Dave:    Almost overnight you can get a hell of a lot of back links. Again, I’m in a very competitive space. I’m either in the SEO space or I’m in the stock market education space, and both of those are very competitive.

If you imagine your little blog from some of your listeners or watchers and they’re in a little tiny space like maybe plumbing in Greensboro, or whatever space that they’re in on a much smaller scale, just one press release has the potential to get you enough links.

Gideon:    You could just run it.

Dave:    Yeah, and that filters through to the rest of your website. I’m building a whole lot of links to those pages, but then the way WordPress blogs work is all of the pages are interlinked so all of that same good PR and page rank, it’s all flowing around and will help other things rank as well.

Gideon:     Awesome.

Dave:    The lucky last one I’ll leave you with, this is I suppose a little bit of a hot topic right now, is doing guest blog posts. That’s another really good way, contacting different bloggers saying, “Hey, I want to write an article for you.”

You write it for their audience and they publish it on their blog, and in some sort of resource box at the end of the article you link back to yourself. That’s another way to get some really good quality links.

I know Yaro’s been doing some of that at the moment and sending some link love out. Not that I want to get him getting spammed for people wanting to do guest blog posts, but I know there’s a whole lot of bloggers out there who are hungry for content.

I’m the same as well. If you’re in the internet marketing space, on www.DavidJenyns.com and a few things like that, we do guest blogging posts as well. I’m sure you probably do the same.

Gideon:    I haven’t yet, but I guess it’s not a strategy that I’ve really been following. So far I’ve just been more a video guy. I really love the video stuff, but this has really just opened my eyes to what’s possible and there’s so much that I’m not doing. I can see that I don’t have to do it myself. I can source it out to one of my workers.

Very, very useful stuff. This is awesome.

Dave:    Cool. We talked a little bit about on-page and off-page. Where do you want to head now?

Gideon:    I think we’ve probably done pretty well. I don’t want to totally fry people’s brains with this call. To me, I think there are three really key steps. Why don’t you summarize it for us, Dave, in terms of the key things that you need to do for optimizing your blog and, in general, your pages online. Could you summarize it for us?

Dave:    The summary would be, get yourself a WordPress blog and make sure that you install the right permalink structure. Make sure that you do some good keyword research to pick out your primary money phrase, and then get a whole lot of other keywords that you want to optimize for.

Keep those keywords handy so then as you start to build content on your website, you choose one phrase and optimize each page or each post for one phrase plus some variations, and then just make sure once you choose that keyword, put it in the few places I mentioned – title tag, meta descriptions, meta keywords and then in your content a few times – and then after that you can start your link building.

There’s a few different ways I talked about doing links, but just making sure you build good quality back links to your website with the appropriate anchor text. That’s pretty much SEO in a nutshell right there.

Gideon:    I think I’ve become somewhat more of an expert of SEO just by having you on the call, David. I’m sure a lot of our listeners will be feeling the same way. This is just awesome.

Thank you so much for this wealth of information. I can tell you’re a true expert. You’ve got the results, so I think that’s always my acid test. I look for people’s results. You’ve certainly shown that, so that’s really, really good. Thank you so much.

Dave:    My pleasure. If anyone wants to find out anymore, obviously you can dig a lot deeper into these sorts of things. We didn’t really get much of a chance to touch on SEO for videos and some of the other things as well, so people can head over to www.DavidJenyns.com or www.MelbourneSEOServices.com. I’m on Twitter, Facebook and all that sort of stuff. My YouTube channel is www.YouTube.com/theseomethod.

I give away tons and tons of free content mainly because my core business is the stock market stuff, and I also work with SEO clients, not so much in the internet marketing space, so I’m happy to give a whole lot of my info away for free.

Gideon:    Awesome stuff. Thank you, David.

Dave: Where that information appears and why it’s important is if you come over here.

Let’s say I’m going to go back to our trading systems. That is our title tag and that is our meta description. That’s why it’s really important to make sure that your title tags are written with copywriting in mind.

I think it’s important when doing SEO. You always put usability first, because I think that ultimately, when the spider comes to your website, it’s not going to pull out its wallet and purchase your product. That’s the end user. Always optimize with a view for optimizing for usability first, then SEO, what I’m talking about, second.

You can see here, you want to make sure you have some good copywriting skills and you put your keyword in that title tag, and then you also have it in the description because Google’s going to bold those. That obviously draws the eye to it.

Gideon:    Does it make a difference where exactly you put that keyword in your title tag? For example, is it better at the beginning or does it not matter too much?

Dave:    People say it’s better to weight it towards the front. We swap it around a little bit. Again, I would err towards going for usability. As long as it’s in there, then go for usability first and then the other stuff, you’re down to a point where you’re splitting hairs.

If let’s say you went after a keyword and you couldn’t rank for the keyword that you wanted to go after, you would look at what your competition is doing, reverse engineer what they’re doing, and copy what they’re doing and at least you start there first.

If they had the keyword at the front, you might move the keyword to the front of yours and then that would be a way to try and slowly work that.

Most stuff, especially with off-page optimization, you can just overcome any issues when it comes to search engines by just sending more links to the page that you want to rank for.

Gideon:    This is extremely helpful. There’s your title that you’ve got to get right. You’ve got to get the meta description right and the meta keywords. Those three things are absolutely key for when you’re creating your new blog post, for example, to think about that.

First of all you do your research, do your keywords, and then you optimize those three things for the search engines. Sounds awesome.

Dave:    Then for the on-page, like on the rest of the page, here’s your actual post. For this post here, what you then want to do is take your keyword and make sure that you put the keyword in early and often. You want to make sure that you have it in the first paragraph.

A lot of people talk about density and all that sort of stuff. Don’t worry about density. Push that to the side,
as long as you mention it two or three times.

It can be a little bit more. You probably don’t want to have it a little bit less. It does depend on the amount of words that you’ve got on the page.

I don’t really worry about density so much anymore. I try and have it early. I’ll try and have it in the first paragraph. I’ll try and mention it a couple of times throughout the article or whatever the post is and then also down at the bottom of the particular post as well I like to add the keyword.

Let’s just hope that this page has been optimized correctly. I’m going to go right click using this search status thing and I’m going to go here. Where is it? I’m looking for keyword density. Highlight Keyword. We’ll just type in, selling a website. You can see here. Bang, it’s in there. It’s not in the first paragraph so that’s a bit of a bummer, but that’s okay.

It’s a little bit further down in the page there. We’ll keep scrolling down. We’ll see if it’s mentioned again. It’s mentioned again. It’s mentioned again down in the last paragraph and also mentioned down in the tags as well.

It’s a good idea to load your keywords into your tags as well. I’ll show you that in the back end in a moment.

That’s the basic on-page optimization. Choose your keyword, use what I was talking about, load it in your title and your meta description and your meta keywords, and you put it throughout the site, and then you should be fine.

Gideon:    That is very cool. That’s very useful. Thank you. That’s awesome.

Dave:    I’ll show you the back end now so you can see how easy it is with WordPress. I’m just logging in here.

Gideon:    If you’re watching this and you’re thinking, “This is quite overwhelming,” I think if you just follow these initial simple steps that Dave’s talking about, maybe watch the video a couple of times, to my mind this all just really super boosts your ability to get found by the search engines and help you get that extra traffic from the search engines. It’s really good.

Dave:    From the back end, it’s quite simple. You’d obviously put your keyword in here. You can edit the permalink structure. Usually what I’ll do if I’m here in editing it – and I won’t do it now because we’ve obviously started sending links to these pages – but I would just have the keyword that you’re trying to rank for as the link like that. That’s a good idea.

You do a little bit of your keywords loading them in here. I’m in Thesis at the moment so it will vary slightly but the All-in-One SEO looks very similar. You will just get the option to do a custom title tag, a custom description, and your meta keywords which I talked about.

That just goes to show you don’t have to hop into the back end coding side of things. It’s really quite easy. Just type it in there.

Gideon:    I’ve just been ignoring that stuff. I’ve done some focusing on the title and the content of the blog post, but everything else I’ve just been ignoring. This is really good. I’ll be doing this from now on for sure.

Dave:    When it comes to driving the traffic to your websites, just organic traffic, making these slight changes that we’re talking about now will make the world of difference.

I’d also go ahead and drop your keywords in your tags here as well. That’s always a good idea. Sometimes I’ll put a few more and sometimes I’ll put a few less.

Another thing that you’ll want to keep in the back of your mind is just when you set your permalink structures. This is a really important thing. Hopefully I can find it. There you go. It’s under Settings on the right hand side or left hand side when you’re in your WordPress. If you just go for something like this, you can set your custom structure.

If you just copy that you’ll be fine. /%postname%/and then finish with the slash again. You can just copy it there and if you set that, your permalink structure is going to be better and more indexible by the search engines.

If you look up here, a lot of times it’s set to the default and you’ve got question marks in there and the search engines don’t like that as much.

Gideon:    Good. This is a whole bunch of stuff here and specifically now this is all on page SEO stuff, right? I’m just conscious of the time as well and your time, David. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about the on-page stuff or can we talk a little bit about the off-page stuff as well?

Dave:    I’ll finish with two final things with the on-page stuff. Number one, I would make sure that you set up some plugin. There’s plenty of free plugins there. Look for a plugin for generating a site map. That’s a good idea and then you can submit that to the Google webmaster tools. It just helps with making sure your site gets indexed completely.

The second tip is don’t stress so much with no-follow. A lot of people are getting out there trying to do page rank sculpting and channel a lot of their page rank to specific pages and they do that by no-follow.

The way that no follow has recently changed and [inaudible] has come and said, “It’s not operating the way it used to.” You’re best if you just throw that to the side and send the links to the pages that you want to have ranked. Make sure you know what pages you ultimately want to have ranked and then send as many links to those pages as you can.

I also would suggest turning off no-follow for comments, because it will attract spammers. I would say when you’re first starting out the chances of you being on the radar of those spammers isn’t going to be very high anyway, and the more you can encourage people to comment on your blog, the better.

If you turn the comments off you can ultimately approve and disapprove whatever you’d like, so it’s better to just sit there and manually approve them. Just don’t approve the ones that are clearly not adding any value. It’s going to encourage people to want to comment on your site.

Gideon:    Awesome. Turn the no-follow thing off for that? Awesome, very good. How are you doing for time, David?

Dave:    I’m good.

Gideon:    Do we have time to talk about the off-page SEO tips?

Dave:     For sure. I’ll move through a little bit quicker.

Gideon:    This is extremely useful and I’ve learned a ton already and I’m sure our listeners and viewers will be learning in time too. It’s really, really good. Let’s keep going.

Dave:    Yeah. This is probably just the easy way to do SEO, which is build as a big of list as you can, find out what the competition is for each one of those keywords, make sure it’s under 500,000 just so you’re not going after super competitive phrases, and then I would sort them based on number of searches.

Going back to our keyword tool here, “SE0 Services,” then I would do it based on number of searches, and then I would choose a phrase that sounds good from a branding point of view and also one that you can get in the domain name like I talked about. Choose one of those. It might be dog training or whatever the keyword is.

Try and find something that has less than 500,000 competition. Then rank them based on the number of searches, and then choose something within the top five or the top 10. That will become your primary phrase.

Then when you start to look for those longer tail phrases to optimize for the posts that you were talking about, those individual posts, I’ll jump around, but as long as it’s got over at least 50 searches when you search on the globe – you want to make sure you’ve got some traffic there but I can go anywhere up to 5,000 or 6,000.

As your website gets stronger you can start to go for those more competitive keywords. You might start off though going for those longer tail phrases with less competition, because that way you can get some quick easy wins and get some traffic to your website, and then you can build up to the more competitive phrases.

Gideon:    I think this is really cool. I’m so glad I’m recording this screen so that I can go back and watch this again.

If I understand this right, there are really two things happening here. You’re doing the research using the keyword tool, but then you do that for checking out the competition and the amount of traffic that those keywords are getting.

Then you also go back to the perform a Google search to basically find out how many real competition is there, and if it’s too much, you basically filter those out and just go back to the ones that you can still compete on.

Dave:    Spot on. That’s a little bit of a manual process. I show you that because if you want to do SEO on the cheap, you can do it that way, but there are different keyword tools.

Market Samurai is a really good one that’s worth checking out. It can automate a lot of this where you can just dump a whole string of keywords in and then you can find out the competition and then you can [inaudible] based on the number of searches, and basically it can speed up this whole process.

Another thing for bloggers as well, which I think is important – let’s just say we go to our dog training example – is this new area here. I only noticed this just recently because they’ve just launched this new update beta version keyword tool and it’s really quite cool. What I wanted to show you is these categories here.

These categories – when I type in my keyword – you’ll actually notice Google changes these categories and highlights the ones blue if it’s got a category in there that it thinks is applicable or associated to “dog training.”

Basically, this is Google saying to us, “Here are the categories that we think are important relative to dog training.” Under dog training, there’s some sort of clothing so having some dog clothing is probably a good idea to have on your website.

When you’re actually building your site and you’re building a blog, you get to select the categories, so why not feed back into Google the categories that it says are important?

If I go down to pets here, we can see pet food and supplies. Let’s say you were doing a dog training website. I would suggest you have dog clothing. You’d have something like dog food, dog supplies, dog leashes and collar. There are other ones under here, different categories.

Basically what this is going to do is it enables you to feed back to Google what it is that it thinks is relevant and important to the keyword that you’ve typed in. This will help you when you’re doing your initial site structure.

Gideon:    Awesome. That’s pretty cool. Would you class this stuff as on- page SEO stuff? Basically everything you’re doing on your page and on your website to make sure that it’s optimized for search engines, right?

Dave:    Yeah, pretty much what we’re doing now. It’s almost like that initial planning stage, and you’d apply this when you’re setting up a new domain name. Then it actually comes to a real on-page optimization after you’ve selected your domain name and you’ve got a list of keywords that you know people are searching for.

I’d save that in an Excel document, so when you start to build that particular site you can refer back to that list, and then you can build pages around those keywords so you don’t have to keep on doing your keyword research every time you add a new post to your blog.

I’ll head over to this little SEO blog here. We’ve done some keyword research here. I’ll show you a little bit of on-page optimization stuff.

A lot of [inaudible] I personally haven’t done, but some of the guys may have done here so, if we do come across something that isn’t the perfect rule of thumb – I’m going to give you the rules of thumb, but we might stumble across something that doesn’t exactly adhere to that, and I’ll make sure I point those out for you.

Let’s just click on the first post here. I’ll show you where you want to look when you’re actually doing your on-page optimization.

The first thing you want to do is, like I mentioned, you’ll install something like the Thesis plugin or you’ll go for the All-in-One SEO plugin. From the back end, that enables you to edit your title tag, your meta description, and your keywords. I’m going to go View, Page Source, just so you know where this information actually ends up.

The reason I start with this information is because this is kind of like on the back end. You might not necessarily see it, but this is important stuff that Google looks for.

Firstly, you’ve got your page title. You’ll get the option to edit that. You’ve identified that list of keywords that you want. For every page, you want to make sure you optimize that page for only one keyword and maybe one or two variations of that keyword.

A lot of people will try to optimize one page for a whole host of keywords. That’s never a good idea. Make sure you just pick one keyword and then maybe a variation of that keyword.

Gideon:    Also when you say page, that applies for posts as well, right?
You use that as the same thing, correct?

Dave:    Yes. By page and posts I mean any piece of content that you create that is its own unique thing, that’s a stand-alone. Each one of those should only be optimized for one keyword plus a variation.

If we have a look down here, you want to make sure that you get that keyword in the title tag. By the looks of things I can see down here, the three main pieces we need to look at is your title tag, your meta keyword, and your meta description.

Your keyword, I can tell here, the primary one we’re going after is Google Yellow Pages. I’m hoping that they’ve done the right keyword research and there’s a few people searching that.

You can also see some variations of that, which is Google Versus Yellow Pages. I’m not too sure why they’ve done the same keyword twice. Really, you’d probably just put both of those. Then you make sure that your primary keyword is in your title tag, which it is. I’m going to find a better example because this one isn’t optimized as well as I would like for this.

I’m going to show you the rules of the thumb and it’s the best idea to do that, but that’s not to say that you can’t not do it and still do very well. I’m just going to go in here and we’ll have a look at this company and see if [inaudible]

Gideon:    I’m just going to add something in here. Of course if you’re seeing this code stuff and you’re freaking out, don’t worry. You don’t have to deal with the code if you’re doing WordPress. It all happens in the back end.

Maybe we can quickly show people where they can change these things inside of the WordPress interface.

Dave:    That’s an excellent idea. What I’m showing you here is more so you know where the content appears, but you’re right, you’re not going to be back in the back end editing this. I’ll show you where it appears.

This one here, I can see the meta keywords here. This is the keyword I’m trying to optimize for which is selling a website, and then there’s a few variations of that – selling a website on Flippa and how to sell a website. You can see where we’re going from one primary keyword and then there are a couple of variations of that.

Then that keyword selling a website is in our title and then down here. This is our description. Selling a website, the keyword, is also in our description.