with your main dashboard for Google Analytics only this time there is some new data. First you are given a graph that compares All Visits for a given time period vs. Returning Visitors for that same time period. Here’s what it looks like…

What is this data telling you?

Basically you can see the difference between your overall traffic and your returning visitors. These returning visitors metrics give you an idea of visitor loyalty or in other words because this is a blog we are talking about, your following! You can see from this particular data I am showing you that even though the total unique visitors is around 1,000 per day, my true following is somewhere around the 200 per day mark. Pretty interesting huh? Therefore I am going to assume that my blog’s following is somewhere around the 200 person mark and I am going to make some actionable plans toward increasing that to 250 or 300.

A Few Things You Should Know

First that the data you are comparing is Visits to Visitors. Meaning that the total number on top is All Unique Visits while the Returning Visitors number is reporting Visitors. This is what makes this report so good. You get a direct idea of your true following based on a Visitor level.

Second this is not the only way to measure your blog’s following. Another metric to take into account is your RSS subscriber list. Depending on the nature of your blog, you could have a majority of your followers subscribed via RSS or little to none at all. It all depends on the content and vertical market you are writing in.

Overall I find this to be a great way to get a pulse on the type of following I have. Remember that once you setup this Advanced Segment now you can go through and pull any type of Google Analytics report and it will continue to measure these two segments. So if you want to go to Traffic Sources >> Keywords you can see what keywords your returning visitors are using to re-enter your site. Pretty interesting. For more helpful information on how to take full advantage of the Google Analytics application I highly recommend RSS subscribing to the official Google Analytics Blog.

Review of the Symphony Open Source CMS

Chase — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:00:57 +0000

Wordpress and Drupal are not the only “heavy hitting” open source content management systems going around today. Symphony is a player too. Symphony is built in PHP and MySQL and built with the ability to create everything from simple websites to more complex web applications. Similar to what Drupal and Wordpress have done, Symphony has been able to create a very modular, component type content management system that makes it easier for “non-coders” to put together screaming cool websites. Symphony is Open Source and licensed under the MIT/X11 License.

Create Your Own CMS

Symphony has done a very good job of creating an environment for you to create your very own CMS for whatever the occasion is. Rather than being told what types of content or structure you have, Symphony allows you to create that content and structure beforehand giving you the utmost customization. Symphony is a XML-based data engine so you have the ability to integrate many types of data into your website. For example a Twitter Feed.

Minimal, Clean Interface

The thing you will enjoy the most about Symphony is it’s simple, clean, and minimal admin interface. The developers behind Symphony were all about making it as simple to use as possible and they sure did a great job. Bulk editing is built in enabling you to manage multiple content pages with relative ease. And Jquery is used throughout the admin interface in order to create quicker, and more effective use of actions.

XSLT Templating Language

Symphony utilizes the XSLT templating language in order to create robust, highly flexible and customizable templates for your Symphony powered websites. This has been one of the more popular features for developers with the new Symphony CMS. Developers love the flexibility and the open code standards that it supports. XSLT is rule based a lot like CSS code giving the developer the ability to write reusable code called “Utilities” inside Symphony.

Before you try installing Symphony on your web server, here are the Server Requirements that Symphony needs to run properly:

PHP 5.2 or above
MySQL 4.1 or above
An Apache or Litespeed Webserver
Apache’s Mod_Rewrite Module or equivalent

See symphony-cms.com for more information and for download links for the Symphony CMS core and install files.

If it’s just a simple blog you need then stick with Wordpress. But if you need to create a more complex website than Symphony is something you should look into. I don’t think you will be disappointed!

Leveraging Online Marketing Costs for Improving SEO

Chase — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:22:26 +0000

What do I mean here? Let me explain. Let’s say you run a website or work for a company that has a website that spends money consistently each month on driving traffic to that website. Let’s step it up one more notch and say that you spend in the thousands of dollars range per month in Online Advertising to push traffic and potential business to this website. These methods could include but are not limited to the following:

Paid Search – PPC
Banner/Display Ads
Social Media Advertising like Facebook & Twitter
Email Marketing campaigns
Contexual Advertising like Google Adsense or Kontera
Partnerships with other websites

In most instances your are spending this money on traffic that will no longer exist once you stop paying for it. We all know that Organic Traffic through Google is something that is much more long term, not to mention free. So naturally we segment a portion of our efforts towards SEO to help improve Organic SERP’s. But what if you could gain SEO strength from at least a portion of the $ you are spending in online advertising?

Another more specific way of explaining this question is, what if you could somehow improve your SEO from the hundreds or even thousands of dollars you are spending in Paid Search? Or what about in Email Marketing? Get my question?

Many medium size players on the web naturally will spend thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per month just in advertising costs on the Internet. This is of course justified by the amount of volume they are generating in return by dumping all this money into the web. But what if you could gain SEO value from your advertising costs while still getting the immediate volume you are after? A best of both worlds type of scenario.

With a little bit of creativity and some elbow grease, not to mention some serious brainstorming (which my tiny little brain can only handle once a week without having an emotional breakdown) I came up with a few cool ideas on how to accomplish this.

Tactic #1 – The “Thank You” Resource Page

The idea of the thank you page is to redirect your visitor to a certain page once they have completed whatever it is you wanted them to do, and that certain page contains valuable content such as a download guide or something like it. Along with this great content you have put together would be some social bookmarking icons so they can bookmark this page and share it with their friends.

Think about it. Let’s say your website’s job is to gather leads. Once a visitor has finished filling out a lead form you have already built up some level of trust with that visitor. Take the time to give them some free stuff that can help them, and in return give them the opportunity to “socialize” that page by sharing it with their friends. This will increase the SEO of that particular page, which if the architecture of your site is sound, will increase the SEO of your overall site.

Tactic #2 – The Tracking Pixel or 301/302 Redirect

One of the confilicts that exists between Internet Marketing and SEO is the issue of the Tracking Code URL. What happens is that in order ot track a specific campaign, internet marketers will work with their web analytics platform and append characters at the end of a page’s URL. For example my homepage with all the SEO value is chasesagum.com. But if I wanted to track the progress of say my Email Marketing campaign, I would append something like this… chasesagum.com/index.php?gty&Email-1_Aweber or something like that.

The problem with this URL is that the whole world see’s it. And I lose all sorts of SEO possibilities to that specific page because if people choose to link to that page, they will naturally link to the URL with all the extra characters at the end. To solve this you have 2 choices. First is the Tracking Pixel that tracks allows your Web Analytics platform to track a specific campaigns data without appending characters to the end of the URL.

The other option is to do a 301 redirect which would essentially redirect your funky looking URL to it’s correct destination, so that the user only actually sees the clean URL. In most cases this one should work but you will definitely want to make sure your Web Analytics platform can handle this.

Tactic #3 – The Hard Link Request

This one may sound simple, but many are letting this SEO benefit slip through the cracks. This involves specific partnerships that your Marketing team is creating. What typically happens here is that a Marketing team will build a relationship with a 3rd party site in order to drive traffic. It could be a banner ad, text link etc. Typically this 3rd party site will run your link through an Ad server on their end in order to track things like impressions, clicks and so forth.

When possible, get a natural HTML hard link from a partnership. Rather than having it redirect through an Ad server, see if it can be a hard link directly to you. The amount of link juice that could be passed on to you from this one link could outweigh hundreds, even thousands of your other links.

Tactic #4 – PPC Display URL Redirect

PPC managers often times use fake URL’s as their Display URL’s. They do this in order to create a better display ad that will improve quality score and increase click-through rates. If the website you are dealing with is big enough, you will be surpised to see how many of those URL’s are being linked to throughout the web, which are of course being reported as Page Not Founds in your Google Webmaster tools.

Solution? Do a 301 Redirect in your .htaccess file for all of these URL’s to the specific destination that you desire. That way any link juice that has been generated will be passed on to the page that you redirect to. Nothing like some nice Free SEO effort from your PPC team.

Tactic #5 – Bypassing Ad Networks

Let’s take a big example here. Google Adsense. By advertising in the Google Content Network, your Paid Search team should be aware of all the sites in the Google Content Network that have your website’s ads in them. What if you could bypass Google on a few of these sites and pay those webmasters directly for your ad? Even better, what if you that ad was an HTML hard link rather than passing through Google’s ad servers?

Doing this with too many sites could potentially cause problems, as i’m sure Google would catch on to what you are doing. I recommend finding 10 or 20 sites with very good page rank in your niche, and building relationships with those webmasters for text links off their homepage.

There you go! If your company spends thousands of dollars per month in Online Advertising, imagine how much you can get out of that for SEO? By thinking this way, you help your company solve a more long term goal which is to have more free, organic traffic be larger piece of the monthly traffic pie.

301 Redirects vs 302 Redirects

The State of the Internet 2009 Infograph

Chase — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:12:03 +0000

I love infographs. I love seeing statistics of how much the Web has grown over the years even more. It’s truly incredible to see the advances we have made on the web over the past year. The argument could be made that we have made as much progress this past year 2009 than any other year since the web has exsisted. Bold statement yes! But the facts back it up.

Recently Focus.com created a really cool infograph displaying statistics from 2009 regarding the growth of the web and also social media. Thanks to our friends at Thoughtpick.com we have this large infograph broken down into a few segments so we can discuss each one.

The Basic Statistics: Genger, Age, Income, & Education Level

Not any real big surprises here. Young people use the Internet more than old people. Richer people have more broadband access. And those with a College education level use the web the most.

Home Usage and Desktop vs. Laptop

Interesting to see how much Internet usage has gone up for Home users. Also interesting is the closer margin between Desktop and Laptop internet users. More home internet usage means more opportunity for entertainment and lesiure type websites and applications.

Internet Speed an Issue & Internet Penetration

I was shocked to see the United States Average Broadband Speed in comparison to other top countries. I always knew it was a problem after hearing it discussed from time to time, but I didn’t know there was that big of a discrepancy. The U.S better do something in order to stay relevant on the web. And do it soon!

Social Media and the Blogosphere

Some more interesting stuff here. Blogging apparently is for the middle-aged while the younger generations use strictly Social Media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. Does this mean i’m turning old school? According to the statistics it does, and you could be too if you are a blogger like me.

How is The Mobile Web?

With all the new smart phones, iPhones, mobile applications and so forth, how fast is this new world of Internet that we are all using? Funny enough, it seems like Mobile Internet bandwidth could be exceeding home and office bandwidth in the next couple of years in the United States. And that’s not exatterating.

Expect 2010 in all honesty to be even better than 2009. Can’t wait to see what this new year brings us on the web. Hopefully we can all work hard to be a part of it!

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Getting Paid to Tweet!

Chase — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:15:17 +0000

I’m not what you would consider one of those “make money online gurus” by any means. But I do know a good online money making opportunity when I see one. For the past 4 years I have been active in the affiliate marketing and content marketing worlds by focusing on publishing high quality content on the web for subjects I am passionate about. Everything from Affiliate offers from CJ.com and Clickbank.com to good old Google Adsense. They have all worked well and have provided me with an extra income over the past few years that has helped.

But what about getting paid to Tweet? Can this really be done? I had to put it to the test to find out. So I setup two accounts. 1 at SponsoredTweets.com and the other at Be-A-Magpie.com. These were the two that came most recommended to me and I wanted to find out if I could really make money tweeting.

Now i’m not the type of person who likes to boast/reveal what his specific income is online. I will also tell you that what I make online is also not that high. I have a day job for example. That should tell you enough. But my income from Google Adsense is not that bad. It’s nothing worth praising. But it’s also not that bad. And over the last 7 days I have made more money through SponsoredTweets.com and Be-A-Magpie.com than I have through Google Adsense on all of the blogs that I run including this one.

How is this happening? Let me break down a few things.

1. I’ve been Tweeting Actively for the past 5 months

I’ve had my Twitter account for almost 2 years. But I didn’t actively start tweeting until September of 2009. Since then I have made an effort weekly to update my profile with tweets, and communicate with other people that have similar interests as myself. It’s actually been pretty fun! I’ve learned a ton in the process as well as making some great relationships with people I would never had otherwise met.

2. I Built My Followers Up One At a Time

I don’t just have a couple hundred followers. At the time of writing this post I have about 1800 total followers. This is of course helpful because it entices advertisers to want to work with me. The more followers you have, the more advertisers are going to come knocking on your door paying you to Tweet. I’ve also tried my best to create a quality follow list, not just a list of a bunch of spammers.

3. I Refuse To Be Spammy

Advertisers like my Twitter profile because I refuse to spam. There are real people that I follow and real people that follow me in return. I involve myself in real conversations on Twitter, not fake spammy ones. So even though one Twitter account can have tens of thousands of followers, if you can build up just a couple thousand solid followers you will get more offers from Advertisers and thus make more money tweeting.

My Final Thoughts

Can you make thousands of dollars a month Tweeting? Maybe. I couldn’t tell you because I don’t make that much. Can you make hundreds? Yes! And there are many ways you can use those few hundred extra dollars towards your online business. That is why I recommend experimenting with SponsoredTweets.com and Be-A-Magpie.com and see if you can make a couple hundred extra $’s a month with them.

I’d be interested in hearing from you also any ideas you have on earning more money through these ad platforms. Maybe we can help each other?

8 Google Analytics Reports For Improving SEO

Chase — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:01:53 +0000

Web Analytics for SEO can be a completely different animal than other traffic sources. You want to know what keywords are performing well on your site. You want to know what search engines are giving you the best converting traffic. You want to know what keywords you should be going after more aggressively. When the right data is researched, you can increase your SEO abilities ten fold. Look at the right data and well…let’s just say you can’t afford to look at the wrong data. I wanted to quickly show you the 8 Google Analytics reports I rely on to help me with SEO.

1. Search Engine Organic Report

Google Analytics allows you to create segments in your data using the Advanced Segments tool. One of those segments you want to create (which will help you for all of these reports I am going to explain to you) is an Organic Search Segment. Luckily there is already one pre-configured and you just need to activate it in the Advanced Segments area. What is this report all about? You basically want to see data relating to the 3 major search engines

Google
Yahoo!
Bing (MSN)

Broken down by these 3 major search engines, you can now start to see specific metrics pertaining to these search engines. This will help answer two very important questions. 1) What search engines perform better than others? and 2) Is there a smaller search engine we need to be putting more efforts towards? The specific metrics I like to look at are:

Bounce Rate
Goal conversion rates %
Unique visits

2. Keyword Organic Report

Now that you have your Advanced Segment setup for organic traffic, looking at this report is much easier. I generally like to take a look at the top 100 keywords that drive organic traffic to my site. This answers two important questions. 1) What keywords perform the best and 2) what high converting keywords should be going after more aggressively. Metrics I like to look at include:

Bounce Rate
Goal conversion rates %
Total searches
Placement (from Google webmaster central)
Unique visits

From here I get a very unique and detailed look at what specifically needs to be done in my SEO efforts.

3. Top 5 Keyword Report

Now that we have a list of our top 100 performing keywords, I like to dig deeper into the top 5 as in the top 5 keywords that are generating the most traffic. By doing this we can help answer 3 questions for ourselves. 1) Which of the top 5 keywords should we more aggressively go after, 2) How can we get more of the search market share and 3) How does SERP really affect our number of clicks? To do this I look at these metrics:

Bounce Rate
Goal conversion rates %
Total searches
Placement (from Google webmaster central)
Search Market Share
Unique visits

I love this report. If Organic Search makes up a big portion of your traffic like it does for most of my sites, you will find that by focusing on increasing conversion rates for your top 5 keywords will increase your overall conversion rates tremendously.

4. Organic Search Traffic Share Report

This is one of my favorite reports in Google Analytics. Comparing across all other traffic sources/marketing channels, how does Organic Search measure up? That’s what this report is all about. Why is this important? Because if you want to be at the top of your Internet Marketing game you need to be receiving at least 60% or more of your daily traffic from organic search. I don’t really need to explain to this audience how important that is to online business. With this report you can answer 2 important questions. 1) What is the % of overall traffic the site receives from organic search and 2) How does SEO compare statistically in other metrical categories against other traffic sources? Here is what I look at:

Bounce Rate
Unique visits
Goal conversion rates %

If you work at a large company like I do, this can help justify the need for spending more money on SEO. To run this report the best way you choose 2 segments in your segments drop-down, allowing you to compare organic traffic to another segment.

5. Organic Search Vs. Report

This is Organic Search vs. another segment. You are probably asking yourself, didn’t you just mention that in the previous report? Yes and know. This type of report is about diving deeper into the relationship between Organic Search traffic and another source or segment. What comparisons can be drawn between say your SEO traffic and your PPC traffic? Or your SEO traffic and your Email Marketing traffic? What can you learn from one and apply to the other?

Rather than listing all the metrics, let me explain that in this type of analysis I actually look at all kinds of stuff. Everything from conversion rates to what browser the visitor uses. I like to look at everything and see if I see any striking contrasts. I then start digging deeper from there.

6. SEO and Google Adwords Report

To do this your first need to make sure that your Google Adwords and Google Analytics accounts are talking to each other. That way Google Analytics can see the specific data from Adwords and allow you to see it in your reports. Why is this analysis helpful? You can see which paid search terms are performing well which in turn tells you what to go after organically in your SEO efforts. Also because of Broad Match in Adwords you can locate highly targeted long tail terms that are doing well for you in PPC, and in turn start ranking for those organically. Here are the metrics to look at:

Bounce Rate
Goal conversion rates %
Total # of searches
Unique visits

7. Internal Search Engine Report

In Google Analytics settings you can actually configure your analytics to capture data from your internal site search engine. If you use Google Custom Search as your search engine this becomes even easier. The benefit? How about full metrical data pertaining to what people are actually searching for within your site? Talking about an advantage! If you know what people are searching for than you know what content to put together and what to show people prominently on your site. Look at these metrics:

The Search Queries
# of Searches per
Pages visited

This is actually the type of data that more people need to be taking advantage of. For some odd reason this type of report and metrics go highly unnoticed in the site conversion and Internet marketing world.

8. Organic Mobile Report

More and more people are using their phones to browse content on the web. And as time moves on you are only going to see this more and more. Chances are you might be seeing 1-2% of your current organic search traffic being viewed through a Mobile Web Browser. So take advantage of this. Look at the data first, then start making your plans for a mobile version of your site. 3 questions this report will answer for you:

Am I capitalizing off my mobile traffic?
How well does my mobile traffic convert?
Do I need a mobile version of my site right now?

Looking at the metrics that I have mentioned in this article of Bounce Rate, Unique Visits, Goal Conversion Rates, and a unique one for this called Visit Share ( meaning the total percentage of overall organic traffic used a mobile ) will help you in this effort.

The Best SEO Advice You Will Ever Get From Me

Chase — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:34:53 +0000

Want to know the best SEO advice I have? Here it is. And you’ve heard it before. It’s all about High Quality Content! Sure there are a few other SEO fundamentals that need to be in place. But once the foundation of your site has been laid, your ability to focus your time and resources on creating high quality content that is of some benefit to visitors is the best SEO tip any SEO professional can give you. Let me explain to you my experience with this.

This Blog Has Been A Major SEO Test

When I started writing in this blog 3 years ago, one of the goals I had was to test certain aspects of search engine optimization with the content I was writing. I had been hearing from other SEO pro’s about how quality content can improve your SERP’s dramatically and wanted to test their methods myself. I found the process of link trading and writing “SEO Copy” very trivial. I felt as though it was one big waste of time and that I was trying to game a system (Google) that was much smarter than myself.

The thought was this… instead of putting in extra time into SEO activities such as Link Building or keyword optimization, what if I just spent that time putting together better content instead? With this I had essentially 3 major questions I needed answered.

Could great content develop link value on it’s own without me having to do link baiting of any kind?
Could these content pages I was putting together rank high enough for competitive terms?
Could I get a substantial amounts of traffic from Google Search with this content?

I must admit that this blog has answered all 3 of those questions yes! Other than establishing a good SEO foundation by setting up Wordpress and a few SEO related plugins (all of which took me just a few minutes by the way) I have spent 100% of my efforts on my content and not on any SEO related activity in the 3 years I have blogging. The result? For the past 2 ½ years consistently my traffic has grown every single month. Meanwhile, I’ve had a consistent 80-85% of all my traffic each month over those 2+ years that come strictly from organic searches from Google.

This traffic is sustainable. Not once over the past 2+ years have my SERP’s been subjected to a “Algorithm Change” of any kind. My rankings are consistent, my traffic consistently increases the more and more content I write, and it’s fair to say that based off my SERP’s and the rate at which Google crawls this site, that I am making Google happy. A goal of every SEO!

Put 100% Of Your SEO Effort in Your Content!

Once you have laid your SEO foundation, spend your SEO time working on your content. I cannot possibly over stress this point. You will not be disappointed. Ask yourself this question… “If I were a visitor to this page, would I find this helpful in any way?” You could also ask yourself another question… “If I were a visitor to this page, would I bookmark this page and share it with my friends?” Two very simple yet very powerful questions to ask before putting your next piece of content together.

Some content will stick while others will not. But the important thing is that you are spending your time putting information together whether it be text, images, video, or audio that is in some way helpful to someone out there. And that’s what this Internet thing is all about.

By doing this you will let things like Like Building take care of itself. And oh yeah one last very important thing. You will be on Google’s good side, a very good place to be!