Ever since the latest algorithm update to fight SEOs and opening a play-field for negative seo I had notice a pattern that was really puzzling me what is going on. Even tho I had some smaller sites penalized with obviously lower quality links and way to targeted anchor texts I also had penalized some high quality sites with very good and strong links, diversified anchor texts and what not.

So the question and doubt that was popping on my head was: Why on earth an over-optimization (anti seo) algorithm would penalize this strong site? While I can understand how the smaller one would have gotten affected from this latest update I had a puzzling theory on what has happened with this bigger and aged website.

I started to analyze the two sites and see what they do share in common and it didn’t took me long to find that the two sites would share

• The same Google Webmaster Tools account
• Both sites used AdSense Ads from same account
• Both sites shared the same Google Analytics account
• Affiliate links & listings

Aside those 4 points, the sites shared some similarities in links, but not at a scale that should be mentioned. As I said the bigger site is one that I took to heart and took good care of it, no sloppy links & only links from high quality relevant sites (curious to know? nope they were not paid for links, but does that make them more natural then the paid ones?), well structured layout and silo-ed content. The only thing that the site would have as negative (or lack off) is social signals, but hey I am not a very social oriented person and I like to focus communication in less channels and preferably more targeted. This means that if I want to communicate to visitors of my website that would be either through;

• Blog post
• Newsletter email
• Tweet on Twitter
• Facebook Fan Page

But definitively not through all 4 channels. Can you immagine if you followed this site through facebook, feed subscription, email newsletter and twitter and you would get the same identical message from me via all 4 channels? I don’t know about you, but I would unsubscribe for sure.

On that note, neither dnseo.net has any social signals (or if any, they are very weak). So I could presume the lack of social signals is not the reason why that site got torched (hey its still indexed, just no signs of it even for long tail keywords).

It was puzzling hard to figure out, so I wanted to further analyze things and added another few sites (of relatives, friends and mine too) to analyze and compare, some of the sites were penalized some were still holding strong in the rankings as before, few shared the same/similar patterns as the 4 above mentioned and others didn’t.

The results were even more shocking, and again the penalized sites showed up to be the ones that had at least 3 of the 4 above mentioned points in common, and that made me think that Google is labeling sites based on user profile. Let me explain, if Jim has a site for which he has done heavy seo and triggers some patterns in Google algo, most likely even sites of Jim on which he hasn’t done any heavy seo or over optimization would get torched because he is labeled as SEO (remember, i referred to this over-optimization algorithm as an anti-seo algorithm early in this post, and it wasn’t for no reason).

But that was just a theory I was thinking of while looking at my analyzes. Obviously I dropped it off the theory thinking “No, this would be plain dumb to be true” and moved on to look for new patterns to identify the issue, until… I happened to read THIS ARTICLE on potpiegirl.com.

If you read the post you will find out that Jennifer (THE potpiegirl) asked a question via Twitter to Matt Cutts with regards to a legitimate question of a WarriorForum user, where he was penalized/filtered/torched even tho he had not used any of the black hat techniques that Google mentioned on their eye-washing post about the Titanic update.

That means, the dude had not used hidden keywords within the body of his website, no keyword stuffing, no blatant spam through completely non relevant articles. What his marketing techniques involved was: Guest blogging on high quality & high relevant blogs for his niche, period.

Cutts answer to PotPieGirl via twitter was .. well, look at it by yourself

Matt Cutts on Labeling SEO - Image Credit: Potpiegirl.com

Ugh.. Deja Vu!? Nope, it’s not a deja vu it is my theory popping up once again, but this time is not just in my thoughts, nor my ideas, it comes out typed from the fingers of Matt Cutts the head of Google’s Webspam Team. So that dude had all those sites, and perhaps he had used something shady (not keen to check them sites and not even important to do so, pages rank in SERPs not the user who is behind them) but along with those sites his legitimate site, apparently clean from spamming perspective got torched too because of the other sites he owns? Ugh!

Recap & What SEO Labeling Would Mean

Once a SEO, always a SEO, that would be the short recap of the entire post to be honest. If you have done seo for one site and you’ve used any shady technique that Google doesn’t like (keep on track with this, because what Google likes today it won’t like tomorrow) in site B, C and D then rest assured that site A will get torched since you’ve been labeled as a spammer.

What this labeling means for me is: Astrit, go dark..i mean really dark, all the way underground and act as if you really are a black hatter! Hide from Google as if you have to hide from a horde of hungry zombies, because if they sniff, hear or find a track of you (r sites where you might have performed a test or two) you’ll be grounded even with the sites on which you’ve been the good boy.

I might be completely wrong and Google is not labeling sites based on user profile since each property (website) may or may not have involved same techniques that the other site(s) from the same user – which would be the right way to treat each property, because websites are the ones rankings in the serps, actually even more specifically specific pages are the ones that are ranking on the SERPs and not the “user” that is behind those sites/pages. But my gut feeling tells me that we are labeled, profiled and categorized into Google’s storage basement room, and every page that should be ranking in the SERPs is influenced from the profile of the user behind it – yet another signal.

Does this mean that I will drop off my sites and start all fresh with a new virtual identity and hide from Google? Hell no, what will change in my game now is the focus and only the focus. If once I was building sites for what I deemed to be good looking, easy to navigate, useful for visitors and tried to please Google and focused on ranking them in Google now the last part changes and my focus will be oriented to Bing & Blekko (as far as SEO regards) and other channels (yes, including social media marketing) – at least until i don’t get the impression they are over categorizing and classifying webmasters as Google does.

Do you have the feeling of being categorized and classified, sites that you’ve done nothing shady got torched?

No really, I am joking, this isn’t an infographic even tho it could serve just well as one after the latest Titanic err sorry, Penguin update. The “quality” results that Google was trying to achieve was a great success, emphasizes on domain authority and not content quality that G was preaching after the last few years is how the chess pol of the web should have been, and if its a success or complete failure to over-value domain authority over quality and engaging content that give searchers exactly what they are looking for.

Check this image and see who ranks #1 for this super competitive one word keyword

Now I think I can really ask my self…how stuff works?

.. but this one is not something you can take advantage of and increase rankings of your website. It is scarier then that, and it was created by Google itself in their no-excuse anti seo rampage.

Their block this and block that, too much of this and too much of that patches inevitably created a new black hole. While many of us try to see the positive side of each and every patch that is being created, adapt to that change in an attempt to succeed others are closely monitoring what these changes are for and what are the consequences by not adapting and try to figure out an opportunity to cash on Google’s mistake(s).

Death of You can’t hurt someone else’s SEO era

If months ago you couldn’t negatively affect someones rankings in the SERPs you can do it now after the latest algorithm adjustment where Google tries to patch those patterns that usually seo professionals use to improve visibility of their own properties or customers websites.

• Too much inbound links in short period of time – Raises a flag!
• Over optimized page – Raises a flag!
• Over optimized link campaign – Raises a flag!
• Too much of same type of links – Raises a flag!
• Inconsistent inbound link bursts – Raises a flag!

We were taught how we need to optimize our websites so search engine spider bots could crawl and know what the topic of our website is. We were told to optimize our websites so it loads faster (yeah, Google bot was getting too busy so didn’t had enough time to spend crawling your site). As time passed algorithm evolved and lead to new rules and methods of optimizing a website and link campaigns. Once any link was better then no links, then that shifted into targeted link from quality sources. We were also told that competition cannot hurt our rankings but with all these new adjustments in the algorithm that recently happened I started to believe that it was no longer that true, those signals were to easy to be misunderstood and that there was no way of knowing if the owner of the site was the one to blame or a competitor was after us.

Through the years of trial and error I learned that almost perfect sauce to optimize a website, avoid any dances in the SERPs and ensure that the site(s) would climb the SERPs gradually day-after-day. Closely monitored and documented everything that I would perform on a site (mine or clients) then compared the before and after each algorithm update, correlated as closely as possible each and every task I would perform with changes based on the new algorithm and adapted to the game, monitored competitors and adapted as well as improved my sites to outrank them. Followed the rules with little twists based on logic and past data to give to users and Google what users and Google needed, but there is a new dangerous player in the game and the fields gates were opened by Google itself.

New bad player in the game – Negative SEO

Throughout all my trials and errors I learned the good and the bad, the effective and negative sides of each and every approach I would/could take. Silly thing is, I was blind enough and focused on the positive things that I simply eliminated and avoided the negative side even tho at times I would ask myself what if I did this to the site that ranked above mine? what would have happened then?

Well someone didn’t hold himself to just asking that question but went further and tested it once, and tested it again and proved that 9 out of 10 times he could indeed hurt its competitors rankings by just sending those “red flag” over-optimization signals to search engines.

Obviously everything is off-site related, you can’t really get access to competitors site and just add a noindex meta to it. So what are the signals that search engines correlate to spammers;

• Forum profile links in large scale in single bursts (talking about 1-10k of such links)
• Links from bad neighborhood and link farms in large scale
• Web2.0 profile links in large scale
• Blog comments from unrelated resources in large scale

As you can see the common part of the above list is 2; cheap and easily achievable links & large scale. This is how spammers used to operate before the algorithm was patched and eliminated / penalized those spammers – far are the days when they would simply discount those links, the shorter road now is not to penalize the site algorithmically or after a manual review.

Especially after this last action taken by Google of deindexing private blog networks, as I said the shorter road now is to penalize the site rather then discount links of certain type, and many SEO’s have notice this and turned this same gun against their competitors. Google Bowling or now known as Negative SEO is nothing new to be honest, but it is even easier to be done today then it was a few weeks ago, but recently negative seo services are popping up like mushrooms and reporting stories of how Joe penalized their competitor with cheap & crap links are increasing daily – worst even, it makes curious other people and they are testing this in large scales. If once SEO firms with deep pockets could risk/afford to play this type of game to get their clients at the top..now even the middle guy can with few hundreds (if he is lazy to do it by him/herself).

Who loses? Welcome Mr. Chaos

You, me, the middle guy & girl that has a small website and tries to generate an extra income online. Definitively such techniques will not work on Fortune 500 websites and properties that are for years now online and have a huge amount of quality links form trusted resources and have gained enough trust from search engines to be penalized with similar tricks.

If you are new in this game and you don’t have the necessary knowledge nor funds nor creativity to survive the risk that tomorrow your site will be buried deep in the SERPs for something that you haven’t done but your competitor did to you is higher.

The game hasn’t changed, only the rules are made tougher

If I was to speculate that Aliens are planing to take over the World someone would call me crazy and I believe they would call me the same if I speculated that Google is just making the rules of the game much harder and less accessible for the middle guy/girl to show off in the first page of the SERPs and make profit out of it while in the same time they are increasing commercial space in their SERPs, giving more exposure & alluring positions to paid advertisers – seo is tough, seo takes time, seo is no guarantee…paid advertisement in the other hand is quick, fast and results are instant..you need to have deep pockets tho.

But I am not even speculating, I am just thinking out loud while chit chatting between me and myself to where this whole thing might be going to.. Feel free to interrupt my rant, say yours bellow.

It is about time to make a seo software review of this excellent article marketing software, the Article Marketing Robot. To be honest, if you are into article marketing, then this is one of those softwares that you really want to have in your article marketing arsenal as it can make you save a lot of time, organize your work in a way like you have only imagined and if you play your game the right way, the impact will be incredible because of the number of inbound links your site or landing page will receive. There is just one little notice I have to tell you before you even purchase this software or run the test version and register into the directories, MAKE SURE YOUR EMAIL HAS ENOUGH SPACE ALLOCATED. That’s right, I am not kidding, the software comes with over 2000 article directories in the list, and it gets updated frequently (new directories being added, dead ones being removed and so on)…so making sure your email account has enough space allocated can make the difference between having over 2000 directories registered and having only 1000 or even less. Enough of the fluff, lets get into the review.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links that redirect to the product for which I am being compensated for every purchase. The review I am writing is based on my own experience with the product. This is NOT a paid review, the only compensation I receive is through the affiliate links.

Article Marketing Robot Features

As i mentioned in the introduction paragraph above, this software comes preloaded with over 2000 article directories and blogs, exactly 2752 article directories as for the moment while I am writing this review. But the real power doesn’t rely only on this number of directories on which you can submit your articles and promote your business or product, its the numerous and excellent features that make this article marketing software GREAT and OUSTANDING (I know, you never heard me shout this loud on articles, but I assure you, this IS the real deal). The list of the features that article marketing robot has are the next (and it is going to be a long list);

• Automatically sign up to all directories and create pen names
• Automatically verify all sign ups – with a single click – checks emails, confirms registration and deletes emails
• Almost 3000 directories where to publish your article
• Spin on submit – place your spinned articles and the software will spin them while submitting
• Nested spinning feature – add spin syntax to spinned articles
• Schedule article submission – POWERFUL
• Built-in spinner – rewrite/spin your articles within the software
• Organize article directories as you wish, in separate directories based on PR, health etc.. – GREAT FEATURE
• Submission report – not just a submission report, but you can extract live or pending URLs into a simple HTML file, CVS file or directly as RSS – WOHO big a.. time saver
• Ability to BLACKLIST directories on which you NEVER want to see your articles submitted – GREAT CONTROL

My Conclusion for Article Marketing Robot

When I friend asked me to recommend him a good article marketing software that could practically do all the above features I mentioned earlier and with a high approval rate I really had to ask him first “Should the software also serve you a hot plate or a drink?” before I could recommend him article marketing robot, you know..just in case he had some weird ideas.

Even tho the approval rate might depend on YOU, YOUR article and the ARTICLE directory I would still not worry about all that. I mean, do a math, almost 3000 directories, even if you get a 90% registration success rate that still leaves you with 2700 directories in your arsenal. Call off another 700 directories because they might not have the proper category for your article, you are left with 2000 directories. Add to that even as little as 1% approval rate, that is 200 LIVE LINKS pointing to your pages for one single click (yup, the SUBMIT one). But the approval rate is much higher to be honest, when I tested the software the first time I had my articles go live within the first hour on 34 websites (auto approval thingie). On day to, I found 96 published articles, that means my spinned articles were published on 96 different domains that would be pointing links to my site (if I had placed my links in the resource box). Third day I had over 150 published articles (and here I stopped checking..), that is less then $0.51 per link from different domains within 3 days.

But honestly, article marketing robot is one of the best article marketing softwares that I have came across during these last few years, and I tested many of them, spent more then I should, I was even thinking about hiring a friend of mine programmer to get a software for me that could pretty much do all of the above mentioned features, good thing I came across AMR in time, I now spent $77 only for this powerful tool instead of the $1000 (minimum) i had in mind to unload for my friend to create me the software.

However, as I said, this software doesn’t serve hot plates or drinks, so minimal work is required from your end as well. Not all of the directories in the list are of TOP quality, so they need a little “push” to get the pages indexed (even tho many will get indexed without any intervention, but if I was you, i would want them ALL indexed). And if you have just a little imagination and know a bit the SEO game, you can do so MUCH MORE (perhaps I could share some tips in new articles on how to get this much more, what do you think?).

Have questions, doubts or need suggestions for article marketing robot? Just comment bellow and I will help you out.

Thanks giving is close and the big names are starting to give out huge discounts, the first one I got hold of that thought it might be of my readers interest is the V7N Directory.

For this Thanksgiving 2010 V7N Network is giving you a discount of $12.50 off Directory submission & Contextual Link advertising, all you have to do in the checkout is insert: THANKS10 as promo code and click on APPLY CODE (wow, handy instruction lol).

For those who are new to this and don’t know what V7N Network is and why it is good to submit your site on the V7N Directory you can read my v7n directory review that I wrote awhile ago.

If you know of any promotional codes for this thanks giving, please let me know so we can share it with others too and save some $$ when we can.

Cheers!

Writing out from Spain, with an extremely low connection (so slow that I can’t even upload files on my sites) and getting bored and annoyed so much that I went back on reading forums and blogs around (thing which, lately, I have been doing less and less).

One thing that grabbed my attention on the forums is the discussions regard Google PageRank that hasn’t been updated for over 5 months now and how so many webmaster feel lost without PageRank. The amazing thing is that they were really based solely on PageRank to find quality sites to get links from and now without the update they feel like lost..it happens when you get used to have everything served in a plate without lifting a finger. The fun part is that these so called webmasters and seo’s now are forced to get back to the basics in order to find the light at the end of the tunnel, those that will move fast might see the light..others will just sink down and hope that almighty Google one day will decide to do them the favor and update PageRank.

Con’s Of Relying on Google PageRank to determine quality of a site and find link partners

Even tho it is true that PageRank can be a strong indicator of the link popularity of a site and it is closely related to the crawl rate the site gets, it is however wrong to rely on Google PageRank solely when you look after link partners and resources where you can publish your articles (guest blogging or article directory submission).

It is wrong because Google PageRank can be tricked out and manipulated. During my research of link partners for some of my sites I have ended up into so many stupid webmasters that thought could their way through easily and get a link swap or even sell a link inventory, the sad part tho is..that they are for a long period in business and I believe that many other people have been scammed. Yes, I use the word scammed because that’s what it is and I will explain you now and use as an example one last case I was involved to, while searching for link partners for a car related site I was approached by a webmaster with a high PR website asking for a link swap, it would have been a great link swap since the site had the double PR then mine..and if I didn’t check the background of the site then I would have been tricked as well, because the site was an old “psychology” related site who’s domain dropped and the webmaster just registered the domain and recycled it as an car related site just because of the high PageRank.

Pro’s of not relying to Google PageRank

As I said, if I had just relied to PageRank I would have most likely exchanged links with a recycled site and be fooled, tricked and manipulated. That webmaster would have got a link from a site that has been heavily promoted, with high quality unique content, top rankings for its targeted keywords and gain more authority as a “car related” site which it wasn’t, while I would have just had a link from a sloppy recycled site.

So how do we check a site’s quality without even checking its Google PR? There are 3 main things I do check on sites with which I want to exchange links, submit my articles or whatever else involves linking and building a link profile;

• Check the link profile of the site
• Check the domain age of the site (and the web archive)
• Check the number of indexed pages the site has

The link profile of a website is a great indicator if the site has been recycled or not. If it is a car related site then obviously it’s link profile should be from car related sites.

The domain age of a site is also a good indicator and it means that the site has been online for awhile. We also know that the age of the site or the page (from where we have a link) play role on determining some sort of an “authority” of the site in the eyes of the search engines. In simple words it means: old sites were not build from webmasters to just make quick money, they were build with the intend to last long.

The number of the pages indexed of a site is another indicator of a “quality” site since this shows the site is being active and the owner of the site is regularly updating their site (well okey, this more relays to blogs and sites that use some sort of a CMS mainly).

Now that you know at least 3 key points on which to rely you can give up on PageRank as resource to determine the quality of the site, you will learn more long the way and be able to find better link partners for your site and increase your search engine rankings.

If you have any other tip or suggestion that you would like to share with the others, leave a comment bellow and spread around the knowledge.

Wouldn’t you want to have an affiliate network that would give you ALL the tools that you can immagine? And I am not referring to simple banner and textual link generator with your affiliate ID integrated, I am referring to full forms and even more (keep on following and you will find out what this “more” really is).

While I was helping a friend of mine to discover new revenue stream for her car related website I decided to search for “anything” car related that could bring affiliate earnigns (the site was already covered from PPC program and banner sales, so we needed something “extra” that would still blend with our site, be useful to our visitors and yet generate profit as well). It was a coincidence that in the same time I was approached by Daniel of T3Leads and letting me know about their latest platform and all the features included.

The sign up process was very clean and neat, it had a phone verification (on which you could choice from two options to be verified, via phone call or text SMS to your mobile phone). Within few seconds I already had my code sent to me via SMS and I could input the numbers in the registration form to be verified. You get to verify your phone after you have verified your email, which I think is a very good thing especially for advertisers as T3Leads makes sure that real and serious publishers are accepted in their program.

Once logged in I saw a very clean white panel with blackish menu bar and drop down options, which facilitate the navigation throughout the panel without having to wonder which way to go now.

In the top right section you get presented with 3 tables of information’s, your user information and current total earnings, the second table displays your earnings of today, yesterday, last week, previous week and last month, so you can compare and see how your affiliate efforts are doing and how much money you are actually doing in a glance, without needing to go through reports (of course you can do that too if you want to see reports for different periods). The last table, and not the least is the info of your Account Representative, full name of A.R., email, phone etc. So in case you need help, you got all the ways to contact your A.R. right in front of you.

But lets get back to the sweet part, the tools that you get with T3Leads Affiliate Network.

Banners research & tracking ID

Just as with other affiliate networks that you might have been you get the regular options to create aliases (which are tracking IDs) to better track each of your campaign. Once created your aliase you can then head over to the banner search form, which lets you chose banners based on different specific features you like, such as;

• Banners based on category niche (such as payday loans, auto insurance, students loan and much more)
• Banner types: static rather then animated, textual banners rather then flash banners or you can simply select all
• Banner shape
• and banner size

I am specifically mentioning these features as it is a great time saver, a feature which I haven’t seen with other affiliate networks. I can simply chose the options that I need and get results of ONLY those banner types and sizes that I have chosen, so i don’t have to scroll through hundreds of banners of different sizes.

Integrated forms to your site

This is the part that I loved mostly and that would have fit perfectly for my friends car related site, the forms. As soon as I saw this I was already imagining a new page with one of these already made forms that have everything integrated, from A to Z. No need to send visitors to a different site and show them the form, show them the firm directly in your site and keep your visitors in your site.

Currently T3Leads has 8 form templates, from easy 1 step forms (longer format) to 2 steps or even 3 steps form (much shorter format). Which can be easily generated through a javascript and even easier integrated as simple as copy/paste within your page template.

Create an entire & powerful affiliate website

This is the tool option that mostly like with T3Leads, you can create and entire affiliate site based on a CMS that T3Leads will provide to you that is;

• Easy to install – no time wasting and wondering what to do
• Easy create unique content and publish it to your site
• Hundreds of professionally designed templates to attract more leads and generate more revenue on your T3leads vertical (design matches your niche), pre optimized for the search engines, simple lead/money magnet CMS

The only thing that remains to your part is creating content and advertise your website (yeah, would be cool if they did even that heh?). You can see more benefits you could have as affiliate in T3Leads affiliate solutions page.

Earnings with T3Leads

The earning options available with T3Leads varies from the quality of leads generated as it is described in the Lead Programs page, were you can earn from a low $4-7 EPL up to $14-25 average EPL.

I haven’t yet integrated T3Leads on my friends site, as we are preparing the content and everything and most likely we will use the form (so we have to make it suit well in our site and blend) but I liked the platform and wanted to share it with you guys.

The only affiliate link you will find in this post is the banner bellow, so if you decide to sign up with T3Leads through my affiliate link I will appreciate it.

For the AdSense lovers and money makers, there are big news and some awfully great features to come with AdSense that will give more options, more ways to analyze and of course, possibility to earn MORE MONEY (yeah, I just capitalized that).

Wouldn’t you want your AdSense panel to look exactly like the Google Analytics panel, with all those fancy graphs where you can see your earnings performance, where you can filter out channels and compare them too.

Google AdSense New Dashboard Panel

Exactly, this is the first news coming out from the Google AdSense team, and I will get to the second one just in a second, lets first take a look at the new dashboard. Other then a new design, the new dashboard has much more features. As mentioned earlier, you can compare channels and see how the are performing, you can see which channels perform better and even see in a graph how your performance is improving while you are doing your A/B testing of your ad sizes and position.

You can filter the ads, and see the performance of your chosen ads over a day, week or a month period and see if you are doing better or your stats are crawling. Chose to see only channels from certain sites or multiple channels and compare them between, see the estimate earnings, the clicks, the pageviews and all the other useful information’s we already have with the old dashboard on AdSense but displayed in a graph as well.

I sent a beta test request to get accepted as well through this URL so I could personally test out the new interface and see if it has also included the that lovely “Create annotation” option as well as it has in the Google Analytics so I can mark the days where I make new changes and see how these new changes perform. If you want to see some screenshots the folks over at mytechquest have published some basic screenshots.

New Google AdSense Ad Formats, Wouldn’t You love Some New Formats?

I don’t know about you, but until now I have had to limit my designs to suit ad formats well on sites where I use AdSense only to make money online. And every time I had to hold back on an idea just because ads would not fit well there I felt like “arghh why the don’t have some new ad formats” .. i guess Google can read my mind too, of course I am just kidding. Anyway, soon to come ad formats are the next 960×250, 300×600, 728×300, I have seen similar ad formats being used…but I just can’t remember where I saw them.

Here is a cool video the Google AdSense team has created regarding the new ad formats, and you can see more videos over at Google Watch This Space

Have you had the chance to work with the new Google AdSense dashboard or to test out these new ad formats?

The very next day of my first WordPress blog my main question was: How can I improve my on-page SEO on wordpress blogs? What plugins should I use and what I might be missing but that is cool? Didn’t took me long enough to go on wordpress’s plugins page and start searching for SEO plugins, testing them one by one and classifying the ones I like and found useful and discard the others.

However, during the last 2 years I discovered much more plugins that I had missed for a long period (trust me, I could have saved loads and loads of hours on link building if I just knew about all these plugins since the start). Today I am willing to share with you all the plugins that I usually use (and in combination with the tips and tricks that I previously mentioned on my seo for wordpress post) on every site I get my hands on that is on wordpress platform.

My Top 11 WordPress SEO Plugins

Note: To install plugins it is not necessary to download the file in your hard drive, you can simply use the Plugins>Add New function and search for the title of the plugin then automatically install it.

All In One SEO Pack

I first discovered this excellent plugin back in 2007, and since then is a must install plugin for me. It gives you the options to create custom title, description, meta keywords and other meta data for each and every post or page that you write. For example, this post title in the body is “11 WordPress SEO Plugins To Skyrocket Your Rankings” while in the title attribute I have “11 Best WordPress SEO Plugins”, this way I can make attractive titles for the readers and specific titles for the search engines where I keep my keywords density higher.

Category SEO Meta Tags

While we are at the title section let me tell you that all in one seo pack plugin is lacking at one part, you can’t work out with the titles of the categories that much. You can set a format to display titles in categories but that’s it, which limits the use of keywords in the titles of the categories. However, Bala Krishna has noted already that weak point of all in one seo pack and created a plugin called “Category SEO Meta Tags”, which to be honest is a great piece of work and gives the exact freedom I have been looking around. It requires that you modify one line in the all in one seo pack plugin but it is worth doing it.

The category seo meta tags plugin lets you change the title of the categories, add custom meta description and meta keywords. An example of how is that done is the seo tutorials category of this blog. Before installing this plugin the title of that category was: SEO Tutorials .. and that’s it. The meta description was the one you give when you create the category, so I had the same text in the category page and the meta description. Today the title of the seo tutorials category, thanks to this plugin, is: SEO Tutorials | How to Learn SEO Articles, a longer, more descriptive and better title for my category I would say. In addition the meta description of the category page is different then the text you can read in the body (which actually is the description option that you have when creating a new category by default with wordpress).

Related Posts

The related posts plugin shows a list of other posts of your blog related to the post that the visitor is reading or the search engine is crawling and links to those posts. This practice assures a proper interlinking of related pages within your blog and improves your internal linking structure. There are different plugins for this same matter, so anyone would work just good as long as it shows relevant results. The one that I use is the wasabi’s related posts plugin (which I am not sure it can be found any longer, however you can find many more by performing a search on wordpress extend plugins).

Automatic SEO Links

Automatic SEO Links plugin is another plugin that I really like and it comes very handy when there is a keyphrase that I often use and would like it to be used as anchor text linking to another internal page. By simply assigning anchor text and a corresponding URL for that anchor within the panel of the plugin I can link to that specific page without needing to worry and add the link manually on the post while I type. This becomes also handy for affiliate links, it is free and there is no need to purchase some funky “premium” plugins. You can download automatic seo links plugin from wordpress.org at any time.

XML Sitemap Generator

The bread and butter for the search engines as I like to call it. Creates a XML sitemap of your site and updates it every time as you publish a new post or page and automatically pings the search engines to let them know a new page is live that should be crawled. This plugin is as well free and can be downloaded from wordpress.org.

HTML Sitemap Generator

The HTML sitemap generator, creates an additional page that has links to your internal pages with their titles as anchor text. Not very excited of these type of plugins but they are still good as it is also a good guide for the lost visitors too (well, if a visitor really needs to get into your sitemap to get what he/she needs..for me it is an indicator that you got serious problems with your internal linking structure). There are hundreds of similar plugins that can be downloaded for free from wordpress.org.

Gzip Output Plugin

Google announces that there is a new rule in the game, so we got to get adapted. Gzip output plugin will help us keep up with the game and make sure our sites loads as faster as possible. (note: make sure your host support gzip compression before installing and using this plugin).

WP Minify Plugin

Another gamer for the speed load time, compressing and minifying your javascript and CSS files to decrease load requests and increase our sites speed. Note, some plugins that use jQuery might not work properly if this plugin is installed and activated, but from the options panel you can always indicate which codes should not be included.

Search Meter Plugin

Search meter plugin is not actually a plugin that will help your on-page optimization, but instead will help you understand what are the visitors of your website after when they use the wordpress search form of your blog. Precious information’s and a great way to find new topics to blog about.

Headspace2 SEO Plugin

Headspace2 SEO plugin is a really all in one seo plugin and enables a lot of options such as assign custom titles to posts, pages, categories, tags, add to the same description meta tags, meta keywords and many other tags. It is a complex plugin that it takes some time to get used to it and work with it, but once you understand the plugin and its full potential you could not build a site without it. It also has options to import titles/description/meta tags from other plugins, such as all in one seo pack so nothing to worry about losing data or having to go through each and every post of your blog to reassign the titles.

SEO Pressor

Just recently I learned about this plugin and had the pleasure to work on it on a clients site. Long time ago I blogged about on page seo optimization factors, however it is easy to miss out something when writing a new post unless you are addicted into checking every single thing before publishing with another tool. However, with SEO Pressor you get everything right in front of your nose as you write the plugin, it shows your on page seo score and highlights what you should add as extra to improve your seo score. I really loved this plugin and I recommend it to everyone that is serious about his/her blog.

Got to recommend a SEO plugin for wordpress? Leave a comment bellow and help others.

Just recently I wrote a similar article on how to find high paying adsense keywords that I published in an article directory. However since that article was pretty much general and I never went deep into details I decided to write one for my blog and share it with my visitors, only that in this article we will concentrate more on high paying AdSense keywords for your niche website and we will get into more details.

Whenever I build the site I use a similar strategy, however I tend not to build the websites for AdSense only and I have some specific criteria that I do follow and one of those is that the site must be somehow related to products and that have a decent market but it doesn’t have to be to saturated. But from the other site, it is also a good strategy to build a few mini sites that would bring some income to pay the bills or even to fund the “main” sites economically too. Since these smaller sites purpose is not only informative but as well to generate a decent income and mainly from AdSense it has to;

• Have a decent search volume – means it there are people showing interest for this type of product/information
• AdWords advertisers should BID a certain amount per click – usually I track down those that have over $1.50 USD per click or even $2 per click
• The site should also be also product driven – in case it shows successful and exceeds my expectations I could then integrate more programs to generate even more revenue

Researching High Paying Keywords for our Niche site

Now that we have got a clean view of what type of site we want to build and that we have a clue on what market we want to build our site what we should do is perform a search based on the main keyword so we can find a more specific niche keyword in the market field that will have a high enough PPC bid. In this example we will use as main keyword “car” and with the use of the Search-based Keyword Tool (or rather, SKTool)we will try to dig deeper and find the perfect keywords for our site.

Once landing in the sktool homepage we see the form as in the above image. Insert you main keyword in the Word/Phrase field and hit the Find Keywords button. Sktool will then perform a search and display results of suggested keywords for our main keyword together with monthly search volume data, competition, suggested PPC bid and some other information’s as shown in the bellow image.

Now that we have the results and keyword ideas based on our main keyword all what we have to do is click on the Suggested Bid tab (which is highlighted in the above image) to organize the display of the results from the highest suggested BID result to lowest, you might also want to align the same results based on monthly search volume to make sure you chose a keyword that does indeed have a decent search volume otherwise we might be just wasting time building a site over a keyword that nobody searches for. You might also want to use a SEO software to perform an analyse over the competition for a certain keyword, check the market samurai review, a seo software that I strongly recommend.

With our results in front of our eyes all what we have to do next is check through the list and find some keywords with decent search volume, that has advertisers bidding over that keyword and make sure that the competition over that keyword isn’t too strong so we can get the site in the top 10 rankings and if possible by just using the free & effective internet marketing strategies so we keep our investment as cheaper as less as possible.

Expanding your site based on other high paying keywords on the same niche

We have our main keyword, we have checked the competition and everything looks good enough for us to jump in and build our site. But don’t rush, the next step you should do is perform yet another search on the keyword you have picked and find other keywords that are related to that niche so you can expand your site based on other high paying adsense keywords on the same niche, drive more traffic and of course generate more revenue.

In the following article under the make money online category I will write on how to check the competition for certain keyword and ways we can expand our site by integrating relevant programs to generate more income, so don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed (it is completely free, but you already know that) and get updated when the article gets published.