An easy way to check how quickly and often your site is indexed is by looking at the Google cache date for your home page. You can either google your site name or if you have the Google toolbar with the page rank button installed, you can go to your homepage and then use the little drop-down arrow to the right of the PR bar to select “Cached Snapshopt of Page”.

Here’s what you’ll get:

The text is a little hard to read but it says: “This is Google’s cache of http://www.affiliatetreasurechest.com/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Sep 8, 2010 15:17:38 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime. Learn more” The date and time it gives you is when google last cached your home page which gives you a pretty good indication of how quickly your site is indexed.

As I mentioned this little exercise is a small part of what we do in week one of the Easy Link Love link building program. The idea behind it is to see how often your site gets indexed at the beginning of the course. As you build more links you will see this increase in frequency over time. Make sense, doesn’t it? The more links are out there that point back to your site the more likely it will become that one of the search engine spiders crawls across that link to your site.

A few days ago, I received a message from one of  my students.

OK question – my cache shows a date of 8/19 but I’ve updated 10 times since then. How to get crawled more frequently? Ack!

I responded with quite a few tips on how to get your site indexed by Google fast and thought I’d share them with you today as well.

Tips For Getting Your Site Indexed Fast

1. Post Regularly – Create a schedule and update your website or blog regularly. To quickly get indexed faster, aim for several new posts per week.
2. Use A Ping List – If you are using wordpress for your website, make sure you include a good ping list. If not, use  a service like Ping-O-Matic to manually alert search engines that there’s new content on your site.
3. Point some new links to your site and both old and new content on it. Take a look at these fast and easy link building strategies to get started and consider joining my link building program at www.EasyLinkLove.com

P.S. As always I welcome your comments and questions about this. What’s your take on getting indexed fast or do you have any questions about my strategy for getting found faster by the big search engines?

Developing Good Keyword Research Skills

Getting good at keyword research really isn’t all that hard. I know it seems like a daunting task at first, that involves a lot of number crunching and market analysis, but the good news is that it really. There are plenty of tools out there that will make your life easier and using them is just a matter of jumping in and giving it a try.

Here’s my step-by-step approach to keyword research. Copy it, then modify it until you find your own style. Then just get into the habit of doing keyword research before you write just about any new piece of content.

Step One – The Idea

I usually start with an idea of what topic I want to write about. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing a blog post or article, creating a squidoo lens or even sending a tweet, it all starts with the idea of what this new piece of content is going to be about.

Step Two – What Are People Searching For

Once I have the idea, it’s time to find out exactly how people are searching for this type of information or product. We find these keywords by using one of the many keyword tools out there. I happen to like wordtracker, but you can certainly use any other keyword research tool as well.

Take a look at my “What Is Keyword Research ” post to learn more about it and to find a quick review of several of the more popular keyword research tools out there.

Step Three – How Hard Will It Be To Rank

My next step is to take a look at how hard it will be to rank for a particular keyword. It’s good to strike a balance between lots of traffic and how many links you will have to build to rank. For most of the new content I’m adding I choose keywords that only have a few serious competitors. These keywords usually include three or more words and are considered long tail keywords.

Take a look at this post to learn more about Long Tail vs. Short Tail Keywords.

How tdo you find out how hard it will be to rank? There are several different ways to do it. The hard  way is to simply type the keyword into Google. Then look at how well optimized the pages that show up on the first page off Google. Do they have the keyword in the title? Does it appear in the content as well? Then plug the page url into yahoo site explorer and take a look at the backlinks for each of these pages. The more links that are pointing to the page and the greater the authority of the site the page is on is, the harder it will be to rank.

The easy way to do this type of research is to use the paid version of wordtracker. This is what I use and it saves me quite a bit of time each day.

Step Four – Choose The Actual Keyword

Once you have your data, it’s time to pick a keyword. Again you want to balance the amount of traffic you can get with how hard it will be to rank. For most of my content pages (individual blog posts and articles for article directories), I aim for a competition of under 25 people who are really trying to rank for the keyword. I get this data out of the keyword report generated by wordtracker.

Step Five – Incorporate It Into Your Content

Next it’s time to use the keyword within the content. I make sure I include it in the title as well as once or twice throughout the content.

Step Six – Build Some Links

Last but not least, it’s time to build some links to the new page that include the keyword as part of the anchor text. I usually start with some internal links (links from my own site that point to the new page), and then move on to building external links through social bookmarking, article marketing, guest blog posts etc.

To learn more about building links, sign up for my link building program. Over the course of 13 weeks I teach you various link building strategies that will help you ensure that you are ranking for your keywords.

Just follow these steps a few times as you write new blog posts, articles etc. and before you know it this process will become a habit.  Keep in mind that each time you create a new optimized page, you will get a little (or sometimes a lot) more free search engine traffic. That traffic can then be turned into subscribers, customers and loyal fans. That’s how keyword research skills help pay the bills and allow you to grow your online business.

P.S. Here’s some “further reading” for you. I wrote a guest blog post about keyword optimization in article marketing yesterday for NicoleOnTheNet.com that will give you some further insight into how I use my keyword research skills in article marketing.

You should also take a look at a post by my friend Trish Lindemood about Keyword Research Tips and Tools. While you’re there make sure you are signed up for her 90 day content challenge. I’m going through it right now and it’s a big help in not only creating more content for this blog but also making sure I market along the way.

I still can’t believe that we sat up there for 90 minutes and in essence created a crash course in keyword research that takes you from very basic to more advanced keyword strategies.

Here’s a little preview video with some of the content from the audio recording of our panel discussion.

Keyword Strategy Panel Preview

Download the entire 90 minute audio of this panel discussion.

Here are some of the questions we were asked:

• Why is keyword research important?
• How do you go about finding keywords?
• What are you doing with these keywords?
• How do you optimize pages outside your own website?

From there we branched out to all kinds of different subtopics including how to not get overwhelmed with all the data you get from your keyword research, what types of keywords to use in what context on your site, commercial intent keywords that put money in your pocket, changing the intent of a search and much more.

You can download and listen to the recording of this hour and a half long discussion for $17 (which is a steal). Get it, listen to it and be sure to take some notes. Then come back and and leave a comment letting me know what you have gotten out of this recording.

My goal was to get them thinking about different ways to increase traffic to their sites including article marketing, SEO (search engine optimization) etc. In the middle of building websites, writing content and either promoting other people’s products via affiliate programs or working on products of our own, it’s sometimes easy to forget that we need to be driving traffic to our sites.

One of my favorite traffic generation techniques is SEO. I start with some keyword research, then create content around a keyphrase and start building links to the new content page to get it to rank in the search engines. One of the big reasons why I like this traffic generation strategy is because I do the work once and it continues to send me new traffic week in and week out.

With this in mind, I’m always working on building new incoming links to my content pages to help rank them well. If you don’t have time for anything else today, work on that, thus when I got a tweet from one of @SenderOfCards saying that she didn’t have time to work on generating traffic, I recommended she focus on a few fast link building strategies.

Here’s our twitter exchange:

Jean asked me to elaborate a bit on exactly what I was talking about in my “You could do something very simple like bookmarking a few of your pages on delicious and stumbleup” response. Thus this blog post.

Fast Link Building Strategies

When you don’t have a lot of time to do something to grow your site, work on a few simple link building tasks. Here are some ideas for you.

Bookmarking Your Pages

Start by setting up accounts at some of the popular bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon and Delicious. Take the time to fill out your profile. Include a picture of yourself and add a link and description of your website.

As you add high-quality new content, use those accounts to bookmark your new page. This will accomplish several things at the same time.

1) It Will Send You Traffic – By bookmarking your pages, you are sharing them with other users. They will come to your site to read more resulting in a quick boost of traffic.

2) Your Pages Will Be Indexed FAST – Search engines love bookmarking sites and are constantly spidering their content. As a result of bookmarking, those same search engine spiders will crawl their way to your own site and index the content quickly, giving you a chance to rank in the search engines for your content.

3) You Get Links – You may be worried that bookmarking doesn’t do much from a link building perspective because the link you get initially is a “no-follow” or non-counting link. While that’s true, you also usually get a link that does count, often through the site’s RSS feed. In addition you are getting the word out about your content and increase your chances of having someone else link to your page.

A huge percentage of online users have “sites” of their own. They are on twitter, facebook and many of the free blogging sites. You never know who will mention your post and link back to you, provided they can find your content.

Blog Commenting

Another quick link building task that you can tackle even if you just have a few minutes here and there to work on your site is blog commenting. Spend a little bit of time finding a few of the bigger blogs in your market and then make it a goal to comment on them on a regular basis. Make sure you are contributing to the conversation, not just adding a comment for a link’s sake and you will quickly notice an increase in traffic and “link juice” to your site.

P.S.  If you are ready to learn more about backlinks I would like to invite you to join my link building program at EasyLinkLove.com

But one of my favorite aspects of attending this event is connecting with other marketers and “talking shop”. It is particularly rewarding if I can teach a little something here and there in conversations.

Yesterday for example I shared lunch and a great conversation about beginning SEO with Nicole Dean and Lain Ehmann. Lain piked our brains about a few topics but most of it focused around SEO. Her biggest problem is information overload. There are so many different articles, reports and products about SEO out there and everyone seems to have a slightly different strategy.

I broke it down for her into “SEO in a Nutshell”, which is just enough info about how you can optimize your pages and blog posts and get some rankings without getting too complicated. I thought I’d share with you today what I told her over lunch.

SEO In A Nutshell

There are only a handful of concepts you need to grasp to start optimizing your pages so you can rank for some keywords. Here they are…

Keyword Research

You can’t start to rank for something unless you know what you want to rank for. The “key” to keyword research is to find a term that strikes a balance between the amount of traffic you get and how hard it is to rank for it.

Let me give you an example:

I’ve been doing a little research recently on article marketing. Trying to rank for “article marketing” would be almost impossible. Yes, this keyword is getting a lot of traffic (it’s searched about 250 times per day), but there are  also a LOT of people trying to rank for that term.

By comparison let’s look at “best article marketing tips”. It’s only searched about 5 times per day, but there is so little competition for this keyword phrase, that you could probably write an article or blog post titled “My 3 Best Article Marketing Tips” and rank on the first page of Google with minimal work.

Find that balance between how often a term is searched and how hard it will be to rank for it.

If you want to learn a little more about Keyword Research, listen to this panel discussion I was involved in along with SEO experts Karon Thackston, Lynn Terry and Dan Morris. Here’s a picture:

Title Tag

Now that you have your keyword, you want to make sure it appears in the title tag of your new web page. If you are using blogging software like wordpress, just make sure your keyword is in the title of your post or page. If you are creating static html pages, make sure you add the meta title tag.

Our keyword example above was “best article marketing tips”, so I may use a little like “My Best Article Marketing Tips Revealed” as the title of my new blog post. If you can include your keyword as early as possible in the title, but also make sure it reads well and is interesting.

It is also a good idea to use the same keyword again somewhere in the first 100 words of your content.

The rest of this simple way to do SEO (search engine optimization) is all about links.

Internal Links

These are the links within your site and you want to make sure you use the keyword in the anchor text when you point to this new page. If you are using wordpress as your blogging software, it will automatically do this for you. If you are creating a static html site, make sure you are linking from your homepage or article page to this new page with “best article marketing tips” as part of the text that links to the page.

External Links

Now that we have the internal linking set up, it’s time to go out and get some links from other sites across the internet that have our keyword in the anchor text. For a long tail keyphrase like “best article marketing tips”, it shouldn’t take more than a few links to get it to rank. For a more competitive keyword, you want to spend more and more time building those backlinks.

By now you’re probably wondering where you can get those external links. Here are a few simple ideas.

• Write some articles and submit them to article directories.
• Write a guest blog post or two for a blog in your market.
• Submit your new page to a few popular social bookmarking and social networking sites.
• Comment on popular blogs in your market and link to the new page or post.

Yes, you can get a lot more complicated than that, but there is no need for most of us. If you can implement just these few things, you should see your traffic and ranking improve.

P.S.  If you are ready to learn more about backlinks (both internal and external), I would like to invite you to join my link building class at EasyLinkLove.com

For a few years, people just stopped taking the time to write good descriptions (myself included), but as it turns out that can be a costly mistake. Here’s why.

Let’s take a look at a search engine listing. Here’s one for one of my niche sites:

Each search engine listing includes a title, a description and a link as you can see. Let’s think about this for a second. On average, there are about 10 listings on each search results page. They are organized in a why that allows the searcher to quickly scan through them.

Do you think writing a compelling description could get them to click on your listing instead of someone else’s? Sure it does. And that is why you want to put some thought and time into crafting a good description for each page on your website.

If you are going after a specific keyword, make sure it is in the title and if possible in the description. As you can see in the image above, the search term will be bolded on the search results page.

Other than that work on good copy. Make it inviting and include some benefits where you can. In the example above I included the terms  “fun dessert” and “dish to bring”. Both of these show how the waldorf salad recipe can be used.

You can even change your description from time to time and check how your click-through-rate changes with each new one you write. If your search results position stays the same, you should see an increase or decrease in traffic for this keyword depending on how well your description performs.

Of course you don’t need to test each description on each page. Reserve the testing for your big money pages, but do take some time to craft appealing descriptions for all your pages.

P.S. There is still time to join my link building class at EasyLinkLove.com … Find out how building links can get you more free traffic.

You could check your rankings by entering your keywords into Google and scrolling through the search results once every couple of days and then chart your progress in a spreadsheet. While that works fine for a handful of keywords, as your site expands, it becomes a lot of work.

Instead I like to automate the process with a piece of software called SEO Elite. It allows me to enter a keyword as well as the url of the page I want to rank for. It then searches my rankings each day and charts overall progress for me.

But that’s just one of the 8 different things SEO Elite can do. There is a total of 8 different projects that can help you with your SEO. They are:

• Analyze backlinks using a specified search engine
• Get links to your website
• Analyze AllInAnchor, AllInTitle or AllInText
• Verify that link partners are still linking back
• Find where your site is ranked for a given keyword
• Find out how many pages are indexed
• Find possible authority websites
• Submit your articles to article directories

As mentioned, I use the project that allows me to see where my site (or any given page on my site) ranks for a particular keyword the most. Being able to analyze backlinks and check on AllInAnchor and AllInTitle are also quite useful when I’m trying to figure out how hard it will be to compete for a particular keyword.

You can also use analyze backlinks to look at a competitors incoming links and then go out and try to get links from those sites as well.

Finding out how many pages are indexed can be useful in two different ways. The first thing you want to do is run this report on your own website. Compare how many pages the software shows you have indexed to how many pages you think you have. If your number is a lot bigger than what the software shows, you may have a problem with your site not getting indexed properly. Usually a sitemap and some proper internal linking can take care of those issues.

Next you can also run the same report on some of your major competitors. Larger sites tend to rank better. By spying on your competition this way you’ll see how large you may want to build your site over time.

And I’m not the only one who likes this software. Here’s what Dan Thies from SEO Fast Start has to say about it:

“There are a lot of tools available for managing and checking links, but SEO Elite fills a great niche. It has a very simple interface, it’s very fast, and it has proven quite useful in researching our competition.”

The first thing you need to know is the keywords your site is starting to rank for as well as the keywords you would like to rank for.

Keyword research will provide you with a list of keywords you want to rank for and you can use a website tracking program like Google Analytics to find out what your site is ranking for already.

Once you have Google Analytics installed and have a few days of data, click on “Traffic Sources” and then “Keywords”. This will give you a list of keywords that you are already ranking for.

To check your search engine rankings, open a particular search engine (I mainly focus on Google.com). Type your keyword or keyphrase in and then look through the search results until you find your listing.

You may want to track your progress for each keyword over time. To do so, open your favorite spreadsheet software (like Excel or open office). Add the keyword in the first column, and the search position for Google in the next. Repeat with any other search engines you want to track.

Come back every few days and search through the listings for each again and note any changes in position. This will allow you to see which of your optimization efforts are working.

It’s a little bit of tedious work, but well worth the effort. You can also use software to automate this process. Keeping track of your rankings over time and seeing how you start to move up in the search results as you build more links and develop a more authoritative site is very motivating.

Grab your keywords, open your favorite search engine and check your rankings.

1) Determine A Related Topic

Start by reading through the blog post or article on your site that you want to link to. Think about a related topic that would be just a little more general or closely related to the post on your site.

Let’s take this blog post for example. After I’m done writing it, I’m going to work on an article and some topic ideas could be:

• 3 Tips For Writing Quality Articles
• How To Get In The Habit Of Writing And Submitting Articles Regularly
• 7 Tips for Writing Great Article Headlines
• The 3 Deadly Mistakes Of Article Marketing
• What Is Article Marketing And Why Should You Bother?

Can you see how easy it would be to craft a resource box at the end of each of those articles that would link back to this post?

2) Write The Author Resource Box With A Link

Once I have my article topic (or title), I like the write the author resource box that goes at the end of the article next. This may seem a little backwards, but there’s reason behind the madness. By having the resource box already on the page, I can then work on drafting the rest of my article in a matter that will make it flow smoothly into the resource box. By doing so, readers of the article will be more likely to read the article all the way through and hopefully click on the link in the resource box.

Tip – Always try to get as much mileage out of your articles as you can. One way to do this is to write an interesting resource box with a call to action that invites the reader to click on the link in it. This way you will not only get a strong one way link from the article directory, but also quite a bit of direct traffic.

3) Write The Article

Now it’s time to sit down and write the actual article. I often start with a rough outline and then just fill in the paragraphs. For this post for example (which is very similar to an article I may write for an article directory), I wrote the numbered points (in bold) first and then just added a few sentences below each to make my point.

Remember to work your way into that resource box at the end of the page to make sure you have a smooth transition there.

4) Submit The Article

Once your article is done, it is time to submit it. Pick a strong article directory. I usually submit my first article to EzineArticles.com which always results in a great link to my site. Often that one good link in enough to get my blog post to rank. If it isn’t', move on to step 5.

5) Rinse And Repeat As Needed

If your rankings aren’t yet where you’d like them to be, just rinse and repeat the first 4 steps. I usually submit the next article to a different directory. Favorites are Ladypens.com, Isnare.com and ArticleBase.com. After that I go back to EzineArticles.com and submit another article in a different category.

Just keep going until you are accumulating enough strong links to rank where you want to be.

P.S. Are you ready to learn more about article marketing to build links and other link building methods? I invite you to sign up for my 13 week link building class at www.EasyLinkLove.com

Before You Start

Before you go out and start working on back links, you need to decide what you want each page or blog post on your site to rank for.

If you are not familiar with this process,  here’s a post on what keyword research is and why you need to do it. Once you’ve done your homework and decided what you want to rank for it’s time to make sure the page (or post itself ) is optimized for that keyword or keyphrase. Make sure you are using the term you want to rank for in your page title and at least once or twice in the content of the page.

Now it’s time to actually start building links. Here are three simple things you can do to get some back links pointing to your website.

Participating in Forums For Back Links

A great and very easy place to start is on forums. Go out and find a few popular forums in your niche and just start participating. Most forums will allow you to set up a signature file that includes your name and link to your website. Start with that and then as you answer questions, slip in the occasional link to an article on your website that provides more information on the topic of that particular post.

Note - not all forums will allow you to add a link. Be sure to read their rules before you start posting. At the very least they should allow you to set up a profile page that allows you to include some links to your website. Be sure to do that and then focus most of your time and energy posting on forums that allow you to at least link to your site from the signature file.

Submitting To Directories For Back Links

Especially when your site is new, you want to spend some time submitting it to various link directories. One of the first things I do once I have some decent content on my site is to submit it to the DMOZ Directory. Submission is free, but it can take quite a while before your listing is approved. Make sure you submit to the correct category and put some thought into your title and your description. It can easy take 6 months or more to get approved, but since there is no cost and it is a pretty powerful link, it’s worth spending the time to create the listing.

After that, look for some link directories for your niche. Do a Google search for your niche + directory or link directory. Make sure the directory is still crawled and cached by Google (both on the home page and on the listing pages).

I also like to use a service called “Directory Maximizer” that will submit your site to hundreds of different link directories. You don’t have to submit to all of them at once, but try to get a few in there every month. It will help your sites ranking and authority over time.

Setting Up Social Media Profiles

Last but not least, you want to set up some social media logins and add your website to the profile pages. Here are a few sites to get you started:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Digg
• Reddit
• Stumbleupon
• Kaboodle
• Maxx

Sign up for a free account with each of these and then add a link to your website in the profile page and start to participate in each network a bit.

That’s it for today. Get started with those three link building strategies and we’ll discuss some more over the coming weeks. Of course you are also welcome to sign up for my Link Building Class.

By the way … do you have any questions about link building? If so, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them in an upcoming post.

P.S. Ready to learn more about link building? I’d like to invite you to join my 13 week beginner link building class at www.EasyLinkLove.com .