I’ve been driving some traffic by writing articles but so far my WA site is only getting a steady 8-9 visits per day. Some of my articles were not even showing up for their keywords in search results. Even if my articles show up in listings, my resource box won’t be enough to make people click through my site. I know I’m competent with SEO but I never really had a method for ranking a brand new site and I needed to build traffic as fast as possible.

Although I was desperate for traffic, I wasn’t intentionally looking for a guide on SEO but when I was browsing for products to promote at ClickBank I stumbled upon The SEO Method by David Jenyns. I was curious and decided to check it out and quickly saw David’s ambitious headline. I then searched for some reviews and landed on a forum discussion where he initially launched his SEO method and I was really surprised by the interaction and positive feedback that he’s getting from the discussion.

Based on the reviews, I was convinced so I decided to buy The SEO Method with the assurance that I can get a refund in case the content was all hogwash. Here are the 3 main videos that you can find inside:

Video 1 – How Search Engines Work

If you’ve been doing SEO for a few years now then you might find this video boring but nevertheless David does a good job of explaining how search engines work. I still got a lot of out of watching this video and this is a must for every serious SEO beginners.

Video 2 – On Page and Off Page Optimization

David then goes on to explain the optimization factors for a web page. I like it when he says that there are no hard rules when it comes to how search engines (I’m talking about Google) really rank a web page but he will give out some general rules of thumb to follow. Again there’s a tendency you’ll be bored if you’re already an expert in SEO but I still watched it just to make sure I didn’t leave anything out.

Video 3 – The SEO Method

In this video, David explains and lays out his SEO strategy. This was really a big revelation for me and I just shook my head as he draws out his diagram and realized that this is a good solid SEO attack that will really work. I don’t know how he came up with this method but I know that he has done a lot of observation and reverse engineering and basically that’s the closest thing that you can get to ever figuring out how Google ranks web pages.

Conclusion

Even if you’re already a seasoned SEO professional there’s still some things that you could learn from these videos. The SEO Method is about ranking your websites in the long run meaning that the methods involved are all legitimate white hat techniques. What you’re getting is a proven and solid plan from David who did all the hard work for us.

I have no results yet (just bought it last Friday) but I’m really excited in finally having a plan using The SEO Method. Everything is ready and I’m going to update this post for future results. My goal right now is to rank my Wealthy Affiliate review site before the end of this month. Feel free to ask  questions if you have any. Wish me luck!

Optimizing your website for search engines is not rocket science. You can actually learn just by reading some SEO blogs but if you want to get started in the right direction and avoid too much confusion, I do highly recommend you read SEO School by Naomi Dunford (Here’s my full SEO School review).

What Is A Keyword

Keywords are just words and phrases that people type in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Keywords are going to be responsible for the success of your business. Choosing the right keywords is like having your hamburger stand right in front of a very hungry crowd in the middle of Broadway!

How To Get The Right Keywords

Basically I look for 2 characteristics when choosing the right keywords. First, the keyword must have enough monthly searches. But don’t think that you need to have a huge amount of traffic in order to have a good conversion and don’t make the mistake of optimizing for broad keywords because:

• It’s next to impossible (unless you have a big budget) to rank for them, and
• The conversion rate will be much lower because the keyword isn’t that targeted

Second, the right keywords must have little competition. Basically you have to check out the number of competing websites in the search results along with some other factors to determine if you can outrank them eventually.

Please take note that this is only a basic guideline of doing keyword research. I’m not a search engine expert so please feel free to comment below if you have something to add. There’s a lot of things to learn and I would appreciate it if you can share your thoughts regarding keyword research.

Let’s Do Some Keyword Research

As an example we’re going to get some right keywords in the weight loss industry. Go to the Google Keyword Tool (FREE) and plug in the word ‘weight loss’. We’re going to start with a broad keyword so Google can spit out more ideas that we can use. First change the results to include all countries and territories.

Here we get some keyword ideas for the broad term weight loss:

• healthy weight loss
• weight loss diet
• quick weight loss
• weight loss exercise
• weight loss supplements
• weight loss programs
• obesity weight loss
• green tea weight loss
• ephedrine weight loss
• low carb weight loss

These keywords are still too broad so we need to drill down a little bit further to come up with more targeted keywords. From the initial results we’re going to choose ‘weight loss diet’ and again plug it in again. Here’s what we got:

• weight loss diet plan
• vegetarian weight loss diet
• weight loss diet supplement
• protein weight loss diet
• weight loss diet menus
• weight loss detox diet

One thing that you’ll notice is that our keywords are getting longer and that is what we want. These are called long-tail keywords and they’re made up of 3 or more keywords that are based from your initial broad keyword ‘weight loss’. I learned about long-tail keywords by reading SEO School and I love Naomi’s explanation on how you can exploit the power of these keywords and using it to your advantage.

With our last set of keywords we can still drill down if we want to but let’s settle in and try to see if we can rank for the keyword: weight loss detox diet

How Do We Determine Competition

Again, I’m not a search engine expert so take it easy on me, okay? When looking at the competition in the search results I first check out the number of competing websites. For the keyword weight loss detox diet we have over 800,000 competing websites.

To determine the real competition we have to surround the keyword with double quotes like this: “weight loss detox diet”

When you do this you’re asking Google (or any other search engines), How many pages in your database that have the exact phrase? Remember that this doesn’t have anything to do with how the searcher types in a phrase. Now from over 800K we only have 200K optimized results for our keyword.

That’s still a lot but there’s one trick I learned from Travis Sago while hanging out with him at the Wealthy Affiliate University (Feel free to read my full Wealthy Affiliate review). You can watch this neat little trick here. After applying this technique here’s our true competition.

From 200K we now only have 481 competing websites that are truly optimized for the term: weight loss detox diet. The general rule is that we can dominate phrases that have less than 5,000 results as competition. So having a 481 competition is a very good number for us! The keyphrase also gets around 6K monthly searches but that is not really accurate.

Researching keywords can also be a good method to come up with post titles. Typically your post can rank for this term if you will apply some proper SEO techniques like optimizing your titles, meta description, pretty urls and the most important of all… writing good quality content. If you would like to learn more, SEO School has a full discussion of on-page and off-page optimization techniques that will really help you understand how to optimize your website.

That’s it! Whew! I hope this article will help you in choosing your keywords more effectively so you can generate some of that free traffic and get customers straight into your business. Please feel free to add anything in the comments below.

WordPress is the most professional and the most customizable blogging platform. Installing self-hosted Wordpress will definitely help your blog reach a higher level.Many bloggers have questions about WordPress, how to install WordPress on your own hosting server, how to setup WordPress etc. This is the complete step-by-step guide on how to setup domain name and hosting, setup MySQL and how to install self-hosted WordPress 2.8 on your own server.

How To Install WordPress 2.8 – Step-By-Step Guide

I will reveal the answer in a while but first I want to thank all of my subscribers. I will continue to write quality articles, but I can’t guarantee how frequent it will be. The only thing you have to remember is that I do my best in offering you the highest quality of information.

Okay let’s get down to business.

It all started with a post from Glen entitled How I Left the Rat Race (And You Can Too). Basically, it’s a post on how to make money online using affiliate marketing.

I love designing websites and occasionally I make money online by selling and auctioning website templates over at the SitePoint Marketplace. But after reading Glen’s post, I quickly realized the potential of what affiliate marketing can do.

For those of you who are not familiar, affiliate marketing is the process of promoting someone else’s products in exchange for a commission.

Glen outlined his live case study on how he makes money online and I religiously followed every step of that guide. I really enjoyed the guide because it’s really helpful and most of all, it’s FREE!

After setting everything up, I anxiously awaited for my first sale to arrive but after weeks and weeks of waiting, I didn’t see any cent in my account!

It was really very frustrating!

I decided to drop affiliate marketing and convinced myself that there are only a select few who can do this stuff. But what I didn’t realize is that I’ve been following a different system. Glen’s guide on making money online is his own system. It can work for a lot of different people. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them. hehehe.

If you’re learning something new, where would you start?

The basics! I needed to learn the solid fundamentals on how to make money online using affiliate marketing.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to waste hundreds of dollars on buying re-hashed make money online e-books.

I found what I was looking for over at Wealthy Affiliate. Feel free to read my Wealthy Affiliate review if you’re interested.

And that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 54 days. I’ve started building my online business since joining Wealthy Affiliate last July 20th.

The definition of success is different for everybody and one of my goals is to earn enough so I could pursue my dreams of playing drums professionally without worrying too much on the financial side of things.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Chris Guillebeau:

You don’t have to life your life the way other people expect you to.

Take care and thanks for stopping by.

Let’s get started. Make sure you download Starkers and save it to your themes folder (/wp-content/themes/).

Note: This tutorial is strictly for beginners only

Review Mark-Up

Starkers has a really stripped down markup. You won’t find any divs if you’ll check out the source.

Add Divisions

I tried to make a layout off of the default Starker’s markup but it’s really quite challenging. So what we’re going to do is add some divisions on the existing markup so it would like this:

Header

Let’s add a container div that will hold our content. Open up header.php and add in the opening container div right after the body tag and before the header div. We also need to add a header div for our logo and tagline.

Footer

Now we need to close our container div. To do that we’re going to open footer.php and add our closing container div. We also need a div for our footer section.

Index

Now open up index.php and apply the following changes:

Please remember that you also need to make the following changes in some of the template files like search.php, page.php, archive.php, etc.

Posts

After you’re all done with the changes, it’s time to open up single.php. The changes are also similar to the previous step but this time we’re going to add a function to output our sidebar. Starkers is based from Kubrick that’s why you’re going to notice that single.php has no function for getting the sidebar.

Now all that’s left is to put in some CSS. You can download my stylesheet or you can just create your own.

Conclusion

This is only a simple 2-column blog layout. I know you can do better than this and I hope that you found some value in this tutorial. Thanks for reading.

Disclaimer: All the links below are affiliate links. I only provide reviews on this blog for tools that I’ve tried and used, so what you read below is based on experience. I only promote products that I believe will help my readers.

Today I would like to do a book review of SEO School – How to Become an SEO Ninja by Naomi Dunford.

I once had a co-worker who talked a lot about SEO and at that time I didn’t really get it and didn’t pay too much attention about it. It sounded like it was an illegal game you play to trick search engines into ranking your sites. I also felt that you needed to study a lot about search engine theories to be able to start with SEO. Well it turned out that my initial impression on the subject was totally wrong! Please do yourself a favor and delete any of these thoughts before you even get started with search engine optimization.

I have to say that SEO School really opened up my eyes with regards to getting started with SEO. After reading the first free 2 chapters, I froze and said to myself that I needed to buy this book right away. And it was the right decision. The book was really easy to read and Naomi will not bore you with the theories and technicalities involved in search engine optimization. SEO School is more like a how-to guide and teaches you things that you can do today to improve your rankings. The book was so good that I have to read it twice just to make sure I didn’t leave any pointers out.

What I Learned

These are some of the things I learned in SEO School.

• How to come up with the right keyphrase you want to rank in Google for
• Researching out competition in search results pages
• How to tell if you’re going to have any chance of ranking for your keyphrase
• Website optimization tips
• What not to do to avoid being penalized by Google
• SEO tips for bloggers
• And lots more…

Before making any changes to my site I was only getting 2% of traffic from search engines. But after reading SEO School and applying the changes, I’ve seen a steady increase of search engine traffic to my site from June 29 up to this date. My search engine traffic went up to 30% eclipsing my type-in traffic!

If you’re already a seasoned SEO expert, this book isn’t going to teach you any new tricks but I think some of Naomi’s tips can spark some ideas even with SEO veterans. This book is perfect for those who want to start learning SEO but don’t have an idea where to start. In my opinion, SEO School is also a must-have for business owners that need to hire an SEO professional. It will help business owners in filtering out those who really can genuinely help their business.

Things to Consider Before Buying this Book

Naomi swears a lot. This is no surprise if you’re a regular reader of her marketing blog. I’ve read that one guy returned the book because of too much swearing. hahaha. But she’s not offensive in anything she says, that’s just her style of writing.

SEO School will not teach you “Black Hat” SEO. Using dirty SEO tricks can rank your site very quickly but in the long run Google will catch up with these dirty tricks. Invest in the good side of SEO and you’ll never regret it.

Conclusion

I totally recommend SEO School to start off your journey in optimizing your site for search engines. I believe all the SEO basics have been covered in this book.

Another thing I like is the support from Naomi. I emailed Naomi asking about a linking experiment she did in the book and she emailed back explaining it more clearly.

The End Result

First let’s take a look at the final design that we’ll be putting together (Click the image for a larger version).

This design is the result of a mock request that I’ve been assigned to with the following requirements:

Your objective is to present any visitor who reaches your website with an eyeful of graphics, but presented in a very pleasant and easy to use / view manner. The purpose of the site is to showcase your portfolio, let them know who you are and how to contact you.

If you would look closely this is a really simple layout: large wood texture, simple logo and a straightforward menu and content.

Step 1

First, open up a 16-column Photoshop template from 960.gs. We’re going to adjust the document size by going to Image > Canvas Size. Enter 1600 for width and 1350 for height then press Ok. Just press Ctrl + ; (semicolon) to make the grids visible. Get your Paint Bucket Tool and fill the background with #f3f0e9. This is where everything is going to be lined up.

Step 2

We’re going to use a wood texture and place it at the top most part of our document.

Step 3

Let’s write a simple logo on the top left side. We’re going to use Georgia. 48px for the logo and 18px for the tagline.

Step 4

Create a simple menu, this time we’re going to position it on the right side just opposite the logo. For most of the text we are going to use Arial. Give each link proper spacing and you can use either the Rectangle Tool or the Rounded Rectangle Tool for the buttons. I then lowered the button’s opacity to 50%.

Step 5

Create a black rectangle using the Rectangle Tool, drop the opacity to 60% and place it just below the logo and the menu. Then write out a prominent message to your visitors.

Step 6

On to the featured work section. Grab your rectangle tool (doesn’t matter what fill color you use). We’re going to add a Gradient Overlay to add some depth to our background.

Step 7

Type in some text heading. Please notice how I align the elements within the grid.

Step 8

Create a 300×200 black rectangle and align the block to the grid. This will be the container for our thumbnails.

Step 9

I’m going to copy the thumbnails from my portfolio page (you can use whatever image you want) and paste it in our document. Make sure the thumbnail layer is above the black rectangle layer (the black rectangle from previous step).

Step 10

While pressing the Alt key, hover between the black rectangle and the thumbnail image. Left click when you see the mouse crosshair change. This will basically put the thumbnail inside the black rectangle. Then Ctrl + T on the thumbnail and resize to your heart’s content.

Step 11

Repeat Step 10 twice with two different images. After you’re finished with your thumbnails, your design will more or less look like this.

Step 12

Put in your content and do your best to align them on the grid.

Step 13

We’re almost finished. It’s time to create the footer. Create a new layer Ctrl + Shift + N. Outline a footer section using the Rectangular Marquee Tool and fill it with brown (492b16).

Step 14

Let’s put some effects on the footer background by applying a Gradient Overlay.

Step 15

Put content in your footer section.

Finished Layout

Here’s the finished layout (Click for a larger version).

As always please feel free to ask in the comment section for clarification on some steps. I hope you enjoyed my first layout tutorial in Photoshop. It’s not very detailed but I hope beginners can get something out of this. Thanks!

What is Archetype?

Archetype is another one of those theme frameworks in Wordpress. A theme framework can also be classified as a parent theme. A theme framework enables you to speed up theme development by providing you a solid code base to start. It also lets you work on your own customizations without touching the parent theme’s files.

Why Create Another Theme Framework?

I created Archetype to help speed up my theme development and to also learn more about theme development in general. I also want to offer something useful to the community.

Inspiration

Archetype is heavily inspired by Ian Stewart’s Thematic. I also checked out ThemeHybrid’s code but I always find myself coming back to Thematic.

Multiple Layouts

Archetype has 10 layouts that you can choose from including fixed and liquid content using two or three columns. The good news is most of the layouts work in Internet Explorer 6 and above.

Download and Screenshot

• Download Archetype Wordpress Theme (Beta Release)
• Archetype Screenshot

Feedback

Please go ahead and try it out. I would love to build a community behind Archetype so I would greatly appreciate it if you can give your thoughts and feedback. Thank you.

Micha posted a link to the layout that needs to be sliced. I checked it out and I really liked it. I’m not sure if Micha wanted the image to be animated but I decided to do just that by using the jQuery Cycle plugin.

Take a look at the final result if you’re interested.

I didn’t convert the said layout, instead I created a basic web site design layout in Photoshop with curves similar to the layout.

The main thing that you should plan out is where to slice your layout. This is one of the reasons why I think it’s important for a web designer to know how to write HTML and CSS. Knowing HTML and CSS basics will help you to design a layout that can be easily sliced and converted to HTML. You can design a layout in Photoshop with a lot of different methods but the difference will show up when it’s time to slice the design.

Let’s slice the main background graphic.

Then let’s slice up the images we need to cycle. I saved them as a .GIF but you can save them in .PNG if you like because we are after the transparency here.

Now let’s see how easy it is to convert this into HTML and CSS

HTML Basic Markup

We only have the main container which will hold up the images and the content.

<body>
<div id="container">
	<div id="cycle">
		<img src="image1.gif" width="610" height="522" alt="description of image here" />
		<img src="image2.gif" width="610" height="522" alt="description of image here" />
		<img src="image3.gif" width="610" height="522" alt="description of image here" />
	</div>
	<div id="content">
		<h1>Welcome!</h1>
		<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nullam lectus mauris, pretium sed viverra eu, luctus quis risus. Cras convallis euismod eros, eu varius magna condimentum scelerisque. Vivamus eu tellus justo. Nam urna nisl, aliquet vitae sollicitudin ut, feugiat non est.</p>
		<p>Aliquam blandit tortor lectus. Cras at nisi consequat dolor suscipit venenatis eget ullamcorper eros. Vivamus nec purus nisi. Integer ut lorem risus, ac feugiat sem. Nam et massa enim, quis dictum purus. Proin tortor dui, laoreet at volutpat eu, pharetra elementum risus. </p>
	</div>
</div>
</body>

CSS Basic Styles

We apply a relative position to the container so we can absolutely position the images. Then we just float the content to the right and apply proper paddings on the side.

body {
	background:#eee2d2;
	font-size:12px;
	font-family:Arial;
}

p {
	line-height:18px;
}

#container {
	width:960px;
	height:697px;
	background:transparent url(containerbg.png) no-repeat;
	margin:0 auto;
	position:relative;
}

#cycle {
	width:610px;
	height:522px;
	float:left;
	position:absolute;
	top:99px;
}

#content {
	width:310px;
	float:right;
	padding:0 20px;
	position:relative;
	top:240px;
}

Calling and Initializing jQuery Cycle

Just put this inside the head section and you’ll be up and running.

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="jquery-cycle-min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
   $('#cycle').cycle({
	    fx:    'fade',
	    speed:  3000
	 });
});
</script>

Conclusion

This is basically one quick way to deal with curves and I’m sure you can come up with a lot more creative and unique layouts. This article also shows how you can get creative with the jQuery Cycle plugin. I hope you get something out of this article and I would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for checking this out.

Whenever you search something on Google, you’ll now see a “Show Options” link just above the first result. Now you have different options to search for videos, forum discussions and reviews.

There’s also an option filter called “Any Time” which will allow you to view results based on the latest date. This will inspire website owners to write updated content.

There’s also a new tool called “Wonder Wheel” which looks a mind map diagram for keywords. The keyword that you searched for is in the center and surrounding it are related keywords. This will help website owners on deciding what keywords to optimize for their sites.

I also love the “Timeline” feature which shows you a graph of how many search results for a keyword in a particular year and you can even drill down if you want to check individual months in a year.

View this video from Google that highlights the new search result changes.

SEO Pointers To Take

• Website owners need to focus on posting the latest updated content to take advantage of the “Any Time” results.
• Video is going to be vital in drawing traffic from search results.
• Reviews will go a long way if you have any products on your website.
• Forum discussions can also strengthen traffic from relevant forum sites mentioning your site.
• SEO keywords in the “Wonder Wheel” can help you focus on keywords that can rank your site.