This is a follow-up to “Link-Juice And Pagerank“, posted at the start of last month.

Some ClubBloggers have gotten a little excited about geography.  And understandably so.

Why and how does the main Google site serve-up particular results for one user in the UK, one user in the US and one user in Italy?

Most of those who spend a lot of time on SEO will get this.  Others who don’t may struggle.  Those in the last bracket who have done a little work on the topic, and particularly those who’ve used AdWords, will get a little caught-up in obsessing about IP addresses.

However, whilst the IP address (which most of you know is one of the vertebrae in the backbone of the ‘net) does play a part, here (particularly with country-specific domains such as .co.uk), it is by far from being the only element. And you really do need to know more than that to properly optimize your blog/page.

Before we get to those other elements, let’s dwell a while longer on the top-level domain. In particularly, on “.com” domains.

Above, we mention the UK and Italy as geographic areas aside from the US. Well, quite a lot of people don’t realise that a “.com” domain hosted in the UK will typically be seen by Google as a UK site. Yes, you guessed it, a “.com” in Italy, an Italian site. This is despite the “.com” universal domain extension.

So, lesson number one here is that, depending on what geographical audience you wish to target, and this really is at the heart of top-level targeted traffic, then look to host locally to your audience.

Lesson number two is that the location of your inbound links (yes, we all know how much Google loves those) is also very important to the issue of geographical audience.  In a similar manner to “get hosted in the jurisdiction you wish to target”, you should get your link juice from the target geographical area.  Yes, it really does matter.

So, you say:  ”c’mon CB, my site’s international, not linked to UK, USA, Italy, Luxembourg”.  Well, fine.  A lot are (you’re not unusual:) ).  In that case, your links should be balanced, geographically.  Yes, it’s all about relevance, at least in the eyes of Google.  Is your site relevant to that Italian searcher?  Or that guy in London?

There are other lessons to learn whilst on the topic of geography, but we won’t obsess about those in detail, here.  They do, however, deserve a passing mention…..  We have seen some poor SEO operators advise on translation of a site into another language (e.g., you started in the US, you now want to target Turkey, too, and want a language-friendly Turkish site) but they forget translation of important elements like meta titles in the code, for example.  C’mon guys.  Get a grip.

We’ll come back to this overall topic again, as we’ve been asked to (and of course we always do what we’re told) but also mainly because it’s objectively really important.

Before dashing, we can’t over-estimate the importance of using Google’s Webmaster Tools properly.  Have a look and let us have your comments, thoughts, moanings if you have any.

Blogging is based on a dialogue, not a monologue. The community relies on hyperlinks to keep us all inter-connected and the conversations valuable and active.

One-way conversations are boring. In life and on the ‘net!

Those in the blog world who play by the rules and interact with others do and will benefit. Those who don’t, well: it’s unhelpful, to say the least.

By linking to another website you will, generally, help it (though there are increasingly complex elements within the Search Engines’ algorithms which mean that receiving a link from a ‘bad’ or off-topic page may be damaging to the recipient page’s Page Rank – more another time, though see other pages on ClubBlogger on the topic).

Linking to fellow bloggers actually helps you, because they will find that backlink (otherwise known as ego-searching) and probably visit your blog out of curiosity. Who knows — they might even bookmark you, or even better link back to you and become a regular reader. Always nice.

Fact: the blogosphere environment is absolutely no different than the community – in ‘real’ life or online. What you put in, you get out. Or at least, should.

On the topic of PageRank, according to Google:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence,Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Outgoing Links

When it comes to outgoing links, there are varying schools of thought. While some believe outgoing links should only be made when absolutely necessary, others believe you should make every effort to include at least one or two outgoing links in your posts. Since the magical algorithms used by the search engines are kept secret, it is difficult to say which school of thought is best for the search engines.

When it comes to pleasing your human visitors, outgoing links are always appreciated when they are linked to relevant and helpful sites. Therefore, regardless of the outgoing link strategy you choose, be certain every link you create links to a site that is relevant to the post and is from an authoritative site. The higher the quality of the link, the higher your visitors and the search engines will rank your site.

Incoming Links

Incoming links are also touted as being highly important in order to create a successful blog. In many ways this is true. After all, if other blogs and websites have links to your blog, you will be more likely to receive visitors from those sites. At the same time, you should exercise some good judgment when trying to get a link to your blog posted on other sites. Otherwise, your link could potentially have negative effects on your blog traffic.

Having an incoming link from a less reputable website can negatively effect your blog in a couple of ways. First, if it is posted on a site that is not too reputable, it may actually hurt your reputation as an authority in the area. Second, your search engine ranking could actually be negatively impacted by an incoming link from a site that is of poor quality.

Internal Linking

The other linking option you have available is to link within your own site. Internal linking offers a number of benefits to your blog. First, it makes it easier for your site visitors to navigate through your site and to find other posts that are relevant to the topic. Not only does this make your site more informative and helpful to your readers, it also encourages them to delve further into what your blog has to offer.

Another benefit to internal linking is the fact that search engines love blogs that link within themselves. Internal linking makes it easier for the search engine spiders to crawl through your site and to determine what the site has to offer. So, as you are building up your blog, be certain to start linking your entries right away – it is much easier to do it from the start rather than trying to get caught up later!

Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this – they naturally attract search engine traffic. Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages. They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked.

Primarily a site should be designed for the user, with search engines in mind. Google tends to talk out both sides of their mouth when they say, “Don’t do anything special for the engines”. Yet, they create a webmaster tool center where you can submit a sitemap, and get information about how the engines see your site, errors and what key phrases your site ranks for. That gives new site owners a little bit of confusion.

I like sites that are easy to navigate, pleasing to the eye and that help sell whatever it is you need to. Pages should be set up as landing pages. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry. This way you can give the visitor everything they need to make a purchase or fill out a form. At the same time you can optimize these pages for the engines and use the pages for your PPC campaigns. I believe in doing sites this way. It brings the visitor a much better experience.

The perfect site is not only user friendly, but optimized for the engines. You need to target where people go to in order to provide them with the information or product they need. There is nothing worse than having people landing on a page that is optimized for a phrase but offers no information about it… It brings the user a bad experience and you a missed sale or lead. You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Once you have a page optimized, you can streamline the transition from viewing what you have to offer to facilitate a purchase. You can also provide related content and links. This, in turn, will help with you PPC because Google is now checking to see how relevant your landing pages are to the keywords you buy.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Sometimes a site’s structure (the relationships between its content) must be altered too. Because of this it is, from a client’s perspective, always better to incorporate Search Engine Optimization when a website is being developed than to try and retroactively apply it.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.Make a good quality site that will attract natural links to it in order to obtain any form of long term presence within the search engine results page.

You can do a little experiment to demonstrate the power of this Google feature. Set up a page on an obscure new domain, but don’t advertise it. Instead, put a single HTML file with a plain list of links to a group of similar sites. The first thing to note is how quickly the bots notice your website, and then how surprisingly high your Google page rank will be for a website with no incoming links or SEO content.

So how can you take advantage of this new SEO device? Be creative with it! No one is really sure exactly what does and doesn’t work yet, even more surprising results might be possible than have been discovered yet. A good place to start though is in considering how you want your website to be classified and linking out to similarly classified websites. This will help to re-enforce the purpose of your website, increasing goggles’ confidence in its content.

Then there’s the regional trick. If you are running a local book store, make sure Google knows that it’s a physical store, and its location. Now use lots of outbound links to websites like Amazon and even to national book retail franchises. When someone searches for a book store in your local area, Google will return yours with significantly more confidence in the quality and size of the store, because of its inferred association with the big retailers.

It’s a fun and simple SEO method, which might result in significant gains for particular websites . Let us know if you discover something amazing!

There is a lot a competition for high rankings. This is because high rankings provides individuals and businesses with free advertising. Therefore, you will need to be prepared to play the game. In order to win, you must have a good number of quality, incoming links. We will be discussing various places where you can pick up good links for your web site. Some of the common and most effective ways include using articles, social networking and bookmarking sites, related blogs, forums, press releases and even Google and Yahoo groups.

Articles continue to be a great way to get incoming links and also to pick up some extra traffic. If you write a good article (one that is not a sales pitch), on a popular topic you can expect to get hundreds of page views just from one very good article directory, such as Ezine Articles. To ramp up the amount of traffic that you get from article directories, it is best to submit them to more than one article directory. You can attempt to go big and submit your articles to hundreds of article directories or you can simply submit to the top 20 to 25. It is important to note that if you’re using articles for building links, then you will want to submit different versions of your articles at the various article directories. You can spin the article yourself or you can use a service such as submityourarticle.com, which will spin the article for you and then send them out to a number of article directories.

Social networking and bookmarking sites are also a very good  way to create incoming links. You simply need to write a short, news blurb about your website and add the link. If you use social bookmarking sites, you can simply add your link.

Blogs on related topics are also a very good to use for back links. However, don’t comment spam. Leave a comment that shows that you have actually read the blog and have gotten something out of it and want to give something back through your comment.

Forums are another excellent way to build links. Simply create a hyper link that includes the keyword that you are targeting. Press releases work similarly to articles. Some of the very top press release sites will likely get you included in Google News. Other webmasters may pick up your release, place it on their site, resulting in incoming links and hopefully an influx of traffic.

Google and Yahoo groups are another way to get links. Again, you don’t want to spam. If you find a topic that you are interested in, post something of value to the group and then leave your link.

These are all various ways to build links to your web site or blog. They have all proven to be very effective in building links and should also help you pick up some extra traffic along the way.

TITLE: A Review Of The Traffic Tips Report By Justin Michie

I recently picked up a copy of Justin Michie’s Traffic Tips Report (Free for a limited time from here). Let’s face it, getting traffic to your website or blog is a never ending challenge. But it’s a necessary challenge, because without traffic you can’t do much of anything. So you are probably – like me – always on the lookout for new traffic generation methods and as many good ways to do it as you possibly can.

The Traffic Tips Report claims to do just that. This is a recently released report from expert internet marketer Justin Michie. Being an internet marketer himself, Justin should have a good hold on traffic generation. But as with anything online I thought it was worth taking a closer look. And the results were actually quite impressive.

For starters, the report doesn’t just show you a few ways to generate website traffic, it delivers 247 unique ways to get traffic to your site. Right from the start that’s something that any website or blog owner can use. On top of that, the report is actually free! Justin is currently giving it away to anyone who wants it.

And even though it’s free, the methods outlined in this report should be able to increase your traffic significantly in just a matter of days. The great thing about this report is that it includes both free and paid traffic generation methods. So whether you are just starting out and you have time to invest but little money, or you’ve been making money online for awhile and have the money but not the time – there are plenty of ideas in here to up your traffic stats.

Just don’t let the amount of ideas in here overwhelm you – don’t try to do it all at once, pace yourself! Some of the methods will result in short term traffic and others will result in long term traffic. If you start with a few of short term and a few long term methods from this report you can give your site a quick burst of traffic right away while building long term traffic. This will help your traffic grow quickly and still sustain itself so you’ll be getting plenty of visitors month after month.

The report has been reviewed by some of the most successful and well known internet marketers. Joel Comm and Willie Crawford both highly recommended it, when Justin was charging money for it. (It had been selling at the discounted rate of $7 at http://www.TrafficTipsReport.com.) Joel calls it a “really valuable resource” that all internet marketers should have. And Willie “recommends it to all of his clients and subscribers.” When you have endorsements like these you really can’t go wrong!

Another great thing about this report is that it will work for any type of niche. It doesn’t matter if you have a website on puppies or a blog about day trading. There are traffic generation methods in it that will work for everyone and every niche.

As we all know the internet is constantly evolving. To be successful, you have got to stay ahead of your competition. You can easily do this by using some of these unique marketing methods Justin has outlined. If you use just one of these methods, you could easily double the amount of traffic you are receiving. Just imagine what could happen if you use ten, fifty or all 247? You would have a traffic explosion! All from one little report.

So if you are looking for unique ways to drive more traffic to your site, you really need to look no further than the Traffic Tips Report. If you want a copy (while it’s still free) you can download it from here. It’s a no brainer decision!

In most blogs and websites that you may have visited, you would have noticed a button saying RSS Feed. It’s orange colored icon, present in all websites that involves regular updates. What does that mean? And how can that help you progress in your online business? How does RSS feed work? What do you need to do in order to get one for your website? Let’s try and explore these. 

Real Simple Syndication – that’s what RSS stands for. People use RSS feeds to collect and spread information across the World Wide Web. An RSS feeder will list all the updates that you are interested in across the various websites, into one single comprehensive list and you can then easily browse through one single list, pick up your choice and explore that further. Regular updates right at your inbox will help you immensely in channeling the wide range of information that is available on the internet, today.

Say you have a great product to sell – let’s consider it is a software that helps the user compose music on their laptops. Now every time that in a blog or a relevant forum, an user raises a query or concern over digital music recording, then you will get that feed instantly which in turn will help you address the query easily. Thus simply put, you stay up to date.

RSS feed will help you grow and manage a steady traffic of new subscribers and not just a handful of people visiting your page a number of times. You can also add RSS feeds to the main page of all your websites thereby allowing a real time record of activities on your website. Use the pinging service to promote your RSS feed thereby directly connecting it to the search engines which will pick up every update on your website and will display that real time. You can use feeds of other websites or you can use your own RSS feeds depending upon the situation. Your target is to give your audience quality content. When they subscribe to the RSS feed provided by your website, they should not get irrelevant content.

Next allow other sites to add your feed content. This will help in cross-promotion and you will get a wider audience. You can also think of importing RSS feeds from social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace.

A large leadership on record will also help you generate good advertising revenue from your website. Tracking the organic traffic to your website is of paramount importance when it comes to online business. You need to create a balance of using RSS feeds and Search Engine Optimization effectively for your product. So the idea is to use all the avenues at disposal to track the traffic and build up on that. Once you have a steady readership, a strong mailing list, good in route into active forums, you are more or less done with the ground work and is now time to actually put the business plan in action.

 Subscribe in a reader

When it comes to web optimization, you can take on the job yourself, or pay someone to do it for you. While it might be faster and much easier to hand off the chore to someone else, you will want to make sure that you at least have a basic knowledge of the process. There are people and companies on the internet that will charge you thousands of dollars for things that you can do yourself. They will also speak to you with fancy words to justify their prices. If you can filter through the junk, you will be able to determine if you are getting worked over. Besides, you will find that the process isn’t terribly difficult, it is just time consuming. If you understand how to optimize your website, you can outsource some of the more boring tasks and do the ones that you find more fulfilling yourself. It will save you both time, money and put you in control of the entire process.

If you know very little about search engine optimization, keep reading, we will discuss the basics.

1. On-Page Optimization: Even though on-page optimization isn’t as powerful as it once was, it is still necessary. If your site doesn’t include keywords in strategic places, your link building efforts won’t be as effective. Be sure to include your keyword and related ones in your H1, meta, title and description tags. Also be sure to use 1-2 in the first and last paragraphs of your copy and sprinkle it in a few times throughout. Don’t go overboard. Keyword spamming may nullify your efforts.

1. Link Building: Getting incoming links to your website is probably the most important part of search engine optimization. However, you don’t just want any links. You want quality links from well respected websites. Look to add links from top article directories, social networking sites, .edu sites, popular forums and other webmaster’s sites.

1. Adding Content: The search engines reward sites that are growing. Be sure to continually add content to your site. This not only helps you get better rankings, but it also gives you more opportunities to make money.

As you see, search engine optimization isn’t difficult. It is pretty formulaic. The problem is that the formula changes every few years (the search engine don’t like to be manipulated) and that it can be time consuming to get your site to rank well and maintain it’s rankings. It is important to keep up with the changes and to properly optimize your site. Again, this is a job that you can do yourself or you can pay someone to do it for you. Before shelling out the cash, be sure to research various companies. Ask to see proof and for the contact information and websites of people that they have worked with. You don’t want to spend thousands of dollars and not get any results.

Pay-Per-Click: Pay-per-click is perhaps the fastest way to get targeted traffic to your website or blog. However, you better know what you are doing, or you will be stuck with major costs and no sales to show for it. Be sure that you carefully select your keywords and don’t bid or spend more then you can afford to lose. You may want to try some free advertising first (forums, articles, classified sites) to see if the product that you are selling converts well and then spend some money with pay-per-click advertising.

Social Network Sites: Social networking sites are a great place for people to get together, chat, and share information. It can also be a goldmine if used correctly. Don’t go on there spamming and trying to sell your products. Instead, provide some valuable information. Send them to a website that has more then advertisements. Work to build relationships and then the sales will come.

Forums: Forums are great place to market. You already have a captive audience that is interested in some of the same things that you are. Again, don’t spam. That is the quickest way to destroy your reputation. Instead, contribute to the board and give away something of value for free. Add a link to whatever you are selling in your signature link. That way, when you post, people will see your advertisement without you shoving it down their throats. After you have built up a good reputation and good will, then sell your product. Most forums will have a section for the sale of services and goods. Offer your product or service there.

Article Marketing: Article marketing is one of the most tried and true online advertising methods. If you write a quality article and submit it to the best article directories, you can almost be assured of hundreds of page views. If your article is really good, another webmaster may place it on their site and send additional visitors your way. To be successful as an article marketer, you will need to write consistently, write well crafted articles and create good signature boxes so that people want to visit your website.

Free Classified Sites: Free classified ads used to be wildly popular a few years ago, then seemingly overnight, they became irrelevent. However, sites like Craigslist and Backpage have revived the market. This is an especially good place to sell services. Selling an affiliate product is a little bit harder but can still be done. Be sure to ask for at least partial payment upfront when providing services so that you don’t end up getting scammed.