Boosting the crawlability of your site or blog is not really rocket science, but still many webmasters see it as something that’s not in your control. You’re about to learn the right changes that will make it happen. What you really must do if you’re trying to attract website crawlers is make your site attractive to them.

Are you trying to improve your site crawlability?

Major search engines like Google are regularly looking for new pages that add value and that will be useful to their users. So if you can convince them that your site is worthy, there’s no doubt that you’ll see a higher site crawlability and better search engine rankings in the long run for all your pages.

Optimize your images

Website photos, like the written content on your website, need to be optimized for a little extra search engine love. Oddly enough, poorly optimized images on your site can lead to dismal ranking. Failing to do this can mean that your website will have a crawl rate that isn’t quite as fast as you need it to be to succeed. How do you do this? Using captions for the purpose of attracting search engine attention is a great first step to make your images more Google bot friendly then you need to move along and make sure you’ve properly resized the images and used appropriate keywords in the file names. It’s not a big deal to make these small changes but the changes they’ll make in your site’s performance is a very big deal.

Choose your hosting with care

Choose the service you turn to for website hosting well (we recommend Host Gator)so your site doesn’t have a tendency to be down during critical moments. It’s impossible to guess about any specific time your website is going to be crawled. Choosing your hosting wisely for better uptime will raise the odds that your site will be operational when they do. Ensure that you double check the server that you’re going for and if you experience any problems in the start, then just switch to another reliable one instead of waiting for these frequent problems to be resolved.

Optimize your website’s SEO

On-site SEO and in particular page titles should also be extremely relevant to the topic of your site and to the information on the page – they should also be designed to really make an impression. This will work to not only increase the rate your site is crawled by search engines but also to help you boost your ranking for certain keywords.

It may not seem all that important at first to go to the trouble of making unique titles but the rewards are well worth the effort. So ensure that you’re focusing on this area too.

Give Google what it wants and you’ll have no trouble at all attracting those famous Google bots to your site every other day. Every step that we talked about here can be applied to any website, and the results will follow. Many new webmasters hardly have any idea as to why a proper website marketing plan is important for their site. Remember, getting the search engines like Google to send you traffic takes effort on your part, and unless and until you take such small actions towards your goal, nothing will happen.

Google is most likely the most critical source of traffic available and you will find that 80% of your organic traffic comes from this search engine. Following Google SEO Advice is clearly important and the best way to do it is to focus on a few variables, which will also help increase your value in the eyes of Google.

Does Google like your site?

Your audience’s opinion is just as important as Google

It is important to remember that Google watches everything carefully to ensure they are providing the best results. Thus, you should remember that your audience’s opinion is just as important as Google. If users have searched for your targeted keyword, land on your site and leave unsatisfied, they’re probably going to come up to look for other sites. Therefore, if the reaction of your audience isn’t positive and they are unhappy with the value your site provides, you clearly need to do something about it. If this happens frequently and Google discovers the pattern, then you might find your site dropping in the SERPs. You have to make sure you populate your site with content that is designed for your audience. Google’s users are at the heart of their business and if you truly want to be noticed then impress your audience.

Be the first when it comes to bringing out the news

Be the first when it comes to bringing out the news related to your niche on your website. This is exactly why you find tech blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable hogging the limelight all the time on the front page of Google for popular keywords.

Even if your website is not a content oriented site, you can always add a blog to it where you can post about the latest industry news. Being updated will help you keep your visitors updated, which ultimately helps you grow your position in the eyes of Google and maintain it.

Don’t overlook the “Title” tag

One thing you shouldn’t overlook is the “Title” tag of your website because it does carry weight. Your primary keyword should be featured in the Title tag because that’s what Google uses to determine what you should rank for. However, don’t go overboard and turn your Title tag into a massive list of keywords. You can easily use up to two keywords in the Title, but not more than that. A smart way to deal with this is to combine your niche long tail keyword research to produce two or three different keywords in the one phrase.

Taking care of little details is one of the most important factors of your online marketing plan if you want to reach the first page of the SERPs. While limited SEO experience in terms of Google won’t squash your chances, you still can’t expect to succeed right away as it will take a little time, but don’t worry because you will get there in the end.

SEO is pretty simple to apply, especially for those sites that are produced with e-commerce in mind. There seems to be a false impression that SEO for e-commerce sites is difficult. But, the truth is, they are no different. When you get to the point of using SEO on your site and are impressed by what it does, you will never look back. In this article, we will look at ways in which you can use certain SEO techniques to bring traffic to your website for no cost at all.

An e-commerce site needs SEO too

Have an SEO-friendly shopping cart

Be certain that the shopping cart that you want to utilize is SEO friendly. This is due to the fact that as time goes on, you will have to make changes to your pages and carry out on page optimization. This is so that when you have an SEO friendly shopping cart, everything will be more simpler. There are many possible options when it comes to deciding upon a shopping cart. But, do not make a quick decision by getting one that make it hard for your to optimize your site for the search engine spiders.

Drive search engine spiders towards the pages you want them to see

If you have a lot of pages on your site, find out which one of them is essential. When you pay more attention to one particular page, you will have the capability of getting that particular page ranked higher than the rest. The pages that you do not want to get indexed should have a robot.txt added to them. Simply put, this says to the search engine spiders that they should overlook those pages. By doing this, you’ll automatically increase the overall value of the pages that you don’t have the Robots.txt on.

Fresh content again and again

Producing fresh content for your site is very essential for making sure that it gets a high rank for particular keywords. Since you have an e-commerce website, what can you do for new content? Allow your customers to post reviews! This is not that hard to do. If you ran an e-commerce site then it is apparent that it contains products. Allow your customers the opportunity to put helpful products reviews on the website. This will help you to convert more views to sales because your new prospects will see the review that other customers have left about your various products. Look at Amazon.com as good e-commerce site example. It is an e-commerce website, but the search engines will always have new material to crawl because the customers are constantly leaving reviews.

Optimizing your e-commerce website for the search engines is easy to do and is not as complex as many make it out to be. You will need to move if you want to be success. If you do not put consistent efforts into this, then quite naturally, you will not get good results. So start optimizing your e-commerce website for the search engines and take your e-marketing plan miles ahead of your competitors.

Following my post a few days ago about off-page seo factors, today I will attempt to shed some light on the fundamentals of on-site search engine optimization…

Do you have an effective on-site search engine optimization strategy?

Start with selecting the right keywords

To start with it’s important that you understand the importance of locating and using the right keywords. You will soon realize that almost everything you do in search engine optimization is built on one key factor, keywords and phrases, because this is how the average consumer will search and research.

Have you chosen the right domain name?

Get your site noticed by the search engines by including the information right in your URL such as your keywords which will get a higher value since they’re in the URL. If you are capable of obtaining a domain that includes your keyword you are one step closer to perfection. You will need fewer backlinks with a domain name like this. Keep it simple but don’t add anything to the keyword you intend to use as your domain name to keep you higher on the search engine results.

Publish great content on a regular basis

If you want to look the very best in the eyes of Google and your market, then you will create a publishing strategy whereby you keep adding great content on a timely basis. If you fail to do this, then your readers will notice it as will Google, and things could begin to slow down for you.

So it’s important to recognize the overall freshness of your website; aim at having old pages with new pages, a healthy mixture of both. Truthfully, if your site is large enough you can continue holding your rankings because it is the backlinks and trust rank that will play a large role. Let’s not forget that you can hire freelance writers to create your content, and then you will be set and save some time. Regardless of your market, you can do this and your readers will respond well.

What is your site ‘theme’?

Focus on the page theming, because search engines like websites that are tightly themed.

The easiest way to keep on track here is to build your skeleton site using the phrases from your keyword research. This is no hard science involved with this, and then you can simply follow your site outline for creating content. You can really derail your SEO efforts by optimizing a page that is not relevant to the topic of your site. Building a site around a solid and clear theme is a good on-page SEO practice.

This is by no means all there is to optimizing your pages – remember to read our internet marketing blueprint for a more comprehensive guide. You can manage to get your site, or pages, to the top of page one, but it does take time and effort.

Search engine optimization is one of the most essential pieces of your web marketing campaign, and in order to truly recognize SEO and operate it, it is imperative for you to know how off-page seo factors impact your search engine ranking.

Are you aware of your off-page SEO factors?

By just having SEO focused materials with the accurate keywords won’t get you the position you desire for your targeted keywords, but instead you need to pay attention a plethora of off-page SEO strategies to get everything you possibly can out of your blog or website when it comes to search engine traffic…

Focus on links

First and foremost, you need to focus on getting a high number of backlinks from websites that have a high page rank. The grounds for this is, search engines such as Google put a lot of stress on the starting place of the backlink and give it power in accordance to that. So it you pick up a backlink from a site that is a PR 6 – it’s perceptibly going to tell the search engines that your website is vital enough to get a backlink from a high page rank site. Even if the backlink you’re getting form is a site that has a little PR, it still has more significance than linking to a site that lacks PR.

Have a site map

Next, you should make sure you have a site map and that it’s set up properly using your keywords. Your site map performs an important function, giving the search engines an easy way to discover all of your site’s pages. A site map is easy to install, and this gives the search engines a complete picture of what your site contains. Site maps are one of the most fundamental tools of SEO, so make sure your site has one. If you’re wondering how large your site should be for SEO purposes, this is something on which even SEO experts disagree. On the one hand, with a larger site you have more pages and content to rank for, yet many site owners who know what they’re doing also manage to rank their small sites highly too.

The way to deal with this issue is to experiment and see what’s working out with you. You may find that a smaller site can’t reach the place you’re aiming for, especially in a competitive niche, so you may have to expand it. The only way you can really find out what works is to test.

Authority sites

It’s also a good idea to inquire about links from authority websites as they share such a wonderful connection with the search engines. Make sure that the authority site you get a hold of your backlink form is applicable to your niche, and ranks suitably with the search engines. For instance, if you obtain a backlink from Ezine.Articles.com (which is an authority) site, it will be a lot more ideal than getting a backlink form a variety of smaller sites.

Off-page SEO is all about precision. Getting the ranking you want and keeping it isn’t something you can accomplish instantly, but you can do it if you make it a constant part of your online marketing plan.

Unfortunately for most websites, or blogs, the visitors are usually first and last time types, and that is why you need to do all you can to make your site sticky and attractive. Believe me, you can learn a lot about optimizing your website to make that happen. I’d like to look into a few simple tips that will make your site more appealing to your target market so visitors will ‘stick’ around for longer…

How long can you keep your visitors on your website?

Make sure your site doesn’t have compatability issues

First of all, make sure your website does not have compatibility problems with certain browsers. There are several popular browsers people use today, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Apple Safari, and you want your website to be compatible with all of these. Since lots of people use each of these browsers, it’s important to test them all to make sure they all work well with your site. If people can’t see or navigate your site, they’re not likely to stay long or come back, so you don’t want to overlook this. You should test this before you even launch a website, but even if your site’s been up for a while you should do it now.

Consider all screen resolutions

Consider all screen resolutions when designing your layouts. Most people don’t like to scroll vertically or horizontally to see the content on your page so be sure you’re not creating pages too wide or too long. It’s important for you to optimize your sites design so that it works with any screen resolution. You may feel this is an insignificant step but it sure can make a big difference where becoming more sticky is concerned. If your goal is to get more website traffic then you need to make sure your site is not irritating to the visitor and is user friendly to all. Also, remember that WordPress now has mobile compatability to ensure that your site appeals to as many people as possible.

Be simple and not too heavy when it comes to design

Thirdly, your website should be simple and not too heavy when it comes to design. Using heavy flash presentations and having blaring music in the background is a strict no-no.

As they arrive at your site they do not want to have to contend with complications they want to view your site with no problems. If you really must have flash on your site be sure that you also have a static HTML page for those who don’t want to go through your flash intro. If you’re going to use flash, at least be aware of the pros and cons. The best thing you can do here is make sure your visitors aren’t waiting for your page to load. Even though nowadays you have high internet speeds, sites that are lightweight are given more preference, so keep this mind.

By implementing the above strategies in your e-marketing plan you’ll find that your visitors will be more likely to return to your site, as you’ll be giving them good reasons to do so. If you want to make your site a popular online destination, you have to pay attention to all these apparently small matters, as they add up. It’s worthwhile to make your website as visitor friendly as possible, so don’t delay in applying these internet marketing tips.

Whether your aim is to write content for your website or create posts for your blog, fast writing techniques will make your article marketing more productive and help you get the most out of your efforts.

Can you train yourself how to write fast?

Pretend you’re doing a test!

Writers generally will do many different things to speed up their writing and get the most leverage from their writing. One thing you can do is to pretend you are being test. It might sound stupid, but it does the trick. You need to imagine that you’re writing a test and you need to finish it on time, or else you will lose your grades. When you begin with this mindset, you generally will write fast because you feel pressure to finish it on time. Apply this method the next time you begin writing your content. You’ll be happy with the results.

Write fast and edit later

As a wise writer, you purpose should be to write a fast draft and go later for editing. It can be very appealing to stop and make error corrections while you are writing. But, this can wreck your flow and make it even harder to get back to your broken speed. The best way to deal with this problem is to look over your notes, let the information sink in and then write. This way, you will not encounter any problems with sticking in substitutes at any time.

When it comes to the small mistakes like spelling and grammar, don’t touch them until you have finished. Everything can be taken care of when you proof-read your article and correct all the mistakes.

Give yourself an incentive

Last, make up your own set of rules and continue to use them. Tell yourself that you will reward yourself if you can finish ‘x’ amount of articles in ‘y’ amount of time. This reward could be almost anything. For instance, tell yourself that you will go to dinner if you can finish up your articles by the deadline.

This could be anything you want – as long as it motivates you and pushes you to take fast action. There is no good reason why this plan should not work for you. Also, you can use this time to make a promise with a friend or family member. Tell them that you will complete your content during a particular time period. When you have to report to someone else, it is a lot easier to pay attention to what you are doing, get in the zone and stay on target. You know that you will be held accountable for reaching your goal. So, this is a great motivation tool.

In summary…

There are many different methods you can use in your quest to discover how to write fast, as long as you’re willing to experiment to find what works for you. So many writers could benefit from increasing their productivity and writing far more content, but often they don’t try different methods that could help them achieve this. Of course, if all this writing still doesn’t appeal to you now’s probably the time to head off to oDesk to find an outsourced writer!

This transcript is the second part of my Ed Dale interview and this part focuses on the Flash SEO, and whether or not building Flash websites is a good idea.

11:50 DB: Are there any conventional offline businesses that can afford to ignore things or keep their fingers in the ears as of the moment? I’m thinking of a plumber, accountant…

11:59 ED: None. No. They are and in fact the more traditional, the so called service, like blacksmiths, the more devastating it is, because let’s think about those businesses, how do they market? They market by word of mouth. And if somebody just does a quick Google search, and I ask every single person listening to this Podcast now, just ask yourself, last time you had to research a holiday, get a plumber, find somebody to do something, research a product that you think you’re going to spend some money on and buy, did you or did you not head over to Google and search for it? And do a bit of research. I’m tipping the vast, vast majority of you listening right now, did. Why is that going to change? I have clients that are working with chimney sweeps in the UK, because again, in this modern day and age, in this world… What? I don’t know, David, when was the last time… In the UK, it’s Thompsons isn’t it?

12:54 DB: They are Thompsons directory, yes.

12:56 ED: Yeah. When was the last time you opened up your Thompsons?

12:59 DB: I had to think of the name then, just to confirm it. And…

13:02 ED: And that tells… If I asked you that question ten years ago, that would be unthinkable.

13:06 DB: Exactly, yes.

13:07 ED: Everybody use their national equivalent of the yellow pages. And again, if a colleague of mine here in Melbourne went out on the streets with a video camera in the local central business district of Melbourne and literally asked, “When was the last time you opened your yellow pages? And when was the last time you did a search on Google?” And most people were trying to think where the yellow pages was. And most people had searched with Google in the previous 24 hours. So, it can no longer be avoided. People have been able to get away with it, up to now. But, let me put it to you another way, David. Think about it from this perspective. Think of the amount of information we do have coming at us every day. This is not just a fire hose of information, this is somebody up turning the lights district and dumping it on your head. It is literally… It just is an… I don’t care who you are. Nobody can master, be a master of the information that’s coming at them every day. There’s just too much, too many sources. And when you think about that, what we tend to do is come back to first principles. And first principles are, where do we use to get recommendations from? And it was from the neighbor across the fence, or your friends, or your family, and so on.

14:27 ED: And this is why Facebook has gone nuts, because it isolates you from the absolute avalanche of information. And at least the information you’re getting is from your friends, family, acquaintances, people that you are happy to show what you’re doing online. And that’s the genius of it. So, given that that’s the case, we… If you aren’t participating and at least giving people the opportunity to “like” you, or comment or rate or review, then it’s a real problem. If you have a look at… Now, let’s turn around this and let’s have a look at a positive example. Now, for goodness sake, if somebody says to you, like you’re a mechanic. And you fix somebody’s car and they call you up and say, or they come by and say, “Oh, look, the car has never been running better, it’s fantastic.” Now, that’s the ultimate time example. “Look, can I just… Here’s an iPad for two minutes can you just type that on Google reviews for me. And look, if you do, your next car’s service is on me.” And you get people in the moment adding positive reviews, positive deserved reviews.

15:47 ED: That sort of approach, that sort of activity, to me, is what’s going to be required. And what terrifies and saddens me is that most businesses, small, medium and large, are being charged enormous sums of money to get very, very poor advice. Like anybody building Flash websites, for example, is insane. I mean it is just beyond dumb to have a Flash on your website. I mean, it is just stupid. Look, the stat I saw last week, there have been 150 million iOS devices that Apple’s produced since July 2007. July 2007, people. It’s not that long ago. Think about this, people had to pay significant amount of money to get some sort of iDevice; iPhone, iPad, iTouch. They reached that 150 million mark faster than any other thing in human history on the planet. Use the Mark. Let me repeat that. Any other thing ever in history. They reached a hundred and… And I’m talking about Netscape which was free, using Google, also free.

17:12 DB: And I think, I remember the reading DVD’s as well.

17:16 ED: Much far… That’s iPad’s alone.

17:17 DB: Yes.

17:18 ED: iPad alone is the fastest selling consumer device in human history. And businesses just have… Look at the positive rather than the negative, although, unfortunately the negative seems to be the only way to get businesses to notice them.

17:34 DB: So, you mentioned Flash SEO there. Does that mean… Obviously, flash intros are a big no, no. Does that mean that you wouldn’t even feature Flash at the top section of the website if there was an alternate version for iPads?

17:50 ED: Well, at the very least, I don’t see why there’s a justification in building Flash websites, in this day and age. But, at the very least, you have the most simple of simple browser detection, so that you know that when somebody arrives at your site and they’re in a mobile device they get a full-functioning mobile version. Also, it helps Google App because Google can’t shape, despite what Google and Adobe may or may not say, they don’t and can’t index Flash. I mean, it’s just total rubbish. It’s beyond rubbish. And we’ve tested that, 6 ways to Sunday. But, here’s the trouble, David, like my local Thai restaurant here, beautiful Thai restaurant in Tyson Road, lovely, excellent. Are they in Google? Nope. Nope. Because why? Their entire website is flash. Beautiful. You can pretend to turn pages in the menu and it’s all… It’s all just lovely! But, completely useless from an SEO perspective. Worse than useless, damaging, devastating to their business. And, of course, most people are making… Again, another question I ask your audience, right now David, ask themselves. How much surfing are they doing in front of a computer and how much are they doing it on their smartphone? If they are typical of the audiences that I asked that question of, the vast majority of the audience are researching this stuff on their smartphone.

19:18 DB: Absolutely, and only increasing.

19:20 ED: Yup.

This transcript is the fourth part of my Eugene Ware interview and this part focuses on getting your internal link structure right. Remember, if you haven’t done so already make sure you download your free trial copy of Eugene’s Market Samurai.

28:39 DB: And I’ve also heard that you think that internal link structure can be a significant problem for quite a few webmasters. What are your thoughts in the best structure for links to internal categories and other subpages on a website?

28:56 EW: I think, SEO, it’s a… There are… It’s like the 80/20 rule. There’s are really, really important stuff to track us on, stuff like getting a keyword in the title and making sure that you got your keyword in your content and getting your internal linking, your on-page stuff correct. That’s the 20% which has 80% of all the value in SEO. So many people obsess about the specifics. So, getting the super ideal anything like… So, internal linking structure is the same kind of thing. I that it’s certainly an area where people stuff up all the time. If you’re doing any SEO consulting, the first thing you’ll tend to do is take a look at their internal linking because a lot of people do it badly and a lot of really quick wins can occur by actually taking a look at their internal linking structure. In terms of the best, I’m not sure if there is a best internal linking structure or best anything but I guess I tend to probably lean towards what is, I guess, commonly known these days as a Silo Linking Structure where you have your… You’ve got your home page and you’ve nominated say 12 to 15 sort of category keywords that you’ve done some keyword research around, that have met the criteria of these 4 golden rules I have spoken about.

30:41 EW: And then each of the category pages also they’re going to be linked… They’re going to have a whole bunch of posts around them. Most people in SEO these days is going to be using blogs, WordPress blogs or things to be doing a lot of their SEO, so, if the category pages then link to the first post link, the second post, in the category of the second post link, the third post in the category and if there was 3 posts in a particular category then the very, very last post would then link to the top of the second category and sort of, and so on. That’s been shown to have good results, but to be honest, it doesn’t make that big a difference. If you just install a bunch of really good SEO plug-ins on WordPress and just focus on the right 20%, just get the basics of your internal linking structure correct, that’s 80% of all the value and just seeing getting 100% right or focusing on the latest super-duper structure is not going to be worth the effort compared to taking massive action and building a lot of content and building a lot of links.

32:09 DB: Absolutely. A lot of marketing managers are maybe a little bit concerned about how they go about producing a lot of content for their website. Would you say it’s reasonable to actually outsource the writing of content for your own website or should you be looking to that in-house really?

32:26 EW: I think it really depends. It depends on your business. It depends on a range of things. Like in any business you’re after trying to achieve a level of leverage and you got to work out what leverage means in your particular business. If your business is highly going to be SEO driven and you really, really want to dominate a market and SEO is the best strategy beyond all the other strategies that you have available to you as a business, then certainly focusing on creating capabilities within your organization through outsources to generate massive amounts of content, quality content that sit on your website, it’s going to very, very important. If part of your core business strategy is around establishing yourself as authority in your marketplace then it’s going to be very important to make sure the quality is really, really high quality and if it’s very, very niche, you’re the only person that actually knows about that specific topic then you might find it difficult to outsource some aspects of your content. You can get really, really, really good results out of outsourcing and I do recommend it, but I still think regardless of whether you’re outsourcing and you’re insourcing or doing it yourself on what’s right for your business, having really good quality content particularly on your main domain, your main money site, the main vehicle to where you actually want to drive traffic to, I think it’s really really important.

34:19 EW: And particularly more important as the… As SEO moves away from web masters having all the control and moves towards social media or and things like Facebook and Twitter being primary ways to generate links to your website, and as that shift happens and real people start building links. If you’ve got average content on your websites then people are less likely to ‘Like’ the content, ‘Tweet’ the content, share the content with their friends but if you’ve got fantastic content. That process takes care of itself to some degree as well. When you generate a content specifically for link building, I still think it’s good to have a good content but it doesn’t have to be as high quality as corporate champagne content. But then again it does have an impact if you’re trying to, say, if you’re using an anarchy marketing strategy, writing articles and syndicating across a whole bunch of websites, if your content is high quality then you’re going to have a much better chance of being picked up and people actually physically using that content on their websites. That’s a really long way of saying that quality is the most important thing. Quantity is important, you can do that through outsourcing and there’s nothing to say, “Hey outsourcing produces bad quality,” absolutely not but just whatever you do, it’s not just outsourcing as a solution but honestly managing people, leveraging up and maintaining a certain level of quality is going to be important.

The 36th edition of our podcast brings you a summary of phase #1 from the original 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan. This video looks at the structure of a website.

The recording is taken from our original 2007 seminar. At the time it sold for £399 as part of our 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan home study package. Now, for the first time we’re giving it away for free via our internet marketing podcast.

Why are we giving all this great video content away for free?

Although these videos still offer a lot of great tips, internet marketing methods change over time. We’re going to be launching a brand new version of the plan soon, and we’re sure that by sharing these original video recordings for free, you’ll be persuaded to jump on-board when the new paid-for version launches! Stay tuned to our newsletter to find out more.