Here is the article from Google Webmaster Central Blog. I highly recommend every IM to read and understand the Google’s intention against Black Hat SEO marketers. Another step to reward high-quality sites

For me, I think my affected site was basically dropped because of “keyword stuffing” and unrelated keyword linking service that I used out of desperation that the site’s ranking was dropping quickly early this year. Here is the sample of unrelated keyword link.

I personally believe Google has done the right thing,  what should have been done already. Effective spam site detection and removal will guarantee the better search results and promote White Hat SEO with high quality contents, so we can all benefit from it. Cheers !

Step 1: Keyword Analysis

Keyword Analysis is the most important and the first step of the successful SEO marketing.

If you already have product or looking for a new niche market, Keyword Analysis should be done properly and throughly. I use only the tools from Google. Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Simply type one or more possible keywords that you want to research. How to read or use the results depends on what kind of marketing campaign you are interested.

First, select ‘Exact’ instead of the ‘Broad’ for the Match type. This will show the results for the numbers where exact keywords were searched. Since we are targeting the particular exact keywords, Broad or Phrase would reflect incorrect search numbers.

Second, if you are thinking of hosting Google Adsense ADs campaign for the profits, turn on the ‘Estimated Avg CPC’ column (disabled by default) and click on the column to sort by CPC price.

This is a Google Adwords Keyword output of ‘insurance pet’ ordered by Local Search.

Now you can sort the table by search volume or CPC value clicking the heading. Enjoy and have fun. You can download the list by using the download link (csv). So you will be able to do further data manipulation with the data using Excel. You will need to check on the competition before deciding on the keywords. If too many search result found from Google search (more than 100,000), just pass to the next one. Also check out who the top competitors are. If they are very strong and famous website, the odds are you will have difficult times to compete against them.

If you are looking for other good external keywords research tool, you may want to try Market Samurai. It’s free to download and it’s free to use the Keyword Analysis menu even after the trial period ends.

Step 2: Get a domain and hosting account

Get a good hosting account that supports multiple add-on domain: Hostgator has month to month plan. So you can start hosting service with out spending too much on the anual plan. Add-on domain means that you can host websites for the additional domains. You can add unlimited add-on domains to your Hostgator account. Link Directly to Shared Hostgator Web Hosting Page.

Some people are wondering if they would utilize free blogging website such as blogger.com or wordpress.com. But the answer is that you should start with your own domain. There are lots of limitations with these blogging services. For example, you can’t insert ADs in your blog with out paying extra fee for the service. If your own hosting account and WordPress software, you can do anything that you want freely. Also this is a matter of branding your own site. If you use 3rd party blogging service, you will probably waste your effort on the their brand sites. Get your own domain and hosting service. End of story.

Step 3: Write or get good content articles

Just remember, both human and Google love quality contents. Do not just copy and paste texts from other websites. You get penalty for the duplicated contents. There are few points to think about.

1. Is your article content unique?
2. Are all your keywords strategically positioned throughout the paragraphs?
3. Human friendly?
4. Is it good?

Of course , writing quality article with all the above requirements may not be easy especially when you have no clue about your niche. Then you can use Ghost writers who will write unique articles for you with some fees. Just check out warriorforum.com or similar Internet marketing forum to get some leads.

Step 4: Site Map

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines (not only Google) about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. It is a XML file which contains the list of all the web pages in your site. You can register the Sitemap into your Google Webmaster Tool account and monitor the Google bot indexing status. Moreover, you can have valuable information such as list of related keywords and their ranking in Google Search , list of websites linking to your site, and more.

Sitemap can be generated using the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in if you are using WordPress blogging software. If not, you can check out this list of sitemap generators.

Step 5: Link building

Link building is a task of creating backlinks to your newly created website. When it comes to organic marketing capaign, you need to be in the first place of the Google search result when the targeted keywords are searched.

It is known that the best way to increase your ranking as one of the top search results, there should be lots of external links to your site. More backlinks will results higher ranking in the search results. I used to think that backlinks can only be created by others. But this is not true. You can create the backlinks to your own website through various free services.

The point is this. Just create as many links to your site as possible. Ask your friends to add links to your site. Join free membership sites and add your homepage linke to your profile page which should be public. Or leave comments on other blogs with your website URL.

Before start building backlinks, create an email address to use for registration purpose only because it’s highly possible that you will receive lots of SPAMish emails to that address.

1. Directory Submission: Some say directory submission is not effective, but you should not ignore this step. This is one of the easiest methods. You might want to start with http://www.easysubmits.com , http://www.freewebsubmission.com/ or search for ‘High PR directory service list’ or something similar.
2. Forum Submission: Just remember, webmasters hate SPAMers. When you post entry in the forum, it is important to post the relevant content to the forum topic
3. Article Submission: One of the popular method to boost your site’s presence. But I admit that writing an ariticle is not easy for me. The popular site for article sharing is of course, http://ezinearticles.com/
4. Video Submission: Create interesting video. It can be simple as series of screen shot of your website. Just add some explanation or texts along with that. There are tons of video sharing site. You can start from Youtube.com and Vimeo.com. Make sure that you provide your keywords and Website URL in the video description. Try Wikipedia’s list of video hosting websites.
5. Link Building: Back links are the heart of the SEO. There are many ways to build backlinks. Such as joining various free membership sites – often they provide a personal profile page that you can set your homepage or simple blog interface so you can write an article about your site. Also you can leave comments on other blogs with the similar interest. Make sure you leave your website URL. Then there are link exchange methods which I am not familiar yet
6. Social Bookmarking: There are tons of social bookmarking , networking sites out there. They are free to join. Use them. Just search ‘Social Bookmarking list’ in the Google and check the results.

Just remember that SPAM submission will not work in a long run. Especially for the wordpress blogs. Most of the WordPress bloggers are using Akismet (Spam comment filtering service). Once you are marked as spammer, your email address,name, or even IP address will be recorded into the centralized Akismet server. Therefore, your subsequenct comments to other WordPress blogs will be blocked and filtered out as SPAM. I admit that Akismet is really a powerful SPAM filtering solution.

Also remember backlinks from high PageRank (numerical value set by Google representing relative importance within the particular set) sites are much better and definitely help to increase your site’s PageRank too.

During the link building process, you will join membership for many websites and bookmarking services. Just record the access information (email address,userid,password) and domain name in an Excel or text file. So you will not loose the history of what you have achieved.

Thank you for visiting WP Marketing. Please leave any comment if you have other good resources on the backlink creation strategies.

1. All in One SEO Pack : SEO is important. It’s the most important part of the website maintenance. and the most difficult. Main SEO tasks consist of managing title tag, and keyword  and description meta tag. Especially I think title tag and description meta tag are important.  ‘All in One SEO Pack’ plug-in make it very easy to maintain out of the box. You can define title , keyword, and description not only for your blog but for every articles using the article’s content. You can specifically define them manually or the plug-in will automatically generate them using tags and categories.  This is the most popular plug-in for SEO.

Once activated you will need to update the settings in the ‘All in One SEO’ sub menu under Settings. You will need to select enable and fill out the Home Title, Description, and Keywords.  For the other options, you can just use the default settings.

I think more important feature is that you can define individual settings per post. Without this feature, a WordPress blog will have the same keyword and descriptions throughout all the sub pages. That’s really terrible for the SEO.

There are other numerous SEO plug-ins in the WordPress website. ‘Headspace’ is another popular SEO plugin-in, but it’s a little bit more complicated than ‘All in One SEO’. 

I highly recommend ‘All in One SEO’ and you will see the results right away if your website has not been SEO optimized before. I had an experience that the traffic was increased about 20% after the plug-in installation. Be patient, the traffic increase was started about a week later.

If you know any other good SEO plug-in, let me know.

Next plug-in is about Google Analytics.

Thank you for visiting wpmarketing.org

It’s probably because your Privacy Settings is set to search engine “blocking” mode which says “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors”.

You should click on the Settings , Privacy menu , and allow search engines by selecting “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” option.

I have been using WordPress and performed installation several times in the past using the WordPress default installation index.php file. But decided to try Fantastico this time because it simplifies the setup process. There is no separate DB setup process , quicker and faster setup. I liked it. But then I guess Fantastico’s WordPress predefined options for privacy setting was to block search engines.

Usually you would start promoting your website by submitting your site to Search engines Directories and social bookmarking websites. Then search engines would crawl to your website and index pages within few days.  But I found the problem when my new website not being indexed , but also AdSense was not working at all.

The AdSense AD always showed Public Ads. As long as I understand, public Ads are showing when Google does not properly analyzed the webpage yet. Then I checked with Webmaster tools and I found robots.txt was blocking the webbots from crawling.

I am not sure if this behavior is only applied to Hostgator, but highly possible that most of the other hosting provider’s Fantastico might be the same, installing WordPress with blocking mode.  So be careful and check privacy setting after installation if you use other similar setup tools to install WordPress.

If you use the original setup that comes with WordPress zip package, it asks for the privacy settings during the setup. I guess simpler is not always the better.

Some ways to check your websites heath.

1. Check if your site is properly cached in the search engine: For Google Search, you can use special search command “site:” to find out if your website is properly indexed with the Google. (Eg. “site:wpmarketing.org”) If you searched your domain with “site:” prefix and no results came out, you should suspect and check your robots.txt

2. Check your robots.txt file : WordPress automatically generates ‘robots.txt’ when Permalink is on. It’s not an actual physical file, but WordPress is dynamically generating when requested. You can view the file by typing ‘robots.txt’ (Eg. http://wpmarketing.org/robots.txt )  Below example shows a sample robots.txt file content which is opened to Search Engines. Note that there is nothing showing right after “Disallow:” which is OK. If there is slash ‘/’ character showing after “Disallow:”, It means to disallow all content from being indexed by Search Engine. So watch out.

Good – Opened to Search Engine

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Bad – Blocking Search Engine Request

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

3. Use Google’s webmaster tool to diagnose your sites health: Apply for the Google’s webmaster tools and monitor your website. It shows current status or errors occurred during indexing or crawling your website. So you can easily find out where the problem is.

This is very important and you should be aware if you are starting a new website for internet marketing otherwise your website won’t be getting any traffic from search engines.

Google officially reported that they do not use Keywords meta tag at all for the web ranking.  And even description meta tag is not used for the web ranking although it is used as the snippet of the Google search result page.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.

…

Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.

According to their meta tags Google uses page, it appears that ‘title’ tag is the only important information that affects the ranking. But of course, the quality content is the most important factor.