I just finished interviewing Mike Spencer about his system for making thousands of dollars a month in Google Adsense…

I love interviewing people like Mike because they’re not “showboats” who need to be up front and center of your attention for branding purposes.

Mike has been quietly raking it in with Adsense for years now, and Matt Garrett, whom I’ve mentioned several times on this blog, told me he’s the most knowledgeable guy he knows when it comes to SEO/Adsense paired knowledge.

When Matt tells me that someone is “high up” in his book as a person to listen to in regard to SEO/Adsense, then I’m all ears.

Mike has to  know SEO and Adsense pretty well since his income is largely derived from getting his sites’ pages ranked highly.

So, I interviewed Mike for close to an hour about his Private Adsense Coaching since 5k/month in Adsense residual income is one of my goals for 2009.  When we were talking about his system, he mentioned something about SEO that came as a little bit of a surprise to me.

He mentioned that he likes to keep his sites “small” and under 60 pages for best results in ranking his sites’ pages.

I found this rather odd since I always held to the SEO theory that having more indexed pages means a larger footprint out “there” in Internet-land, therefore more feelers being put of there for to attract more traffic.

Kind of like how a gas-guzzling SUV expands your carbon footprint, but in a good way, in my case…  I think 

Mike said he likes to build compact sites because the larger the site, the more diluted the link juice of the site becomes, unless it’s one of those true authority sites like Amazon.

Imagine if you have 200 inbound external links to your site.  Now, also imagine that the juice of those inbound links are spread evenly across all of the pages on your site.  According to this SEO practice/theory, the more pages you have, the less effective your inbound links will be when applied and credited towards your site’s main url.

Kind of like what Obama said to Joe the Plumber when he said, “we take the wealth and spread it around”….

Interesting… and I can see how this would hold true…

I have 2 domain names that I chose to build sites on to promote LinkVana, and Web Prosperity.

The LinkVana blog slowly turned into a link building tips and link building service reviews site since I wanted to keep fresh relevant content on there. So the initial 3 page site for linkvana reviews has now turned into many more pages about related topics.  It ranks well without many backlinks to it because of the keywords in the domain name.

The blog about WebProsperity is tight, and on focus and will be a tightly spiralled site.

I’m rambling, I know.. the Ridalin hasn’t kicked in yet….

The point being, that YES, search engines DO like new content and YES, you should add content regularly.

But the goal is to get ranked well, isn’t it?  So why not do more, with less effort?

Search engines also love links, and reward sites that get links….. with higher rankings.

So, you can write a ton of content for your sites, or have them written for you, with the hope of getting some long-tail traffic that eventually adds up to a lot of traffic, or just focus on your best KWs and work on getting your pages ranked better.

A tightly spiralled site, SEO-wise, and even design-wise will link to other pages on your site in as many ways as possible.

Think  of your website as a tear in you jeans and each time you link from one post to another on your site, it’s as if you’re applying needle and thread to tighten things up.

Sometimes a month or so after a product launches, I will look to see what sites did well in the long-run and what I find is that the sites that did well were either old, aged domains with a lot of inherent link juice, and already have a lot of their pages ranked well.

I also see some new sites that have only a few backlinks, but ranking well due to having a tightly spiralled site.  This is proof that on-page optimization can be just as important as off-page optimization…

Some properly built, silo-style, tightly-spiralled sites will outrank other competing sites that are not as well built, SEO-wise and their competitors will never know why…    You can easily build silo site structure sites, and you can even take your current old sites and make them go “silo” with a simple plugin.  Silo site structure is a way of building your site to make it easier for the search engines to categorize/rank what your site is about.

How do you make a tight SEO spiral?

• Keep the site small in size, have no more than 60 total pages per site unless you’re going to make it a true authority site with a lot of incoming links and unique content being added on a regular basis…
• Inner-linking, or inter-linking - Link to inner pages of your site from other pages on your site whenever possible (which means every post).  Example:  When you write a new blog post, link to a previous post or page…
• Add to your site’s link juice- this is the power behind the arm throwing the tight SEO spiral….the more external links you have pointing to your site, the stronger the arm is that’s distributing link juice and page rank down to your new posts and pages, if that’s how you want it set up.  Silo site structures tend to keep the theme bleeding and PageRank bleeding down to a minimum, but Mike’s method for building sites wants the page rank to be bled from main site down to the pages because he knows there’s going to be a limit on the PageRank bleeding due to him only putting 60 pages, maximum on his sites.

The more pages and posts you have, the more diluted the link juice will be and the more links you’ll need just to keep up with things.

When I learned this, I realized that I’d made some SEO mistakes in the past year or so…

I’d been trying to get ranked for sub-keywords by getting backlinks when all I had to do was just go “wide” with my domains strategy and get a domain name with my sub-keywords in there.

Once I got a good KW-rich domain name, I was page 1 in 3 days for my terms…

Point being, Adsense guys need a lot of domain names in order to target new niches easily…and their goal is to get their pages ranked quickly by throwing a tight SEO spiral.

Please do NOT waste time trying to rank well for keywords when all you have to do is get a domain name with the keywords in there and create some content based on the sub-keywords.

My story: One of my first products was a free report on the top ten internet marketing mistakes.  I gave this 82-page report away via squeeze pages, and it converted well, but I wanted to automated that list-building so I tried to get that squeeze page ranked highly in the search engines for the term (internet marketing mistakes).

I wrote some EZAs (ezinearticles.com articles), got backlinks to the squeeze page itself and did many other tactics to make the search engines notice this page.  So far, the results were not very promising.  The squeeze page wasn’t properly built with all that privacy policy and terms and  conditions stuff at the bottom, so it just never ranked well.

So I got a keyword-rich domain name for internet marketing mistakes, made a blog post, pinged it out, and was page ONE in a couple of days…  I also wrote an EZA article which linked back to this site, and now I have 2 spots on page one of Google for my terms.

Now I’m practicing what I preach and started to build another internet home business reviews site as a reminder that I may have been wasting time trying to get rankings for domain names that were self-limiting.

Point being, you can do more with less time and effort if you’re willing to spend a few bucks on domain names…

I think it also forces you to ask yourself,

“What is the goal of this site, what do I want this site to do for me, what will I write about, how will I promote its pages and posts etc…”

and asking these questions lends focus to your marketing efforts.

Do not confuse motion with accomplishment, be smart, work smarter, not harder

NOTE: When inner linking, it’s better to open link in SAME window, not open in NEW, but it requires testing to see if sending people off your site via “open in new window” when clicking on affiliate links is a good idea

This is not another blog post about the Web Prosperity MLM Program

This post is SEO-related and about how I maintained top rankings for the terms WebProsperity, Web Prosperity, WebProsperity Review and Web Prosperity Review, before, during and after the Web Prosperity Launch…

The 4 steps I took…and the 4 steps I know you can take as well…

Step 1- Decide on whether or not I wanted to get back into MLM…

Well, before I did anything I thought long and hard about getting involved in another MLM program like Web Prosperity. I still had mis-givings about MLM in general so I spoke to Stu Stirling, James Brown, and Kevin Riley about it…

None of us are/were big fans of MLM, but if they were convinced of the “good-ness” of this program, then there was a good chance that I would be convinced, too.

And I got convinced… I decided it was OK to get involved it

Then I got conviction…I got excited and really “up” on the concept

Then I got committment…I went all-out in my dedication to promoting Web Prosperity…

So, Step 1 was committing to the project, or not… and that’s really the most important step to anything you do, and something that cannot be taught, but the rest fo the steps can be taught and adapted tohugh.

Quick note:  Isn’t it “funny” that many of the most important steps we can take with any type of venture or project begins with a mental assessment of self?  Something to think about….

Step 2 was getting a good domain name, keyword rich, with name of company or product or program in the name of the domain itself.

This was fairly easy to do at first because not many people were thinking about promoting Web Prosperity for the long haul when I went looking for domain names, just blogging about it and putting up additional pages on their sites.

When choosing a domain name, I went the same old route I usually go with, which is to get a domain name with the product name and the word review in it, but the dot.com name was taken so I got the dot.org name instead…

(Kevin Riley can thank me later for the dot.me name I pointed out to him, which I should have got, too 

Many people overlook the .org extension when ordering domain names but they’ve proven to perform very well in the SERPS. 

A keyword rich domain name virtually assures anyone who knows a little bit about SEO that they’ll get top rankings for the terms in the domain name. 

So nothing special was done there, really…

Anyone can do that…

Actually…. anyone can do what I’m revealing here in this post 

Step 3- building the site up….

What kind of content was I going to add to a brand new site about a brand new program and product, in an industry of which I am not too fond?

Here are some simple ways to add content to a site that is new in topic to you…

Write about:

• What it is- pure information
• Why you joined- your opinion
• Why you’re excitedh about it and believe in the product
• What others are saying on other blogs, especially the eventual negative bloggers…
• Copy and paste the emails you’re being sent by the program itself onto your site as added content (believe me they don’t mind that a bit)
• Write a review, or another review
• Write about the specific individual products being offered
•  Rebuttals to other bloggers’ negative comments to offset their impact…(My favorite)
• You can also write an Ezine Articles article and republish it on your blog/site.  When you re-post an EZA article on your site properly you’re linking to it and that helps that particular article get read more (higher rankings for those terms)

So, right there those are more than enough ideas for site content.  You can also do some searches to see Who is writing What and How…

Some extra sites you could build:

Sqidoo Lenses - make one or two of these based off the main keywords you’re targetting..

Hub Pages, same thing…

Free wordpress.com blogs – same thing

Focus most of your time on the real site though, since the Hubs and Lenses won’t be on Page 1 for too long, history shows…

When a launch proves to be big like the Web Prosperity one is/was, the lenses and hubs and ezinearticles.com articles seem to disappear from Page 1 and it’s sites optimized and edicated to ranking well for those specific terms that will end up filling up Page 1.

There are some things you can do to boost your hubs and lenses and article sin the SERPS, but more on that later. 

Suffice to say it takes more work on your part to get an EZA ranked highly than it does to get a good domain name ranked highly.

Click here for proof of that, it’s a link to a search for a review of a product that was launched in a big way…and no lenses or hubs listed there on Page 1 of the search results, just sites with the keywords in the domain name…

Point being… use hubs and lenses as helper sites, but don’t make themyour main focus.  Use them for backlinks and for republishing your blogs’ RSS feeds.

Steps 1,2. and 3- Recap

1. Commit to the project,
2. get a domain name,
3. build up the site content, maybe even add in some helper sites…

Step 4- Watch the SERPs and if you start to drop, add another piece of content and get more links.

I watched this Web Prosperity launch like it was another SEO case study, and whenever my site dropped in the SERPs, I would write another post and climb back up to Page 1 or 2 for the harder terms I was going after (the name of program itself, without word “review” in there)

I also wrote an article ( 2 articles now) for EzineArticles.com and re-published it on my network of blogs.  This made the first published EZA article rank well, and since the article linked back to my main site, I now had a high-ranking article in the SERPS linking back to my main site.

This helped the main site maintain its rankings, too, so re-publishing the EZA article had a two-fold effect…

Then team members who were added to the main site’s blog roll were re-publishing the article and the effect was increased some more….

At some point though, I ran out of blogs to re-publish the article on, and didn’t want to write the main site’s content on all my other sites because it wouldn’t be totally relevant…so I was out of ideas and places to get links from.. 

I started to see some slippage in the SERPs again after the launch hit and more videos and lenses and keyword rich sites and press releases came out…

This was driving my site’s SERPs over to page 2 and even to page 3 for a day or two…

So I shot out a few articles for syndication to the 1WayLinks link building service and the main site I have been referring to is now page 1 for every single term I was going after…

What makes me particularly happy is that 4 of the terms I was going after are above the fold, ranked #1,2,3 or 4th in the SERPS now…and ranked #7 and 9 for the harder terms…at the time of this writing…

Sometimes good content on a great domain name may just not be enough to get the ranking you want, no matter how hard you try….

If attaining the top SERPs are important enough to you, then you should have a link building service at the ready to help solidify what you’ve achieved…

You can use this simple strategy for anything you want to rank well for, but none of it will be possible for you without the all-important step of Total Commitment… then it’s all fun stuff after that 

I don’t know man… are people really that stupid or ignorant about SEO that they’ll actually pay for submissions to the search engines?

Apparently so… Wow… I mean,,, WOW!

Look, don’t bother with this stuff ok?

It’s better to just spend your time writing good content and letting the search engines find you on their own.

Once one search engine finds you the others will find you, too, eventually.

To start your blog or site off on the right foot, submit the sitemap to Google WebMaster Tools, and maybe to DMOZ directory, but focus more of your time on building a good site with good content and good backlinks.

Also, if you have a blog submit it to FeedAgg.com and Feedage.com for maximum results from minimal effort.

A lot of people submit to as many RSS places as possible and also focus on doing a lot of submissions of site urls to search engine directories.

That’s an absolute joke/waste of time/money and shouldn’t even be a serviced offered by “SEP pros”

No related posts.

What Really Works For Search Engine Optimization
By Daniel McGonagle

The evidence is right in front of your eyes when it comes to realizing what works for SEO.

If you are a student of SEO and Online traffic generation like I am, then you learn to look at things in an analytical way.

Some things that I see when analyzing new SEO trends is what types of articles, blog posts, and sites are ranking well.

A great way to determine this is to watch the SERPs during a popular new product launch. At the very beginning of a launch you will see some Diggs, some FeedAge and Feedagg RSS submissions, and even some Mixx-es and “Stumbles”.

But you hardly ever see those social bookmarking urls in the top of the SERPs for a very long time. Sometimes you’ll see a new social bookmarking site doing really well in the SERPs, but it’s difficult to keep track of which ones are currently working.

In my experience, the following types of web real estate do very well in the SERPs over a long period of time.

• Blogs with good domain names (keywords in the title of domain name)
• Articles from EzineArticles.com
• Forum posts from DigitalPoint and the Warrior forum
• Slideshare
• WetPaint blog posts
• WordPress.com sites
• Squidoo Lenses
• HubPages

Recently though, I have seen Google’s version of EzineArticle’s doing really well. Google’s version of EZA is called KNOL, but the KNOLs I’ve seen are pretty heavy-handed and promotional, unlike EZA articles.

When you watch the SERPs during product launches you will see some sites come and go, You will hardly ever see a social bookmarking link maintain its position in the SERPs for a long period of time.

Squidoo Lenses, HubPages, and WordPress.com sites can do pretty well and have some staying power, but the sites that maintain the top rankings are those that are self-hosted sites with keywords in the domain name.

It is possible for lenses, hubs and free blogs to do well if you put some links pointing to them, but it would take more effort to get those to rank well than it would for a regular site to rank well.

The point of this article is to tell you that SEO isn’t complicated if you know what to look for.

Here’s a checklist to teach you how you can learn what really works for SEO

1. Type in your search term at Google
2. See what kinds of sites are ranking well on first 2 pages of listings
3. Check back in a week and see what kinds of sites are still there
4. Make a note of what kinds of sites are doing well for your search term.
5. Do not try to reinvent the wheel with SEO, just open your eyes to see what is really working right now.

It’s that simple, so keep it simple. If you want to take things another step further, install the SEO for firefox plugin to assess the SEO competition you’re up against. The SEO for firefox plugin will tell you how many links other sites have pointing to them, and conventional wisdom states that if you get more links than your competitors, then you will outrank them.

However, that conventional wisdom is not always true, because the search engines like to rank new content higher sometimes, and not all links are created equal. So getting more links than your competitors may not work for you, or it will work really well.

Earlier I mentioned that lenses and hub pages and EZA articles and do well for rankings and they can achieve this without any backlinks because of the power of the system they’re tied into (Squidoo,com, HubPages.com, WordPress.com). That right there is a testament to the fact that not all sites are created equal.

Things are also subject to change at any time when it comes to how Google and other search engines rank certain pages. Recently I’ve noticed that EZA articles are doing really well in the SERPs, and KNOL is making some appearances as well.

An ezinearticles.com article I wrote about how to start an internet business has been at the top of the search engines for 2 weeks now at the time of this writing, but it wasn’t anywhere to be found prior to that. So things change when it comes to ranking pages in the SERPS.

Some things that will always work for you SEO-wise no matter what:

• Keyword-rich domain names
• Getting relevant one-way, anchor-text style backlinks
• Adding fresh new content to your sites

A lot of people look at PR, or PageRank as an indicator of how much traffic a site gets or how much link juice a site has. Well, I’m here to tell you that PageRank is not as important as the linkjuice your site has and also, how often your site is getting spidered by the search engines crawlers.

The more frequently you post to your sites, the more frequently the search engines spiders will come back. If your site is not properly optimize for on-page SEO, then it may take a few passes of the spiders to have additional pages noticed by the search engines.

A lot of blogs and themes comes with calendars and many people leave these on their sites and it’s a mistake to do that because the calendars send the spiders into an endless loop and they eventually just give up spidering your site after a certain period of time.

The better your site is built, the easier it will be for the spiders to crawl your site and rank and index your pages.

One last thing you should know about SEO….

You can do a lot of the wrong things and still get ranked well if you have other good things happening to your site, like getting linked to by a particularly high-ranking site with good link juice and relevant anchor text-style link back to your site.

And everything I stated here is just for Google.

Yahoo ranks sites differently, as does MSN

Article Source: SEO Tips

 The new SEO Voodoo term that making more appearances these days is the term LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing.

LSI in academic terms refers to methods of accurate data retrieval, or data retrieval methodology.

In layman’s terms, in marketing terms, here’s what is really means.

Search engines like Google want to rank your sites according to what they think you should have on your site in order to rank you well for certain search terms and phrases.

If your site is about dogs, and all the words on your site are about cats, not only does that make for a poor visitor experience, but it also makes for misleading on-page optimization.

By misleading on-page optimization, I mean that you shouldn’ t optimize and design your site title and meta tags to “claim” your site is about dogs when it’s really about cats.

A while ago, a long time ago, on-page optimization was a very critical part of your efforts to rank well in the search engines for certain terms.  Then Google realized that many marketers were gaming the system with meta-tag stuffing and keyword-stuffing their pages to fake the search engines out by making them think that their site was about something it really wasn’t.

After that happened, another change took place and search engines like Google started relying on off-page optimization factors like link building and links in general to determine the popularity of a site. Once SEOs or SEO professionals saw this change take place, they started gaming the system by getting massive amounts of links using linkbuilding services and networks of blogs.

As a result of this, the search engines had a choice to make and let these link builders game the system or make another change.  The change that is now taking place refers to LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. 

As mentioned earlier in this article, LSI refers to data retrieval and the reason it applies to SERPs and rankings is that search engines like Google are basically just data retrieval systems that find sites that have certain words on them and add them to their index of sites that are about that certain word or phrases.

This indicates a shift towards on-page optimization playing a larger factor than before when it comes to ranking well in the search engines.  With the advent, or coming predominance of Latent Semantic Indexing in ranking factors, the search engines appear to be looking for the best of both worlds by taking into account what relevant and related keywords are on your site, plus what kinds of sites are linking to yours.

The search engines that don’t present the results and sites and SERPs that the searcher is looking for are search engines that are going to lose business, especially with it’s advertisers since they are in the business of presenting the most relevant search results to its users.

What’s the best way to use LSI, Latent semantic Indexing in your efforts to rank well in the search engines?

Do what professional SEO have been telling people to do for years!

• Write and publish quality unique content which will result in getting a natural pace of backlinks to your content
• Use the terminology that is often used when the topic is discussed, so use words, terms, terminology and verbiage that is naturally used when this topic is written about.
• For example, a site about gas grills should probably mention charcol, brisquettes, pool party, Fourth Of July, beer, wine coolers, tongs, meat, burgers, hot dogs, gas grills, electric grills, getting burned etc…
• Those words are words often asosciated with people that use gas grills therefore the theory of using LSI to rank well in the search engines would naturally assume that a site that uses these words on its pages would be found to be most relevant to that niche even though it doesn’t present every possible alternative version of the word gas grill, grille, grills etc…
• Site structure seems to be another factor tha tis having mor emhpasis being put on it when it comes to ranking well, and the term most often used when describing the new site structure site builders should use is called Silo structures.

Can LSI be gamed by marketers?

Yes, and it’s already happening, with some sites and services offering LSI keyword research services, and offering to build silo structured sites, which is another part of the LSI ranking theory for SEO.

Does Link building still work?

Yes, it does but the reason it works well still is that natural link building comes from people linking back to your quality content pieces and usually thes elinks come from appreciative people with similarly-themed sites, therfore those links are relevant and naturally given.

How does one write content that is good enough to get linked to witohut asking?

By writing knowledgeably about your subject matter an din such a way that is resounds well with your readers. 

A lot of marketers that get tons of traffic tell me that LSI is nothing to even be converned about because you should be writing naturally anyways and using the words that come naturally to you you when writing about something you know about.

Here’s an example of how to naturally use LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing in your writing:

If you write a review on a product made by someone, include the product owner’s name in your review because the search engines using LSI in their ranking factors know that most sites that write about this product also mention the owner’s name so including the owner’s name in your review helps your site rank better merely by including a keyword that is associated with that product.

No related posts.

I call this my “10 Articles Method”

Here’s how it works:

You have a brand new site and you want it to get indexed, traffic, and you want to build up your subscribers, too.

The first thing you need to do is write a 10-part series of site content pages on a certain topic, like “10 ways to get out of debt fast”.

Each of the 10 ways, or tips is an individual article or blog post or site page

You will publish all of these to your site first

Then, you take each content piece and submit it (modified of course) to the article directories for publication.

In your author resource box, you link to the main domain name of the site.

In the body of the article you link to an inner page of your site, the better longer version of the original piece…

You do this 10 times using the pre-written content from your site

Then, you take all 10 content pieces and make them into a short PDF report.

You will give this free report away on your site to build up some email readership.

In your free report, you will recommend 2 or 3 things that you recommend people buy to help them with whatever the free report is about.

Then you make some affiliate sales from that.

And all you did was fill your site with content, re-purposed the articles for article directory traffic, publication and backlinks, and of course, to make sure your site is now indexed.

Out of all of this you got 10 backlinks ( 20 actually) a report to give away to your site visitors and a free report promoting your recommended products.

Plus, you have an email list to contact again, repeatedly