Using Twitter For Instant Web Traffic

Today I am going to discuss a tutorial I wrote a while back about using twitter to receive traffic to your website or blog. This helps to build on ranking when you have a new site. We all know that SEO takes time and work everyday. It can take a while to actually see desired results. What you need is to start getting traffic right from the get go. What better method than using twitter?

The first step in this process is to have your website ready and published on the net. Now let’s drive some traffic.

Create a twitter account

You can easily set up a twitter account in 1 minute. Simply shoot on over to twitter.com and register for a new account. It is quick and free. I would suggest customizing your twitter with a background and site logo within the background.

Getting quick follows

Now we need to get you some followers. The most you can add is about 1500-2000 followers in a day. I would add about 1400 just to stay off of twitters radar. As more people add you back, you can add more followers. You can simply search for people that are related to your niche and manually add them or you can shoot on over to buzzom.com which let’s you easily target your audience by users who are related to your niche. Build up about 1400-2000 followers right from get go.

I want to stress the fact that you need to target followers who relate to your websites niche. You need to do so because, if you are adding people who are interested in let’s say for example “technology” and your website is about “myspace layouts”, nobody is really going to be interested in what you have to offer.

Auto-Cross Posting To Twitter

So you don’t have to spend a lot of time posting your articles and links to twitter, you need to download an auto-cross poster. If you are using wordpress there are tons of plug-ins for this. Simply just search Google for an auto-cross poster or for wordpress search “Wordpress To Twitter Plug-in”. What this does is let you configure your site to automatically post headlines of your new articles with a shortened URL/Link back to your article page. These plug-ins use a link shortening service automatically so that you can have more characters to write into your tweet.

Start Posting / Adding Content

Now all you have to do is just simply post your content and with every new article you write, it will be shown on twitter. Depending on your audience and how many twitter followers you have, this will bring you about 100 hits a day with just 2000 followers. (Not everyone will click and go to your article) So this is just my range of hits. With an old news site I was getting 400+ hits a day just from twitter alone with 2000 followers.

All in all, this will help build up your websites popularity while you focus on the SEO and maintenance of website or blog. If you have any questions or like this method, please leave some feedback below.

When Is The Next Google Update

The Next Google Update

I would venture to guess that one of the most common questions on any webmaster forum involves someone asking, “When is the next Google update?” Although they are probably asking about visible PageRank updates in the Google toolbar, the answer involves a bit more than that.

Visible PageRank is what you see in your Google toolbar. At this point, that has been updating an average of every three months or so.

HOWEVER, real PageRank is continually updated and continually factored into how the search results are determined. By the time you see a change in the toolbar, any effects of that change have already long since been included in the search results.

Google updates its index data, including backlinks and PageRank, continually and continuously. We only export new backlinks, PageRank, or directory data every three months or so though. (We started doing that last year when too many SEOs were suffering from “B.O.”, short for backlink obsession.) When new backlinks/PageRank appear, we’ve already factored that into our rankings quite a while ago. What Is An Update by Google Engineer, Matt Cutts

For a few years now people have been confused as to what the cache date on page actually indicates. It used to be that if there were no changes on the page since the last cache date, then often Google would only change the cached version of the page about once or twice a month. If there had been changes, people would see the cached page updated much sooner.

Google has now changed the cache date to reveal the last date the page was accessed by Google. (Updated September 6, 2006)

“We’ve recently changed the date we show for the cached page to reflect when Googlebot last accessed it (whether the page had changed or not). This should make it easier for you to determine the most recent date Googlebot visited the page.” Google Webmaster

How often a page is crawled is determined by the number of links that are out there bringing the robots back to your website again.

Search engine spiders crawl the web on a continual basis by following links. The more links that are pointed to your site, the more often your pages will be crawled.

This means that websites with very few links pointed to them, will notice it taking longer for Google to find and index their new pages.

Websites with a large number of links pointed to them will likely see their new and updated pages added to the index quite rapidly.

The search engine result pages update continually. As Google finds new information, it is added to the index. The goal of the search engines is to display the results in the exact order of relevance to the search query. The more relevant your page is to the search query, the higher your page should show in the results.

Since the information going into that determination is continually changing, so are the results you see in search engine results. When you combine all that with occasional changes in how Google factors page relevance (algorithm) to the search query, you end up with results that are continually fluctuating.

In the end, all of this should mean very little to you as a site owner. The more time you spend focused on what Google is up to, the less time you are spending on building a website filled with quality content for your visitors.

If you follow the basic guidelines and develop a quality site that invites incoming links naturally, you can focus on your results over time, rather than day to day search engine fluctuations.

By www.website-development-training.com

2 Overlooked SEO Tricks That Can Double Your Traffic

I thought this was an interesting article that I would share with you all.By

Kenneth Koh

It’s no longer a secret that the way to get good ranking in the search engines is to build backlinks. But besides backlinks, there are two other SEO tricks that are important but often overlooked. These two factors can play a significant role in getting SEO traffic.

Today we are going to discuss these 2 overlooked SEO tricks that can easily double your search engine traffic.

1) Title That Clicks

If you are a blogger or content website builder, besides choosing the right keyword and optimizing it, you should spend some time to come out with a title that will entice people to click.

Think about it. Even if your website rank #1 in the search result, if the title of the link is boring, people will just skip your link and move on to the next result.

This is commonsense, but it’s often overlooked, especially for those who outsource article writing.

Personally, although I outsource article writing for my content websites (aka Adsense websites), I still put in the effort to rewrite every title personally. This is because freelance writers are good in writing, but they are often not good in writing juicy title.

I run a program where I help members to promote their Adsense website (membership closed). The method I use to promote their websites is the exact same method that I use to promote mine. But strange enough, my Adsense websites perform much better than theirs. Honestly I can’t think of a logical explanation except for the fact that my titles are juicier than theirs!

2) Turn Every Webpage Into A Resource Center

If you haven’t noticed, besides backlinks, Google has been putting more weight in the ‘resourcefulness’ of a webpage.

Note that I say resourcefulness of a ‘webpage’, not ‘website’.

The idea is this:

If your webpage is about headache, regardless of what your website is about, it would be good to have lots of other headache related articles (from the same website) linked to this webpage. This way, this webpage looks like a good resource center for headache.

Let me show you an interesting website that demonstrates this point:

Take a look at this webpage from Bigresources.com. This webpage, as well as other similar webpages in this website, has the following characteristics:

- All of them rank well in Google, especially in long tail keywords.
- None of them are unique content (they are syndicated from different forums).
- Every webpage contains lots of other internal links. More importantly, the links are in the same topic as this webpage. (In the example, this webpage is about javascript, update, div, frame. You can see that all the internal links in this page are related to these keywords.)

To Google, every webpage on this website looks like a great resource center where visitors can look for more information on the same topic.

Actually this is the internal linking strategy that Wikipedia adopts and it’s doing very well in the search engine. The difference between wikipedia and bigresources is that Wikipedia has unique content whereas Bigresources uses primarily duplicated content. But does Google care?

Understanding this point, when you design your website, you should make sure that the articles in the same topic are linked. This way, every single webpage in your website can look like a good resource center for that topic. For those who use Wordpress blog, this can be done by adding a ‘related post’ plugin. For static websites or other content platforms, you’ll have to think of ways to achieve the same effect.

How To Make Money With A Blog

There are many ways to make money online. Today I will be discussing how to make money with a blog. You can also use these same standards for any kind of website. This is a basic tutorial on how to make money blogging.

Making money with a blog is one of the most easy, efficient ways of doing so. You don’t have to put any time into custom coding your website or doing any programming for dynamic content. It is all set for you and ready to go with one install. This can be done for free or with $15.00 monthly.

Where do I start a free blog?

If you don’t want to invest any money into running a blog, you can go to blogspot and create yourself a blog for a free in minutes. There are benefits to putting a few bucks into your blog though. Blogspot is just one of the free sites around. You can find many others if you search Google.

Why should I invest money?

The benefits to investing money is, you will have your own hosting and a domain name (yourname.com). This way you can brand your website or product and it also looks better to visitors. You can also focus on your niche as to what kind of website yours is and so on.

So….how do I make money?

The possibilities are endless. One of the easiest ways of doing so is through Google Adsense and let’s throw Adbrite in there also. These are two of my most profitable PPC(pay per click) programs I use. What these programs do is enable you to put their ads on your website to fit your niche and in exchange you will get paid per click and per 1000 impressions. So what this means is everytime that someone clicks on an ad you get paid for the click and every 1000 views your ad has you get paid.

Another way I am going to discuss is with Affiliate Networks. An Affiliate Network is basically the middle man between you and the large companies paying to have their ads out there. When you join one of these networks you will get a list of campaigns or products to promote. Depending on the ad, they will either pay you by lead or by sale. A lead is where you don’t have to make any sales. For example let’s say you are promoting a simple “Make Money Taking Surveys” offer. With this offer on Cxdigitalmedia, it will pay you $1.50 every time someone clicks to the ad and just simply enters their email. A sale is pretty self explanatory. Sales are harder to promote but they payout anywhere from $35.00 – $200.00 plus bucks! It all depends on what kind of site you are running.

Now this is simple but you also need to figure out a way to drive traffic to your website.

Here are a few good Affiliate Networks:

CXDigitalMedia
Maxbounty
NeverBlue
ClickBank

I am getting traffic but no ad clicks, why?

This can be a tricky situation. You want to monetize your site to make you money. Where you place your ads is crucial. With Google and Adbrite you have the option of blending the ads into sections of your site to make it look more like it is a part of your site. So if you write an article simply place an ad above it, under it or even in between a paragraph. Put one in your side bar, or even in the header of your site. It all depends on placement. Test it out in different positions and work with your results to find the best targeted area.

With affiliate network ads, you always want to choose one that is related to one or more of your pages. If you have a page about video games but you’re trying to promote a dating offer, it is not going to happen. You could even do reviews on related products then tell the visitor “Hey! if you like this product you may be interested in (other product)” .

So I have a blog, where is my traffic?

This is the challenging part. There are many ways to drive traffic to your blog / website. You should start to learn SEO which is Search Engine Optimization. This is a practice in which you can optimize your blog so that you can rank high in search engines. If you need help be sure to check out our SEO Tutorials . I recently wrote another article about Increasing Traffic With Twitter so you should check this out also for instant traffic while you are studying SEO.

This Article is do-follow.

Keywords:

seo, search engine optimization tips, seo tutorials, twitter, twitter traffic, google adsense, adbrite, ppc, make money blogging, how to make money blogging, how to make money online, make money, make money online

SEO Wordpress Plugins Every Blog Should Use

I dug this up from an old post I read back in 2008. I figured it would be helpful to bring it back for you guys. What we have here are some wordpress plug-ins that will help you rank better in search engines.

1.All in One SEO Pack

Let’s you configure page meta tags, keywords, titles and descriptions.

2. Redirection

When you make changes to your blog and a permalink is change this will redirect to the new one.

3. Robots Meta

Let’s you easily configure your robots file and let search engines crawl your entire wordpress blog.

4. SEO Smart Links
For bettering internal linking on your blog.

5. SEO Friendly Images

Allows you to tag and edit image tags in your blog.

6. Google Positioner

Track keywords that you want to get stats on.

7. Permalinks Moved Permanently

This plug-in is similar to redirect but is an easier and better way to manage permanent permalink changes.

8. Nofollow Case by Case

Self explanatory.

9. SEO Slugs

Gets rid of stop words in your links.

Things you should always do with SEO

So what are the do’s when it comes to Search Engine Optimization? In our last discussion we talked about things that you shouldn’t do when optimizing your blog / site for search engines. To follow up please read our other topic “Things Never To Do With SEO” before you get started reading this.

Let’s get started shall we?

Don’t optimize once then quit.

When you are going to optimize for search engines, never quit after a day or two. SEO is not a one time thing. You have to stay on top of it everyday, with every new addition you make to your site, every new page. With search engines, they are always changing their algorithms so the methods and techniques that we use now might not work down the road.

When applying SEO Techniques to your site you will never see results instantly. Keep in mind that patience is the key and the seo methods that you use on your site now will benefit you down the road.

For beginners.

If you are new to SEO the few tips that you learn are not going to be enough. Always look around the net to learn new SEO techniques. Look around for new articles and tutorials that are recent also.

Using web analytics.

This is crucial when you are applying these methods to your website. This can help you see what and what isn’t working so you can switch it up. Also keep track on all of your content and see what is most popular, what the readers like to see. That way you can base new content off of those things.

Using a site map

Site Maps are crucial to getting a higher ranking in search engines. A site map helps spiders find all of the important pages or the pages that you want to be shown on search engines. With every new page you add be sure to keep your map updated. if you have navigation menu’s that are hard for spiders to crawl this will also direct them down the right path. I have explained this in other articles about using text in your navigation menu’s. If your site is fairly big, use a few different site maps.

Using SEO in your URLs

Don’t use basic names in your urls. Don’t use a bunch of numbers or letters either. You want to make your urls have keywords in them spaced out by hyphens. Don’t use underscores, hyphens mean the same thing as a space between the words as underscores do not.Don’t over do it with the hyphens though because it will make your page look like it is a spam to users. I’d say when doing this have a limit of about 3 or 4. For example yoursite.com/seo-tips-and-tricks.html

Keyword Research

When you begin a website or a project you should do this from the start. This way you can figure out what keywords you want to rank for and what not to. Look at the volume of one keyword to the next. Try opening up a PPC account also. I prefer Google Ad Words. This helps you find out the volume of your keywords.

Title and Meta Tags

Search engines don’t care much for Meta Tags anymore because of the abuse in the past but again it does not hurt to do this. Titles are one of the most important factors. With your titles simply use the keywords that you are building your page and article around. This helps your ranking. Meta keywords won’t help you rank but when you have a Meta Description it will show up on search engines under your link and explains the page a little bit. When using Meta Keywords limit it to 600-700 characters. In the Meta Keywords only put keywords in there that don’t appear on your page.

Writing

Don’t just write for search engines and stuff all of your pages. This makes them looks spammy and your readers will not stick around. Write pages for your readers, the search engines have bots but has a bot read your article and stuck around? Has a bot bought anything or even signed up for a mailing list? You need keywords and such in your articles but don’t stuff the hell out of it.

Unique Content

As I have explained in other articles, unique content is the number one thing to do. This can be hard depending on what your niche is but if you have content that isn’t anywhere else, your readers will be intrigued. Make sure your content is interesting also, just because it is unique doesn’t mean it is great. Combine intriguing with unique and you got your self something nice.

Anchor Text – Internal Linking

As I have explained in my other article “Building Page Rank“, Anchor Text is also a must. Anchor Text helps spiders know what the page you linked to is about. Using keywords in the text helps your ranking but also tells them what the page is about when listing it in the search engines. If your anchor just says “Here”, it doesn’t help much for search engine visibility.

Building Links

Submit your site to directories that are popular, high ranked and trusted. Try and get links from popular sites in your niche and category. If you are running a site that is for your local area you can try to find trusted sites that are in your area geographically. Analyze your inbound links also to find what you may be looking for when linking and back linking. You can read more on back linking in our previous article “SEO Techniques all websites should use” along with many other techniques.

Social Media & Networks

Using social media websites like digg.com , propeller.com and many others gets your articles and sites exposed better. Also using social networks like twitter also can do the same thing. This helps you connect with many others directly to better promote your website. You can also use twitter to post new updates to your followers automatically. For more information, read the latest article I wrote for “Increasing site traffic with twitter on auto-pilot“.

And there you have it. These are some of the main things you should always do and use when optimizing your website or blog for search engines. If you have any questions please comment below or ask and discuss it in there forum. If you would like one on one training feel free to contact me.

craigygee@therantandrave.net

Twitter Auto-Follow Program – free

This is our new release on our software that we are calling Twit Auto-Follow for now.. Until we think of a better name for it. This software/script is free and it is open source. So we urge you to have fun with it and updates us about any changes you make to it that make it better because we would like to see what you can do with it =)

Screenshots:

Increase site hits with Twitter on autopilot

How to use Twitter on auto-pilot to increase hits?

In this article I will explain this pretty thorough and it is quite simple. I use this method whenever I kick off a new website or blog. First you will need to find an auto tweet plugin for whatever platform you may use, or maybe an auto tweet widget. Search google ..

If you use wordpress, get the WP to Twitter plugin and install it. This is what is called an “Twitter Auto Cross-Poster” which basically means it automatically cross posts your articles and blogs to Twitter. It will post a headline or whichever you set it to with a link on the end back to your article.

If you don’t already have a twitter and make one. Try to get as many follows as you can. I usually build it up to between 1000-2000 followers. Even a few hundred should get you started.

Setting up Twitter Auto Cross-Poster

Once you have installed it go into the options panel and you can customize it from there. Be sure to enter your login information for Twitter. This is pretty customizable and you can even choose from a couple different URL shortening sites.

I actually discovered this method when I started using Twitter last year and noticed a significant change in my uniques and hits. Make sure you update a couple times a day and add a few new articles daily. If you write articles that are unique and intriguing, your visitors will stick around. Try to urge your visitors to discuss the topic. If you keep your site/blog updated with fresh content everyday, you will notice with every day that goes by, your hits will increase. Depending on your content, you may see a huge increase. For example, when I started an old blog using this technique, I was getting 300+ hits a day after less than a week of doing so. As your site gets more popular, you will move up in ranking and well, you can guess what happens from there.

Another technique to double or triple the hits is use a couple different Twitter accounts with a seperate plugin for each one, or find one that posts to multiple accounts. Make sure you have a different follower base with each different account.

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If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

Wordpress Media Site Technique

Here is a technique I tried back in April of 2009 with my old news / media website. This got me a steady stream off traffic and in no time I was getting 500+ hits a day within a month or so of getting my new website off of the ground. I got results within the week of doing this method.

So here is what I pretty much do and what I use to do so.

First off I use Wordpress. I use the All In One Seo Plugin, Wordtwit(to automatically cross post my stories to my twitter), Sociable plugin, Related posts plugin, Subscribe & share plugins(for sharing on social networking sites), XML Site map plugin, Socialize it pro(to cross post to other social networking sites) and of course Permalinks.

I have found permalinks to really help a lot. In the permalinks I always list the keywords and keep it short. The keywords I use for it are based off of google trends.

Now I use Google trends everyday to get content for the top used keywords and write based off of it. I also use the keywords listed from 1 or more related top searched keywords.

Now in the title of my posts I always try to use the keywords and try to keep it short.

For example I did a story on Kal Penn when he died on that tv show.

In the title I Had it say “Kal Penn Death”
In the body I had the story, I made every keyword bold.
Now at the bottom of every post I list keywords and bold them also.

Like for example:

Keywords:
kal penn, kal penn death, kal penn death house, etc..
You will want to put anchor links in your post also. I didn’t but it always helps.
Now of course I list the keywords in the tags and in the all in one seo pack tags for each post which you can find at the bottom of the post page when writing an article.

Now for my permalinks I have it set like so for example:
http://www.therantandrave.net/wp/2009/08/08/seo-plugins-for-wordpress/

You always want to use keywords in your posts and in your categories so this post was in Search Engine Optimization Tips now heres how you want to list it:

http://www.therantandrave.net/wp/category/search-engine-optimization-tips/

And this is a keyword I am trying to rank for. Make sense?
Right after I posted a particular article I happenned to get 15,000 unique visits(the story must of beenpopular on digg or hit the front page) I am still unsure where all of the traffic was directed from to be honest.

In my all in one seo pack plugin, I go into it and add keywords from every post also every time I make a new post into the meta tags and what not.

I do about 3+ posts a day, I have found that doing 5 posts based on google trends top searched keywords works best. But don’t just do em based on that, try to write a couple that interests you or that you might think might interest others too on top of it.

Make sure to keep your xml site map updated after any update to the site, this helps also.

So all in all, I use these plugins, I write 5 or so stories based off of googles top searched trends, I make sure titles are short and have the main keywords in them and the permalinks also, I make sure to include keywords in tags, meta, in the post itself and at the bottom of the post itself and I bold all of them in my posts and I write 1 or 2 articles not related to google trends on top of it. I let my auto cross posters submit em to social networking sites, twitter works wonders if you have a lot of followers in which I have about 1400 followers that I added within an hour of setting my twitter up and I use ping backs(pingomatic.com) also. I get spam from it though but I do get traffic from it.

I did not use any backlinks at the time. So I did this without using any backlinks.

I’ve noticed the top trends are also keywords that aren’t competitive either for instance I posted a story tonight about the boston marathon 09 and typed it in google and was listed in the 1st search for that keyword and for boston marathon 09 video keyword which got me a bunch of traffic from the search engine for a few hours before it was knocked out of place by more popular sites that ended up doing the same articles. But I have noticed that I am getting more and more search engine traffic every day which is what we aim for.

SEO Plugins For Wordpress

An up to date list of SEO Plugins For Wordpress . This list of Seo Wordpress Plugins will get you going and just remember, it takes time and effort. Don’t give up when you don’t see instant results!

SEO

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – Adds meta tags automatically to posts

Aizatto’s Related Posts – Adds related post information to posts and feeds

Cross-Linker – Set up commonly used words to link to posts or redirects (also useful for affiliate links)

Sitemap Generator – Automatically builds and HTML style sitemap

Google (XML) Sitemaps – Automatically build and ping multiple sitemap services with an XML file

HeadSpace 2 – A monster plugin that lets you rewrite titles, meta data, and host of other features watch the video on the page for the full list of features

SEO Title Tag – Don’t need all the power of Headspace try SEO title tag

SEO Slugs – keeps slugs from becoming too long

Utilities

Secure Form Mailer – makes building and integrating multiple and custom forms easy

FeedBurner FeedSmith – Makes integrating with feedburner easy

Feed Footer – Adds advertising, copyright or other custom messages into feeds

Flickr Photo Album – Integrate your flickr photo’s, albums, sets, and groups into your website

flickrRSS for WordPress – add photos from any flickr RSS feed into your website

Future Posts Calendar Plugin – A calendar that shows which days you have posts scheduled to publish, very helpful for multiple authors and scheduled posts.

Full Text Feed – Lets you use the “more” tag and still publish full feeds

GoCodes Redirection Plugin – Add tiny URL style functionality into your blog

Got Banners – Makes adding advertising banners quick and easy without having to monkey with the template

Highlight Author Comments – Makes giving authors comments a different style much easier

Objection Redirection! – Makes setting 301’s (especially lots of them) easy as pie

Wordpress Organizer – Makes adding and managing uploads and images easier

Who Sees Ads – Makes ads or other elements conditionally displayed

Absolute Comments – Makes replying to comments and managing them much easier

Photo Dropper – Makes adding Creative Commons licensed photos from flickr quick and easy

Search Pages – Lets the search box search both posts and pages

Permalink Redirect – Keep urls with parameters from being indexed

WordPress Mobile Edition – Display a simple stripped down version of your site to mobile users

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin – Save yourself thousands of hours of time upgrading wordpress

WordPress Database Backup – Automate backups of your blog

Social

Increase Sociability Wordpress Plugin – Display custom messages for people who came from social sites like Digg and stumbleupon

Share This – add buttons for social networks under the share this icon

Subscribe to Comments – let people subscribe and be notified when new and follow up comments are made

What Would Seth Godin Do – Display a message to a new visitor on your blog

Twitter Tools – Integrate twitter functionality into your blog

Maintenance

Close Old Posts – Closes old posts keeps them from becoming spam targets and maintenance issues

Search and Replace – Lets you easily search and replace information in your database

Simple Tags – Manage and get tag suggestions for all posts

Reports and Analytics

Blog Metrics – Gives you comments and stats on monthly and author levels

Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports – get feedburner and google analytics in your wordpress admin section

Search Meter – Find out what people are searching for on your site

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