My 4 Hour Workweek

When it comes to learning SEO (search engine optimization) on the internet, there’s a lot of fluff out there.  There are experts who claim to know everything and know very little, and there are people with hidden agendas – one of which is to make money off of you by promoting a product or getting you to opt into their e-mail list.  We accept this reality, and many of us embrace it.

That’s why it’s a breath of fresh air when the masters of SEO – the search engines themselves – provide guidance.  They have no hidden agendas, or at least, none that really bother us.  They want to create useful search engines and meaningful results, so it’s in their best interest to come up with a ranking algorithm that accomplishes these objectives.

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In an effort to enhance the SEO of my blog, I decided to change the permalink structure of my posts.  You may have noticed that my post URLs used to contain the month and year the post was published, along with the name of the post.   Instead, I wanted my permalink structure to just include the name of the post.

In other words, it used to look something like this:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

And now, I’ve changed it to this:

/%postname%/

Much cleaner and it’s more SEO friendly (or so I’ve read).  My biggest concern was creating broken links on other sites (where my blog posts may be linked) and losing any pagerank assigned to each specific page through Google.  To mitigate this issue, I used the plugin Dean’s Permalinks Migration 1.0. Very simply, you can input your old permalink structure and then change your permalink structure to what you want it to be (in the same permalink settings you would normally use), and the plugin takes care of the permanent redirection.  This is similar to the 301 redirection I discussed in another post.

The Big Problem

Unfortunately, I didn’t account for the affect this would have on my social networking/bookmarking plugins – in particular, the Retweet button and StumbleUpon button.  Because my link structure changed, the counts on these plugins reset to zero (they were tied to the old links that I just changed).

Now, I have nothing! I’ve heard about this happening before, but completely forgot about it.  Now, I’m faced with two options:

1) Leave it as is and maintain a better search engine optimized blog, or

2) Restore the old link structure, and thus restore my tweet and StumbleUpon counts.

I’m really incline to stick with #1, because I know it’s the best long-term answer.  What would you do?

If you’re interested in helping me out, feel free to go back and retweet some of my older posts – I’d owe you forever. I know it seems silly, but it’s been well-documented how important “social proof” is, and I’ve basically just lost a big part of mine!

Google certainly made a big splash in the news today with its implementation of “Google Instant,” a new Google search feature that instantly displays search results as you type your search query.  This was such a big story that I decided to postpone my monthly passive income update until tomorrow (or Friday).

I am by no means an SEO expert, but as someone who dabbles in website creation and affiliate marketing, I wanted to weigh in on how I think this drastic change to the way people search could effect SEO and affiliate marketing, especially with respect to long-tail keywords.

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Have you ever wanted to see exactly what your competition’s backlinks look like?  You’re trying to get on page 1 of Google and you know the #1 ranked site has 180 backlinks, but you really don’t know much about them.  You certainly don’t want to go through and check each one of them manually.

In the comments section of my article about increasing search engine ranking, one reader (Eric Greene), pointed out this awesome feature of Market Samurai that I completely overlooked.  Sure enough, I was blown away by it and decided that I absolutely had to share it here because of how powerful I think it is.

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Note: The methods described in this massive article are definitely not just applicable to InfoBarrel articles – you can use these same methods for any website.

I’ve already covered how to make $2,000 a month writing articles for InfoBarrel as well as how to come up with unlimited article ideas.  If you’ve been following along with me, you are probably starting to build up a nice base of articles.  However, maybe you’ve noticed that some of your articles don’t rank highly on Google, and you want to fix that.  After all, if people can’t find your articles via search engines, you aren’t going to earn any AdSense revenue.

This article is going to take a detailed look at different ways to build backlinks for your articles so that you can get them onto page one of Google’s search results, for your desired keywords.

Warning: This is a long article that goes into a ton of detail. You may want to bookmark it and revisit it as needed.

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