There is software out there that will submit your PAD files for you. The problem is that the success rate is not very high. If you want to do a more thorough job of software promotion and link building, manually submitting your software is the way to go.

Pad Submission Tool

If you are interested in inbound links from high authority domains, check out 30minutelinks. I tried it and have found it to be very useful and well worth the $97. I liked it so much, that I even created this nifty little tool to help with manual submissions

Anyway, here is how it works. You copy your PAD file URL. Next, you go to this PAD File submission tool. Basically, you start with clicking link one. The page loads in a frame. You paste the location of your PAD file into the form and click submit. Then, you click on the next link and submit your PAD file to the next software directory.

Currently there are 255 directories. I will be adding more as I can find them.

Post from: Internet Marketing Atlanta

Free PAD file submission tool

This is especially useful if you want to use a short term for the page navigation and a long headline. For example, when using Wordpress as a standard CMS, you may set your home page to “Home” in your wordpress settings. This works out well because in the wordpress page navigation, you have a link to your home page titled “Home”.

*********************Plugin Issue*************************

The newest version of this plugin changes the header of the navigation title on the actual page. For example, if you change your “Home” page to “Blue Widgets”, while your site navigation will show “Home”. However, if you are on the “Home” page, the navigation will show “Blue Widgets”. This is not a big issue, unless you use a really long page title and it breaks your navigation. I will create a fix for this and release version 1.3 ASAP.

But the problem is, that the word “Home” in your headline (and your headline should be an h1 tag), does not help your SEO nor does it give the reader a great message.

I have used the plugin on this page to change the headline from “SEO Header Plugin” to “A Plugin For SEO Headers”.

For example, all though the name of the home page of my site is “Home”, I have used “SEO Internet Marketing Services Consultant” as my headline with this plugin.

I built this plugin based upon this Wordpress Hack provided by Scott Hendison and Heather Barger. The hack does require an edit to your template files, however this plugin does not.

Usually, I would use another template hack to change my h1 headline on certain pages, but Heather’s and Scott’s method was the best method.

How it works

While editing a post or page, simply change the headline by adding a custom meta description with the term SEO_heading:

I have tested this plugin with Wordpress 2.7.

Download The File

To install the plugin, upload the folder to your plugin directory and activate it. Once it is activated, it is ready to use.

Download SEO Headers Plugin

Any feedback is appreciated.

Post from: Internet Marketing Atlanta

A Plugin For SEO Headers

In my previous post on natural link building, we discussed a local contractors market, specifically windows. There were a wide range of stats for the sites in the top ten. But we were able to establish that for each page of the site, it would be appropriate to have 10-12 inbound links. Now, we can not just go out and add those links in one month, so lets look at how to establish a monthly capacity.

Monthly link building capacity

Every month, I make it a habit to add four new articles or blog posts to any site that I am SEOing. So, if I were targeting this market I would add to the total link capacity of the site by 40 links a month.

This month, we started with 20 pages giving us the total link capacity of 200 inbound links. We are adding four pages so the total comes to 240 links.

I want to keep my inbound linking capacity to below 25%. So that means, for a site with a link capacity of 240 inbound links, I want to be somewhere around 60 inbound links.

I look at what links I need to get in order to achieve that and I plan accordingly. For example, if the site currently has 45 inbound links, I know that I need 15 inbound links.

However, I do not go over 10% of inbound link capacity. So, if my link capacity for the month is 240, than I would not link build for more than 24 inbound links, unless I was staging an anomaly, which we will talk about in a minute.

If I find that my site is above the link capacity, I simply add inbound links at a 5% rate every month. Having no new inbound links is a bad idea, so something needs to be done every month.

Keep in mind, that this is for a new site, or a site that has not been SEO’d. Sites that are older and already have a solid inbound link base do not have to be handled with such kid gloves.

An anomaly, the natural way

The internet is a very large place, and websites get links for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, they naturally get 1000’s of links for viral content in a short amount of time.

Of course, it would be nice to have some linkbait, which is something I do on a regular basis. But in some industries, you may have to create the effects of viral content manually.

I usually wait for the right opportunity. Like if an article I added to the site is getting some attention. Or, we are at the bottom of the first page, or top of the second page of Google and need a little boost to close the gap.

Basically, I go out and link build until I can not possibly do it anymore, sometimes reaching the 60%-80% link capacity mark. I only do it for 2-3 weeks. If you funnel the link juice correctly, the inbound links should push you several spots in the SERPS.

Keep in mind, Google is looking for a “natural” anomaly, so most of the links need to go to the post or page that is viral. If you can keep on the home page, this would be ideal.

Post from: Internet Marketing Atlanta

Developing Natural Links For New Sites — Part 2

I know that sounds a little over the top, but I was struck by a black hatter last week and it cost me some traffic.

I spent several weeks working on a site using WP e-Commerce. While I was working on the site I kept a log of all the changes required and I wrote a SEO tutorial for wp ecommerce.

After I wrote the post, it was number three overall for “SEO wp ecommerce” in Google the next day. It was already bringing in some great traffic.

The next day I did a search and found my post at number three in Google, but it was not my site! I was very upset, after all I spent many hours working on the post.

I looked up the site’s owner in whois and sent him an email. I also left a comment on the site asking for a link back to the original post.

While I waited for his reply, I emailed the search commander and asked him what he would do. He said there was not much as far as recourse since the offender was not in this country. He sent me a link to Google’s solution for this type of problem.

He also alerted me to a very cool plugin, called RSS Footer. Basically, it puts two links into the footer of every post in your RSS feed. Matt Cutts said this is a good way to foil RSS scrapers because they always link back to the original post and Google will credit the original poster.

Fortunately, the guy who took my post was kind enough to put a link in his post to my original post. It did the trick…the next day I was number two overall in Google again.

I emailed the RSS scraper and told him he had my permission to post all of my content, as long as the RSS footer links were left intact. So, RSS Footer gives you a way to leverage RSS scrapers as a link building tactic.

Post from: Internet Marketing Atlanta

RSS Footer Plugin Is A Great Link Building Tool

There are four major changes that need to be made to your wordpress theme files as well as WP e-Commerce.

SEO Tutorial Overview

1. Some SEO basics.
2. Remove Wordpress headline from “products-page”.
3. Add h1 to item/product page.
4. Add h1 element to Category/Group pages.
5. Title tags and meta descriptions

SEO Basics

For those of you just getting your feet wet when it comes to SEO, there are a few basic on-site optimization fundamentals that should never be overlooked, especially if you plan on driving traffic from the search engines in a competitive market. There are three main factors, the title tag, the h1 tag and the inbound anchor text to your page.

It is important that each page have a unique title tag and h1 tag that closely match (contain the targeted keyword phrase). The h1 tag is often and mistakenly used in the logo and is not unique to each page.  In Google’s algorithm, any content in the h1 element is more important than any other content on the page. For more on the H1 tag you can read Scott Hendison’s explanation or checkout this SEO basics article (third step).

Removing The Products Page Headline Title

WP e-Commerce uses the page template in order to display all products. For example, the products-page will contain a list of products that you choose in the setup. When you click on a category/group, that category or group will be displayed inside of the wordpress products-page. It will send a string to the URL so it may look something like: site.com/products-page/test-category

Since the wordpress products-page is always present, the title (headline) for the page will remain no matter what category or product you are viewing and will say “Products Page”. Lets get rid of the page title for the products page so we can use h1 tags that are related to our products.

The Page/Post title is featured above the content and is displayed in the page.php template with something like this (this is your general wordpress theme, not the WP e-Commerce theme):

Lets tell wordpress to display the page title as long as the page is not the “Products Page”.

Add H1 Element To Items Page

Not to be confused with what Wordpress calls the “Products Page”, this is the page where your individual products are for sale. For example the page would be:

site.com/products-page/example-category/another-test-product/

In products_display_functions.php on line 645 you will find the following code.

Change the h2 elements to h1 elements.

You will need to play around with the stylesheet to get the look you want, I am not going to go to in depth into the design process here. But, In the iShop.css, look for h2.prodtitles and create another style with h1.prodtitles. If you use the same attributes, will get the same look as the h2 elements.

H1 Element On The Categories/Groups Page

You will need to edit the core WP e-Commerce files in order to get the h1 element included at the top of the categories pages. The category pages are sometimes referred to as group pages. It is important to name them with the proper keyword that you are targeting.

Open products_page.php in your favorite text editor. You will find the following code starting at line 63.

On line 64 replace the strong element with the h1 tag. Remember to replace the closing tag with it is well and leave the class=”cattitles” the same. Do the same thing on line 70 since it is an if/else statement.

This is how the code should look after you are done (you could just copy and paste if you like).

Title Tags And Meta Descriptions

The title tags and meta description hack was a little bit more involved. Most of it, actually all of it, is done outside of the WP-e-Commerce plugin. First of all, before you can test the description tag, make sure that your categories/groups have a description added to them, since this fix uses that content as the description tag for the category pages.

I built this script based on this one, I modified it to include a title tag for the products page itself. I also added the meta description capabilities.

The category pages function determines that it is indeed a category page, queries the database for the category name and puts it into the title tag. It also takes the first 150 characters of the category description and puts it into the meta description tag

The item (actual product) pages function does the same thing as the category pages function, except that it makes sure you are on the product page. It replaces the title tag with the product name and blog info (you need to edit script to put your blog info in). It also includes the first 150 characters of the first description in the meta description tag.

The title tag and meta description for the main products page(products-page) is added manually when you install the script. Simply, replace, “My Products Page Title” with the appropriate title tag.

I normally use a plugin to add the meta description tag, but that plugin conflicted with WP e-Commerce. So I am using SEO Title Tag and wrote the next part of the script to add the description tag. Basically, it simply adds the description tag to every page that is not on the products page by adding the first 150 characters of the post.

This goes into the main Wordpress header template where your normal title tag would go.

Alright, you should be well on the way to a nicely optimized WP e-Commerce site. You still need inbound links so check out linkvana.

Post from: Internet Marketing Atlanta

WP e-Commerce SEO Tutorial

Identify your competition

When researching a new market, I analyze the competition to see what they are doing and what their advantage is. I do a search for the top three keywords I am targeting and find three sites that show up in the top page of Google for each search. Once I have found my competition the fun begins.

What is their domain age

So the first factor in this formula is the domain age for each site. You can check the domain age with this cool little tool. Domain age is actually very important in my experience, especially in respect to the example I am going to use here.

So the three sites that I have analyzed have the following domain age:

Site 1: 5 years 3 months
Site 2: 5 years 2 months
Site 3: 1 year

Alright, this tells me that we have some aged domains coming up in the SERPS, but a site that is less than one year is also able to rank well.

Inbound Links

Inbound links are the single most important factor in establishing credibility with the search engines in most cases. You can use Yahoo! Siteexplorer to see inbound links (here is a video of me using it). So after doing our research I found the following.

Site 1: 150
Site 2: 16
Site 3: 267

I was surprised to see that site 2 only had 16 inbound links. Obviously, domain age is playing a factor here, and the other thing worth noting is that we have a benchmark for a site that is a year old on how many links will be required. Link quality is also a part of the factor here, but we will discuss that later.

How big is each site

We can see how many pages the links are spread across. This gives me an idea of how many links I can build per page.

Site 1: 10 pages
Site 2: 5 pages
Site 3: 20 pages

The formula

To start off with, lets determine the average amount of links to the site based on pages.

Average pages: (site 1 pages + site 2 pages + site 3 pages)/ 3  = 11.7

Average Links: (site 1 links + site 2 links + site 3 links)/ 3 =  144.3

So now lets see what the link to page ratio is:

144.3 / 11.7 = 12.3

Of course, you could find the median instead of the average which would make sense in some cases where there is a serious outlier, but I do not think it is necessary in this case.

So now we know that it is typical for sites in this industry to have 12.3 inbound links per page. This gives us our link capacity for our site. Theoretically, If I have a site with 20 pages, than I know that I could have 246.6 inbound links without triggering a Google filter. Of course we can not just get 246.6 links in the first month without being hit for spamming. So we will discuss monthly link capacity in the next post.

Read part two of this post.

Post from: Internet Marketing Atlanta

Developing Natural Links For New Sites

A guy named Shaun from India text messaged me and asked for a link in exchange for a logo design, business card design or any other graphic design.

I actually bit, that is why this random post exists.

Shaun not only got one link, he worked in four links. Not bad! I got the logo, and it was ok, plus he offered to do a free redesign. Which I accepted. He gave me three proofs. They were very basic, but overall this is a very effective strategy for link building.

I am considering a offering a short site video review in exchange for links. Basically, I would review the site from an SEO perspective and give feedback in exchange for a link. Any thoughts?

Post from: Internet Marketing Atlanta

A Link Request That Worked

Anyway, if you are just starting out, go get a cheap hosting package at godaddy.com. You can get one for just $4 per month.

Go buy a cheap web design template and download dreamweaver. You can use it free for (30 days).

You need to brand your website with a unique look and custom icon. I also found these cool vista icons.

This post is very random I know, but that is what happens when you have very little sleep. Anyway, you can also get membership logos, or any other logo for that matter.

Next, simply upload your new site with some great content and start your SEO Campaign!

Post from: Internet Marketing Atlanta

Getting Started On A Budget

The purpose of using this tool organically would be to find out what people are asking related to your website subject and answer it for them. If you answer the question in a way that is fun, informative and helpful you will find that your blog article attracts traffic and links.

One other obvious benefit will be that you will have a page that matches the long tail search perfectly, increasing your chances of jumping some sites in the SERPS that have more ranking authority than yours. Personally, I would use the question just as it appears in the tool as the title. Lets do a quick example.

Lets say that we have a website that is focused on technology including digital cameras. We have just signed up for a killer digital camera affiliate profit sharing campaign and can not wait to start earning some profits. So, we jump on over to the SE Question Machine and enter our keyword phrase “digital cameras”.

The Results:

So now we see that according to wordtracker this question has been asked 153 times in search engines they have access to, which does not include the three big boys: Google, Yahoo and MSN.  So we can assume the searches for this phrase is much higher.

Lets check out our competition and see what we are up against. Obviously digital cameras are a very competitive market.  A search in Google for  “when was the first digital camera made” returns no exact matches. To dig a little deeper, I searched for “intitle:when was the first digital camera made” and found out that the only result with an exact match is a dogpile search result that got indexed by Google. The “intitle” result gives you pages with that keyword phrase in the sites title.

Wiki.answers does have some closely matching posts but substitutes “made” for “invented”. All though, wiki.answers carries some link authority, this should be a long tail keyword phrase that is obtainable quickly.

Write The Article

Writing the article should be very easy. Simply research the question and give very helpful, informative information to your reader. For a post like this, find a picture of the first digital camera and post it. Give your readers a reason to link to your site.

Build Some Links

Call in a favor with a buddy who has a blog, or do whatever you do to get links. But link to this page with the anchor text: “when was the first digital camera made”. Or at least a part of that phrase. You will be suprised at how quickly you show up in the search engines. Especially if you read my posts on the title tag and header tags.

I would love to hear ways that you are using this tool. Cheers!

Post from: Internet Marketing Atlanta

Find Out What People Are Asking Search Engines