My 4 Hour Workweek

I realize the title of this post sounds like I’m about to try and sell you a product…the good news is, I’m not! I actually just wanted to share with you a quick story about how one of my niche sites landed on the first page of Google and received an ad click without me doing much of anything.

Although I uploaded a WordPress theme and added my usual plugins, this site was ranking on page 1 before I even added the content.

While you can’t plan for this in any way, I thought it might be interesting to take a deeper look at this site and the keyword that it targets to see if we can learn anything…

Read more…

As you may have noticed, Google pushed through a major algorithm update very early morning on October 14th.  The past few “Panda” updates didn’t seem to affect me much, but this one definitely took a toll on the rankings and traffic of several of my niche sites.  I just wanted to write a post here about my observations and other bits of information I’ve been reading the past couple of days.

If this affected you too, keep reading, and please share your thoughts in the comments.

Read more…

You’ve no doubt heard by now about Google’s recent algorithm change that has been responsible for a significant drop in traffic/rankings for some of the largest article/content collection sites on the internet.  I can’t say I’m shocked.  While there are a lot of well-written articles out there deserving high rankings within Google, there is also a lot of garbage – duplicate, scraped content, poorly spun content, etc.

What’s the true impact of this change?  How is it affecting us right now, and how will it affect us going forward, especially with niche sites?  Let’s try to figure it out…

Read more…

Last week, Pat Flynn (from Smart Passive Income) posted, in complete detail, the backlink strategy that pushed his niche site to a #1 ranking on Google.  This epic post was very well received, as it immediately spread around the blogosphere and ignited a massive conversation (currently the post has more than 190 comments).  It’s not any kind of “magic bullet” backlink solution – it’s a somewhat complex, highly effective strategy that can profoundly improve your site’s search engine ranking if implemented correctly.

Although the strategy makes sense when you read it, I figured that it’s probably difficult for many people to grasp the entire process as it pertains to their specific websites – in particular, I think a lot of people might struggle with finding a good way to track the process and backlinks that they create.  I think I’ve designed a effective solution for this.

Read more…

When it comes to building a website of any kind, the domain name is one of the most important considerations.  Do you want a keyword-rich domain that works well for SEO?  Or do you want a domain name that is memorable and works with your brand?  Is there a way to have both?  These are the questions you might find yourself asking.  Even if you know the answer, the hard part  is actually formulating the perfect domain name.

On its face, buying a domain seems so simple – type in your word or phrase, decide on your domain extension (.com, .net, .org, etc.), and boom, you’re ready to go.  Unfortunately, it’s not that easy if you really want to achieve astonishing results.  Today’s your lucky day though -  I’ve put together what I think is a definitive guide to expert domain buying.

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more…