If you have an online home business then you will know that it is important to have at least the very basics of search engine optimization in place for your site.

A few seeming small changes can make a big difference to  search position and traffic.

There have been many books written on the subject, some making the whole issue a lot bigger than it needs to be.

Google has released a search engine optimization guide which is aimed any-one who wants to understand some of the factors the Google search engine uses to rank sites.

Topics include:

• Page Titles
• “Description” Meta Ta
• URL Structure
• Site navigation
• Quality of Content
• Anchor Text
• Heading Tags
• Optimizing Images
• Robots.txt
• Rel=”nofollow” for links
• Site Promotion Good Practice

You can download the PDF by going here

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Theres been a lot written about dofollow blogs. This post is about dofollow forums. That is forums which don’t have nofollow in their signature links.

I saw an interesting post at Digital Point today about dofollow forums which provided inspiration for this post.

Making posts in forums is a good way of promoting a site.

Most forums allow you to post links in your signature (a little box after every one of your posts, where you can put a message of your choosing). Usually people put links back to their site so if readers are interested they can easily check out the writers other material.

Some forums have quite good page rank, so when you participate in the forums you not only get a little bit of free advertising but also a little page rank.

The usual rules apply. Don’t spam – make a relevant, on topic post that genuinely adds value to the discussion.

If you are looking for a few forums to become active in here are are a few suggestions:

• Digitalpoint Forums
• v7n Forums
• SitePoint Forums
• Harmony-Central Forums
• Search Engine Round Table
• Submit Express Forums
• Start Ups
• Comic Book Resources Forums
• Web Design Forum
• Acorn Domain Name Forums
• Book and Reader Forums
• Ableton Forums
• 6Pins
• IQ69
• Adobe Forums
• Adobe RSS Feed Submittal (This may be hand reviewed – But if your blog talks about Adobe products, you can get excellent exposure)
• MSDN Forums
• MySQL Forums
• AMD Support Forums
• Intel Software Network Forums
• CNET Forums
• Payment Processing Forums
• Directory Junction Forums

This list is taken directly from the DP topic and a few other sources I found while checking the forums out.
Here are the links to original posts:

• http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=644815
• http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=672932
• 7 high PR do follow forums

Let me know if you find any more and I’ll add them to the list.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

It’s well known that a site which gathers links too quickly can be penalised by search engines – but what about sitewide links ?

Are they just discounted to count as one link by search engines or is the effect more significant ?

Well over the last month we conducted a small experiment with a couple of sites.

Firstly we have a site which has not been highly promoted, but has been getting a trickle of natural search traffic. We added a link to it from an article directory with over 50,000 pages. Almost immediately the natural search traffic dried up.

A couple of weeks later the links where removed. Traffic came back in a few days.

So now we turned our attention to this site. In the early days I promoted it any way I could – sometimes copping a 2 or 3 month trip to the sin bin, courtesy of our friends at Google and Yahoo.

All the way through it though I’ve had a sitewide link on the same article directory above.

After seeing the results of the sitewide link on the newer site, we decided to try removing the site wides pointing here. I had thought about doing it on an off for a while but never did because I was afraid the sudden removal of the links would have a negative effect.

Its a bit harder to tell what the real results are with a more mature site. However, since removing the links serps have stayed static for the major terms but we seem to be getting a lot more traffic from the long tail keywords.

Overall traffic appears to have risen. Could be coincidence (natural fluctuation) but it feels like removing the links from the article directory has had a positive effect.

For me the take-away from this experiment is two fold:

• Always make small changes to your sites, watch the results and take action accordingly. When it come to search engines, there is always an opportunity to make small improvements by tweaking the on-site and off-site SEO
• This has confirmed for me, that its best to stay clear of site-wide links for sites where natural search is an important component of incoming traffic. They do more harm than good.

If you’ve done some experimentation with sitewide links, please drop some notes below so other readers may benefit from your experience.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Want some links for free then read on…………

In a hurry? Then go here Links For Free

When looking for links to your website the best ones are:

• Free
• One Way
• On pages with good PR
• On topic
• Relevant anchor text
• Can point to any page in your website

This software will trawl through Google listings for a supplied keyword, then list out a number of related WordPress blogs accepting comments.

The download is free. It shows about 10% of the WordPress listings available.

There is a paid upgrade which lists all the WordPress Blogs along with WordPress.com, Drupal, Live Journal and Typepad.

The links are listed with PR. Pages can be limited to those greater than a specified value. Simply clicking each link take you to the page listed. Link lists can also be exported.

The program has been setup to prevent spamming. It won’t make the comment for you. But it will lead you to all those juicy high PR pages which, with a short, intelligent comment will yield a good clean link.

I have used this program and purchased the paid version. It’s simple, easy to use and allows me to easily generate high quality deep links (links on the inner pages of my blog).

The one improvement I would like to see is for the program to separate the blogs using rel=”nofollow” from those that don’t. This is relatively minor and doesn’t detract from a highly focussed, simple to use, link building software.

This is an excellent tool which comes highly recommended. Its free, try it out, there is nothing to lose. The link again Links For Free

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Looking for a great free seo tool? This one is worth a try.

A while ago I downloaded Firefox to see what all the fuss was about. Have to say I’ve been a convert ever since. I like the tabbed browsing, the speed and the huge number of extensions which help me customise my browser to my specific requirements.

One of my favourite extensions is called seo-for-firefox. If you’ve ever done any manual competitor analysis for a given keyword, you will know how repetitive and boring it can be.

This little extension is perfect if you want to know why Google or Yahoo! ranks pages.

“SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results.”

Well that’s what it says on the SeoBook.com site and I have to agree with them.

The way it works is that you load the extension, turn it on, then enter a search into Google or Yahoo!. The tool then embeds the results into the Search Engine listings.

Under each result here’s what you can get:

• Page Rank
• Age
• Technorati Links
• del.icio.us links
• Yahoo! Domain Links
• Yahoo .edu Domain Links
• Yahoo! .edu Page Links
• Yahoo! page links
• Alexa rank
• Google cached Pages
• DMOZ listing
• dir.yahoo.com listing
• bloglines subscribers

When you look at a whole page of results it becomes pretty clear which key factors lead to a top ranking. You can see how your site performs compared to the rest, by scrolling down to the page with your listing on.

All in all this package has saved me many hours, and its provided a few areas to work on that I would not have otherwise considered.

Interested in more? Here’s the link: Free SEO Tool

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Recently my home based business website was dropped by the search engines. It happened across them all, and the dropped occurred over about a week.

There are often comments in the forums about this. Your site is included one day and the next its gone.

Usually when this happens, the finger is pointed at search engine algo’s, network failures or web hosts etc

A few broken links caused my problem.

If this has happened to you, here are two free online tools which will give your web page the once over and identify any obvious issues.

They are:

• Summit Media: This search engine spider simulator provides you with a report on aspects of the page that are used to determine how highly in a search engine the page is ranked, and also gives some general usability feedback.
• SiteReportCard: provides free website analysis, optimization and promotion reports. Tools offer valuable information to help improve your web pages and increase your search engine ranking. They provide detailed reports on various aspects of your web pages including:

  * Broken Links
  * Misspelled Words
  * HTML Validation
  * Load Time Analysis
  * Meta Tag Optimization
  * Image Optimization
  * Search Engine Inclusion
  * Site Popularity
  * Keyword Analysis

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

One of the most effective methods of getting traffic to a sales page is very well-known within Adsense circles (used to send traffic to Adwords advertisers through the Adsense program), but not as well known for traffic generation directly to sales letters.

That method is the content site. There are literally thousands of people making a living online by simply creating content sites, placing Google Adsense code on those content sites and collecting a check from Google every month.

There are literally thousands of others who have sales pages selling products and services who have never created a content site and pay for their traffic through the Google Adwords program. Much of that traffic is coming from those who are creating the content sites and placing Google Adsense code on their pages.

Isn’t that interesting? If you have a sales page selling a product or service; how much could you save by cutting Google out of the loop? A lot! If you have been creating content sites and depending on Google for a paycheck, how much more could you earn if you sent that traffic to a site selling an information product of your own? A lot!

There is even more money to be gained with this strategy then you might first imagine. At first, you might be tempted to think that the only money being left on the table is the money going to Google for providing the Adwords and Adsense programs. Nothing could be further from the truth. If that was the only money involved, then the percentages that Google keeps are very small… their service is well worth that price.

But it’s not! That money is only the start. Let’s consider the following facts to see that we can actually earn a multiple of whatever you are currently earning from your Adsense check or from your product site if you cut Google out of the loop.

1. The Adsense algorithm isn’t perfect. It often shows ads that aren’t very relevant. If you cut Google out of the loop, you can make your content site to sales page site traffic 100% relevant 100% of the time.

2. Adsense publishers often only get 0.5%-15% click through rates on any Adsense ad due to a number of factors. The method I will show you in this article will deliver 25% of the hotest buyers from your content site to your traffic site continually.

3. Adsense is currently a negative ranking factor on all three major search engines (see RankingFactors.com for more information on that). That means that by running Adsense on your content sites, they are slowly losing search engine traffic month after month. By removing the Adsense and sending that traffic directly to a product site, you will retain your search engine traffic.

4. Many have reported getting banned by the Google Adsense program. You came to the Internet to make money because you wanted more control and freedom over your life. By getting a large percentage of your income from a single company (Google), you are sabotaging your efforts. You are at the mercy of Google just like you were/are at the mercy of any employer.

5. If you are selling a product using Adwords traffic, you also are at the mercy of Google and bidding wars. You must continually improve your conversion ratio or the ongoing bidding wars will eventually eat up your profit. Google (or Overture or any other bid PPC system) is slowly allowing your competitors to either receive more traffic while you receive less… or causing you to pay them more and more of your profit every month as you are forced to raise your bids to continue to receive traffic.

Wouldn’t you rather generate your own traffic and not be held hostage to bidding wars?

So we are agreed that you want to cut Google out of the loop whether you are a content site creator or the seller of a product or service; right? How?

Well, first of all you will nead to learn the skills of the other side. They aren’t difficult whichever side of the fence you are on. If you are a content site creator, you can pick up InfoProdCreation.com and have your own product 35 hours from now with 5 hours of work. If you are a seller of a product or service, you already have the skills to create content sites. Just write articles instead of sales pages and give information instead of trying to sell. Make it a multi-page site instead of a single page sales letter.

And I’m about to give you the secret to traffic delivery from a content site to a traffic site. It’s very simple. Create a home page with only the following elements:

1. A very short 2 paragraph, 3-5 sentence description o your product or service (no selling here).

2. A large (size 6) link that says either “Enter Site” or “Enter Here”. This link leads to your product site.

3. Three smaller links (size 2) on a single line below the above link that lead to the rest of your content site. They can say “Widget Articles”, “Widget Reviews”, “Widget Forum” or whatever types of content you have on your content site… about widgets in this case.

You will find that about 50% of the traffic on a content site eventually ends up at the home page. You will find that about 50% of those that end up at the home page will choose to click the “Enter Site” or “Enter Here” link. You will find that those 25% of the content site visitors (50% of 50%) will be fairly pre-qualified to read your offer. In many, many split tests, this traffic has out-performed Google Adwords traffic.

Have fun and please leave a comment and let me know how much more money you are making with this strategy. I would love to hear from you.

Come check The Ramblings of James D. Brausch. My marketing blog is updated regularly with stuff the other guys would put in an ebook and sell you.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Here is an article which was submitted to our article directory today. Because it’s very topical decided to publish here as well.

The article lists at good page rank prediction tool. If you wish to follow-up there is another good one at http://www.searchengineengine.com/

Anyway here is the article ………………

With much enthusiasm and equally much concern, there are clear signs that a new Google PageRank update is happening right now as we speak.

Most of you, web site owners, publishers and SEO consultants, are probably dreading these updates just as much as I do: after a period of working hard into acquiring new valuable links, the inevitable question is “Will I be rewarded? And if so, just how much?”

Let’s take a glimpse into what the new PageRank update is bringing:

First, let’s see what will your page’s new PageRank be?

If you haven’t done this yet, check the page(s) that interest you using a Future PageRank tool (available from http://www.teawithedge.com/google_pr_update.html ).

This simple tool sends queries to known Google data centers in order to retrieve the PageRank of the given URL. It should normally show the same PageRank for all centers, however, if you run the tool during an actual PageRank update, you can see variations from one data center to another thus previewing what your page’s future PageRank will be.

Caught any changes?

Whatever the answer, there are some logical explanations for it.

After studying the performance of several web sites, these are the conclusions I have come upon:

1. The trend to reward links from content-related web sites continues.

Web sites that have focused on gathering quality links, both reciprocal and non-reciprocal, from web sites with related content, shall expect to see their efforts to be successful: a relatively small amount of related links, even if reciprocal, proves to be much more beneficial than thousands of totally unrelated links.

However, one must not forget that climbing on the PageRank ladder becomes increasingly difficult as you ascend. If your web site already had a good PageRank before this update (i.e. 4 and above) it is possible not to see an improvement on the 0 to 10 scale. The true PageRank scale is exponential: the distance from 3 to 4 is much smaller than the distance from 4 to 5, and the distance from 4 to 5 is tiny compared to the distance from 5 to 6!

If you know you have planned and executed your SEO plan correctly in terms of building link popularity (and that means focusing on gathering links from related sites, work towards getting non-reciprocal links, and paid attention to various way PageRank can leak out of your pages), keep on the good works and if possible intensify them: you’ll be rewarded by the next update, depending on how high is your current PageRank.

2. Newly created web sites are able to achieve a nice PageRank from their first PageRank update, providing they played fair in the link building game: little but quality links, and care for not leaking PageRank when not necessary can easily get a PR of 3 to a new site!

The issue of PageRank leaking has been probably overly-discussed within the SEO media, yet it might still be useful to mention that there is “good” leaking and “bad” leaking and it’s only up to the site’s publisher to make a choice:

- “good leaking” is when a site links to external resources that are of benefit for its readers, thus giving a vote of trust and approval to the linked site;

- similarly, “bad leaking” is when a site associates itself with a resource search engines (Google, in this case) dislike, such as link farms, sites employing gray or black SEO techniques, or sites with totally unrelated content (this usually happens when, in an attempt to monetize a site, ads and links to unrelated resources are published).

3. Sites that acquired no new linkbacks since the previous update seem not to be penalized (unlike a while ago!), and stay constant with their older PageRank.

The current PageRank scale seems to be stable and it might take a while until it is brought down a level, in order to keep some proportions to it.

If this is the case for your sites, it might be a good idea that you start a link building campaign in order to make sure your site is not in danger of being brought down at a further update. Depending on the intensity and quality of your campaign, you can even go up the ladder – with all the benefits this can bring.

To sum up, Google’s new PageRank update shows clear signs of continuing the existing trend of rewarding those who employ clean, honest techniques against the less innocent ones. This is nothing but good news for the SEO community and serious publishers, however, there’s no guarantee we will live to see the end of the war between the “good” guys and the “bad” guys of the SEO world.

Otilia is an e-Marketing expert. She publishes MarketingWHO.com, a Marketing Links Directory, and TeaWithEdge.com – Marketing & e-Marketing Articles and Resources.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Over this year I have decided to focus on natural search engine traffic for the Home Based Business site.

Last few days have been a reminder of how fickle the search engines can be. One day you have a world record (well in your own mind) number of keywords with high ranking, then – bam – no warning all listings disappear.

I happened to me yesterday. Everything gone from MSN. Having checked the forums it seems this is pretty normal and usually the listing reappear.

In the past when this has happened the cause has been tracked to keyword density, with some of the new content taking densities past the limit. This time though 90% of my backlinks disappeared. All pages where affected.

One of my larger keyword has been relisted today (phew !) so am hoping the rest will find their way back over the next few days.

Speaking of websites – still waiting for WordPress to be updated to V2.01. Fantastico scripts must almost be done by now. Can’t wait to get into developing the next site without the hassel to the current bugs in 2.0

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Have had good success in the last few weeks with search engine listings. Now have six keywords on the first page in MSN.

Traffic from these is generating an average of $3 per day. Not big money by anyones standards but a start. I’ve read that you get traffic from MSN first, then Yahoo then Google.

Now I know the formula its just a matter of adding more and more keywords and as the traffic grows so too will the income. I reckon its time to have a go at a two word keyword.

The key was finding a small E-Book called SEO Made Easy. It is a free giveaway as part of the SEO-Elite promotion. When I followed the instructions in the E-Book my search engine rankings lifted. What more can I say.

There has been some severe pain also. I wrote last time that I had settled on WordPress as the basis for future websites. Made the mistake of upgrading to 2.0 without keeping my backups. Serious, serious error. Ended up dumping the whole site as it introduced several bugs which made the no longer viable.

Good news though WP2.01 is out. Just need to wait until its available through Fantastico and (cross fingers) looking at the bug sheet, the problems I was experiencing will be gone. Will be so pleased to be back to building up the work at home site.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.