Image by Hobo! via Flickr

Blogging and SEO are inseparable. The blog is perhaps the defining website content, and blogs cover every imaginable subject on Earth. The trouble is that low grade SEO, or non-existent SEO in many cases, is an own goal for blogs. If people can’t find your blog, how do you expect to get read? SEO is a logical approach to a basic online issue, and it’s more of a science than anything else these days.

There are a lot of businesses around the world which are literally built on SEO. These are often online businesses, but many of them are “bricks and mortar” businesses, too. SEO is how their clients find them. This is the new Yellow Pages, more efficient and easier to carry around. For bloggers, it’s best practice to make absolutely sure that your blog is easily searchable using keyword phrases, the sort of terms people normally use to search.

Checking your own SEO as it is

There’s an easy way of checking your current SEO situation:

Try searching your own blog, using two or three key phrases from your text related to your subject matter.

How did you go? Did you:

• Find your blog instantly?
• Not find it at all?
• Find it down on Page 50 of the search results?

You’ll have noticed that some phrases are much better than others. You’ll also have seen that you got a lot of other sites on the top rankings. That’s SEO at work, and it’s what SEO is all about. The SEO keywords are the core issues when searching.

For bloggers, there are two major SEO issues:

• Blog content and subject matter
• The fact that many articles vary considerably and keywords may need some adjustment to make the individual blogs easier to find.

If you use WordPress, you’ll know their tagging options. WordPress uses tags as a default process for SEO purposes. Tagging is built in to WordPress specifically because the SEO process is so crucial to blogs. Convincing argument, isn’t it?

The other big issue is content. Search engines look for useful information, links and additional values. It’s like saying an encyclopaedia entry is more valuable to searchers than a Post-It note full of scrawl. SEO uses articles to provide high value relevant materials to improve search rankings. As a matter of policy, Google also uses content as a value indicator for its basic search algorithms.

Improving your SEO

There are various ways of improving your search engine optimization:

Content quality: This is a major issue for search engines, and relevance to search subjects is highly important.

Accurate, useful keyword phrases: This is basic, and you’ll need to put some thought into each blog piece for good tags.

Focusing your blog on critical core subjects: Some blogs cover far too many subjects for a search engine to consider the blog subject-specific. You may need to create another blog to help organize the subject matter, keeping your original blog for its basic subject matter.

Get help if you’re not sure what to do with your blog. It’s easy enough to get some professional assistance with your SEO. This also acts as training, explaining how specific SEO issues relate to your blog.

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Image via Wikipedia

This is a guest post by Brandon Hopkins

When I first got the email from “Sandra Bullok” I was excited. Did she want me opinion on Jesse James? Was she looking for a movie recommendation? Did she want my opinion on Beiber??

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the real Sandra Bullock, just a spammer. However, for the record I think Beiber gets a bad rap!

Just like anyone who owns a website, I get emails from “professional” link building companies every day. As we all know, they’re scraping email addresses, filling out comment forms and generally spamming in any way possible. Since it’s obvious that these emails are completely spam, we can use them to as a “What Not To Do When Building Links” guide. Here are some observations about building links through email.

1. Don’t be Generic.

If you don’t use my name, I won’t be reading your email. You will earn extra points and probably even a contact back if you use some other personal piece of information beside just my first name or email address. All you would have to do is read the “About Me” page to find that piece of info. Anything from a hobby to children would work.

Sandra’s Email Fail: Dear Webmaster,

2. Use a Company Name.

“SEO Company” isn’t actually a company. Instead use either your own name or a company name to make your email a little unique.

Sandra’s Email Fail: I am Sandra from SEO Company

3. Use Correct Capitalization and Punctuation.

Certain words, no matter how important they are, should be capitalized. Here is an easy to understand guide of capitalization instructions.

Sandra’s Email Fail: We are looking as a long term Link Exchange Partner with your team of link builders.

4. Features and Benefits

Since you’re essentially “selling” yourself and your website, you should know something about the sales process. One of the strongest sales tactics is showing the features then benefits of your product or service. In this case, the feature would be “You will be providing your website visitors with a website that will help them with XYZ.” The benefit would be “This will help them remember that your website gave them exactly what they were looking for, so they’re more likely to remember your website in the future”.

Sandra’s Email Feature Fail: I am excited to offer you a very good back link (no site or page was listed, we all know it’s going to be on a links.html page buried on some junk .info site registered yesterday)

Sandra’s Email Benefit Fail: none.

So how do you write a good email asking to either buy a link, or get a free link? Here is a template you can follow.

Hey Brandon, (never use “Dear Brandon,” or “Dear Mr. Hopkins,” or “Sir”, only spammers use those terms)

I wanted to let you know that I really liked your latest post about Twitter. I really liked the part about building a strong twitter following. That’s much more important that the total number of followers.

The reason I was emailing you was to see if you wanted to sell some advertising on the page, http://www.example.com. I have a website that would fit nicely and give your readers some additional information about Twitter resources.

My budget is fairly small, I’m just a guy with a website .

Let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Alexander Dombroff (don’t use a celeb’s name…)

p.s. your daughter is really cute! How old is she in that picture on your site? My daughter just turned 3 last week, they look about the same age.

There is a reason that buying links under the radar is so expensive, it takes a lot of time! All of this doesn’t include the actual cost of paying for the link, which is generally $20-$50 depending on the site. That is the same reason that people don’t mind spending money on a few high quality web directories like BOTW, Ezilon, and Yahoo! Directory.

Brandon Hopkins runs a team of freelance link builders with the one goal of getting your website to rank #1 for your terms. Contact Brandon at brandonchopkins@gmail.com to discuss link building!

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And there I go again, writing what I want to call an SEO blog and then putting a title on this post that guarantees nothing. But I am currently a self-supporting SEO (i.e not looking for clients) so who gives a shit if my posts here rank for anything. So I can disappear like J. D. Salinger for periods of time and really not care too much about it. There are just other things to do and I write this blog for shits and grins now. I just linked to fricken Wikipedia, for crying out loud. That’s because I am lazy and don’t want to explain shit. And, damn it, I like cutesy titles and mixing unrelated topics together and seeing what comes out on the other end. It’s called analogy. So I figured I could at least be nice enough to define things a bit. I can do SEO on the other sites that make money and just shoot the shit here.

Calling it bragging rights. And then there was the phase about a year ago where I really didn’t have much to brag about, so I stopped writing and went back to building things so I actually start claiming again that I made good money online. This blog and let’s call it social media mania were responsible for at least a part of the loss of income. I was having too much fun and not doing enough work. WOOT, traffic to a blog that now has a PageRank of 5 to get me freelance jobs I really don’t want to do. So I slowed down a bit on both and just watch myself. I guess is like alcohol or gambling.

Blog Stickiness

But you know what, the traffic at this site never really dipped much. It has been very slowly but steadily growing. And the feature that did this has been built in almost since the day I started this blog. These lists here get the majority of traffic on my site. The people that use them stick around a long time because they are long lists. Most are from India, but what can you do.

You will notice that those lists are on pages. That’s because posts can drop out of Google quicker especially when you are posting a lot. Yes, posting often is a two edged sword. You can get more traffic by posting often and filling your blog with content. But you can also go through periods of crap posts. I know all about crap posts. And after about ten of those in a row, your search engine traffic bearing posts are buried. Chances are your highest ranking page is your home page. It is generously boosting the last ten posts of your blog and whatever links you have in the sidebar. And if those posts are bad, then you better hope your good posts got some generous links from other bloggers, because you are helping those posts by writing bad posts on a tight schedule.

But not every type of content should go on a page. You learn to notice the difference between pages and posts after a while. You can say that posts are timely content, but there are plenty examples of posts that stand the test of time and are current for years. But they don’t quite fit the “page” type content slot. So how to you help these buried timeless posts.

I simply use a blogroll category here. At the time I was hunting for a featured posts plugin years ago, I couldn’t find one that worked like I wanted it to. Plus by just adding these posts to my WordPress links, I could control the anchor text and mold it however I wanted. Knowing that I would add to this list from time to time, I add the php_exec plugin and wrote code to pull a random 7 posts. That way I could keep the widget under control and satisfy my need to check if semi-sitewide links pack more punch than sitewide ones. Reload the page and the featured links change.

This also helps keep people on my site. I put what I consider to define what my blog is about despite my random walks down random topics. But how do you find yours?

J. D. Salinger wrote “Catcher In The Rye” and that’s about all he had to do to have people wondering where the hell he went for decades. You and I probably don’t have the next Great American Novel in us. We have our stats, we have our comments, we have social responses and we have our pets. I know I have my pets. Those posts I write and am just jittery about. Where I know I said exactly what I wanted to say or I wrote something that I never knew was in me just by starting to type. And I am going to feature them whether you like it or not.

Use Google Analytics to find out which posts get the most hits from outside of your site. Make those posts your “Featured Posts”. There are some “SEO” WordPress plugins out there you can purchase that will do this for you automatically. But you will have to do a bit of editorial work and make sure you want those posts to rank. I had a post here that used to rank for “girls with nuts”. Google took two words from the title, smashed them together and bam I beat the porn seos.

Comments are a good indication of popular posts and topics. Only a small percentage of your visitors will comment. And it seems I can finally say this now. The Noise/Signal Ratio in comments increases with your traffic and/or rank in the blogoshere. So this takes some editorial work also. And there is probably a WordPress plugin out there to rank your posts by comment count too. There are so many now, it’s hard to take the time and do the research on them for a post. For anything your want your WordPress blog to do, there are probably 5 or 6 free plugins that will do it and you can search for and install them from inside your WordPress installation. A post about WordPress plugins is almost stupid any more. The WordPress plugin search in your admin is almost Google. Just type what you want and it appears.

Putting links to your best and most popular content on every page will not only be a great housesitter for your blog while your away, but also keep those visitors around longer, finding more posts they can’t help but read.

But I Haven’t Been Sitting on My Ass

Yes, you may think it ironic that my last post about using Windows Live Writer was about 40 days ago. But I have been writing posts. WordPress 3 has really helped me explore my interests. I am currently running 3 WordPress Multisite Installations each on it’s own Virtual Server. In fact this blog, StephanMiller.com is squatting on top of this blog and the shortest domain I own.  And the two links before the last two also go to blogs on this server, one where I write about server issues as I deal with them and the other is waiting for me to write about this whole blog network deal. And I also have this blog about Android phones because I love mine. I thought mobile, smobile before I got it and now I am “fuck, I got to catch up”.

The idea with these blogs is content that people come back to, refer others to, bookmark in case they need it again. The server blog got traffic the third day, as well as the android blog. No pressure on posts except usefulness. Usefulness over prolificness. And the tight topics almost guarantee that Google as well as users will like them. I wrote about writing while learning a long time ago. It is one of the best times to blog. It is one of the only times you will be able to talk like the newbies your blog will appeal to. And almost any time forum results show on the first page of Google for a query, a blog can eventually kick it’s ass. Just saying.

That post was 3 years ago and that’s about how things go. There are so many things you can do to make money online that some projects can wait for a bit until the tools fall into your lap like WordPress 3′s multisite capabilities. There was WordPress MU before that but it was a different animal and to use plugins from regular WordPress you had to modify them. But in the meantime I learned more about VPS’s on the job and learned how to wildcard and park domains in Virtualmin. Once all the parts came together, I can now create a new blog in about one minute. Of course it takes a bit longer than that to set up but every theme and plugin I used on every blog in the network is already there. I don’t have to hunt them down and install them for the new blog. Perculation is good and good ideas rise back to the top when they are ready. There is a way to monetize any content.

So if you can write it easily, do so, and come back later to see what happens. If you get mounds of traffic great, if not, the act of writing helped make you learn more fully what you were going to learn anyway. Either Win/Win or just Win. But both ways, worth it.

I also have been writing software. The Google Scraper software I wrote is pretty popular for the limited market I thought it would have. So I am reading the second edition of Code Complete because I need some help. I know a lot of progrming languages. That is not the problem. I was at one time trying to limit this. That was because of a bad experience of using just two languages. I always confused the two. But after learning three programming languages, it seemed to get easier and easier to learn in another by diving into writing real life software in a brand new language with a browser open for searching functions. This year I added IronPython, Flash/Actionscript, PyQt and C# on top of Mono .

I just know at times I am sloppy and there has to be faster and more efficient ways of doing things than jumping right into the code. I still look at ERD or any one of those three letter diagrams and understand them but don’t get it quite right when I try to take my idea and put it in that form. But I’m trying. Automation and software have made it possible for some of my disappearing acts. 4 Hour Work Week my ass but I’m working towards that direction. And I am starting to think I am on the wrong side of this affiliate equation right now. Picks and shovels or selling the right products through affiliates or both.

Don’t get me wrong. I still have a part-time day job. I do make decent money affiliate marketing. These together provide for my whole family and it’s the affiliate marketing that makes it possible for me to dick off writing these posts and maybe squeeze out some time to write some software. Multistreams of Internet Income and seriously, that was actually the book that got me started in all of this.

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And here are some similar phrases that I put in the same basket:

• “We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round.  The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round.  He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.”- George Bernard Shaw
• “If you build, they will come” – Random Ghost in W. P. Kinsellas “Shoeless Joe” (yes, there was a book before the movie “Field of Dreams” and the author they were traveling to see was J. D. Salinger.)
• “If men were meant to fly, God would have given him wings” – A lot of people with a close connection to God who seems to have changed his mind. He does that a lot. He’s an old god and has a touch of Alzheimers.
• “Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest.” – Jimmy Swaggert
• “Fascism combats . . . not intelligence, but intellectualism . . . which is . . . a sickness of the intellect . . . not a consequence of its abuse, because the intellect cannot be used too much . . . it derives from the false belief that one can segregate oneself from life. . .” – Giovanni Gentile, addressing a Congress of Fascist Culture, Bologna, 30 March 1925
• “Ignorance is better than knowledge” – Tao Te Ching

This is an answer to this post: sachin.posterous.com/will-seo-experts-ruin-search-results-or-will

And no, that is not a link because that would be SEO too, just to let you know.

Since I have starting working on websites here in Kansas City, I have had the chance to work with a lot of local tech people. And since I was freelancing here for a bit and have not decided to shut that part of my business off at least currently, I thought I could send some people in the right direction if they need web design work in Kansas City.

I have decided that freelancing is like having a day job and boss for each client you have and not ever hour spent freelancing. So instead I will be putting in full-time hours at the day job and doing my own thing on the side. It’s amazing how the outlook changes when you are building something that is your own idea and start writing again.

So here are a few local and not so local people who may be available to get some work done for you here in Kansas City.

Adam Russell

Adam came in shortly after I started work on my first Magento site. Magento was a learning process, and I wasn’t quite sure then what I was getting myself into. I had yet to have a clue about the file structure and just looking at the themes, I knew creating a custom one would be a job. However, Adam took the job on and created a custom theme for All About Doors and Windows multipoint locks site. It has since been a bit muddied by too many cooks, I think, but it’s a great theme.

Adam was not only a great designer but knew just about everything that could be known about computers and technology. There was not much I could show him. He knew a lot. You can find Adam at Room/One-Eleven Design.

Ryan Jennings

Ryan Jennings is a great Flash designer and ASP developer. He also knows a bit about Magento, since he and I built two complete Magento sites here with over 20,000 products. Ryan caught onto to SEO and link building right away, driving many of the sites he worked on to the top of the search engine results.

You can find Ryan at his Kansas City barter site.

Steve Kohlmeyer

Steve I just starting working with me a few months ago and he’s still here. He knows PHP and is a great coder. He is also quickly learning the ins and outs of Magento, OsCommerce and WordPress. And I have had a few months to work on him, so he now has the blogging bug. I told him to simply write a post about anything he spent over 15 minutes searching for on Google and use your queries in your post.

It seems to be working and his new kansas city tech blog was getting targeted search engine visitors the first week.

Derek Miller

Derek already had his own online business when he came here, selling sports cards online. He can also write MySql queries that I have to break into bite-size chunks to understand. He also once won $10,000 in a few months playing online poker. Put these skills together and send them in the right direction, and you have the perfect analytical SEO. Which is ironic, since he was wondering how to get more traffic to his site when he started here.

So he started working with our Google Analytics account. Soon he had a Filemaker database with our most valuable words, where we ranked, and what pages had to be focused on to rank higher.

Jessie Cabbage

Jessie does not live here in the Kansas City area, but she is a great content writer and SEO. Over the weekend, I wrote a upcoming post for Search Engine Journal. It has been a while since I really had hit publish anywhere though I have been writing, as you will see, starting Friday. I know I have been sloppy in the past, hitting publish the instant I was done with no editing. So I asked Jesse to read through my post and check for issues.

I got back a detailed list of the issues in my post along with the spelling, grammar and style rules I was breaking. Thanks Jessie.

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Image via CrunchBase

This is a guest post by Craig Smith of Trinity Insight.

In early February of this year, search engine representatives within Google, Yahoo, and MSN (before it was Bing) made an announcement into a uniform method of embracing a new html tag to reduce duplicate content for a webmaster.  This “canonical” tag, which would be inserted within the HEAD portion of any HTML document, is a great way to reduce potential negative affects that can happen when you have the same page indexed multiple times under a variety of URL’s

The tag is written as this:  <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com/page1.html“/>

This is essentially saying to a search crawler, “Hey Googlebot, this isn’t the preferred page for this content, href=http://mysite.com/page1.html is.”

In working with a variety of ecommerce platforms and content management systems, this is a pretty widespread issue and this tag will go along way to helping webmasters properly structure a site for optimal SEO.

Think about this for a minute.  You can have the following example variations for a fictional homepage:

www.mysite.com

mysite.com

www.mysite.com/

www.mysite.com/index.htm

mysite.com/index.htm

www.mysite.com/home.aspx

You get the picture.  Which is the primary page?  All of these pages can be indexed by search engines, but which version should an engine render when users are searching?

Sure you can use 301 redirects to fix this issue, but sometimes these are tough to generate within varied system and server environments.  You could try to eliminate varied parameters such as session ID’s and tracking codes, but then you are losing valuable data to help you understand the dynamics of your visitors and marketing campaigns.

In working with a new client in the eCommerce sector, we saw this issue first hand.  A single product page had 27 different versions of the page (different url’s for each) indexed within Google.  Each page had the same title and each page had exactly the same content.  Because of the different paths that users could take to find the product, due to the parametric filtering capabilities on the site, these urls existed in the index for years.

How does this impact your SEO efforts when you have these duplicate url’s in search indexes?  For starters, unlike a 301 which redirects all web traffic, the canonical tag is an indicator for only engines which allows you to keep your existing url parameters.  It will help engines in concentrating link equity into one primary URL, for a specific piece of content, as well as essentially tell them which page you want to have as the “authority” page.

Looking for answers direct from Google relating to the canonical tag?  Here are some Q&A answers that they provided in their webmaster central blog

Is rel=”canonical” a hint or a directive?
It’s a hint that we honor strongly. We’ll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.
Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as <link rel=”canonical” href=”product.php?item=swedish-fish” />?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the <link> tag. Also, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.
Is it okay if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content?
We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products. We also recognize that we may crawl the canonical and the duplicate pages at different points in time, so we may occasionally see different versions of your content. All of that is okay with us.
What if the rel=”canonical” returns a 404?
We’ll continue to index your content and use a heuristic to find a canonical, but we recommend that you specify existent URLs as canonicals.
What if the rel=”canonical” hasn’t yet been indexed?
Like all public content on the web, we strive to discover and crawl a designated canonical URL quickly. As soon as we index it, we’ll immediately reconsider the rel=”canonical” hint.
Can rel=”canonical” be a redirect?
Yes, you can specify a URL that redirects as a canonical URL. Google will then process the redirect as usual and try to index it.
What if I have contradictory rel=”canonical” designations?
Our algorithm is lenient: We can follow canonical chains, but we strongly recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page to ensure optimal canonicalization results.
Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?
No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can suggest www.example.com vs. example.com vs. help.example.com, but not example.com vs. example-widgets.com.

So what’s your action plan?  First thing is to evaluate your site paths and look for instances in which you have multiple url’s with the same content.  Look for the duplicates and decide which version that you desire to have as your primary version.

Embed the tag on the duplicate pages as indicated above, potentially in an automated basis within an eCommerce platform, and help the engines more effectively index your site.  The canonical tag is a major development within the SEO market that has flown a bit under the radar, but can really make a difference in your rankings.  Best of luck in reducing your duplicate content and making your website more efficient for search engines to crawl and index!

————————

About Author:

Craig Smith is the founder of Trinity Insight, an eCommerce optimization firm that specializes in web analytics consulting and multivariate testing

I just recently built a e-Commerce site. Only about 20% of the products are up but we decided to launch it. It was time to start getting links and making sales. The domain had no links pointing to it. We had paid for no advertising yet.

As the owner browsed to Google, he said, “I just want to check something.” You see, the domain was a keyword based one. What he was checking is if we showed up in the SERP‘s. I just couldn’t understand why.

How is it so hard to explain this? It doesn’t matter if you have a website. Building a web site is the first part in a long process. I turned this over and over in my head last night, because I had told him and others before about the concept of internet traffic. But I guess I needed a better explanation because obviously he did not get it. But maybe the concept wasn’t as easy to understand as I thought. So here goes what I think I should have said:

“You have owned brick and mortar stores before, right? Okay. What if I told you I was going to build a store in the Sahara where there were no roads? Not smart, right. Well, we do have an advantage with the internet. We can build that store in the Sahara. But we have to build our own roads. And those roads are links. What you just did was this: You just checked if we had the possibility of getting visitors before any roads were built. And those roads are links.

You see, I am an underground SEO. I have to do that work on the sly. While those who I have built sites for sit smiling thinking that they have this awesome site that just absorbs visitors by osmosis, I rob time to build links and rewrite parts of the site. Oh yes, some of them know enough about keywords. “Is this a good keyword? Is this a good place to put it?”

But links are the megaphone for that keyword. Do you want it loud or just whispering in the background? It’s your choice. And while you can fiddle with your keywords, it will have no effect if there are no links pointing at those words. And while you think it is what you have told me to do that has been the cause of all the resulting effects, I can tell you that a large percentage of those effects have been the links I have been building whenever I get a spare minute. Why do I do it? Because my name is on this site in one way or another. And it may go down because of ignorance, but not because of mine. So I will go behind your back give you the traffic you want although you may never understand what I did or the true value of my work.”

But, of course, I couldn’t say all that.

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How do you rank a blog?

It’s Google Pagerank. Which page? The home page. I have changed the rank of my homepage just by changing the structure of my site. It isn’t hard.

Alexa rank? Ha! I have already shown this one is way off.

Compete? Also off, but don’t have all my data together just yet.

Technorati? These numbers are like a roller coaster. Who knows?

Feedburner? Are you kidding? It depends on the day.

Well, Gyuate Park took 10 factors to create his top blog list, including user votes. So vote up mine if you get a chance. I am currently at #88. Maybe I do like the other number systems better? Just kidding. More accurate numbers means a better list.

Internet Marketing Top Blogs at Winning the Web

Searching for the top blogs in the Internet marketing niche? Look no further. Winning the Web’s IM Top Blogs is the ultimate ranked list of the best Internet marketing blogs in the industry. Site categories include affiliate marketing, blogging, copywriting, Internet marketing, link building, make money online, SEO / SEM, and social media.

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I am writing this post tethered to the wall by a cord. I have a laptop but the battery is a year old, lasts about 10 minutes now and I am waiting on the new one to come in the mail. I didn’t order it when it still lasted a half hour. I waited for the 10 minute mark.

The pay periods at the various affiliate programs I sell for dictate my work schedule. As a period nears the end and I have taken off on a new project for while, I snap back just in time to kick the money up enough to keep the machine going.

This post pits two seemingly unrelated topics together and I have no outline, just a vague idea or feeling that I am looking for it to produce by the last sentence. Notice a pattern yet.

7000 planes land in a day in New York, at least that’s what I heard in the movie, lined up perfectly for the runway. No mistakes. No accidents. Seconds away from crashing in one direction or another.

Stress, some people live on it. And sometimes you have to fake it, because that is the only time your mind stops chattering and everything becomes clear. Deadline surfing is my zone.

But sometimes it is just straight stupid. Yes, my explorations, side projects and new vistas have taught me a lot and I would have never made it this far without them. Know that. But I can do SEO.

I just think too much about it. I figure the more convoluted I can make it, the more worthwhile it is. SEO shouldn’t be easy. Not with the payoff. But you know what, it really is. I just make it hard by thinking way too much.

Every now and then I write a post or an article or a tweet that basically says, “If you are stuck in a rut, walk outside and throw a stick of dynamite in your front door. You will find new energy to move forward.” And I know write that one a lot, in cycles. These posts are challenges. Points of no return. And as my subscriber base grows, the more drastic that point is. In order to save face, I have to move forward.

I had a chance to play with RankSense for the last couple of days. I am not going to tell you a lie. Hamlet Batista was good enough to give me a free copy. And damn, did it open up my eyes.

I have taken a haphazard approach to SEO. It has worked in a stubborn “I would rather walk to New York than take your free first class ticket” sense. Tread my own path. Take my own way. Watch me pull this one out of my ass. Didn’t think I could do it, did you. A1, first class but second rate macho techie bullshit.

If you want to do SEO, get RankSense. That’s all I have to say, but of course, if you are a subscriber here, you know that’s a lie, a white one, but a lie nonetheless. Step 1, step 2, step 3. Now maybe I can get my shit together, let this software do the part I always overthink and I can write posts like this more often. Thinking sucks.

And why am I not telling you here what RankSense actually does. Well, I will be writing other posts, here and on other blogs, enough that you should be seeing one of these posts I am planning on the first page of Google. I am not going to tell you when or where, but it will happen.

And another reason why I am not going into detail right now. Because I think you should try it for yourself. And it’s free, for 90 days. That should give you enough time to make a decision without my big mouth getting in the way.

Oh yeah, and the movie, I almost forgot. Sometimes posts like this are like standing in the wake turbulence of a 747 and getting blown across the runway for that moment of time. Thought point zero. And tomorrow I will be sitting in front of a screen looking at dots on an electronic screen that is only a mirror of reality.

Now, the question I ask is whether you go get the movie or download Ranksense. The software downloads in less than a minute and is free for 90 days. But I would get the movie too. Both are good tools for people who think way too much.

Time is money. It may be something we all agree on, but what does it really mean.

Fixed costs are nice. One of my fixed costs is hosting. When I make $4000 in a month, my hosting is $125. If I triple that, it will still cost me the same and the ROI triples.

On the other hand, PPC advertising moves with the income. If I make more through PPC this month, chances are I spent more too. Yes, I can increase ROI. But for the most part, I have to spend more money to make more. And it doesn’t help that the amount of money I spend on ads is limited by my credit.

Now there are a few campaigns that I currently have running that have not been tweaked for months. But for the most part, I have to babysit. Not much now. But if I were to increase my Adwords spending to the point it replaced all the other sources of income, I would have no time to do anything else and I would be stuck in the same rat race I am trying to remove myself from.

I ran into a similar problem with the direction my blogging was going. A post a day may be recommended for a lot of bloggers. It isn’t going to work for me any more. Don’t get me wrong, I most likely write a post or more a day, but not on every blog. And this blog, which is mainly a journal of my journey makes no real money. And I like it that way for now. I am not looking for money here yet.

Building links is like hosting and social media marketing is like PPC advertising. Both have their place, but my time is limited, so I had to work out a balance.

A link I get to a site today will most likely be there tomorrow, next month, and next year and since I know a little SEO, the traffic results of that link may be less volume than I would expect from a Stumble but the quality of that traffic will be much greater.

Don’t get me wrong. You can’t just build some links and then go take a nap for the rest of the year. But here is what I know. I made $25,000 in the last 12 months from the results of links that were already there. Not John Chow money but it beats being a 24/7 internet hustler.

And all links are not created the same. Some take more time to build. A directory links takes a minute. If you want to release software to promote a site, it’s going to take some time but that time will come back to you once the ball is rolling.

I am writing this post to beat something into my head. I have a weird relationship with money. I spend in the range of $100 in Adwords a day and have to pry my wallet open to buy software and hire people to speed up the link building process. Money spent there will free up time and possibly lower the need for so much advertising. It is basically a fixed cost. Spend the money and see the results for months or even years. You cannot say that for PPC advertising.

This has also forced a weird relationship with time. If I am doing my own grunt work because I refuse to hire someone than I am basically paying myself what I would pay the other guy to do it for me. So if I refuse to pay $10/hour, that is what I am paying myself. If I buy software that speeds up a process, than I am effectively raising my hourly rate. If a job that took 3 hours now only needs my guidance for 20 minutes, I just gave myself a 900% raise for that time period.

It’s a way to look at things and a way to start putting money and time in balance. Hopefully it works.