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.

Two nights ago we received a pre-recorded message from our daughter’s elementary school principal. We get these messages about once or twice a week, usually reminding us about some school event or an upcoming holiday. Not that night tough. Instead the principal rambled on and on about a facebook contest a local car dealer ship is running. The dealership set up a fan page with a short survey that includes a question about what your favorite local school and what your favorite Toyota is. The school with the most votes wins $1,000 from the dealership – thus the call from the eager principal.

Since facebook was down for a good part of yesterday, we received another urgent call from the principal last night. But it doesn’t end there… as I was walking up to the school just now I can hear him making a loudspeaker announcement to all students challenging them to go to facebook and fill out the survey. Remember this is an elementary school and students range from kindergarten to fifth grade.

I realize that schools are in desperate need of funding. I also realize that social media is the big new buzz word in local business, but if you ask me, this is social media marketing gone too far.

I also doubt that it will be very effective because, believe it or not, Toyota of Rock Hill, elementary students aren’t really your target market and by pushing your product on my child, I for one will not be buying a new car from you.

P.S. What are your thoughts? Am I overreacting or does this seem inappropriate and ineffective to you as well? Share your opinion as a comment below.

While last year’s challenge mainly focused on getting 90 new pieces of content up on the site in 90 days, this year Trish is focusing on a more long term approach. During the 90 days she will walk us through creating search engine optimized content that will help increase traffic to our websites both short and long term. Along the way, I’ll also be sharing some link building tips with you to help further boost those search engine rankings and get free traffic.

I hope you will join Trish and me and spend the next 90 days discovering  free ways to increase website traffic and more importantly learn how to make sure you are getting traffic that converts (into new subscribers, customers etc.)

Ready to get started and join us for this year’s challenge? Start by reading a little more about the challenge in the “Getting Started” post by Trish below and make sure you sign up for free email updates at the end of that post.

90 Day Content Marketing Challenge – Getting Started

Then read this post about leveraging your content . Last but not least, download this Worksheet (pdf) and record where you are at traffic wise at the beginning of the challenge.

Here’s where I am currently at with this Affiliate Treasure Chest Blog. Visitor stats are for the month of August 2010.

Unique Visitors: 762

Total Page Views: 2,089

# of Keyword Searches: 39

Incoming Links (according to yahoo site explorer) 207

By the way, I am using Google Analytics for tracking. You can use it, the AWstats tracking that comes with most cpanel hosting or any other tracking software. Just make sure you use the same program throughout this challenge.

as you can see this blog has been sorely neglected over the past 6 months or so and I haven’t done much of anything to build links to it and market it. I’m excited to pick things back up with this new content challenge and see what kinds of results I can get in just 3 short months.

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

The conference is put together by David Perdew who does an amazing job. He invited me to attend as an aide this time which helped me realize just how much work goes into an event like this. Here he is with Nicole Dean, instructor, friend and my roommate. I recommend you take a look at her blog at http://www.nicoleonthenet.com/

Nicole and I have been friends for years and had a great time brainstorming during the event. Which brings up a good point:

Put some thought into who you want to share a room with at an event. You will have some time to connect, work and brainstorm with this person.

One of the reasons I highly recommend the NAMS workshops is the fact that it is broken down into different tracks or rooms. This go around David put together 4 different tracks (beginner 1, beginner 2, intermediate and advanced). This helps make sure that you learn exactly what  you need to move forward no matter where you are at with your online business.

Being an aide in the beginner rooms came with an unexpected bonus. I ended up watching some presentations and workshops that I probably would not have otherwise. During past NAMS conferences I spent most of my time in the Advanced Room, which certainly has helped my business, but I was pleasantly surprised how much I learned in the beginner rooms. It’s always good to be reminded of basic skills that we all let fall by the wayside as we tackle more complex tasks.

Two of my favorite presenters this go around were Lynn Terry and Denise Wakeman.

Denise talked about basic blogging skills including writing compelling titles and posts that include a strong call to action.

Following her presentation she led us in a brilliant workshop that walked us through a content idea exercise that resulted in an editorial schedule with 35 blog posts titles. It’s a simple strategy that I’ll be using regularly. In fact, this blog post was one of the ideas I came up with during the workshop.

Big Lessons Learned:

• Plan your posts ahead of time so you can focus on just writing them.
• Don’t overextend yourself. Writing just one or two posts per week is fine.

To learn more from Denise, visit her blog at http://www.buildabetterblog.com/

Lynn Terry talked about her powerful “From Start To Profit” strategy which takes us all the way from ideas and market research to a profitable website.

Big Lesson Learned: Don’t get distracted by too many new ideas and strategies. Stick with one until it becomes profitable, then rinse and repeat.

To learn more from Lynn visit her blog http://www.clicknewz.com/

The downside of having 4 different presentations/workshops running simultaneously is that you will not be able to attend all of them. I would have loved to sit in when Karon Thackston talked about copywriting and Jeff Herring about repurposing content.

By biggest personal highlight was overcoming my fear of public speaking (which is kinda important since I was invited to be an instructor at NAMS 5 in January).

It all started innocently enough when David asked me to work with a small group of beginners teaching them about setting up a squeeze page. It was a very informal setting in the lobby as you can see in the picture.

Being able to share some of what I’ve learned over the years in an informal setting outside of the presentations has always been one of my favorite parts of going to NAMS conferences.

Next, my good friend Nicole Dean startled me into being on the “Affiliate Marketing Dating Game”. At the end of day 1 of the conference, David set up two “Dating Game” type activities.

First up was Kathleen Gage who asked 3 affiliates questions about how they would promote her product. It was interesting to see all the different approaches people took in promoting an affiliate product from blogging and tweeting to more traditional methods like writing reviews and sending an offer to their email list.

Next up was Nicole Dean in her role as super affiliate. Her task was to ask 3 product owners questions about their affiliate programs to determine which one would be the best fit for her. Right before the game she asked me to volunteer as one of the product owners with an affiliate program.

I as a bit nervous (particularly about not being able to hop on the barstool in front of the whole room), but since I was “just” talking about my affiliate niche pack affiliate program and one of my best friends was asking the questions, I quickly overcame my fear of public speaking and actually had a pretty good time playing the game.

As with the previous one, it was very interesting to hear the different approaches to affiliate marketing and we ended up sharing quite a bit of knowledge about different systems, cookies, commissions and such.

Most importantly though, it gave me the confidence to be part of a Keyword Research Panel the following day. Karon Thackston, Lynn Terry, Dan Morris and I spend 90 minutes talking about anything from the importance of keyword research to what tools we use to how we approach the research in the first place. David Perdew lead us in this discussion and then turned the audio into a product that workshop attendees could sell as affiliates. Quite a few people made their very first affiliate sales this way.

I ended up buying it myself to be able to listen with a pen in hand to what Karon, Lynn and Dan (all of them brilliant online marketers and researchers) had to share. You can order your own copy of the recording for $17 at http://www.affiliatetreasurechest.com/keywordresearch

Big Lesson Learned: When you step outside your comfort zone you will seem amazing growth both personally and in your business.

Overcome your fears, try something new, learn and apply a new skill. Take some action and watch your business grow.

What can you do this week to step out of your comfort zone?

P.S. I hope I’ll see you at NAMS 5 January 27th – 31st 2010 in Atlanta GA.

P.P.S. If you attended NAMS 4, I’d love to hear what you thought about the conference.

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.”