Learn From A Pro

Do you know John Reese? If not, you probably haven’t spent much time in Internet marketing circles. John is the leading guru for teaching people how to get more traffic to their web site(s). He leads special multi-day seminars to small groups, charging up to $5000/person to attend. And you know what? His students walk away feeling that they got a BARGAIN!

John has now made his marketing course available to the general public at a FRACTION of the cost. It’s full of DVDs, audio CDs, textbooks, workbooks and tip sheets to help you build a comprehensive Internet marketing strategy.

114 I own a copy of John’s Traffic Secrets and am pleased to give it my very personal endorsement. While I could attempt to teach you everything I know about Internet marketing, there is no point in attempting to reinvent the wheel. Everything you need to know is in this is course, and the

investment is very minor for people who intend to build a successful Internet business that will last.

If you want to read more about John’s Traffic Secrets course, click the link below.

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17. Search Engine Optimization

In the previous chapter, I talked about a number of different ways that you can increase your traffic. Probably the most important method though is to get a high ranking on search engines. That’s free traffic.

Again, there are all sorts of books and experts who can help you improve your SEO and win a top spot at a site. I have had experience with a number of strategies that could help you improve your ranking. I’d like to share them with you now.

17.1 Robot.txt

The first thing you need to know about indexing your site at search engines is that you control which pages are indexed and which are excluded. You do that with a file called robots.txt.

Robots.txt contains nothing more than a record of which robots should index which pages.

Without going into too much detail, there are two conventions used in a robots.txt file:

User-agent: [Defines which robots the site is addressing.] Disallow: [Allows you to list the sites or robots you want to

exclude.]

In general, you’re probably going to use “User-agent: *” to make sure that you’re addressing the robots of every search engine and you’ll probably want include all of your pages (although you might want to exclude your

directories: “Disallow: /cgi-bin/”).

Robots.txt just allows you to control which robots index which pages. It’s important to have in your directory but it won’t really increase your search engine rankings.

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17.2 Titles And URL’s

I mentioned back in chapter 2 that Metatags just aren’t what they used to be. I also said that it’s important that your titles and URLs contain the most important keywords for each of your pages in order to keep the ads relevant. But those titles and URLs don’t just influence your ads; they also affect your search engine rankings.

A page about toy cars called cars.html might have a low ranking when

someone looks for information about cars. Change the name to toy_cars.html and you should get a much higher ranking when someone looks for “toy cars”.

The more relevant your URL is and the easier it is to read, the better. www.domain.com/page is always an improvement than

http://domain.com/page.php?newsid=1234583373. That’s why on my website www.familyfirst.com, I use URL’s like

http://www.familyfirst.com/miss_abigails_time_warp.html rather than strings of number which confuse the robots.

One of the first places you should look when you want to improve your rankings then is your titles and URLs.

17.3 Links

The more links you have, the better. And the better the sites that list those links the more they’ll be worth.

It’s one thing to swap links and ask for links but it is worth aiming to put your links on sites that look good and have high rankings. In fact, being listed on a poor site can bring your ranking down.

One of the best places to place links to improve your search engine rankings is on forums. Add a comment and include your URL in your signature.

Google’s spiders love forums and review them every week. And because these sites tend have quite high ranking, those posts will do wonders for your listings.

117 www.LinkAdage.com. These allow you to choose sites on which you can place your own links.

On my own site www.buyjoeldessert.com, for example, I give page links to people who satisfy my sweet tooth with a donation to my cause. (I’m still hungry by the way, so feel free to sign up and make my dentist happy!)

Fig. 17.1 Links for sale on BuyJoelDessert.com.

I know of several associates who have done something similar, allowing their visitors a tangible way to say “thank you” for their online efforts. Smart site owners see opportunity in this strategy as you can acquire quality links rather inexpensively. Here are some additional examples:

http://www.buyleoalatte.com http://www.buybarbaracoffee.com

118 You can actually acquire the “Buy Me A Drink” script that all these sites use to create your own “Buy Me a ---“ site. Click here!