Patrick McDowell's Blog

Good evening everyone.

I finally got around to fixing my blog, and designing it the way I want it. What do you think? It’s a custom version of the iNove theme by NeoEase, and it should do for now.

After much thought, I’ve decided the last thing the world needs is another SEO / Internet Marketing blog that is rarely updated, so I’ve decided to move in a new direction and instead focus on things that I am passionate about. From this point on, my blog will focus around four core themes:

Life – This includes personal events in my life, random thoughts, experiences, etc. This also includes my love for healthy living, fitness, and nutrition.

Philosophy – Recently I have fell in love with philosophy, and I am going to start sharing and critiquing some of the more famous ideas and theories.

Technology – I’m a geek, I’m a coder, I’m a hacker, and I love everything in-between. Naturally, a great deal of this will come out in my blog.

Entrepreneurship – Although I am not wildly successful (yet), I still consider myself an Entrepreneur. The more I learn, the more I share. Due to my current ventures, this will still contain a great deal about Internet Marketing.

That is pretty much all I wanted to say in this post. Now that I am writing about things that actually hold my interest, my audience (that’s you!) can expect quite a few more posts from here on out.

Cheers!

My blog is a mess after a theme update error, so I am working to fix it up a bit. I’m going to change some things around as well… so if you get 404′d I am sorry

I know I know… I’ve been naughty and haven’t been blogging. I’ve just been very busy! I promise I will be getting to it soon. I’m going to try to take this blog in a more personal direction, with a little less business involved.

Wish me luck, post coming in the next day or so!

Well hello again and welcome to another episode of me not updating my blog for over a month. I’ll be you host, Patrick McDowell, so let’s get started!

Alright seriously, hello from beautiful Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I am here celebrating a traditional get-together with my family, while getting some time to relax as well. I hope everyone is doing great and enjoying life to the fullest! Wordpress wanted me to let you know that I updated to version 2.8.4 (although secretly I think they are trying to score some free advertising, but don’t tell them I know this!)

Project Updates

Okay so the SEO Tip of the Day was obviously put on a hold, with the last update being on July 12th. Basically the story behind that is it’s been way to busy to think of a new topic daily, then write 500 words on it. I am considering moving it to a weekly tip instead of a daily one, but I’ll keep you guys updated.

Some time ago I mention plans to launch a step-by-step of an affiliate marketing project, which would show users not very farmiliar with the industry how to make some money online. After much procrastination, I am finally planning all of it out, and it will begin when I get back next week. I’m pretty excited about it, as it is going to be a huge project and I think you guys will learn a lot.

Just wanted to get this blog started again, I’ll update more here soon… it’s getting close to 1AM so I’m going to hit up some Sopranos. Cheers!

Welcome to day two. From here on out, these tips are going to be quick and to the point. Time is money, and the less time you spend reading the more you have to act. Today’s tip is going to be on optimizing your images for Google Images.

Why would you want to do this you ask? This is something a lot of people miss out on that can be a gold mine if done correctly. If you can get in the first page of image results for your keyword, you acquire both maximum exposure and potential links (one of the rare instances where hotlinking isn’t bad). Still not enough of a reason? If you can get in the top handful of image results, you could also show up in the regular organic results. Take the keyword carrots for example.

Google bots can’t “see” the image you have, so they rely on its name(s) and the content surrounding it to place it properly. Naturally to have the best change of ranking high for your target keyword, your image has to be well optimized for Google. To do that we are going to add div tags around it, then drop the keyword into the actual image name, Alt image tag, and meta file summary. The example below uses yesterdays post on 301 redirects, and we will be optimizing the “SEO Tip of the Day” image on the top right.

<div><img title=”SEO Tip of the Day” src=”http://crims0n.us/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/SEO-Tip-of-the-Day.png” alt=”SEO Tip of the Day” width=”220″ height=”96″ /><br />SEO Tip of the Day</div>

Sometimes the meta file summary looks tacky, and in that case don’t use it. If you looked at the actual code I have up, you probably noticed I left it out myself. That is all there is to it. One more quick tip, if you are shooting for showing up in organic results as well, make sure your images are at least 300 x 300 in size. Smaller images tend not to make it.

As always, ask any questions you may have below

Welcome to the first in my SEO Tip of the Day series! If the title is not self-explanatory enough, I will be providing you with daily tips in SEO, Internet marketing, and web design to help you learn the business, or keep your memory fresh. So without further delay, today we will be covering the importance of 301 redirects.

Any time you make a major change in your website, search engines need time to figure out what you did, and update your rankings accordingly. If you do not properly “instruct” the search engines on what you changed, they can no longer find the page that is in their results. As you can imagine this effect would be disastrous, so how do you change a URL without being penalized for it?

Let’s look at an example. Your doing some on-page SEO and you decide to change this:

yourdomain.com/startrek_novel_01.jpg

To this:

yourdomain.com/novels/science_fiction/startrek.jpg

Obviously you made a wise choice, as the second URL is much more organized, and thus will rank better. However now potential customers that may have bookmarked this page can now no longer get to it, and it won’t be long before you loose any and all rank you had for that page in the search engines. Luckily a quick 301 redirect will fix both of these issues. Simply add one line to your .htaccess file:

(If you are not sure what or where your .htaccess file is, it is a small text file located at the top level of your domain. It is possible you may not have one, and if that is the case just fire up notepad, save it as whatever, upload it to the top of your domain, and rename it “.htaccess” without the quotes.)

That’s all you have to do. Now anytime a visitor or a spider goes to the original URL, they will be automatically redirected to your new one. As mentioned before, this is particularly important for search engines, because if you use 301 redirects your rankings will be preserved. Just remember, it would be wise to do this for every URL change you make. Never assume the search engines understand what you are doing, regardless of how simple it may seem.

If you would simply like to redirect everything on one domain to another, use the following:

Redirect 301 / http://www.yourdomain.com

Note the “/” before your target URL. That indicates everything from the top level of your old domain down should be redirected. You can also redirect dynamic content, however that is beyond the scope of today.

Well that wraps up our first day. Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments below. Until tomorrow, cheers

In my previous post I stated my apologies for a lack of updates. I am very excited about what I am going to be doing with this blog from now on. Here is a little preview:

• Daily Internet Marketing tips (starting tomorrow).
• Weekly articles designed to help those new to making money online.
• Contests and giveaways.
• A step-by-step of an affiliate marketing project (Basically I am going to start a new website, and blog about everything I do, step-by-step until it starts earning big so you can see exactly how it’s done).
• Q&A’s

There will be plenty more content, so if you haven’t already, you may want to:
Subscribe to my RSS feed.

My best wishes to you all, and my many thanks for reading

Trust is everything. If major search engines do not trust your website, it will not rank. If your visitors/customers do not feel your website is legitimate, they won’t come back. It is as simple as that. Here are a few quick tips that will help you score points with both:

Structure Your Website Properly – A bit basic? Ya, but you would be surprised how many webmasters I come across that neglect a well organized and SEO optimized structure. Make sure your website is free of any broken links, use structured URL’s, 301 redirects, etc. How to do this all beyond the scope of this article (perhaps I’ll go over this soon), however a quick Google reveals quite a bit.

Create a “Company” Info Page – This is a nice little trick I learned last year that has helped me a lot. Even if your website isn’t a real company, you should still do it.  A nice little “About Us” or “Company Information” page can go a long ways in making your site look legitimate. In fact, most SEO experts believe that a many search engine robots crawling your website are looking for it. Statistically this page is one of the most visited of your entire site.  Here are a few tips to maximize your legitimacy:

• Make sure there is a link to this page from your websites home page.
• You can include a mission statement, company bio, history, what exactly your business/website/blog does, a quick biography about yourself (as owner/webmaster), a paragraph about each employee/staff member, etc.
• Have some kind of contact info, such as an email address or phone number.
• Photos are a good thing! Visitors are much more likely to come back to your site if they can see it is being run by “real” people.

Don’t be afraid to put some work into this page, remember on the web your image and reputation are the only things you have.

Publish a Privacy Policy – This is another area where SEO experts agree, robots look for privacy policy pages. It is generally good practice to have these anyway, but many people leave this out. Unless you are dealing with a whole bunch of legal business, keep your privacy policy simple, easy to understand, and accessible. Visitors tend to feel better seeing one, even though 99% of them will never read it. If you don’t want to do it yourself, here is a great free tool to help you:

http://www.dmaresponsibility.org/PPG/

Design a Sitemap – Again this is a bit basic, however newbies may have skipped it. Sitemaps are important to both search engines and some users. They provide a very simple and organized overview of your website. Sitemaps also help search engines find pages that are usually overlooked, such as standalone pages (a webpage contained within a site that is not linked to) .

If you would like to see a quick example, you needn’t look farther than this blog:

http://crims0n.us/sitemap

If you are using Wordpress, I recommend Google (XML) Sitemap Generator, which is what I use personally. For normal sites I would recommend XML-Sitemaps.com

Link Directly, but Thematically – Try not to link to something within your site that is not directly related to what you are trying to rank for. For example, lets say you own a website selling used books, all under different categories. It would not be in your best interest to have a link from your romance novels to you science fiction ones. Although technically they are all “used books”, by doing this you are diluting your rankings for both “used romance books” and “used science fiction books” respectively. If you absolutely must link, consider using the nofollow tag so search engines know you are not passing any relevance. That is just one example, but hopefully that puts it into perspective for you.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have below in the comments section

Some of my readers may have noticed that this blog has not been updated since mid-April, and for that I apologize. I would love to say I have been busy, but that is not entirely true. I have been pretty preoccupied with personal things lately and my online presence has been greatly affected. Nevertheless I have plenty to do from now on, and this blog is in high priority.

I have actually written a handful of blog posts on SEO, and are now going through the polishing stages. Everyone will see those here pretty soon. I also have PLENTY of projects to work on, which is exciting for me. New projects equate to new experiences, and with the knowledge gained from them I can in turn, share them with you.

I want to take a moment to apologize to my regular readers, and RSS subscribers. I believe that owning a blog entails the responsibility of keeping content fresh, and I have obviously been slacking on that. To those that are still with me however, I will not disappoint you again!

Alright with all that said, let me start on some useful content

Using latent semantic content in your posts can help you rank for the terms you want using less keyword density, and still being just as effective. As search engine algorithms become more and more complex, latent semantic indexing is going to become more and more popular.

What is Latent Semantic Content?

Say the keyword you are trying to rank for is public school funding. In the old days you could just repeat that ten times, drop some links and you were good to go. Obviously it is not that easy anymore, and we can really only use the keywords a handful of times before it becomes spammy.

We can use the keywords as little as once or twice and still rank just as high, if we use words that are related to the subject throughout our content. Look at the chart below:

Google sees all of these keywords as related. Thus using any of these keywords is just as good as using the keyword itself. In reality you should use latent semantic content as much as possible, simply because it looks all the more natural. Remember if your are wearing the white hat, you are writing for people, not search engines.

How Do I Know What Google Considers Latent Semantic?

Luckily, the big G made that easy for us. Check out this link, and look at the search box. All you need to do is put a simple tilde (~) before your keywords, and any word in bold under your results is considered latent semantic.