Friday, February 4, 2011

Interview: Corey Bornmann

Corey Bornmann comes to Internet Marketing from a strong programming background. Born an Entrepreneur, he loves to watch anybody selling anything to anyone. Corey is the founder of AffPortal.com, an ever growing Internet Marketing toolkit that is born of tools he developed to build his own profitable campaigns. Corey also has a 1/2 stake in PPVPlaybook.com, an internet marketing forum that teaches PPV, PPC, SEO and general shop talk having to do with making money online.

Tell us a little background info about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you? How long have you been working in this industry?
I am originally from Doylestown Pa and now live in central Pennsylvania with my awesome wife and super good daughters. I just turned 40 years old this fall, gulp, and have been in Internet Marketing for over 4 years now.

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
I am proud of three major accomplishments so far in marketing. 1. That I had made enough in affiliate commissions two years ago to allow my wife to quit her job and stay at home full time with our youngest daughter and run our home.

Second is that I kept working hard to build an income stream that allowed me to quit consulting and work from home full time.

Third is how AffPortal has grown to be a multi national presence in Internet Marketing with long term members from all over the world. When we combined with PPVPlaybook.com last year it completed us to be more than just tools but a killer community as well. I'm very proud to be part of the AffPortal.com / PPVPlaybook.com community.

How did you come to learn about this industry? Why did you choose this career? When did you first realize the full potential in affiliate marketing? When did you first “hit the big time?”
I first learned of making money online when I purchased a book at Borders about Adsense and started down that rabbit hole. Once I gained a little traction I found my account had been closed and I was back to square one. That was the best piece of bad news I had ever received.

It was then that I really dug in and discovered the old forum at Click Consultants. Ironically Jon, you were in the same group as I was if you remember.

I realized the potential in affiliate marketing when one of my first sites started to gain some traction in the email submit realm and dishing out free baby stuff. I hit my first $30 on Superbowl Sunday night and from then I knew I could scale this to MUCH larger heights.

It was that next monday that I wrote my first tool, a keyword permutator, to help build a massive list of city relative keywords. That was the beginning of AffPortal but I didn't know it at the time.

I had initially chosen Affiliate Marketing as a second income and eventually realized with enough work I could build this into a full time income.

I "hit the big time" with a killer funnel I built for the netflix offer using PPV as a paid traffic source. The income from that far surpassed what my wife was making and it allowed her to quit her job and come home for good.

What do you think it takes to be successful as an affiliate?
It takes a never say die attitude to become a successful affiliate along with realistic expectations. It's not easy, won't always work, will be challenging, will keep you from sleeping your full 8 hrs and will test your creativity. But most of all it takes a Village. Seriously, if you're an island in IM, you won't reach your potential because by talking things out with others in the industry you get insights and new ideas you may not have.

What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
My biggest failures in IM has been that heart breaker of a niche, dating. I have promoted about every offer and only found one that made a profit for me. THEN, that one, mature dating, switched up their lander and never converted the same for me because I was direct linking and the automation on their new lander wouldn't get approved by my traffic source. Geeze that's a frustrating one. I'm gonna get that niche eventually though, you'll see…

What is the single toughest problem you've had to face, and how did you get through it?
The single toughest problem I had to face has been when I was working full time consulting and learning Internet Marketing in the evenings and super early mornings. Up at 4am for 3 hrs of IM work then off to work at 8. Pick up the kids, make dinner, wife comes home, have dinner with the family then down to my office from 7:30 PM until at least 12 midnight or later.

I averaged about 4 hours of sleep every week day for about 2 years and the only way I got through it was with the encouragement of my wife and friends online that were doing the same darn thing… clawing forward and burning the midnight oil.

Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
I'm not crazy about writing content. I don't like to write about things that don't interest me like recently, Wedding Favors. So I have a girl in the Philippines that I outsource content writing to. She has been with me full time for a month and it's working out better than I ever could have imagined. It was hard to find someone I trust and that could deliver content that I didn't need to edit but the search was worth it.

What is the future of marketing?
Internet marketing is never going away. It grows every year and I'm looking forward to the day that we can build campaigns for automobiles. Now that would be a fattie commission.

If it’s possible for you to share, are there any particular niches that you currently favor? Or that you aren’t necessarily in right now but that you would recommend?
I favor niches that I see that are popular around me. I watch what my kids like, what my neighbors and friends are up to and what I see on TV. This Christmas I got into promoting popular stuffed toys because my daughters like them and there was a good search volume online for this particular toy.

I really recommend evergreen niches and to stay away from fad products if you are looking for sustainability. If you can bring traffic fast and furious for any keywords, then get into fad products but I like long term assets b/c we spend quit a bit of time on our campaigns here.

What niche has worked best for you?
My favorite niche to date has been Netflix. The checks coming in from that campaign and the dollars being spent on PPV traffic was big. I have yet to find one like that again.

Which methods of promotion do you favor?
I like a healthy balance of diversification. For affiliate products currently I am splitting my time 50/50 between SEO niche blogs and PPV traffic. However my partner and I are developing our own front end adware and private PPV network using a very interesting open source (not free) script that we are helping to expand on.

How have you made those promotion methods successful?
SEO is new to me and I love a challenge so have tried just about everything out there and let me tell you there's a lot of crap advice and techniques. So with SEO I have a back to basics approach of solid upfront research and strive for exact match domains (but not always possible). I rely HEAVILY on my google suggested keywords scraper inside of AffPortal to find kw phrases that translate into available domains in the .com, .org and .net range.

Next with SEO is consistant content creation and for back linking I employ a strategy that we discuss in length inside of PPVPlaybook lead by a long time SEO expert that goes by DanTheMan.

What have you been up to recently? What projects are you working on?
It's no secret that I love making and selling things online to anyone and I also use PLR a lot of the time as a foundation for those products. So what I'm doing is building a searchable PLR library of all my PLR material at www.PrivateLabelRights.cc. I'm still adding content every day and it's open for foundation members for less than $10/month but it's a ways from where it will be. This is a long term project.

The key with PLR is to group several products together so you can pick and choose pieces of each to use, rewrite and combine together to make your own product or content. This site, with it's searchability will allow that once the products are all loaded.

What problems have you had with those new projects?
It takes FOREVER to go through mountains of PLR material and sort the crap from the good stuff that's going into my library. Setting up the membership system, DAP, is a little tricky too to make sure the content is locked down enough but still shows enough to get indexed well.

Also I put this on a .cc domain really as a test to see if I could get substantial rankings over time using a .cc domain. So far we have luke warm results but it's still a new site.

Do you think anything particular in your past prepared you for this industry? Your education? Jobs you’ve held before?
I know being a programmer has helped me BIG time to prepare me for this career choice. Not only for myself but for my partnership with David Ford at PPVPlaybook.com as well. We compliment each other like yin and yang. I'm a stronger tech guy and he's a stronger marketer and together we are a solid one, two punch.

What are your greatest strengths?
I am not afraid to fail. This enables me to try things that some people may not try for fear they will fail. I am also naturally technical minded so the more technical aspects of this industry do not intimidate me. I see a lot of opportunity in the tech aspects of IM.

What are your greatest weaknesses?
I have general anxiety disorder so sometimes even though things are solid business wise, I find myself worrying about the future and if this or that falls apart, what will I do. This is where I try to rely on my faith.

What motivates you?
I am naturally an entrepreneur from a very early age. I used to dig through dumpsters to gather out wine bottles that my brother and mom and I would decorate and sell back to the residents at our complex when I was in 3rd grade. I made candles to sell every Christmas and I LOVE infomercials.

On top of that, my family motivates me. I want my wife to be able to spend her days with our youngest while she is still young.

What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
"Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle"…. yea Ryan!

Who has impacted you most in your career, and how?
My partner David Ford. He's always there to bounce ideas off of and is not afraid to tell me if an idea is good or bad. He's also not afraid to tell me when I spout off a little too hard in our forum. We're in the same phase of life, live on different ends of North America, partners to the end and have yet to shake hands in person.

What kinds of people do you have difficulties working with? Any good stories?
I can work with pretty much anybody that is genuine. I have worked with a few guru's and some are impressive and I consider friends, and some others, well… they are matchstick men.

What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?
My long term goals include a solid portfolio of aged niche blogs selling physical products on auto pilot using only SEO traffic that provides for all my family expenses.

I want to write a SEO Scheduler program to track an SEO project from conception to managed maintenance and all points in between.

I am building a private PPV network for myself and my partner to test out which could develop into a much larger network for PPVPlaybook down the line.

If money were no object I'd be making niche blogs and snowboarding to keep in shape at least 3 times a week.

Where do you want to be ten years from now?
I would like to be back to working 40 hours a week and get in some of those snowboarding days back into my life. Living possibly in Sedona AZ with a large portfolio of my own products and seo niche blogs.

How do you like to spend your free time? What doe work-life balance mean to you?
Now my free time goes to my family. My daughter Araella is 13 now and I am trying to steer her into her teen years as smoothly as possible. My youngest Greta is 5 and I'm savoring every little girl thing she does while I'm still bigger than life in her eyes. Finally I'm working on building a strong marriage stronger with my lifelong love Carrie.

If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?
I would pursue programming and wait around for the internet to be unleashed from Arpanet.

What is your greatest achievement outside of work? What are some of your unfulfilled dreams?
My greatest achievement outside of work was probably being an all conference center in college playing football for Shippensburg University in PA.

I have an unfulfilled dream of cruising on a power boat for a year all over North America.

What is your favorite quote?
"Look beyond the Battle"

Do you have a Twitter account or Facebook “Like” page?
I can be reached at AffPortal.com, affportal@gmail.com and on skype at "affportal"

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My thoughts on this week’s debate

Earlier this week I was on a search panel with Harry Shum of Bing and Rich Skrenta of Blekko (and moderated by Vivek Wadhwa) and the video now live. It’s forty minutes long, but it covers a lot of ground:

One big point of discussion is whether Bing copies Google’s search results. I’m going to try to address this earnestly; if snarky is what you want, Stephen Colbert will oblige you.

First off, let me say that I respect all the people at Bing. From engineers to evangelists, everyone that I’ve met from Microsoft has been thoughtful and sincere, and I truly believe they want to make a great search engine too. I know that they work really hard, and the last thing I would want to do is imply that Bing is purely piggybacking Google. I don’t believe that.

That said, I didn’t expect that Microsoft would deny the claims so strongly. Yusuf Mehdi’s post says “We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop.”

Given the strength of the “We do not copy Google’s results” statements, I think it’s fair to line up screenshots of the results on Google that later showed up on Bing:

Google Screenshot
compared with
Bing Screenshot

and

Google Screenshot
compared with
Bing Screenshot

and

Google Screenshot
compared with
Bing Screenshot

and

Google Screenshot
compared with
Bing Screenshot

and

Google Screenshot
compared with
Bing Screenshot

and

Google Screenshot
compared with
Bing Screenshot

and

Google Screenshot
compared with
Bing Screenshot

I think if you asked a regular person about these screenshots, Microsoft’s “We do not copy Google’s results” statement wouldn’t ring completely true.

Something I’ve heard smart people say is that this could be due to generalized clickstream processing rather than code that targets Google specifically. I’d love if Microsoft would clarify that, but at least one example has surfaced in which Microsoft was targeting Google’s urls specifically. The paper is titled Learning Phrase-Based Spelling Error Models from Clickthrough Data and here’s some of the relevant parts:

The clickthrough data of the second type consists of a set of query reformulation sessions extracted from 3 months of log files from a commercial Web browser [I assume this is Internet Explorer. --Matt] …. In our experiments, we “reverse-engineer” the parameters from the URLs of these [query formulation] sessions, and deduce how each search engine encodes both a query and the fact that a user arrived at a URL by clicking on the spelling suggestion of the query – an important indication that the spelling suggestion is desired. From these three months of query reformulation sessions, we extracted about 3 million query-correction pairs.”

This paper very much sounds like Microsoft reverse engineered which specific url parameters on Google corresponded to a spelling correction. Figure 1 of that paper looks like Microsoft used specific Google url parameters such as “&spell=1″ to extract spell corrections from Google. Targeting Google deliberately is quite different than using lots of clicks from different places. This is at least one concrete example of Microsoft taking browser data and using it to mine data deliberately and specifically from Google (in this case, the efforts of Google’s spell correction team).

That brings me to an issue that I raised with Bing during the search panel and afterwards with Harry Shum: disclosure. A while ago, my copy of Windows XP was auto-updated to IE8. Here’s one of the dialog boxes:

IE8 suggested sites

I don’t think an average consumer realizes that if they say “yes, show me suggested sites” that they’re granting Microsoft permission to send their queries and clicks on Google to Microsoft, which will then be used in Bing’s ranking. I think my Mom would be confused that saying “Yes” to that dialog will send what she searches for on Google and what she clicks on to Microsoft. I don’t think that IE8′s disclosure is clear and conspicuous enough that a reasonable consumer could make an informed choice and know that IE8 will send their Google queries/clicks to Microsoft.

One comment that I’ve heard is that “it’s whiny for Google to complain about this.” I agree that’s a risk, but at the same time I think it’s important to go on the record about this.

Another comment that I’ve heard is that this affects only long-tail queries. As we said in our blog post, the whole reason we ran this test was because we thought this practice was happening for lots and lots of different queries, not simply rare queries. To verify our hypothesis, rare queries were the easiest to test. To me, what the experiment proved was that clicks on Google are being incorporated in Bing’s rankings. Microsoft is the company best able to answer the degree to which clicks on Google figure into their Bing’s rankings, and I hope they clarify how much of an impact clicks on Google affect Microsoft’s rankings.

Unfortunately, most of the reply has been along the lines of “this is only one of 1000 signals.” Nate Silver does a good job of tackling this, so I’ll quote him:

Microsoft’s defense boils down to this: Google results are just one of the many ingredients that we use. For two reasons, this argument is not necessarily convincing.

First, not all of the inputs are necessarily equal. It could be, for instance, that the Google results are weighted so heavily that they are as important as the other 999 inputs combined.

And it may also be that an even larger fraction of what creates value for Bing users are Google’s results. Bing might consider hundreds of other variables, but these might produce little overall improvement in the quality of its search, or might actually detract from it. (Microsoft might or might not recognize this, since measuring relevance is tricky: it could be that features that they think are improving the relevance of their results actually aren’t helping very much.)

Second, it is problematic for Microsoft to describe Google results as just one of many “signals and features”. Google results are not any ordinary kind of input; instead, they are more of a finished (albeit ever-evolving) product

Let’s take that thought to its conclusion. If clicks on Google really account for only 1/1000th (or some other trivial fraction) of Microsoft’s relevancy, why not just stop using those clicks and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this? And if Microsoft is unwilling to stop incorporating Google’s clicks in Bing’s rankings, doesn’t that argue that Google’s clicks account for much more than 1/1000th of Bing’s rankings?

I really did try to be calm and constructive in this post, so I apologize if some frustration came through despite that–my feelings on the search panel were definitely not feigned. Since people at Microsoft might not like this post, I want to reiterate that I know the people (especially the engineers) at Bing work incredibly hard to compete with Google, and I have huge respect for that. It’s because of how hard those engineers work that I think Microsoft should stop using clicks on Google in Bing’s rankings. If Bing does better on a search query than Google does, that’s fantastic. But an asterisk that says “we don’t know how much of this win came from Google” does a disservice to everyone. I think Bing’s engineers deserve to know that when they beat Google on a query, it’s due entirely to their hard work. Unless Microsoft changes its practices, there will always be a question mark.

If you want to dive into this topic even deeper, you can watch the full forty minute video above.

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Save $100 on Search Marketing Expo: Early Bird Discount Expires Saturday, 2/5

image of the Search Marketing Expo logo

Search marketing is a huge topic — and includes dozens of ways you can grow your business and get more (and better) traffic to your site.

And Search Marketing Expo is a conference that offers more than 60 cutting-edge sessions (as well as invaluable networking opportunities) to help you do exactly that.

At SMX, you’ll learn how to:

  • Optimize your site content for better organic search results,
  • Get the best ROI from pay-per-click search advertising,
  • Expand your skills as a local and mobile advertiser,
  • Master social media marketing on Twitter, Facebook, and other networks, and/or
  • Boost your conversion and increase your sales

As a bonus for Copyblogger readers, use the code smx100copy (case sensitive) and save $100 off your registration. Sign up by February 5th and save even more with early bird rates.

To learn more about the Expo, visit http://smxwest.com. We’re impressed by the depth of knowledge and expertise represented at SMX, which is why we’re happy to be a media partner for the conference.

But don’t delay — you’ll get the best early bird pricing if you register by February 5.

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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

The Straight Dope on Facebook, Twitter, and SEO

image of a twitter icon

Ever wonder if all those links that result from people retweeting and sharing content on Twitter give you a boost with SEO?

For a long time no one was sure, because the dreaded nofollow is in use on big social sites to keep those links from being counted as a “vote” for search engine purposes. No matter what, social networking links are still highly useful from a traffic perspective, because they have the power to get new readers to your content.

But in December, Google confirmed that the playing field had changed a little. Here’s what that means for you and your content.

In May, 2010, Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google was not using social media links as a signal. And then in December, 2010, he announced equally firmly that they had changed their mind:.

We do use Twitter and Facebook links in ranking, as we always have in our web search rankings, but in addition we’re also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or a creator on twitter or Facebook. […]

This is something that is used relatively lightly for now, and we’ll see how much we use it over time, depending on how useful it is and how robust it ends up being. The one thing I would caution people about is, don’t necessarily say to yourself, “Aha, now I’m going to go out and get reciprocal follows and I’m gonna get a ton of followers,” just like people used to get a ton of links.

In the same way that PageRank depends on not just the number of links but the quality of those links, you have to think about what are the followers that mean quality, who are the people who are actually not just bots, or some software program or things like that.

What that means is that Google has decided that social media sharing is a smart way to weed the creeps from the good guys.

Right now the effect is still probably small, while the Google teams figure out if social media sharing patterns are a reliable way to uncover the best sites and pages — and leave spam at the bottom of page 10.

(Remember, the first rule of SEO is a lot like the first rule of Copyblogger — don’t try to send users to crappy content.)

Signals

Google uses about 200 “signals” to suggest if a given page is useful or junk.

Right now, links from Twitter or Facebook are still a weak signal. That means that more weight will be given to the usual suspects — how many traditional links you have, the authority of the pages that link to you, what kind of anchor text they use, and your on-page keywords and related copy.

(Check out our free report on SEO copywriting if you want to know more about how this works.)

But those links from social sharing are now a signal that search engines using — and if it proves a reliable way to get better pages to the top of the SERPs, they’ll turn up the volume on it.

Authority matters

Google and Bing have confirmed that they do take into account the authority of users who tweet links to your site.

If someone who looks, acts, and smells like a real user with actual authority tweets a link to your site, that counts for more than if a newbie (or a bot) does it. Which makes sense — just like if an authoritative site links to you, that counts for more than if a small, new site does.

Does that mean you should suck up to people with lots of Facebook friends and Twitter followers? Not exactly.

It does mean that you’ll want to create content that stands out in the crowd. Because of the nature of social sharing, the best stuff tends to find its way to the top. You may not have 100,000 followers, but someone in your 100 followers knows a bigger fish, and so on and so on.

But your content can only capture the attention of the biggest fish if it’s exceptional. So create the best work you can, always.

What should you do differently?

Probably the worst thing you could do would be to start gaming social networking sites to try and manufacture bigger follower/friend numbers.

Forget lame tricks that you think will make you look bigger than you are. Put that time and energy into creating better content — either by becoming a better writer or by partnering with a fantastic writer who needs what you bring to the equation.

(Your side of the bargain might be a paycheck, or it might be business expertise, or a great sense of graphic design, or killer chocolate-cream-cheese cupcakes. You’ve got to figure that part out on your own.)

If you’ve put off social media because you rely exclusively on SEO to get traffic, you might want to reconsider that.

Not only because social sharing will probably become a stronger signal, but because of the many other benefits that get the right visitors to your site.

That’s why Scribe SEO added Twitter to its link-building tools late last year. (And we’ll include more social media link-building tools in upcoming releases.) As SEO evolves, Scribe evolves.

Social media and SEO were never actually as separate as people think — but they’re becoming more entwined every day, and there’s every reason to think that will continue.

What if Google changes their minds tomorrow?

This is always a good question to keep foremost in your mind when you’re planning your SEO strategy.

Using Twitter or Facebook purely to generate links for SEO is a short-term play that probably isn’t worth your time.

But using Twitter and Facebook to:

  • yes, generate links and also
  • get content in front of readers and
  • develop relationships with other content marketers that will earn you high-quality organic links (the old-fashioned kind) and
  • let prospective customers come to know, like and trust you and
  • translate online connections into real-world relationships and
  • do market research by listening for customer problems you might be able to solve …

… well, that’s a smart long-term play that will build your business.

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Tuesday, February 1, 2011

SEO Tips and Search Ranking Questions Answered

seo tipsSEO isn’t for everyone, and honestly… it’s a huge pain in the butt to manage if you are currently working on ad campaigns, writing new content and handling everything else for your business. Over the past few months I’ve been working with RankPay, and they have a really amazing setup. In short, you pick the keywords you want to rank for, and you don’t pay anything until you see results.

After seeing some great results, I wanted to sit down with Justin from RankPay and have him answer some important SEO questions and provide a few seo tips as well. Please keep in mind that Justin’s answers to my questions are based on the question themselves, but with SEO there are so many different moving parts and dynamics that not every questions answer will work for each and every website. Let the learning begin!

SEO TIPS & FAQs ANSWERED

How effective is article marketing for web sites, in terms of seo rank and keywords? (ie: using backlinks as keywords and submitting one article vs. weekly for the same site)

Backlink building is one of the most important things that you can do for your Search Engine rankings. While article marketing is a great strategy to build highly relevant backlinks to a website, it must be executed properly to see results from a rankings perspective. When backlinking you want to make sure that you have links from a variety of websites and not only a single one. Therefore make sure that you are submitting articles to more websites than just Ezinearticles. Next you want to make sure that your links include your keyword, also known as anchor text. Anchor text helps the search engines better understand the content of the item that its linking to.

Obviously the PageRank of a web site is very important, but let’s say we have a few sites/domains that all have the same page rank and links to the site, but one domain is 10 years old, another is 5 years old and another was just recently registered, how will the age of a domain/site effect it’s results in search engines?

The age of the domain can have an affect on search engine rankings if the link age that were pointing to those domains are nearly as old as the domain itself. If all things equal, and one domain was registered last week and another registered ten years ago they will both have an equal opportunity to rank. Again, the only thing that would influence something differently is if the ten year old site had been indexed by Google years ago and has backlinks that are older than the new website.

What are you thoughts on the millions of autoblogs that are simply replicating content? How long of a life span do these sites usually have, and how does article replication effect both the original content creator, and the ones stealing it?

We aren’t fans of autoblogs, stealing isn’t right and copying another persons content is the same as stealing. It is disappointing to see the recent explosion of autoblogs and their popularity in the internet marketing community. Matt Cutts just posted today about how Google has rolled out algorithm changes that deal with this very thing: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-change-launched

There are millions of old sites that were built in plain HTML, but still rank very well in the search engines. What is the best method for these site to convert their HTML sites to WordPress sites, while keeping SEO and prior links in tact?

Great question Zac and critically important for most long time internet marketers. When transforming a website from legacy HTML to WordPress there are a few methods that you can do to keep and retain backlinks. Keep in mind though that both methods are very time consuming but worth while in the long run.

First, take inventory of all your websites URLs and indexed pages in Google. There are tools that can expedite this process, or if your site isn’t that big you can go to Google and search “site: http://www.url.com” This will show you an index of all of your pages from your domain in Google.

After taking inventory of the pages, you’ll need to replicate those same URLs in WordPress. You can change the permalink structure to reflect your old page URLs by adding .html to the end. For example, /%postname%.html. This will change any of your post names to have .html at the end, matching your old legacy html website.

Finally, you need to make sure that you copy your information architecture of your old website. That includes directories and how your site had its linked laid out before. While this method is extremely time consuming it will help save your site from experiencing a tremendous loss in rankings or PageRank.

The easier method to converting a legacy HTML site to a WordPress website is to use 301 redirects for all old pages to the corresponding pages on your new website. You’ll want to make sure that you don’t miss any links, so do a backlink check in Yahoo Site Explorer and verify that all links that pointed to your old HTML website are redirected using a 301 to your new similar page.

Backlinks, Page Content, Sitemap and Image Tags… can you rank and give a quick explanation of each in order of their importance when trying to make the most of your site for seo ranking purposes?

#1 Page Content

Page content is the single most important ranking factor for all websites. By having great content on your site, that is also relevant and keyword friendly, you give yourself the possibility of attracting quality inbound links. Do yourself a favor and make sure that the content is unique, and that each page has keywords corresponding to it which you are trying to target in the search engines.

#2 Backlinks

A great backlinking campaign can work wonders on a website’s search engine rankings. It’s one of the strongest ranking variables in Google’s and other search engine algorithms. Not all links are made alike, so don’t try and go get as many links as possible, it’s all about building a great backlink portfolio by first and foremost creating great content that your readers want to read.

#3 Sitemap

A Sitemap allows your site to be indexed and crawled properly. It also helps the search engines crawl and identify pages that may not be linked from any pages on your website. Be sure that your site has a sitemap that’s built in an XML format and is located on your root directory (http://www.url.com/sitemap.xml). If you use WordPress there are many plugins that can help you automate this process.

#4 Image Tags

While image tags can slightly help a websites rankings they are not significant enough to waste a tremendous amount of time on. The biggest benefit about having proper image tags is the traffic that a website may receive from Google Images. By having proper image tags, and file names, Google could rank your websites well in Google Images. Although from an SEO perspective I would not recommend wasting a lot of time on Image Tags.

What is the fastest way to build up page rank for a web site?

The single best way to build up PageRank for a website is by having excellent content. Build great content and watch the backlinks naturally come in. By building your site for your reader you’ll be surprised by how many natural links will begin appearing. Another strategy is to have and work with a great PR company. Landing a review on a reputable newspaper, website, or magazine can help your sites credibility and rankings.

Using RankPay for Keyword Placement & SEO

seo tipsI hope you’ve enjoyed this Q&A session with Justin from  RankPay on seo tips and how you can improve your web sites search engines rankings. I highly recommend using RankPay to improve your seo rankings, as I have been using them for the past few months now and with many different sites. You will never pay for RankPay services until you see a Top 30 ranking for your specified search phrase, and each campaign is limited to a minimum of only 6 months. In addition to providing a quality service that works, you will also have a full support team that can provide you with advice on choosing the best keywords, setting up new campaigns, seo tips or just any questions you might come up with.

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