Hey there,

  So before I even start you reading this, I want you to zip over to Google.com and do a search for ‘free month of hosting’.  You should be able to find TheGuruMarketer.com, which is my site, sitting there on the 1st page beating out almost 50,000,000 other pages.  That’s a pretty competitive keyword phrase if you ask me and it’s ranked on first page of Google.  WOW!

  So how did it happen?

  Alright…here’s the dealio.  Most SEO experts will tell you that one of the most important things you need to do is optimize your webpage for the specific keyword you want to be found for.  But if you look at the source code of the page mentioned above, you’ll notice I don’t have either the META NAME=”keywords” or META NAME=”description” tags in my head.  I also don’t have the keyword phrase ‘free month of hosting’ or ‘free month hosting’ in my first paragraph of text, which is considered to be a great way to improve keyword density and ranking.

  I simpy have the page title set to “TheGuruMarketer.com - Free Month of Hosting.”  That’s it.  So why without those key attributes is that page still ranking so darn high?

  It actually came down to one thing, incoming links with high Page Rank values.   I have just over 50 incoming links to my site, according to Alexa.com and if you look at that list you’ll see quite a few of them are from blogs of other sites where I have either left a comment, or made a post.  The important thing about those websites is that they have a high Page Rank value and Google really likes that.

  So once I figured this out, it was off to the races on trying to find good blogs with high page rank values that I could start commenting on and getting incoming links to my sites for various keywords.  But man…let me tell you it’s a pretty hard task to find relevant blogs with high page ranks.  Finding even a handful can take hours.

  But alas, I have found a savior and best of all, it’s free.  It’s called Comment Hut and it’s a nifty piece of software that takes all the work out of finding relevant blogs with high page rank values for you to get involved with and start commenting on. 

  Yes I said it’s free.  So if you want a free copy for yourself, head over to the Comment Hut page.  There’s a video you can watch that will explain what the software does and how it works.  You’ll be able to grab your free copy from there as well!

  For my next post, I’m going to write up a step by step blue print guide that you can use to find a good niche market with great products to promote, find the highest searched keywords for your niche that have low search competition, and how to set up a page dedicated to drawing free search engine traffic, and making sales using tools such as Comment Hut, Micro Niche Finder, Word Press Blogs, and guides such as Blogging To The Bank 2.0.

  Ya ya…hope you like it!

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hey everyone,

  Ok so my last post I was simply telling you about how I got ranked in Google on the first page for a whole bunch of keywords I found using Micro Niche Finder and using Squidoo as the blog I posted on.

  It worked amazingly well and within 7 days I was ranked as high as #1 for more than one keyword which I found amazingly surprising!  But then something really strange happened…

  I was checking my ranks for my keywords and I noticed that my actual blog, yes this same website you are reading right now also started ranking for those same keywords!  What?!?  In the broad matches of the short-tailed keywords, I was actually ranking much higher (up to 30 places) for my blog post than my Squidoo sites!  Wow!  

  The only problem is that I have no idea why the blog is ranking higher than the Squidoo sites.  Either way I don’t really care, but it has sparked a curiosity in me to see if I can’t get higher rankings for other keywords using the same methods.

  So the keyword I have chosen to use this time is ‘opt in list building’.

  I was searching for opt in list building on Google to see how one of my other sites, TheOptInStrategy.com ranks and I noticed that it ranked at 180 amount over 2 million sites.  That’s not bad…but it’s not great either.  I also noticed that I hadn’t actually done any sort of page optimization for the site either.  So I quickly changed that and here is what I added.

<meta name=“Keywords” content=“opt in list building, optin list-building, opt in list-building, list building, opt in email”>
<meta name=“Description” content=“TheOptInStrategy.com is a free ebook about opt in list building. If you want to build your opt in email list then download this free guide that will have you on your way to an opt in email list.”>   I simply added some meta tags and now here’s the test.  I’m going to ping this blog post using PinGoat.com and see in a couple weeks how my search engine rankings for this keyword phrase improve, if at all.

  If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, please let me know ok!

  I’ll post again in a week!

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  Ok, I never knew what a perma link structure was until today.  Did you?

  I learned about it in Rob Benwells book, Blogging To The Bank 2, and why
it’s important.  Basically it makes any posts I make on my blog turn into
keyword rich URL’s that are on the top level rather than the typical number
based URL’s that come pre-loaded on most blogs.

  Here’s two examples.

  PermaLink the good way:
  http://blog.ianherculson.com/index.php/dealing-with-permalink-structures

  PermaLink the bad way:
  http://blog.ianherculson.com/?p=18

  So I guess just by looking at those two links you can tell why one is so much
better for search engine optimization right?

  So how do you change it?  Just login to your blog and under the Options
menu you can chose Permalinks.  Then you can select default permalinks
to read like this “index.php/%postname%”

  That one small change will help make your own blog more optimized for
search engines for two reasons.  One is that you are using more keywords
in your actual link, and second because the link is actually closer to the
root directory which SE’s love!

Great tip Rob, 

Thanks

Ian

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