EzSEO Newsletter # 57

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EzSEO Newsletter # 57

Andy Williams ez SEO

ez Search Engine Optimization

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Hi

This week has been exciting for me - I have played around with RSS & Blog software and am learning a lot. I intend to pass on anything new in future newsletters.

There was one incident that upset me a bit this week. One subscriber told me he wanted a refund on all of the products he had purchased from me.

Why?

Because he said my newsletter was “.. nothing but sales pitches”. I know for a fact that this guy had downloaded and read most of my f.r.e.e. reports available on the subscriber bonus page because he told me a few weeks ago:

“I’m going thru all your stuff. Makes sense. You’re a good writer. It’s all finally starting to come together. I’m just a slow learner. Once I get thru your articles, I’ll have a pretty good plan. Thanks.”

There really is nothing as queer as folk, but to keep the Joes of this world happy, today is packed with a lot of great resources that wont cost you a cent!

This week:

1. RSS & Blogs - an update

2. F.r.e.e. Blog Software - and a warning!

3. How to read blogs

4. Wordtracker Part VII

5. Warning - Software using Overture for keyword research

6. One final fr.e.e.bie

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1. RSS & Blogs - an update
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In the last few issues I have been very excited about RSS feeds and blogs and promised to keep you informed on the progress my own sites have made since adding this technology to my pages.

I had reported that my own sites seemed get indexed better and be more sticky in the search engines after adding an RSS feed to them. Here were the number of pages indexed and included in the main search engines as reported last week, for one of my 12 pages sites:

google.com 12
search.yahoo.com 10
search.msn.com 4
www.alltheweb.com 9
www.altavista.com 6

This site has not been touched since adding the RSS, so how many pages are in this week?

google.com 12
search.yahoo.com 10
search.msn.com 4
www.alltheweb.com 10
www.altavista.com 7

OK, still some pages missing in 4 of the engines, but no pages dropped and a couple more added.

What about my wife’s larger 200+ page site that I told you about last week? Here were the indexed pages last week:

google.com 165
search.yahoo.com 198
search.msn.com 58
www.alltheweb.com 212
www.altavista.com 204

and this week:

google.com 164
search.yahoo.com 213
search.msn.com 72
www.alltheweb.com 220
www.altavista.com 216

Lost a page from Google, but the others are all up. This is a site that I had great difficulty getting indexed in Google, and we found that it often only had around 10 pages indexed at any one time.

A few of you sent me in your own experiences - One user who blogged his site found that within days he was sitting pretty at #1 and #6 in Yahoo for two of his targeted phrases… and he had not even optimized his site. In Altavista he was #1 and #3 for those terms. On the 25th of this month he was still not found in Google, but this morning I had an e-mail saying that Google had now been and indexed his homepage, though he had mysteriously disappeared from Yahoo.

On the private SEO WSB forum, one user reported that one of his sites that had been averaging $10 a day, is now averaging $29 a day after adding a blog for the site two weeks ago. In addition he is now being visited by every major search engine spider daily.

It seems that the tactic of blogging, pinging and RSS feeds discussed in Adrian’s book is really causing quite a stir.

I must admit to not having gotten into it myself earlier because I figured I did not have time to learn it. However, with RSS Made Easy, it took a couple of hours for me to set up feeds on my site. It is now on autopilot. For those who are still sitting on the fence about Blogs & RSS, I highly recommend that you get on board now. You can find all the information on the internet for free, but if your time is precious, don’t let that put you off, get Adrian’s book and learn it in a couple of hours.

RSS Made Easy

Everyone I have spoken to is glad they did!

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2. F.r.e.e. Blog Software - and a warning!
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I have previously used the excellent blogger.com solution on the websites mentioned in the first section of this newsletter. However, this week I setup a blog on my own server using a f.r.e.e. script called Word Press.

Word Press

Anyone with basic FTP skills can easily setup a blog using this fantastic software. In minutes, I had a blog set up at:

ezSEO Blog

I am intending on eventually moving my newsletter over to this blog (though may still send out e-mails for those that want them). Aweber, my newsletter host allows me to quickly publish my newsletter to my blog when I send it out, so it is no hassle.

The advantages of publishing my newsletter to a blog is that anyone can then publish my blog on their site if they so wish. Anyone doing so will get free content in the form of my newsletter & daily ramblings published on their site automatically whenever I update my blog. In return I get inbound links to my site. That’s a win-win situation.

Just a word of warning though.
I setup the blog only a few days ago, and have already been spammed. One spammer tried to add around 15 comments to my blog, all of which were nothing more than links to his/her Casino sites. Obviously these spammers are wanting free links pointing to their sites, and blogs is one way of doing it. However, spammers always want short cuts to success. They don’t want to invest the time and effort into creating their own blog, so they spam other peoples. This is going to be a very common problem, so if you do set up a blog, configure it so that comments require approval - you will be glad you did. Word Press allows you to scan down the comments waiting for approval and block delete the spam. Very useful.

Incidentally, if you are taking any “shortcuts” in your own online business, you need to seriously consider whether a search engine might consider you a spammer.

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3. How to read blogs - more f.r.e.e. stuff
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Blogs are great in that you can read stuff from ordinary people on a wide range of subjects. You can visit the blogs directly, or use some aggregator software to go and download new blog entries from all of your subscribed blogs, as they are posted.

Several months ago I bought an excellent program called Feed Demon by the same author as the superb CSS editor Topstyle.

It is very easy to configure and means that you can get your chosen blogs sent to your desktop without having to visit each blog in turn. Feed Demon is probably the best feed reader available, but there are f.r.e.e. alternatives. Probably the best known is at:

Feed Reader

I have not yet worked out how Feed Reader can be set up to read my blog built using Word Press, but with Feed Demon it is as easy as visiting my blog (or any other) and clicking a couple of buttons to subscribe to that blog. If anyone has used the fr.e.e. Feed Reader and knows how to do this (and if it is possible), please let me know so I can give you instructions next week.

and Feed Demon is the tool I use:

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4. Wordtracker Part VII
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The Wordtracker series is coming to an end this week. I had planned a couple more issues, but I think I will save that information for the PDF version of this report which should be available to you next week on the subscriber bonus page (f.r.e.e. of course).

Before we finish though, I had an e-mail from one subscriber who was still not sure how the keyword “Spike Detector” built into KRA-WT could help find profitable niches that were hot TODAY. So, armed with my Wordtracker subscription and KRA-WT, I copied and pasted in the long and short term reports and set KRA-WT to work.

In the top 20 traffic surge items, there were some interesting items. I have mentioned them below, together with an idea of why they are the most searched for “surge” phrases in the last three days. You should be able to think of ideas on how to profit from them. If you can’t find affiliate programs for these items, there is always Google Adsense!

5 hunting dispute 2218
This entry was the 5th most search for term in the last three days. What does it refer to? Well, in the UK, the government is trying to ban fox hunting. Just wait for the day that Spain decide to get rid of Bull Fighting!

17 jfk reloaded 1402
A new film perhaps, or is it just an interactive web site?

19 stuffing recipes 1304
Thanksgiving advice on how to stuff your turkey. Turkeys are popular at Christmas too. Why not write a turkey stuffing eBook?

157 turkey 373
And the turkey itself…Cooking advice could be included in your eBook on stuffing, setup an affiliate program at Clickbank, and you’d be “quids in”.

227 reindeer 297
A sign of Christmas arriving? A comprehensive search at Wordtracker shows 500 phrases including the word Reindeer.

241 aragorn legolas 288
Perhaps a toy that people are searching for to give as Christmas presents to their kids. Lord of the Rings is a very popular topic!

If those examples still don’t show the power of knowing what is hot now, I don’t now what does… and that is only 6 of the 200+ surge phrases in the last 3 days….

Also these people must have done something to make them famous for a few days (or at least more famous than usual:

36 dan rather 944
122 robin quivers 445

Incidentally, searching Google for Robin Quivers showed an interesting Google Adwords entry - Online Degree Review!!! Not particularly targeted traffic, and not how I would recommend you set up your Adwords campaigns.

The surge report is only one of a host of powerful features built into KRA-WT.

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5. Warning - Software using Overture for keyword research
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Goran Nagy, the author of Keyword Analyzer, sent out an e-mail to all customers saying that Overture was beginning to block IP addresses of those who abuse their f.r.e.e keyword suggestion tool. If you use any tool that query Overture’s Keyword Suggestion tool, you run the risk of getting your IP address blocked.

This will make your software useless, since it will no longer be able to retrieve data.

Goran advised users to limit their searches on Overture. I don’t have the e-mail handy so cannot give you figures, but please be warned. If you are making thousands of requests at Overture using this type of software, you may find it stops working as Overture block you.

A few days after reading Goran’s e-mail, I had this e-mail:

“Andy, I’m not sure if you’ve heard yet, but Overture is now blocking IP’s of people over-using their database. My IP recently was blocked, using a keyword program called Keyword Analyzer (Part of Armand Morin’s Directory Generator)”

This is happening…..
I don’t think there is way to reverse this decision so please be careful how often you run these automated queries.

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6. One final fr.e.e.bie
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Firefox is a web browser taking the internet by storm. Now, there is a fabulous plug-in (f.r.e.e) which does a very similar job to the commercial software I recommended some months ago (Net Snippets). Check out the scrapbooking plug-in.

Researching your projects has never been so easy!

Well, that is it for another week. Hope you enjoyed today’s issue.

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Visit the subscriber Bonus page for free reports and other subscriber-only offers:

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If you enjoyed this newsletter, please recommend it to your friends. Also if you have any tips of your own, questions or comments, please send then to me at webmaster@ez-search-engine-optimization.com. Any tips or questions & answers I print in this newsletter will also be put up on the web version of the newsletter with a link to your site
if you want it. That’s extra free traffic for your site as well as an incoming link to your site.

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