Click on the picture to see the interview

You’ve probably seen those trite posters featuring rowers, runners, concert musicians and so on working together as a team to achieve lofty goals. It’s all bullshit. Over the last 10 years a few enterprising individuals have cut through the crap and released a set of demotivational posters that tell it how it is. Here is a link to a collection and below is the latest crop:

I’ve just discovered a very cool tool on the shoemoney.com site

Basically, you enter in your keyword phrase and your web url and see where you rank for that keyword phrase in the major search engines. This saves a lot of time compared to manually looking for your web site in the SERPs.

Click here to try it yourself.

Foggy or undefined business goals – your web site needs a purpose. For example, the purpose of my web site is: “to support word-of-mouth and classified advertising of my web design services to small businesses and sole traders in the CBD and southern suburbs of Brisbane. I will know if it is successful if it generates an average of at least five enquiries or three sales per month.”

A Bad Business Model – a great web site will not save a bad business model. If you cannot state in one sentence what you have to offer, or why you are different to your competitors, then you have major marketing problems. Remember, your web pages are competing 21 billion other web pages on the Internet. Without a good business model and marketing and PR support, your business will have difficulty in succeeding.

Focusing on style rather than substance – it’s easy to waste a lot of money on fancy Flash pages, Java script, music, graphics and other techniques that add little to your sites value and make it slower to download and harder to navigate. When in doubt – don’t do it. Your web site should be designed so that even people with older versions of browsers and slow old modems can still get the information they need quickly.

Trying to be all things to all people – getting found on the Internet means a focused approach to marketing. Pick one product or service offering and build a web site around that one offering. By appealing to different markets with unconnected products means that your search engine rankings will suffer. Pick a profitable niche and focus on that niche.

Using a generic domain name – the more unique and memorable your domain name, the better. Domains like pets.com or computer.com describe the product category, not the brand. google.com, dell.com , yahoo.com are easy to say, easy to remember and excellent brand names for the web. Do what they do, choose your online name carefully.

Not having a domain name at all – the use of a web address like ispname/~fashionshop looks unprofessional and “small-time”. Invest the $40 or so it costs to have your own domain name.

Not thinking like a customer – your web site should anticipate your prospects’ questions and be designed with them in mind. What do they want to know? What’s the best way to tell them? What proof can I offer? Consumers don’t necessarily want to make the best buying decision, they are usually happy just avoiding a bad one.

Not listing prices – the second question all prospects ask after “have they got what I’m looking for” is “how much is it?”. If you can give straight pricing, do so. Prospects are looking for value, not necessarily the lowest price. Value = offer/price. If you have a strong offer and your prices are reasonable you will represent value to your prospects. If you don’t state your prices then the value can’t be calculated. If you charge by the hour, state your rates for the type of work you do and a typical project cost.

Bad spelling, punctuation or grammar – there’s no excuse for typos, bad spelling or bad grammar. Always get your web site proof read by an independent party. If you do find an error, fix it promptly.

Not allowing for growth or updates – your web site design should allow for growth in content and easy changing of content. New product lines, additional locations, extra consumer information should all be catered for without the need for a major site redesign. This website uses what’s called a content management system.

Not considering search engines – The primary way people will find you online is via search engines like google, altavista and sensis. By adding key words to the header of your web pages, using paragraph headings, linking to related sites and other techniques, you can improve your ranking in search results.

Investing too much in electronic order taking systems – if you expect to receive less than 10 orders per day from your web site, it’s probably far easier to use a simple order form and manual credit card processing using your EFTPOS machine than building real-time electronic payment processing systems. For low to medium volumes, another option is the range of merchant tools from PayPal. It takes about 5 minutes to insert a Buy Now button on your web page that allows customers to pay immediately by credit card.

Investing too little in online marketing – in most cases it pays to invest in online marketing. Unlike traditional media, with online marketing you can choose your daily budget and the cost-per-click of your marketing campaign. With good reason, Goggle Adwords is the leader in pay-per-click advertising. Learn about Adwords or hire a consultant who does. For about $5 -$10 per day you can get yourself a source of steady, qualified leads.

Not responding quickly to inquiries that come via the Internet – the Internet works very quickly. It takes less than a second to send an e-mail from Australia to Europe. Internet users are impatient. They want immediate results. If you take a few days to answer and e-mail there’s a good chance you’ve already lost the sale to someone who understands this and acts quickly. Check your e-mail twice a day and once a day on weekends if possible.

Unreadable pages - your pages should be clean, simple and readable. Red writing on a black background may look rather funky, but it is hard to read and will lose visitors quickly. Similarly with fonts. Only use fonts that you would usually see in a mainstream newspaper or magazine.

Unprintable pages – if you use lots of graphics and coloured text on coloured backgrounds it my be difficult for prospective customers to print out your pages. Black on white/cream works well. It’s easy to read as well as cheap and fast to print.

Using stock photos and graphics – photos can really ad impact to a web page, but don’t be tempted to use the same stock photos that everyone else does. You know what I mean, “man with briefcase running” or “business meeting” or “close-up of pen on table” or even “business handshake closing a deal”. These are the sort of cheesy images a 12 year old would put in a school project. If possible, use original photos of you and your business.

Bad site navigation – it should take a maximum of three clicks for your reader to find the information they are looking for. 40 seconds is the average time a person will spend scanning your web site to see if you have want they want. Deliver.

John Hacking is owner and operator of a Brisbane web design firm. Visit today and sign up for his marketing tips newsletter.

As Google Adwords and Google Adsense becomes more mainstream, the rate of fraud from self-clicking (commonly called Google-bation), and click-draining (clicking on competitors ads), will increase exponentially.

The problem is that the electronic antichrist has an obvious conflict of interest in eliminating fraud. Like most web site owners running Google Adsense, you probably are tempted to just “test” ads to make sure all the html you have embedded on your site is working.

In some markets these little “tests” can reward the web site owner over $20 per click. Drugs, bank loans and obesity cures pay pretty well I’m told.

And if you only test one click per day, that’s $140 per week. You and Google share the booty and if the pain is spread across multiple Adwords advertisers. Who is to know? What are the chances of being caught?

The super-paranoid defrauders who do their research will probably discover the joys of anonymous proxy servers. With these little beauties you can click on your ads all day long. An iPod by lunchtime, a new Xbox 360 by dinner – the money and the buzz of ripping off the electronic antichrist becomes addictive.

And for the truly entrepreneurial why not hire some click-workers in a low-wage country?

Some enterprising click-workers roam from Internet cafe to Internet cafe in large third world cities with lists of web sites in their hands. They may use up to 15 different cafes per day in an effort to show the Google database different IP addresses.

Their full time job is to click on Adsense ads on specific web sites. They get 10 – 20 cents per click – substantial and pretty easy money for them. The Adsense publisher and Google get much more, and the poor old Adwords advertiser foots the bill.

And on the flip-side if you want to drain away your competitors advertising budget the technology is just click away.

It’s 8:30. You’ve just arrived at work. You unlock your PC and open your browser – Firefox of course.

Taking your first slurp of coffee you go to Google and search on a keyword phrase for your industry. At top and right of page you see your competitor’s ads.

You put your coffee down.

Click, click, click, click (center-button tab browsing is the best thing since the web browser). There goes $120 of your competitors advertising budget. Google is $120 richer.

You do this every day … $28,800 per year of your competitor’s advertising budget blown on your coffees.

The phone rings. It’s that boring client from Sydney. While you listen to her tales of woe on the phone you search on a term that may be related to her business.

Bingo! There they are. Click, refresh, click, refresh. That call just cost her $30.

You see the Google business model doesn’t take into account human nature. Some people are greedy, rude, arrogant and nasty. Correction, a lot of people are greedy, rude, arrogant and nasty, especially if cash is involved.

Google has got away with it for so long (2-3 years), because the same sort of people ain’t that tech-savvy. There were a few exceptions of course, but they were lost in the white noise.

Not now. As Google Adwords and Adsense becomes mainstream the rates of Google-bation and click-draining will increase.

This year watch out for the growth pay-per-action and pay-per-sale. The affiliate marketers have it right.

John Hacking is Product Manager for Search Tempo, a Brisbane based search engine optimization and marketing firm that specializes in helping small businesses get found on the Internet.

Posting articles on article distribution sites is one of the latest methods that web site owners and SEO experts employ to get more and better quality traffic. Articles allow you to get multiple quality one-way links with a lost less effort and better results than link exchanges. By consistently applying the following tips you will increase you web site traffic.

Invest time in a great headline. A catchy headline that offers the reader a real benefit will draw readers and visitors. Use concrete and credible words that make the reader excited about reading the article. Words like “free’, “amazing” and “new” are often overused and are less likely to draw cynical readers.

Try to be specific, beneficial and believable. “How to travel in luxury and see the best sites in Sydney for less than $30 per day” is a good example of a specific, beneficial and believable headline.

Work on your signature/bio. Second only to the title, the anchor text in your bio is the most important part of your article. The anchor text should include that key word phrase that you want to rank highly on in the search engine results page. If you want to rank highly on the term “Sydney limousine hire” then make damned sure Sydney limousine hire is a part of the bio and that that phrase describes the link to your web site. Look at the resource box for this article and try to work out what keyword phrase I am trying to rank highly on.

Register a Google alert. To track your progress in Google, register a Google alert for the headline of the article you are about to submit. When you register the alert, make sure you put the title of your article in quotes. Each day Google will send you an e-mail showing where your article’s headline appears. You should start to see results in 3-4 days.

You will be stunned where you article shows up, often in sites where you didn’t submit it. This is because many article directories syndicate their content to other web sites. By registering a Google alert you will also be able to track down article thieves who copy you work and submit it as their own.

Register with multiple article submission sites. The most time consuming part of article submission is the initial registration process with the article directories. Once it is done, you can keep on using the same directories to post your articles (it’s probably easier to use the same username and password for every site).

To find the good article directories, go to your favourite search engine and search on “list of article directories”. Aim to register with at least 50 different directories. For an excellent list of directories with good PageRank, send an e-mail to directories@searchtempo.com

Experience shows that an article submitted to 50 different article directories with reasonable page rank should generate over 200 back links within 3-6 months. This is good news for your Page Rank and for generating organic traffic.

Automate the process with macros. You can save heaps of time by using macro software to paste your article text into the submission forms on article directories. A very useful application is called Hot Keyboard Pro. You can trial it for 21 days.

With this software you can program different keys to perform different tasks. For example, you could program F1 to paste in the title, F2 to paste in the article summary, F3 to paste in the article body, F4 to paste in the author’s bio/resource text and F5 to paste in the article keywords.

With practice your macros should enable you to submit to 50 sites per hour.

John Hacking is Product Manager for the Brisbane search engine optimisation and search engine marketing firm, Search Tempo. To submit your sales and marketing related articles, please submit your article here.

Here’s five great reasons to consider migrating your web site to a content management system (CMS).

Speed of deployment – Many inexpensive web hosting packages now come bundled with open source web content management systems. For less that $100 per year it is possible to purchase hosting with a variety of features including e-mail, cgi support and CMS like Joomla, Mambo, Geeklog, Drupal and Xoops. It literally takes less than 60 seconds to install these CMS packages. This means you can concentrate your time on developing compelling and sticky content for your web site rather than investing tens of hours worrying about look, feel and structure.

Low maintenance cost – Once the CMS is up and running it’s very easy to edit text, add pictures, reorganise menus and so on. With less than an hour of instruction most people can perform basic web site editing functions. If you can use a word processor you can certainly use most CMS packages. And because the system is hosted online, you can edit your web site from any computer connected to the Internet without the need for special software.

Online support – Unlike propriety CMS and web development applications, there is a multitude of support options when it comes to open source CMS. And most of this support is free. There are freely available manual to download for the most popular CMS packages. If you look around you can also find excellent animated tutorials for the most popular packages. Open source means well supported.

Variety of designs – There are hundreds of free web site templates for the most popular open source CMS packages. A online search for free Mambo templates will give you an idea of the range and variety. The basic CMS provided with web hosting will include several templates that can easily be customised. If you want something unique and special, there are commercial template development companies who can design CMS templates for you for very reasonable (< $150), fees.

Powerful features – Basic features included with CMS packages include: a basic administration panel, user level access control, add and delete pages, add and delete images, menu management, web site search, contact forms and rotating banner ads. More exotic components include weather and news feeds, wiki, media galleries, forums, blogging, CRM, form capture databases and advanced SEO features. And that’s just the start

The emergence of opens source CMS packages means that anyone can now have a professional web site that they can edit, manage and enhance at very little cost. Spend a day investigating CMS options, starting with Mambo and Joomla. You will not regret it.

John Hacking is Marketing Manager for a Brisbane web design company and Product Manager for a Brisbane SEO company. Both of his business web sites use Joomla CMS with modified free templates.

I must admit I haven’t done many article submissions to date. A few press releases to PRWEB is the full extent of my experience.

To find out the benefits for myself, I’m going to share my experience and the results over a period of time and keep re-editing this post with updates ( I hope the system will let me). Maybe this post will become an article about article submission?

The metrics I will be looking at include:

1. Increase in average number of unique visitors per day
2. Increase in the number of sign-ups to my newsletter
3. Increase in PageRank (currently at 4)
4. Money making potential as a business
5. Degree of fun and intellectual stimulation

Day 1
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Based on a post to this forum I expanded the text to be a reasonably interesting article on Adwords and Adsense. I drafted it in Word and only included one hyperlink (with appropriate anchor text), in the html version of my bio/signature.

1. Posted the article to my web site (the only article I have there
2. Submitted a link to the article to digg.com
3. Submitted the article to contentdesk, articlemarketer, goarticles and articleuniversity
4. Registered for articlesfactory.com – a painful process compared to the others

Over the next few days I will try to submit the article to the rest of Mr SEO’s list of submission sites.

Day 2
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It’s the morning of Day 2. I’ve already had a result. My submission to articlemarketer.com has been rejected. Nothing to do with the content or style of the article.

It seems that I should not have used Microsoft Word to draft my article. It automatically replaced the letter “e” in the word “cafe” with an accented “e” .

The articlemarketer system didn’t like that special character and sent me a polite e-mail asking me to change it as well as get rid of some fancy html that Frontpage inserted in my bio/signature. All Microsoft products should have a “I’ll make up my own freakin’ mind thanks Bill” button. From now on I’m using Q-edit.

I made the edits and resubmitted this time using the special review feature that highlights any problems. Later on today I’ll submit the article to more sites.

I’ve just had a brainwave. To monitor whether or not my article gets picked up and indexed, I have created a Google Alert using the title of the article as the search term.

It’s lunchtime. I’ve just submitted the article to ezinearticles, ideamarketers, mailbiz and articles factory (my registration and profile was approved). This process is probably taking longer than usual as I have to register before submitting.

Based on what I’ve done so far, once I’m registered at the Mr-SEO recommended article submission sites, I figure I could do about 30 submissions per day in my spare time. I’ll try to do another 10 or so site tonight. I wonder what the going rate is for manual article submissions? I must look up eLance.com and find out.

If I were doing it on behalf or a client I guess I’d charge about $5 per article submitted, with a minimum of 50 articles.

In between watching the best of Family Guy on YouTube, I’ve submitted my article to several new sites. I’ve come to the realisation that article sites aren’t that much different to link farms. The only real difference is the link description text runs to 1500 words.

I’ve also noticed that a few of these article sites poo-poo SEO and Adwords and suggest that article marketing is where it’s at. Maybe they are right. Time will tell. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m going to be a SEO by Article submission convert. Maybe this is a new career for me?

Wanted – burnt out ugly people with no social skills who can write well about anything.

Based on what I’ve learnt so far I believe I could research, write and submit an article to over 50 sites within 2 working days. I wonder what the going rate in Australia is for that sort of work?

In my pre-Internet days we used to call writing for free advertising public relations. I guess the thing that has changed is the technology. Maybe I should approach some local Brisbane PR firms and suggest that article marketing is where it’s at? Do PR firms in the USA promote their article marketing capabilities.

Day 3
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Article Marketer have sent me an e-mail saying that my article needs attention. Talk about picky. The title case is not within their standards. I had a mix of upper and lower case in my title.

They even have a nice little tutorial on how to use case in your title. Basically it’s either all uppercase, the first letter of each word in uppercase, or only the first letter of the first word in uppercase. And no full stop at the end of the title.

My goal today is to post to 10 more sites.

Update: I just received a Google Alert in my e-mail. Google has indexed the story on digg.com and on my web site. Not bad – 3 days !

I’ve reached my goal of 10 more sites today. What I’ve realised is that it’s far easier to submit 3 articles to 20 sites than one article to 60 sites. I must remember that in future. With most of these article submission sites one you hit the save or post button you are immediately invited to submit another article. It’s then just a simple matter of cutting and pasting from your open text file.

I just checked out elance.com to see what the going rate is for article submission services. I couldn’t find pure submission, but there are certainly a lot of business in article writing. Click here to see for yourself.

Here’s a guy (check right down the bottom of the page), who will write two original articles and submit them to 70 different directories for $200US. Not a bad deal I guess.

Day 4
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I’m just not in the mood to do too many submissions today. Maybe I’ll do another 10 sites this afternoon after a long boozy lunch with my friends from Optus.

The good news is that the Google alert I set up on day one is picking up my article. articlesfactory.com, 2findlistings.info and webhosting-articles.com have all been indexed (see attached screenshot).

Here’s 2 tips, if you are looking for interesting local country web sites to submit your article, go to your favourite search engine and search on “submit article” or “submit your article”. I found a couple of high PR Australian sites using this method combined with the .au domain qualifier. Here’s an example.

Tip 2 .. this is probably obvious, but it helps if you put your keyword phrase in the title of your article. Reason, a lot of these article sites rotate the article titles on their home page. These pages probably get indexed more often than their other pages.

I’m thinking at the end of this quest I will put together an article submission checklist. Any takers?

Day 5
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Saturday … not much chance of many submissions today. I received an e-mail from ezinearticles saying my article had been accepted. Here’s the reason why it’s important to put your keyword phrase in the title. This page has a PR of 6.

Just got back from a pleasant day of sailing on Moreton Bay. Guess what? My Google alert tells me that some more web sites have picked up the article and I have been able to determine that two people have already stolen my article and claimed it as their own work.

I heard Joe and Alan talk about article theft in a podcast, but I would never have thought it would happen to me.

The first thief is a guy called Larry Gomez. Here is a screen shot of my article with his byline. I sent a polite e-mail to the contact on the web site asking that the article be removed. If he had claimed to be the publisher rather than author, and left my bio details on it, I would not have minded at all. I suspect my new best friend, Larry, will be writing and submitting lots and lots of articles about Gay Pride

The second thief is a guy called Dalton. He cut and paste my article into his blog. Here is the evidence. And here’s his profile.

I left a post on that article explaining that Dalton had not written it and that I was the writer. I wonder how much article theft goes on? By the looks of it, heaps.

I guess the up side is that my article is being read and distributed far and wide. Maybe I’ll do another 10 posts this evening.

Theft update: The nice folk from webdotdev.com got back to me about Larry stealing my article. They offered to take it down and have a word with young Larry. I thanked them.

I just submitted to isnare.com
Registration was pretty easy, as was submission. Only problem is that for the free submissions they don’t allow html in the bio (meaning no back links).

They do have a paid service where you can by credits starting from $10 for 5 articles fed to 40,000 sites (that does seem like an awful lot of sites). The paid submissions do allow html in the bio. For $10 I’m tempted to give it a shot. I will make that my next research project. I’ll come up with 5 articles, submit them only to isnare and then track the results. Have any of you people out there in Mr-Seo Forum Land used this service or something similar? If so, please share.

Day 6
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Sunday morning. I submit my article to a few more sites. Nothing from my Google Alert today. I’ve noticed that many of the sites I’ve submitted to run a script called Article Dashboard. It seems quite powerful and is certainly the right price.

Seems to be very popular. I do a search on Google for “powered by article dashboard“. It’s everywhere ! There seems to be an entire industry supporting article dashboard. There are people who will install it for you, sites to download templates for it, and plug-ins to customise the software.

From an author’s point of view, it has a nice interface, allows html in the resource tags and allows you to preview before posting.

I download it and have a look. I’m thinking I might install it on one of my web sites and see what happens. It comes with some PDF documents that tell you how to install it and how to promote your site once it gets installed.

Theft update: Not only did one of the thieves steal my article, they also submitted to digg.com. Thankfully the webmaster for the thief has removed the article. Talk about hide ! The thing that really ticks me off is that the thief got more diggs than me

Day 7
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Monday morning. I probably won’t get much time today to submit my article. My Google alert tells me more sites have picked it up and had it indexed. Even I few sites that I didn’t submit to. Must be the syndication thing working. I must say I’m impressed how quickly this method works in terms of getting one-way links back to my web site from the bio.

Monday evening. Didn’t do much today. My real job interfered with my SEO work (don’t you hate that?). The good news is I got three sign-ups for my SEO newsletter today. I’m not sure if it’s the result of my article submission efforts or something else (maybe this forum post). It’s all good. I wonder how Joe and Alan cope with all “them SEO groupies”? You can 301 them my way if it gets too much.

If I can finish this bottle of Brown Brothers Tarango red wine without falling over, I may do another 5 to 10 submissions. Don’t bet on it though. X-Files series 6 is beckoning. That Scully, she is so hot

I just stumbled on a very useful site. Have a look at webconfs and enter your keyword term in the backlink builder. Scroll down until you see the add article section (see gif below). This may be another source of little known but high PR sites in your particular niche. Worth a shot.

News just in. I have found another useful list of article directories. Some with PRs of 8. Write this list down and stick it in your knickers (as my Granny would say). Nobody every stole her lists. I wonder why?

I’m thinking given the exponential nature of PR, a link on a PR 7 or 8 site is probably worth 100s on a PR 5 site. I’ll submit my article to the top 5 on this list and see what happens.

Here’s an unusual site (bpubs.com). You submit a link to an article rather than the article itself. I’m not complaining. Their submission page has a PR of 6.

Day 8
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I did a few more submissions today through sites I found using the webconfs back link builder method from day 7. One of the sites that came up was slashdot.org which has a PR of 9. I had forgotten all about slashdot.

It was surprisingly easy to submit to slashdot given the site’s popularity. It will be intersting to see if my article gets accepted.

In future I will submit to slashdot.org first, wait a few days, then submit to the others. I’m thinking any article that gets a run on slashdot will probably have better street-cred with digg readers.

Day 9
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Too busy playing in the RAAF Reserve to do any submissions today. I may do a few tonight after a few red wines. My article has been picked up by a few more sites according to the Google alert I set. Have a look at alert3.gif below for the update.

These seem to be feeds from other web sites, one of which is feedburner. I can also highly recommend ezinearticles.com. My article appears on a PR 6 page with a link back to my web site. Hopefully this will improve my site’s PR and drive more traffic to it. The stats say it has been viewed 14 times.

I did a search on my anchor text on Google for my article. 4 sites total. I suspect as Google reindexes more sites that result will improve. I certainly hope so. Two of the sites were PR3, the others were PR 0. Bottom line, just because it’s in the Google alerts doesn’t mean that it’s indexed.

I guess this is one of the Litmus tests. If your anchor text gets indexed by Google on high PR sites, then it is worth the effort.

Note to self: “search on your article’s anchor text across all the major earch engines each day”.

I just did the same search on Yahoo, Ask and MSN. MSN is the only other site apart fom Google to pick up my anchor text phrase (bless their little cotton sox).

Day 10
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I didn’t do any submissions today – too busy. The only things of interest to note was an updated Google alert, a new subscriber to my newsletter and a wierd e-mail from a web site owner who thought I was accusing him of click-fraud.

I submitted the article using his submit article link so I really don’t know what his problem is. I deleted his e-mail rather than explain. Oh well, it takes all kinds.

Day 11
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Another busy day. Too busy for much part-time SEO. I submitted to a few more sites. I must say I really like article dashboard sites. I did some searching around and found this site that has a directory of sites running article dashboard. Some of these have reasonable PR 4 & 5.

To automate the registration process I have written a macro to automatically sign me up to article dashboard sites. Works a treat. I find the process of registering at all these article sites a bit of a pain. More painful that posting the article. I guess I only have to do it once, but it is a pain.

I also took Joes podcast advice and have started modifying my bio anchor text and linked page to broaden the scope of the possible search hits.

Wow, I just checked Google and did a search on the title of my article. 307 results ! I don’t know how this will translate to PR, visits or $, but it certainly proves that article submission certainly gets lots of one-way links.

I just did the same search at Yahoo. Even more impressive. Over 500 results on my article title.

I also did a search on titles of a few of Joe’s articles. There’s quite a few sites he doesn’t mention in his magic list

Did some more searches on Google and Yahoo for my article’s anchor text. Not good. Two results in Google and one in Yahoo. Makes sense, the article title appears on the main page, the anchor text appears on it’s own page which has not been indexed yet. Remember, try to put your keyword phrase in the title.

Day 12
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I’m hooked. Not many results to speak of yet, but I am hooked on article submission as a way of getting one-way links.

Today I finished recording a keyboard macro that signs me up to article submission sites running Article Dashboard. By hitting CONTROL+SHFT+F11 I can signup with one click. The macro recorder I used is called Hot Keyboard Pro. It’s free for the first 21 days. I figure in 21 days I can sign up to hunderds of article submission sites.

I’ve just done a bunch of about 20 sites. The next step is to validate my registration and start submitting.

Out of interest I searched on the term article marketing firm. I found a company that specialises in this service. Not bad money in this by the looks of it. $700 for a “professional” article of 1500 words submitted to up to 200 sites.

Day 13
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Sunday. I’ve got about 40 new article dashboard sites to validate my registration with today. I’m submitting a new article. The format of my article writing has evolved as a result of the last two weeks. The format for my article text files is now:

Headline
Article summary or teaser copy
Article body
bio – resouce box
keywords

This format works well with most article submission sites although I do put some html in the body, I only put links in the bio-resource box section.

I suspect tomorrow will be my last update to this post. After that I will only revisit it if I have any news or seee any striking results.

Update: I’ve just invested the princley sum of $12.96 in some automatic article submission software. I got it on eBay, here’s the product description.

I’m going to test it out on a new article and report back on how it performs. I may start a new thread because I think I’ve nearly broken this posting. I’ll create a new article, install the software, run the software then share the results. I may even post some screenshots so you can see how it works.

Good or bad I’m then going to offer the software (I have resale rights apparently), to all you mr-seo forum readers for the sum of $1 per copy (I really want to get my $12.96 back so I can buy more Australian red wine.) Fair enough?

Day 14
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Update: I’ve decided not to offer the My Article Submitter software. It probably worked OK 18 months ago when it was first released, but it doesn’t work very well now. I suspect it’s just a smart macro type program. Unfortunatley a lot of the sites it is programmed for are no longer taking new articles (possibly as a result of flooding from software like My Article Submitter). It is pretty slow too. I think it waits for strings of text and if it doesn’t see them it times out.

What I have found that works very well is Hot Keyboard. I have programmed function keys to do the following tasks saving me heaps of time:

1. registering at new article submission sites (only article dashboard powered sites)
2. Logging in to article submission sites once I’m registered
3. Pasting pre-loaded text into the Title, Article summary, body, resource box and keywords sections of the submission forms.

I’m not a touch typist and it works a treat. I can now log on and submit a new article in less than 20 seconds.

Day 15
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Signed up for another 20 or so submission sites today using the new macro software. Took about 20 minutes to post the article. I figure I’ve posted to over 100 sites so far. Three different articles to 100 sites. Not a bad effort for my first time at article submission.

I searched msn, yahoo and alta vista to find some fresh “powered by article dashboard” sites that I hadn’t registered with previously.

My Google alerts tell me that the bio/resource box is now starting to be indexed from the first article. That’s a little over 2 weeks. 3 days for the headlines to get indexed and a little over 2 weeks for the bio/resource box to get indexed.

The last few days I have also been posting different titles and anchor text. I just edit the macro and away it goes.

Day 16
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A few more Google alerts have started to come in for my second article. I didn’t do anything today. I’m thinking I’m going to combine all this information into a report on article marketing.

Day 17
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This is my last update to this post. I’m in love with article marketing. Metrics 1,2,4 & 5 have been met and I assume my PR will increase over time. At the moment I’m drafting a short article on article marketing. It will be published this week. Thank you for your time.

Addendum

Here’s another few tips:

1. Most article sites require some sort of pen name when you register. Pick something unique and searchable. Rather than register as Fred Bloggs, try something like Fred_Bloggs_2007_seo_client_submissions

The idea is that you can now search on that unique string “Fred_Bloggs_2007_seo_client_submissions” and get an accurate idea of how many articles in total have been picked up by the various search engines.

It’s also a good way of showing off to your clients how successful your article submissions have been.

2. Inspired by Mr-Seo’s podcast and my new experience with article submission, I have recorded my own podcast about article marketing. If you’re sick of American accents (not Joe’s incredibly sexy New York accent of course), try a bit of my Australian twang. Crikey, the article took my baby !

It took me 4 hours to record and edit 11 minutes. I don’t know how Joe does it week in, week out. I guess it gets easier with practice. My point of difference is no chit-chat. I hate the standard music intro, chit-chat and the into the content format. Let’s just skip the chit-chat and get into it. Foreplay is for pussies. Ain’t that right Al?

I used a crappy headset mic and recorded and edited it using Audacity software. Surprisingly the audio quality isn’t too bad. I got the royalty free music intro from looperman.com

Article Theft Update

There seem to be article thieves everywhere. This time it is a 19 year-old woman from California. I gave her a rude post and moved on. The Google alert thing works a treat. Attached is her profile.

And another thief

This seems to be a real problem. No sooner do you post an article and someone knocks it off. Here’s another example

Maybe we could have a new topic that lists article thiefs? What do you think Joe?

Good News !

One of my web sites has moved from page 3 to page 1 in the Google SERPs for my keyword phrase. I suspect it is a result of article marketing and the single podcast I published. PR for both my sites have also increased from 4 to 5. I’m a happy little camper and will continue to use article marketing for my sites and my clients.

Over 80 percent of Internet users use Google to find products and services on the world wide web. It stands to reason that if you want to generate more qualified sales leads you need to rank on the first or second page within the search engines results pages on Google.

As Google gets more and more sophisticated with each algorithm update, search engine optimisation methods have to change to keep getting good results.

Here is a list of ten important tactics that you can use to improve your Google rankings.

Use the right keyword phrase The most important factor in getting quality web traffic is to optimize your web pages for the correct keyword phrase. Getting the most sales is often a balance between search volume for key words and level of competition. Use the Overture keyword tool and Google Adwords tool to research and identify your best keyword phrases. Look for keyword phrases that have high search volume, but low competition. It also pays to see what key words your successful competitors are optimising for.

Put your key word phrase in your title tag Forget about putting your company name in the title tag (unless it is a valuable part of the key words), it’s a waste of words and will not help you rank in the search engines. The first three of four words in your title tag should be the key word phrase you are trying to optimize for. Try to limit your total character count to 60 characters.

Write a compelling description tag Title tags are for search engines, description tags are for people. Spend time researching and writing a description tag that compels the reader to click on your listing. Come up with a great offer, use action words. Use shock and awe. Use anything that will get them to click.

Use H1 tags An often neglected search engine optimisation technique is to put your keyword phrase in H1 tags on your page. This tells Google that the following text is about your keyword phrase. Google weights H1 tags nearly as highly as title tags. This tip alone can drastically improve your Google. Similarly, the use of bold and strong html tags can emphasize a key word phrase within the paragraph text where it may not be appropriate to use H1 or H2 tags.

Get the right keyword ratio Aim for a keyword density of around 3-5% of the page contents. Try to work your key word phrase into the page so that it reads naturally. This may take some research and analysis of successful web sites. Remember to use headings and sub-headings that include your key words.

Use alt tags and description tags on images Key words used image file names, alt tags and description tags add to the key word density of any web page. They doesn’t make a huge difference, but every little bit helps. In some product classes a Google image search may lead web surfers to your web site.

Get quality one-way incoming links through article marketing and directory submissions As far as Google is concerned; link exchanges are just about dead. They can help to get your web site spidered and indexed more quickly, but these days they add very little in terms of Google search engine rankings unless the link is on a trusted site and that site has excellent page rank. Wikipedia and DMOZ are examples of such trusted sites.

A more effective approach is to write interesting and informative articles and submit them to article directories. Make sure that you use the author bio/resource box to maximum advantage by using your key word phrase in the link anchor text, AND, by pointing the anchor text to the correct page. Your home page may not be the best choice of pages for your selected key phrase. This will also ensure that more pages than just your home page gets indexed.

Use Social book marking If you have something newsworthy, humorous, quirky, unique or shocking to say, submit a link to your web page to sites like digg.com or redit.com. These up and coming web 2.0 power houses can create a buzz overnight driving thousands of interested visitors to your web site.

Note, just because you build it doesn’t mean they will come. If it’s boring link it will quickly get buried by newer and more interesting stories. But what the hell, it’s free to submit links to these sites and you never know your luck.

Record a podcast Google loves podcasts … it just loves them. Get yourself a decent microphone and some podcasting software like Audacity and go for it. Once you have an interesting and tightly edited podcast, put it on your web site and submit it to all the major podcasting directories like iTunes and Podomatic.

Sign up for Google Adwords Although Google will deny it, anecdotal evidence suggests that Goggle favors Adwords customers over non-Adwords customers. This is true for new web sites that often take months to get spidered and indexed by Google. I have seen brand new sites get spidered, indexed and listed in the search engine results pages in as little as a week.

It doesn’t have to cost a lot either. You can set up a low budget campaign of 50 cents to one dollar a day and still get favorable treatment.

Welcome to the Search Tempo Blog. The purpose of this blog is to discuss SEO techniques and support the students of SEO training conducted by Search Tempo.

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