Canonicalization is something worth knowing about…even if just to test your SEO company to find out if they know what they’re talking about. Have  a look. If you have questions or comments let me know.

Okay guys…these next couple videos should clear a few things up. You may be wondering… Where does Google get the information they display in the search engine ranking results?

I could tell you…but I think Matt Cutts, Google’s head search education dude will do a better job. Have a look. Next video we’ll talk about canonicalization and 301 redirects.

Building on the other keyword research video I made a while back, and as a response to some questions about keyword research I decided to make another video showing a simple, free, and effective way to do keyword research. There are plenty of good keyword research tools out there such as MicroNicheFinder and Keyword Elite, but the free albeit newly updated Google keyword tool does a fine job.

Curious about Google Adwords quality score or why you have to pay what you do to get the positions you get? Here is a very informative video of Hal Varian, Google’s Cheif Economist explaining everything.

I’ve been doing some work with SEOENG, a search engine built for search engine optimization. This incredibly valuable tool is used by SEO companies to improve their clients sites. The benefit to SEOENG is that it can crawl your site on demand. So once you make changes you can recrawl the site and see how those changes will effect you in Google search results.

I’ve been studying their search engine now for the past couple of weeks. Throughout the course of my research I ran across an interesting article on Google Page Rank from Smashing magazine I want to share with you here. In case you don’t know, Page Rank is essentially Google’s measure of how important your site is. This measure is based on links to your site from other sites.

I could regurgitate the information from Smashing but I won’t. I’ll just share the great article on Google Page Rank with you here. If you have any interest in SEO or are curious about page rank this article is definitely worth a gander.

Here’s a proven web traffic generation plan.

Before we start, it’s important to note that traffic generation tactics are not something you do once and forget about. Rather, traffic generation tactics should be part of your site’s ongoing marketing plan. The steps I am listing below should be done often. I recommend weekly or semi-weekly.

Here we go:

1. Research Keywords (Here’s a Tutorial). This may be obvious to many but make sure that your keywords are highly relevant to whatever it is you are promoting. Really, you should be targeting keywords that buyers are typing such as “buy Sony xr51131cblahblahetc…” or “product x reviews,” etc…You might also do a Google search for your keyword ideas and see if there are many Adwords advertisers on the top and right of the results page. This is a good indicator that those are buying keywords because advertisers are actually bidding on them. Be as narrow as possible with the keywords you choose. This will improve your chances of actually converting your traffic toward the desired action.The Google keyword tool does an okay job for me. If you want a paid tool, MicroNicheFinder is pretty good too.Hopefully you can come up with 50 or so keywords. That should give you enough keywords for 150 articles, or 3 articles for each keyword term which will give you a solid foundation to spread out over a year (if you are not planning on being very aggressive).
2. Now, start writing a list of benefit laden headlines related to your keywords such as “Top 10 Work at Home Opportunities for Moms,” or “How to Lose 50 Pounds in 3 Weeks, Get Lean Rock Hard Abs, Keep the Weight Off and Feel Great…Without Dieting,” etc… You get the idea. Write fast, just write down whatever comes to mind. Do this for 10 minutes. That should get you a list of at least 30 headlines. Plenty to keep most people busy for at least a couple of weeks.
3. Begin with the first headline on your list and write a 400-500 word article targeting your keywords. Keep your keyword density to less than 2% or fewer than 8-10 keywords per article depending on the word count. Ask yourself how can I make my article valuable to my reader. If you think more about making your article valuable by providing good, useful information you will get more clicks to your site from your Author Resource Box. The author resource box is a resource provided by article directories (where you will submit your articles), that tells people where to go for more information. Start by writing and submitting 3 articles per week. Submit to article directories such as EzineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleBase.
4. Next, take each of the articles or a few if they are shorter and record them and save them in mp3 format. You will need a microphone and some way of editing audio. I like to use Audacity it is a free audio editing program that works very well. To export the mp3 format you will need the lame_enc.dll file (also available as a free download). Next, go to the ITunes store and setup an account if you don’t already have one. Once you have done that you will need to create a podcast xml feed using notepad (tutorial here: http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html). You may also wish to create a logo. Once you have done these steps upload your podcast to Itunes. It will take a few days to get approved.
5. Next, take the same articles and make a powerpoint presentation with a bullet list of the key points. When you have done that create screen recordings (screencast video) reading the content aloud and recording the screen while you go through your slides. I use Camtasia for this, but if you don’t want to spend a couple hundred dollars you can use a free screencast app like CamStudio.org. Again, make sure your articles are high quality. Spamming people with crap will turn them off. Once you have made your videos post them to YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo, etc…
6. Create Squidoo Lenses, Hubpages, blogs, etc…
7. Social bookmark what you can using SocialMarker.com. This service allows you to social bookmark multiple sites from one location. You won’t be able to bookmark everything because some of the social bookmarking sites won’t allow you to bookmark Hubpages and Lenses.
8. Hopefully your articles are high quality and have at least some newsworthy element. If not, you might figure out a way to weave some newsworthy element into them. Once you have figured that out create a few press releases and post them to PRLog, or PressReleasePoint.
9. Go to Twitter and Tweet About your podcast or videos.
10. Rinse and repeat.

That’s it. Do this week after week and you WILL get more traffic. Just make sure your content is high quality. If you are a bad writer either (A.) Read a few books on better writing then practice, practice, practice (B.) Hire Ventura Search Marketing to do all of this stuff for you.

If you really don’t want to do any of these things you can always buy traffic. We’ll talk about various traffic buying options in another post. Suffice to say that Google Adwords aren’t the only game in town.