Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

I’ll just slip this in before I head off and work on my launch video since EVERYONE is going nuts on Twitter about it (Ed Dale is of course the craziest).

Google’s keyword tool just become a goldmine for accurate keyword data. Go have a play with it now and you will see what I mean -

You can use this tool to look up keywords related to your blog or the product you are promoting and find the EXACT number of people conducting searches for each keyword phrase. You can also stick in a website URL and Google will give you suggested keywords based on search volume.

You can use this data to decide what headings to use in your blog tiles, how to conduct SEO on your sites and to generate keyword lists for your advertising campaigns.

This is of course not a new thing - keyword services have existed for a long time, but this is the first time Google has made such finite data available to us at no cost.

As Ed so calmly noted - the Internet marketing game has just changed…again.

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Three quick updates for you today, starting with a way cool video and tool from StomperNet’s latest Going Natural 3.0 launch series of videos (if you haven’t opted in to get these free videos, go do it now - you’re missing out!).

Assessing Your Website’s SEO with Stomper Site Seer

Today (Friday USA time) StomperNet are making available a search engine analysis tool called Stomper Site Seer (or SSS for short).

It will cost you NOTHING to use it. You can submit your site and get a complete StomperNet search engine diagnostic report.

To prep everyone for the release of this tool Jerry West and Howie Schwartz put together a video that explains some of the key on-page and off-page elements that matter when it comes to your website (and blog) ranking well in Google and the mistakes you need to avoid.

The video is worth watching even if you don’t use the SSS tool because it’s a fantastic primer on some search engine optimization fundamentals, including metrics you need to know about to assess where your site is performing well and where it is not.

The video reviews things you can do to your website internally (on-page), such as how much the title tag matters, what you should do with your Meta Keywords and whether a sitemap is still important or not.

Then they cover external linking elements (off-page) such as keyword cost analysis, how well your site is performing in social media sites and data on the number of incoming links to your pages. This is all very handy stuff for anyone doing SEO.

One of the cool features that the tool offers is information on what Google thinks is the THEME of your website. If your site is not themed by Google how you think it should be, then this is an opportunity for you to create some new pages to target the traffic Google is sending you because of your theme.

This might sound confusing, so if this is the first time you have heard the term theme as applied to websites, you need to watch the video and then grab the SSS tool to find out the theme of your site. I’m not sure what the theme is for my blog, so as soon as the SSS tool comes out I’m going to find out.

The SSS tool and the video are available today. To get them and all the other free videos, all you need to do is opt-in to the newsletter from StomperNet here -

http://www.stompernet.net/

StomperNet are not spammers when it comes to their email list, they send out some very good content, so you should be on their newsletter anyway.

Cow vs Conn a Case Study for Making Money Online

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A quick short post today as I’m busy getting ready with my final preparations to head for Canada (more on this soon).

If you are into search engine optimization you know the importance of back links. In a newsletter I sent out to my email subscribers back in February (you have to be on my blog tips newsletter) I told you about a neat little software tool from Neil Shearing called Real Link Finder.

The software lets you search the blogosphere for blogs that do not use the “no follow” tag (which makes links near useless for search engine optimization purposes - see this for more). I had a play with it and while it was okay at finding blogs, it was a bit hit and miss with the how on-topic the results were.

Just this week the “Jasons” (Jason Katzenback and Jason Potash) released a very similar software tool called CommentKahuna. There’s not much different with this tool compared to Neil’s in terms of functions, but since it runs its own search engine and queries a few other sites, the results can be different.

If you are looking to run a comment marketing campaign to build links and traffic, or if you just want to isolate blogs related to yours that do not use the no follow tag, both these tools are useful. The creators of the software do ask you to opt-in with your name and email address, but the program itself doesn’t cost any money.

You can get CommentKahuna here.

The Jason’s have a follow up product (surprise!) released today called TrafficKahuna, which I haven’t had a chance to play with just yet, but is some form of community traffic building resource. It’s not free and since I haven’t had a chance to actually use it I will reserve judgment for now.

You can find out more about TrafficKahuna here.

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There’s something I’ve come to realize about most of my fellow bloggers - you guys and girls are not great at marketing.

Don’t take offense, marketing is not something that comes naturally and most people enter the blogging world as writers or hobbyists, not business people.

Some look at marketing as advertising and their current perception of advertising is akin to lying. With that attitude in place, no self respecting blogger wants to learn how to lie in order to promote their blog. This may be an inaccurate assumption about marketing, but let’s face facts, most people don’t know what marketing is and their world view of the advertising industry is framed on their experience with television commercials, magazine advertisements and billboards.

Some might say I’m a good marketer, but I want to be honest with you - if I had a choice, I’d rather sit down and just write to my blog and not worry about how I’m going to “get my message out there”. I’m lucky because I have some momentum here at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, so in a lot of ways I can just publish content and my traffic will grow, but chances are for you, if you build it, readers won’t just show up and read your blog because it’s there.

…or will they?

The Long Road To Blog Traffic

You’ve possibly read the varying arguments about targeting the Long Tail for traffic as a blogger. Some argue that you can’t leverage the long tail for traffic in the same way that a business like Amazon does for profit selling goods.

This is true, in some respects. Amazon, iTunes and companies and services like them, have massive scale and can reach the entire long tail of a product catalog and thus truly leverage the full breadth of the tail.

Bloggers cannot realistically do this since it would mean writing content to hit every single topic and keyword phrase in a niche - effectively millions of articles.

Any blogger who has managed to stick to writing regular content for at least three months - and it really kicks in after about six to eight months - knows about the gift you receive from Google. If you check your traffic statistics regularly, the traffic coming from Google and in lessor respects from the other search engines, will increase if you stick to regular content production long enough.

Thanks to search engines, bloggers who specialize in writing voluminous amounts of content but with poor marketing skills or a lack of motivation to do much more than put creative thought out on their blog, can still succeed - it’s just a bit slower this way.

One Visitor At A Time

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You may have noticed this blog is back to a PageRank 6. Back in October 2007 my site was one of the blogs hit with a PageRank penalty because I had paid links. I dropped from a 6 to a 5 and then later when the big sweep happened, down to a 3.

This article sums up my speculation during the event and lists some of the other blogs hit at the time - Possible Explanations for the PageRank Penalty Sweep.

After some thinking I decided, at least on this blog, to add ‘no follow’ to any paid links and succumb to Google’s wishes. I added the no follows, submitted a review request with Google at their Webmaster Tools and then sat down and wrote this - Frustrating Yes - But I Want Google To Be My Friend.

Nothing happened for a month, but I thought Google might need longer so I let it sit. Little did I know that Google simply doesn’t tell you whether you have successfully adhered to their requests or you still need to do more to have the penalty removed and apparently I hadn’t done enough.

Another victim of a PageRank drop was Wendy Piersall from eMoms at Home. Wendy was relentlessly monitoring what was going on with Google as she attempted to have her PageRank restored to it’s original status and every now and then she updated me with details on what she found.

A couple of weeks ago she finally found what she was looking for - a blog post about people who had submitted requests to remove the PageRank penalty to no avail. The post itself didn’t have the answers, it was the comment stream after it that presented the solution, or should I say it was Matt Cutts, Google’s blogging rep who provided the answer because he was diligently responding to comments to the post.

Matt went so far as to even personally help some of the bloggers who asked for Google to go look at their site because they were certain they had removed or nofollowed all paid links.

The blog post is here - Matt Cutts, Why Am I Still Being Punished? - and kudos to DazzlinDonna from SEO Scoop for asking the question.

I read the comment stream, determined that I hadn’t been liberal enough with no follow tagging and then went into my blog archives to rectify the situation (I’m just glad I haven’t done many paid reviews, I can’t imagine how much of a job this would be for someone who actively does paid reviews). After I submitted another Google request to have the penalty removed and a week or so later it was done.

I owe Wendy a huge thanks for keeping me up to date with this - cheers Wendy!

If you still have not had your PageRank restored and you are prepared to follow Google’s rules, check out the post above, the answers are there.

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