It’s been well over three years since we initially announced the Python Sitemap generator in June 2005. In this time, we’ve seen lots of people create great third-party Sitemap generators to help webmasters create better Sitemap files. While most Sitemap generators either crawl websites or list the files on a server, we have created a different kind of Sitemap generator that uses several ways to find URLs on your website and then allows you to automatically create and maintain different kinds of Sitemap files.

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In social networking, Liana “Li” Evans asks, “Are Ghost Writers for Social Media Profiles Wise?” As many are aware, Ghost Writing is a business that is picking up a lot of momentum among the blogging industry. When blogs yield higher levels of profit, this opens doors towards investing into ghost writers. But what about being hired as a ghost writer by a famous celebrity to rebuild a broken public image? Lana Evans expressed interest in Britney Spears.

I’m no fan of Ms. Spears, but I, along with every other American who has an Internet connection, couldn’t help but watch that train wreck shave off all her hair and beat a car with an umbrella a few years back. Now that her father is in charge of her affairs and her image, this in some semblance of saneness does make a logical sense.

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The youth of today has more motivation than most adults. Bloggers in their early teens want to make money online. Alex Delibas, 17 year old high school student recognized mainstream frustrations with bloggers constantly getting denied from participating in affiliate networks. He took aim to help increase approval success rates with publishing an article that helps fellow bloggers gain approvals.

Getting approved at big affiliate networks that have great payouts it’s a challenging thing, but my brain works on this principle “if he could do it, why couldn’t I?” and you should too. I am member of many affiliate networks and trust me, some of them are really really good (Market Leverage, MaxBounty,etc) but some offer only few campaigns that don’t even pay much. So, choosing and getting approved at a big and good affiliate network is an important step. So, how do I get approved by any affiliate network?

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How can you recruit and hire an excellent SEO? Who can provide your business with top notch SEO services? It can be a mess trying to figure out. Richard Baxter, an established SEO Consultant in London, provided an excellent article on how to recruit an SEO.

Recruiting a top flight SEO can be a daunting challenge for the inexperienced recruiter. This post examines what you may need to consider along the way, how you need to be prepared before placing an advertisement and what to ask in an interview to make sure you’ve got the right candidate for the job.

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In my business of search engine marketing, I don’t fool around too much with Pay Per Click. I focus on organic search. The two primary reasons why I focus on organic search versus pay per click is because I am very good at it and secondly I have something to show for my work after it is done. With Pay Per Click, once your campaign money expires so does your listings in the search engines. With organic search, I have an endless amount of free traffic for as long as my keywords continue to be ranked in the search engine.

With all that said, I want to show you an example of how I choose keywords to target in the organic search section of search engines, mainly Google.

I have used quite a few tools in the past to help me do keyword research. Over time, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool has grown on me. It is my favorite tool to use and it is free. In the examples in this article, I will be using this tool. If you have never used the Google AdWords keyword tool for researching keywords, you should give it a try. I think you’ll enjoy it. Let’s roll through a few examples of how I find keywords to target.

Nike

Nike is a very popular brand of shoes. It is very unlikely that I would be successful ranking well in Google for the search term: Nike. Granted, it could be done, but it would take a ton of work in order to pull it off. Needless to say, the amount of time and energy I would have to invest towards ranking for the term Nike I could instead use that towards ranking for about 20 other keyword phrases instead.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool Results For Nike:

[Click to view full size]

Looking at the above screen shot you will see that Nike generates over 13 million searches in Google each month. Ranking #1 on the Nike page in Google would be a total dream. Like I said, anything is possible, but with the amount of time and energy needed to do so, it might not be worth it. Instead, I use my time and energy to rank for longtail keywords.

Longtail keywords are keyword phrases that have a much lower level of competition while also having a decent amount of monthly searches. Longtail keywords are also keyword phrases that are much easier to rank well in Google.

Longtail Keywords For Nike

Here are some examples of longtail Nike keywords that I would target.

• Nike Shoe Sales
• Nike Shoes on Sale
• Nike Shoe Deals
• Nike Shoe Clearance
• Kids Nike Shoes
• Mens Nike Shoes
• Nike Baseball Cleats
• Nike Football Cleats

I would write blog posts using these keyword phrases as post titles. From there, I would make sure that the first paragraph of the post included the title phrase, and then I would make sure the entire article include proper alt text and images all with the post title name. Once the content is indexed, it is very likely that the page will rank well. If it doesn’t then you will have to do a little link building, no big deal. The point is that the amount of time and energy invested into ranking for longtail keywords are much less than trying to go for primary keywords. Also, most all attempts to aim for mainstream keywords end in failure.

One of the main reasons why I target longtail keywords over mainstream keywords is because I feel it is better to rank on the top ten for a keyword phrase that has only 1000 searches per month compared to ranking on the second page (results 11 through 20) for a keyword phrase that receives 10,000. Not very many people investigate the links on page two.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this article. What are some other ways you research longtail keywords? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

From time to time though, I sit here staring at that blank white screen. I have writers block. And as a writer, that can be a very scary thing. Over time I have learned how to deal with what I call search engine marketer’s writers block, and I want to share with you one of the solutions I have created towards dealing with it. The solution is so simply, you will kick yourself for not thinking about it on your own.

So here is what I do to eliminate writers block. I ask people what advice do they need. How can I help you? What can I help you with? In short, I open up my email inbox, open up my instant messenger profiles, and open my social networking profiles to the public and I ask people, How Can I Help You? And I invite people to contact me with their questions.

The next thing that happens is a beautiful thing. In less than 24 hours, I have enough material to write about for almost an entire month! Granted I have a lot of contacts, but really, you don’t have to know a lot of people in order to get requests for help. For instance, if you have around 100 people following you on Twitter, you can simply write a tweet stating that you have experience with a certain skill, does anyone need help? If you do that, it is very likely that at least one person will reply with a request for help.

The next step is to take the material that you have received and write content based off these requests. The process is the same as you would apply for any article publication. Research your material, research your keywords and proceed to produce a very well written article and publish it on your blog. After you publish the article, send an email back to the person who requested your help and inform that person that you wrote an entire article for them and published it live on your blog. They will be so thrilled that you took so much time to help them.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this article. What are some other ways search engine marketers can do to avoid writers block? Share your feedback and opinions in the comments below.

Paying for links is risky. Google has a good sniffer for spotting paid or sponsored links. Doing link exchanges, especially blogroll exchanges is proving to not have much value. Ordering sponsored posts is very risky because you then put your site on Google’s radar. So really what option do you have left? 

The answer is in writing guest posts. It is a safe and very natural / organic way to score powerful backlinks to your blog or website. Consider this too. When you publish content on other blogs, you are in complete control of the link building process. You are in complete control of how you want to word your content and shape and mold your links pointing back to your site.  In other words, writing guest posts on other blogs gives you the ability to take a blank piece of digital paper and turn it into anything you want. 

Guest posting on other blogs has other benefits as well. For one, you’ll find that you have an endless supply of blogs where you can publish your content on. Most bloggers struggle for material. Just like a journalist or a columnist, often bloggers struggle from writers block and totally enjoy it when someone offers to provide them with killer content. 

Another benefit is the fact that not only can you build links by writing the content, you can also take advantage of the opportunity and use the post to sell yourself to readers of the blog you are publishing on. This gives you an amazing opportunity to increase the number of regular reader who read your own blog or website. 

The only disadvantage I can think of is the amount of time you need to invest into writing content. One thing about that though is I believe that you always get back when you put in. Meaning, if you invest the time into writing quality content on other blogs, your return will be great as well. 

Contact a few blog authors and you’ll be surprised to discover how many of them will contact you back having a strong interest in having you write a post for them. I know for a fact that when people contact me, I get excited because I know that my nightly post is covered and I can have a little free time to do something else. My advice to you when you do contact bloggers is to present yourself well. Be honest and explain what you want to do and what are you are willing to do for them in exchange. Writing content on other blogs is  mutual exchange. You give the blogger a night off from having to write and they give you a medium to spread the word about your own blog or website. 

Having that said, I am not going to tell you that traffic is a bad thing. The more traffic we all get to our sites the happier we are, that’s a given. Who doesn’t want extra traffic? But that’s not the point. The problem is that most people think increasing traffic is the solution towards fixing a web site that is failing to earn money. That is far from the truth.

In most cases when I check out the sites of the people that email me asking for tips on increasing traffic, what I find is that their site has conversion cancer. Simply put, their websites or blogs are failing to convert for them. It doesn’t matter what it is, some people want to get more Google AdSense clicks, others simply want their visitors to purchase their eBooks. Whatever the call to action may be, It all boils down to the same thing; conversion, and the lack there of.

What good is increasing traffic if the current traffic you already receive doesn’t convert? If the existing traffic you receive doesn’t convert, do you really think that adding more traffic will help conversions? It won’t!

Something is wrong. You have to change something. If your blog or web site doesn’t have a lot of traffic, that is fine! Use that to your advantage. In my business, I based things off percentages rather than by units. In my fleet of a few hundred various sites I own, most are very low volume. Meaning each site I own typically gets around 100 visits per day. Most of my sites are monetized with Google AdSense. My aim is to score 10 clicks per site per day off 100 visits, which equates to 10% conversion.

On occasion, quite a few of my sites get bursts of traffic. When that happens, they still convert at 10%. When more traffic is added, say 1000 visits per day, I make more money off the added traffic because I still convert at 10%. The reason why is because I always focus on conversions based off low volume. Gaining massive amounts of traffic to a blog or web site is the single most difficult thing to achieve. My focus is in taking full advantage of the traffic that I do get.

Consider this and re-visit your blog or web site and ask yourself what you can do to capitalize on the current traffic you get. If making money using Google AdSense is your goal, then consider changing the position of your ads. Maybe change the size of your ad or even the colors. After you make changes, take note of the effects the changes have. If performance increases, try to tweak things even more. If after you tweak things further and find that the results depreciated your earnings, reset things back to how you had them previously, or try something different again.

You’d be amazed when you discover how simple it is to run tests on your site. The beauty of discovering how to score high conversions is the fact that once you discover what works, you can do what I do and duplicate your system over a few hundred times. My Google AdSense earnings for the month of December 2008 exceeded $10,000 USD. This was all generated on a few hundred low volume sites that achieve high conversion rates of 10% or higher.

Before you ask for advice on how to increase traffic, the better question to ask is how can I increase conversion off the current traffic I already receive.

The difference I see though is with popularity and backlinks pointing back to these more popular sites. For me, I build very low traffic and low key niche sites. Just about every web site that I build has a domain name with the primary keywords in it that I am targeting. Typically it doesn’t take very long to rank for the keyword phrase I am targeting. Within that, I will also rank for many relevant keyword phrases based off the primary keyword phrase due to me writing content that specifically targets these other phrases. 

All in all, I have had and continue to have great success with doing this. With that said, I’ll admit, I have never tried to target keyword phrases using a domain name that didn’t match up with the primary keyword phrase I target. So I can’t say for sure that what I am doing is truly a legitimate tactic or strategy. That is why I wanted to carry on a discussion with you about it. I’d like to know your opinion on how important do you think domain name selection is for search engine ranking? Share your feedback and opinions using the comment form below. 

Ann Smarty, author of the successful Search Engine Journal, wrote an article titled, How To Build Links and Awareness by Pitching Bloggers. In this article she addressed that bloggers can be an excellent resource towards building links for the fact that most bloggers are always on the hunt for new material to write about and they are connected with many friends which gives your links the opportunity to go viral. The article was submitted into Sphinn, so be sure to help Ann out by casting your vote.

The author of a blog titled, Link Building Best Practices, wrote a very thoughtful piece that distinguishes the difference between SEOs and Link Builders. It is stated that there is a clear difference between the two skilsets and it is noted that commonly most people are either one or the other but not both. Understanding the difference between the two very well might break the boundary and expand the skilset from both professions. You should take a moment to help out by casting a vote on Sphinn.

SMX in London is at full force this week and one of the more popular topics — you guessed it — link building. Wiep Knol, author of a very informative link building blog, provided some coverage for all the folks who could not attend SMX in London with an article titled, Blog Your Mind Link Building Techniques. Without a doubt, there are some excellent links and references found in this article including a wonderful overview of the line up of professional speakers who gave speeches. As with the other two articles, providing your vote on Sphinn will help out the author.

What an amazing week to learn more about link building. What other articles did you read this week that helped you? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts.

Today, we are going to discuss Part II. When I wrote the first post, I decided to break things down into sections. If I didn’t I would have just created an eBook for you to download. So with that said, let me show you another method towards getting free backlinks to your web site or blog.

Now, many of you guys and gals know about companies such as Text-Link-Ads.com and ReviewMe.com. Make no mistake, these type of businesses work and work very well. For those who don’t know what these services offer, they provide people with a way to purchase backlinks. Text-Link-Ads.com is more blunt about it and ReviewMe.com attempts to sugar coat the process by making publishers write a crafty review about the site needing the backlink.

Both places are owned by the same company and both companies are hot on Google’s radar. Selling links for the purpose of boosting PageRank is against Google’s Web Master Guidelines. So when you use places such as the two services mentioned above, you really put your blog, web site and or business at risk. With that said, there are ways towards getting around this so that you can totally boost your PageRank and not get caught.

Now, I must tell you that this tip is more effective for bloggers, especially bloggers who have a bunch of other friends who are bloggers too. If this isn’t you, then what I am about to show you still is possible, but you will be challenged a little bit with executing. With that said, let’s continue on.

The first step is choosing the keywords or phrases that you want to have link to your blog or web site. In the tutorial, we’re going to use the word Traffic. Second thing we want to do is do a scan on different blogs that have used the word traffic. This is where having blog friends can really help you in this situation. In this tutorial we’re going to use SEOHosting.com, because we are all Best Friends with SEOHosting.com, right?

In order to find the blog posts on SEOHosting.com’s blog that use the word traffic, we need to use Google. Ironically, we are going to use the same search engine in which we are attempting to build backinks towards ranking better on. I find that funny, but at any rate, here is how you do it.

In the Google search bar type: traffic site:seohosting.com/blog

When you do that, you will see a complete listing of pages that have the word traffic on it. Now, I am not sure how familiar you are with WordPress, but publishers are not able to add links to category sections. So any listing you see that has the word category in the url of the listing in the SERP doesn’t count. Same goes with tag and archive. The little treasures you are looking for are the blog posts. In order to have Google display only the blog posts that have the word traffic on it you can do the following:

In the Google search bar type: traffic -category -tag -archives site:seohosting.com/blog

What this will do, is strip away all of the categories, tags and archives from the results and only display blog posts with that have the word traffic in it. Does this sound too hard to remember? I don’t know about you, but things like this can be kind of tricky. But that’s ok, these special searches you are doing are called Advanced Operator searches. Google has a bunch of them that you can do. If you can’t remember how to do all this technical Google filtering, then check this out:

This is called Google Advanced Search. In fact, here is a LIVE EXAMPLE of the above screen shot. All you have to do is answer a few simple questions, and Google will filter the results how you want it.

So what is the point to all this? Well, I have shown you a lot of information here, so let’s recap. The purpose of doing all this is to find blog posts on SEOHosting.com’s blog that use the word traffic. Again, we are trying to get our own web site to rank in Google for the word traffic and in order to do that, we are going to need help from our blogger friends.

Now that we know which posts on SEOHosting.com’s blog that uses the word traffic, we can pick out a few of the posts, and contact the author of the blog and ask him to edit the post and add the link in. If you are scanning the blogs of your friends, having success in this request should not be too difficult at all.

Keep in mind, you don’t want to have more than maybe ten posts from one blog to point links back to yours. I can not PROVE this, this is just my opinion. However, with my link building techniques, I play things very safe. Also, you don’t want to score a ton of backlinks in a short period of time, if you do, Google will catch that and hunt you down.

I hope that you found this article to be helpful. As always, I would love to hear from you. What are some other ways that you score free backlinks? Drop me a comment and share your thoughts.

The single most difficult thing with running a blog or web site is scoring traffic and landing backlinks, Especially if your blog or web site is geared towards promoting affiliate products. So how does a blogger or as webmaster increase traffic and score backlinks? Well, let’s start with reading the question that I was asked:

Hi Garry,

I am working on a couple of new sites at the moment that I wouldn’t usually use WordPress for but as you know I have been learning the ins & out’s of WordPress for a few months now so have decided to go ahead and use it for these new sites to see how it pans out.

Once I have the sites completed, I know I can gain organic search results over time and can even provide relevant links from other sites of mine. With that said, can you recommend any other ways of getting links/traffic to an affiliate based site?

With your Micro Niche Sites, do you invest time in link building to these sites or are they a truly “build, walk away and see what happens” type of sites?

I do want to build, walk away and see what happens with a few of these sites but I also want them to at least generate an asdense monthly payment along with some affiliate payments. Any advice is well appreciated.

Thanks, dave.

Wow! When I read this question that Dave had asked me, I was very excited to provide my feedback not only for him, but for all of my blog readers. Secondly, I now look forward to sharing this with you. Here is my response back to Dave.

Hi Dave,

I great way to get organic links is to have a bunch of friends who will bend over backwards for you. If you simply be a super nice guy and help people as much as you can afford to, when it comes time to asking for help in return, such as asking for a few backlinks on some blog posts that you have keywords you are targeting on it, friends will grant these requests.

Secondly, friends will also voluntarily advertise your blog or site on their blog or site if you ask them to. This is very successful because the post comes from the author in which many people follow.

Look at it this way, tomorrow, if I wrote a blog post and told everyone to check out John Doe’s Blog because he is offering something that I feel everyone will enjoy, he will end up getting quite a bit of traffic because I suggested to my readers that he has someone worth their while.

Asking… it never hurts to ask. The worst someone can say is, “No!” Never take offense when someone says NO, it’s a crap shoot… some people will grant your requests, others will not… no big deal.

I ask for TONS of favors from my friends, but also too I work my tail off to make sure that I help them TWO FOLD in return. At any given time, and I am not tooting my horn, I can get well over 100 high quality backlinks to any site I want within just a few hours. You have to be careful of that though. You never want to channel links to a web site or blog too quickly. If you do, Google has filters that catch that and I believe that will get you on their radar. Getting on Google’s radar is something that you don’t want to have happen.

Like I said, there is a balance… you can’t link build too aggressively. Google red flags that…. you got to maintain a nice steady pace and build as naturally and organically as possible.

You asked me if I invest time into link building? YES! On sites that target keywords that are too strong and competitive just to rank organically on their own without backlinks, yeah… I get links. These links though aren’t just, “Hey Bob, can you add me to your blogroll?” These are very well thought out and personalized backlinks that I put a lot of time into scoring.

Growing a site in a competitive niche is very much like being in chemistry class. I don’t spend too much time with competitive keywords, I more go after the ones that just naturally rank on their own in the top ten simply by creating the content, getting the page indexed and filling a VOID in the Google SERP.

After reading Dave’s question and reading my response to his question, what else can you add to this? What are some other creative ways towards scoring backlinks and increasing traffic to your blog or web site that is geared towards promoting affiliate based products?  Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

A heading tag defines headers. A header is used to mark sections on your blog or web site. There are six header levels. These levels are as follows: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. The H1 header tag is the largest font size and H6 is the smallest.

Search engines look for header tags because they are beacons for finding content as well as pathways on your blog or web site. The three most commonly used header tags are: H1, H2, and H3. Sometimes, H4 is used, but not too often. H5 and H6 are rarely used.

Here is an example of how I use Header tags on my blogs.

In the source code of my blogs, the H1 tag is the link to my home page. The H2 tags represent my categories, and H3 represent my post and page titles. From there, my WordPress Tags are made as STRONG, or otherwise called BOLD. Excuse my lack of being an artist, but here is a screen shot:

The home page of my blog feeds H2 links to my category sections. From there, my category sections feed h3 links to my blog posts. My blog post then feed BOLD links into my tags. Electricity always takes the path of least resistance. With search engine optimization, web crawlers follow the same rules. Web web site building, or in my case, blog building, I paved the path for web crawlers. I build the path of least resistance.

On the home page of my blogs, as you know, H2 links feed to my category pages. However, as you know, my most recent blogs posts still appear on my home page. These will remain H3 links. When web crawlers see this, they place emphisis on my category sections to find the content.

That is one of the reasons why I believe that I can pump out so much content and have it all index so quickly. Granted, nothing I say or do is proven. That is where many SEOs differ. I am just telling you precisely what I do and it works.

When you build these pathways for web crawlers, really in many ways you are building multiple HomePages to your site or blog. In fact, there are many situations where a category section of one of my blogs has more PageRank and power than its own home page and the same goes with a tag section too.

If I have a blog that has three categories: Dogs, Cats and Humans. And I write a post about Dogs. It is very likely that that post will get indexed because the crawler found it on the category section rather than the home page.

Using proper heading tags to shape and mold how I want web crawlers to perceive my sections of my blog is very important. Of course, getting an sitemap xml on your blog is extermely helpful too. Everything in SEO compliments each other. In order to have a site optimized for search engines, you should understand that there isn’t just ONE SUPER HUGE thing you need to do. Instead, there are many smaller things to do that add up towards the big picture of doing SEO on a site.

What did I miss? How else can you better optimize your web site or blog for search engines? Drop me a comment and share your thoughts.