September 24, 2007

SEO News from Ron Castle www.roncastle.com

Greetings,

I have been too busy working on everyone's newsletters but my own!  Here are a few news items that should be of interest.

Get a free copy of Wordtracker Magic!

My good friend John Alexander's Wordtracker Magic eBook has become the defacto best educational tool for learning to use the Wordtracker search phrase database.  John is in the process of updating the book to reflect the many changes made to Wordtracker over the past year.  If you act NOW you can get a free copy of the old ebook.

All you have to do is sign up for John's Free SEO Tip of the Day  There are no tricks or catches. You will get a link to download your copy of Wordtracker Magic by signing up.  This current e-book is offered free as is until October 31.  John will notify you when the updated version is available for purchase.

Never used Wordtracker?  Sign up for a free trial here.

Home Page Copywriting Tips

Writing a good home page that works both for human visitors and for organic search is one of the toughest jobs there is, especially for new web owners who are just starting out.  I have offered a lot of advice on home page copywriting in the past in one on one emails and decided it was time to create a page of content in my website about this subject so I could stop retelling the same story.

Check out my home page copywriting tips here.

Search on Google for home page copywriting tips - how did I do?

Submit or Don't Submit Your Website?

There are lots of companies out there trying to get you to sign up for submitting your website to 400, 4,000, 40,000 search engines every month for a year for a tidy fee?  Almost all of these folks are offering a service that you can do yourself.  And, there are only a handful of search engines that matter regardless of where you are in the world.

I don't like to see folks taken advantage of, so I recently wrote a new page of content in my website titled Best Web Site Submission Service Is Don't Submit with my page target being best web site submission service.

As you might image, this is a very competitive target?  If you search on Google for best web site submission service you should see my page # 7 on page one out of 60 million and something? 

You can read the page here.  I have several solid ideas on how you can get more links in to your website.  The answer to the question is don't submit.

How to Create and Manage a Business Blog

I have had a blog page in my website for a number of years but I never developed a consistent theme for my blog and was not, until recently, using a blogging program.  My old blog was the place in my website where I put information both personal and business that didn't deserve a full page of new content elsewhere and didn't really fit anywhere else.  Sound familiar?

I am business blogging now, and you can, too!  There are lots of good ways to create a blog.  I chose Google's Blogger.com, which is free.  You can have a standalone blog on Google's servers, or you can integrate the blog with your website, which is what I decided to do.  If you are reasonably web literate, you can set it up yourself.  Blogger's directions and help files are not the best in the world.  Or, if you need help, we can set one up for you, including testing, etc. takes me about an hour to an hour and a half.

The theme of my blog is Search Engine Optimization Help and I am posting the free website analyses people get when they request my free SEO help file or a free ranking report.  The folks asking for help get a free link in to their website, too, which almost all new websites need.

There may be some advantages to using Blogger?  Two weeks ago I put up a new page of content in my  website on Tuesday evening, put up a link to it in my blog, crawled my website and updated my xml sitemap, etc. which is standard procedure for me.  On Thursday, less than 48 hours later, my new page of content was on page one of Google for my page target!  Luck of the draw?  Could be.  I attribute the quick indexing to the link in my blog.  I will test a few more posts and let you know how they do.

Business blogs used properly can be a valuable tool and addition to your website.  You can subscribe to my blog feed here.

Watch for a new page of content in my website about business blogging.

Keep adding content and keep working on links in to your website.

Cheers,