You can go to Google Trends and see how some markets didn’t really exist at all a few years ago, but as certain keyword phrases gained popularity with consumers you can see the upward trend.  Some phrases have downward trends as consumers move on to new and different products.  Anticipating keywords is a good to do so that you can see trends develop, and that includes slang and names of products or services.  One of the best ideas I got from a friend is to listen at party's or gatherings on how people talk about different things.  This gets you real life and up to date keywords and phrases.

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A Consistent site — Keep the font and overall design consistent from page to page.  It is best to use a standard font, larger type, and an ample amount of white space throughout your site.  You want to keep visitors on your site for as long as possible.  A clean and simple to read site is more relaxing and easier on the eyes than a page that is crowded.  Keep graphics and the overall design and color scheme consistent throughout.

Not To Many Ads — Don't forget, for the most part it is the content visitors seek when they visit your site.  Visitors are most likely not coming to your site to look at the ads so don’t overwhelm them with commercialism.  Try to avoid ads that blink, move, or jump around the screen these are the most irritating, although users are becoming used to pop-up ads, they are still annoying to many and the majority of users simply cancel them without reading them anyway.

Also, note that web site visitors don’t like to be fooled and they have an uncanny ability to spot sales and marketing material that is simply disguised as web content. Use ads that efficiently and powerfully get the message across and you will be able to use fewer of them.

Don't Be Pushy - Don’t drive users away by immediately asking them to buy.  I do know the purpose of most sites is to make money, either directly or indirectly, but if all visitors receive when they visit is products and more products.  They will just move on to another site and trust is lost.  Give before you take.  There are probably dozens of sites selling the same thing as yours and users will choose the website that they believe is worthy of earning their business.

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1. The SEO Book Keyword Tool - I use this on a daily basis, primarily for the keyword research of all my websites and article marketing efforts, but it’s useful for selecting niche phrases for any type of website. It's like any other keyword tool, the results aren’t exact, but it’s worked quite well for me. I would recommend it to everyone.

2. Instant Article Wizard Pro - This is the first article “creator” I’ve ever recommended. My initial feelings on this type of software was that it was impossible for software to create an article that was actually readable and useful to others. I can honestly say that I was wrong. I started using IAWP about a month ago and although some articles need a little editing, it’s cut huge amounts of time off of article writing. I’ve been having my sister write my articles lately and she’s been using this and sending twice as many articles than before.

3. Rank Checker - This is Aaron Wall’s newest tool from SEO Book, which provides a very simple way to check your sites rankings on Google. It is also a Firefox addon. You just open it up, insert the domain name and the keywords you want to analyze and it shows you the rankings.

4. SEO for Firefox - This is possibly one of the most useful and time-saving tools I use. It inserts loads of useful data directly into the search results of Google and Yahoo. You just do a search as usual and directly below each result you’ll see data such as PR, Age, Cache date, Yahoo Links, DMOZ, Alexa etc. It makes analysis of the competition much quicker and easier and is just neat all around.

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StumbleUpon is a great source for any blogger to gain new readers and rss subscribers. But how does StumbleUpon really work?  I thought I’d address a little of it here. StumbleUpon is a Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking site.  What this means is that it allows you to control what content you see, based on what you bookmark.  It's a pretty good system, and it’s a great way to find new sites.  Based on a simple voting system, You’ll see a thumbs up, thumbs down, and a stumble button in the left of the toolbar when you download it.

The thumbs up means you approve of the post, and you’d like StumbleUpon to send you to more sites like this one. The thumbs down obviously means that you don’t like it, and avoid sites like this in the future. Then the Stumble button sends you to the next random website based on your voting preference from the sites you visited previously.  It’s a pretty great system, and I’ve personally found a ton of value from it when it comes to finding new sites, and building traffic to your websites.

StumbleUpon Traffic

StumbleUpon is a community.  It allows you to add friends, comment on their pages, send stumble recommendations, and join communities by becoming someones “fan”.  The key to more StumbleUpon traffic is first building an authoritative StumbleUpon profile. Go build your profile, add friends, and start stumbling sites when you get a free time.  A thumbs up on any given website, sends more traffic to that website based on your preference.  This is why it’s key to only stumble things you think others would enjoy. If you stumble a load of junk, and people behind you click the thumbs down, you become less important to StumbleUpon than a more authoritative stumbler.  Each “vote” is weighted based on how much trust you’ve earned from the community.  What I mean by that is when I stumble a site, it might send a wave of traffic to them almost instantly, and when you stumble a site, it might send them 3-4 visitors within a few hours. Why? Because it’s based on what people behind you do.   For example, if I discover a page (which is what you want to do, discover new pages), and then click “thumbs up”… it sends traffic to it.  If the people behind me click thumbs up, then it views my stumble as a good one.  If everyone behind me hates it, then my credibility go's down.  This is all automatic, so don’t worry about the how, just the why… get out there and stumble QUALITY content.

We know that not all stumbles are created equal, but how do we get more stumble traffic to our blogs? You ask!  If you have maybe 5-15 friends that you can send a link to and ask them to stumble it.  You can do things like that.  However, don’t do it every time because if the same people are the only ones stumbling your posts… they’ll lose credibility, and their stumbles on your site won’t be worth as much.

Another method is sending recommendations, which you can find out more about at stumbleupon.com. These recommendations send a small pop-under to your stumble friends (see why it’s important to add friends?), and it gives them a brief description of your recommendation, and will take them to your site. This is done automatic you just submit the request.  I recommend getting out there and adding stumble friends. Start stumbling content often!  And be sure to try and find new sites that haven’t been stumbled. This will build you into a top stumbler quickly.

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About a year ago there was a lot of buzz about trackbacks and people kept sending trackbacks to blogs.  Now it has pretty much stopped or slowed down and trackbacks have been disabled by thousands of blogs.

Increasing SPAM
Spam is increasing a lot nowadays and many people are using automated bots to send trackbacks to blog posts for the sake of increasing their backlinks, improving their SERPs and traffic and technorati ranking, that’s one of the main reasons for many people to disable and discourage trackbacks.

NoFollow Tag
Due to increasing spam most of the blogging softwares have the evil “nofollow” tag in the trackbacks, due to this the search engine king, Google won’t index the backlinks, so less backlinks, low SERPs and less traffic.

Trackbacks disabled
Many blogs have also disabled trackbacks, so no blog or software can send them trackbacks. I enabled trackbacks in my posts but those are “dofollow” but i might install a dofollow plugin for trackbacks soon and only enable “dofollow” tag for legitimate bloggers.
Note: I have enabled “dofollow” tag for comments, but the commenter must make 5 comments to make his links “dofollow”.

What do you say? Do you support trackbacks? Do you have dofollow in trackbacks?

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1. Not split-testing ads. Only using one ad. This is a big mistake because you cannot find out which ads will convert better without a comparison.

2. Split test two ads at a time to determine the winner. Some people like to write 4,5 or even 10 ads at a time and let them all run. I prefer to test two at a time to determine a clear winner. Wait for at least 100 clicks before deciding which ad is the winner.

3. New campaigns checklist – the defaults are: automatically optimize ads, search+content network, show ads evenly over time. When split-testing ads, set it to rotate ads evenly so that you can show each ad 50% of the time when you are split-testing 2 ads. You’ll need to uncheck content network if you don’t want your ads shown on websites running AdSense. Thirdly, set to accelerated delivery to show your ads as often as possible.

4. Use scheduling. If you determine that conversions occur on certain days more than others, you can turn off ads on days that you select. For instance, some people elect to show their ads only during the weekdays and turn them off during the weekends.

5. Use automatic bid adjustment. You can increase the bids during peaks hours that get you more conversions. For instance, if you want to target prime time in the west coast and east coast, you’ll need to set your time window large enough to encompass both time zones.

6. Tracking results – conversions, visitor behavior, time spent on site. This can really give you a deeper insight into your visitors behavior. I use both Google Analytics and Clicky (if you’re paranoid and don’t want Google to access your stats).

7. Separate search network from content network. One may get you better ROI than the other. It’s best to set up two separate campaigns to test this - one for search network and one for content network.

8. Separate Google search from search network. The search network are other search engines that syndicate Google’s search results, e.g. AOL.

9. Separate bids for the content network. You’ll get somewhat less targeted visitors from the content network as these are not people who are actively searching for the thing you’re advertising. In general, people who are actively searching for a particular product on Google are the closest to being in the ‘buying’ mode.

10. Use tightly themed ad groups. You’ll need to do this to get better quality scores.

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I think the most important thing when starting a new blog is to be original. I’ve seen so many “make money online” blogs that all contain the exact same information and half of them even have the same sponsor buttons. It’s such a waste of time and they wonder why they have no traffic. Stak Loaded is a make money blog but it’s definitely a lot different from the rest, and that’s why people read it. This is a very important concept that some bloggers don’t understand - you have to be original and give people a reason to read your site. This can be done a few ways:

• Narrow down your topic: If you’ve done any affiliate marketing, you’re probably familiar with narrowing down a niche. Let’s forget about keyword research and just do it - if you have a technology blog, instead of trying to rip off Engadget, you could focus on a specific field of technology, such as aircraft technology, video game engine technology, or fringe developments (time travel, etc). Personally, I think that last one would be pretty cool, it caters to a specific niche and it’s not just a repeat of a million other blogs out there.
• Have a fresh take on an existing topic: Instead of a traditional SEO blog, you could do only reviews of SEO tools. If you’re writing a fitness blog, you could write it from the viewpoint of an arrogant motherfucker who posts videos of people with incorrect form and berates them. You could mash unrelated topics together - conspiracy theories and hot babes, math problems and hot babes, fitness advice and restaurant reviews. Get the idea?
• Appeal to a different audience: This is related to the last point, and it will help you expand your audience while still targeting your current audience. Let’s take the “conspiracy theories and hot babes” idea. Instead of just appealing to people who like conspiracy theories, you’re now appealing to every straight male in the world, AS WELL AS people who like conspiracies. You could use the “about” page to make it look like the blog is written by a hot girl, or you could have a laid back writing style like it’s written by a college kid and not a crazy conspiracy nut, or you could mix up personal stories about your life (make them up if you don’t have an interesting life, it doesn’t matter) and stuff about girls. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: sex sells. It really does. I always recommend appealing to horny guys because let’s face it, it works.

If you have a blog that falls into the “there are a million other blogs like it” category, you should definitely think about how you can change it up. I guarantee you you’ll attract a lot more readers, and it will be more interesting for you to write. And I mean right now: if your blog is totally unoriginal, change it RIGHT NOW! Spend a few days planning it and then just do it. If you sit on an idea for too long, you’ll get uninterested and will end up never doing it. If you have a specific topic and need me to help you figure out how to make it different, leave a comment with your idea or URL and I’ll let you know what I think.

This post by STAKLOADED.NET

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Do you know the difference between PageRank, TrustRank, and link equity? Want to know what a canonical URL is?  The SEO Book is one of the most widely read search engine optimization. SEOBook.com is a leading SEO blog by Aaron Wall covering the search space. It offers marketing tips, search analysis, and whatever random rants come to mind. The first version of this very popular SEO Book came out in December of 2003. It has probably been revised it about 50 times since then. It has 220+ pages and I would recommend it to anyone involved in Search marketing, from absolute beginner to seasoned veteran. The SEO Book takes you right through the vast spectrum of techniques, tools, theories and history of Search marketing.

Keywords, keywords, keywords. Yep, it's all about those keywords, and this chapters primary focus is just that. We start off with some general admonishments to focus on specifics, and leave generics well alone. Swiftly moving into targeted Search phrases, the book walks you through keyword conversions, the keyword pyramid, and keyword research -- with a great list of keyword tools and services.

Keyword suggestion tools and discovery techniques are an essential part of any seo's toolkit. There are good explanations of such tools as Wordtracker, Google Suggest, Overture Keyword Suggestion and Google Keyword Sandbox, as well as a whole list of lesser known but powerful research tools.

Keyword competition was a great section for me, as many of the tools cited were known to me, but not necessarily bookmarked, and some of the techniques for judging the competitiveness of a keyword/phrase were very new, or long forgotten -- This particular section i'll most likely come back to time and time again, not to mention finally sorting out my outdated keyword tools bookmarks. Smashing stuff.

Meta tags, along with page title's takes us right back to SEO 101, the take home here comes from the large section on page titles where the focus shifts to ROI.

Optimizing page copy as you would expect is de-emphasized as an important part of SEO in this next section. The focus instead, tunes to page structure and good use of headings, and other HTML elements as well as how to smoothly integrate keywords naturally into a page.

Content building concludes the chapter, with a strong statement on how junk content will only damage most websites. The list of ways to find quality free content however, is superb, with ideas for finding both cheap premade content, cheap custom written copy and more premium freelance hire.

While some chapters are lighter than others, every one is packed with detail, with an interactive section at the end of each for quick reference to tools and sites mentioned in the book. It is one of the Top books on SEO and has gotten much praise for its easy and simplified approach to search engine optimization.  I highly recommend it, you will not be disappointed.

SEOBook.com

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