Pennies for Wink Publishing

Your home page, that is. This blog is directed to my authors, but the information is of value to anyone who wants visitors to their website. The subject, SEO – Search Engine Optimization, is a huge sector of knowledge. Even an epic post would not really scratch the surface of the subject, and it is not my intention to produce even half of an epic post. There are some things that are basic to SEO that I intend to mention here.

In the world of SEO there are two sectors. Off page SEO is the building of backlinks and reputation for your site. Article marketing can be an important part of an off page SEO strategy. Participation in blog and forum conversations and social networking and bookmarking can also be parts of a good off page SEO strategy.

For off page SEO to be of maximum benefit good on page SEO is very important. On page SEO is not all that hard, but getting it right can make the difference between a high position on the first page of the search results and being on page 3 or 10 or completely buried. Would you like that number one, two, or three spot on page one? Those are the spots that get over half of all traffic from the search engines.

Keywords and keyword research are an entire subject in themselves. On page SEO should begin with good keyword research. The things that make a good keyword/phrase are a good number of searches that are conducted for the term with not too much competition. The less competition the easier it will be to rank for the keyword, but if nobody searches for the term it does little good to be number one.

The key elements of on page SEO are:

1. The page URL
2. The page title
3. The meta description
4. The html heading tags – primarily the h1 tag
5. The page content

The URL for the home page will be the domain name for the site. There is and advantage from an SEO standpoint to have the site keyword in the domain name. The url for interior pages consists of the domain name and the page.html name at the least. Use the page keyword in the page.html name if possible.

Your page title, description, and content should be written for your human visitors, but the impact for the search engines should be taken into consideration. For the title having the keyword near the beginning will be of value, as will also be the case with the description meta tag. In the content you should have the primary keyword in the opening and closing sentences. In the body you can use variations of a keyword or phrase a few times. After the title and URL the html h1 tag is of great importance. Your page keyword should be in the tagged text, nearer the beginning if possible.

These are the important points for on page SEO. Good on page SEO is of great importance. If the page keyword is not too competitive good on page SEO can put your page in a good position in the SERPs. For more competitive keywords on page SEO is the foundation on which to build your off page SEO strategy.

There it is in a nutshell. I don’t think that it qualifies as even half of an epic post, but there is good information. Small changes on page can make big changes in the search results. Now get out there and optimize your pages!!

There is a new tool available from the IMTalk forum. I discussed this in my previous post, but now I have implemented this for my feeds and suggest that you submit your author feed using this tool.

This can greatly enhance your article marketing efforts. You are paying for article submission services one way or another. Article marketing is a proven way to produce quality backlinks to your sites. But getting your articles published is not enough. Your articles must be indexed in order for those backlinks to count. To be sure that your articles are indexed they need some backlinks as well. The RSS Submitter is a painless way to get some backlinks to your articles.

IMT RSS Submitter
This tool will submit your RSS Feed to my private network of RSS Directories/Aggregators, then it will ping each created page to 33 ping services*, which will result in many backlinks towards your URLs (web pages, blog posts, backlinks, etc.).

How To Use the Tool

This tool is provided free of charge to Nemanja’s forum members, so you will need to register for the forum to use the tool. Once registered the tool is very easy to use. You will need your RSS feed to submit. Provide a title for your feed and select an appropriate category, then hit the submit button. There is a button to test your feed, use that before you submit your feed to be sure that there are no problems with your feed.

To get your feed URL go to your author profile page on the directory. An easy way to get there is to click on your Author name on any of your articles on the site (links to your articles are included with the article accepted emails). On your profile page is a listing of your articles and an RSS feed icon and link to subscribe to your feed. Click on the icon or link and your feed page will open. Copy the URL from your browser address bar.

You can submit any feed that you have. I went through my article sites and blogs and picked up the RSS feed links. I then copied them to a notepad page. Then I went to the submitter and submitted each of them. If you have a blog or forum they will have an RSS feed available. I suggest collecting all of your RSS feeds and submitting them.

Why Should I Do This?

This tool establishes a feed page on up to 5 RSS aggregators or directories around the Internet. It then pings the existence of these pages to 33 services to be sure that they are noticed. On the created pages your articles will be listed with their URLs from your RSS feed. The search engines spider these sites regularly. This exponentially increases the chance that your article will be indexed and your backlink will be noted. The pages contain your RSS feed, so any time that an article is added to your feed it is listed on these sites. You only need to submit your feeds one time and the pages will continue to work for you as you submit new content for distribution.

This Internet Marketing and SEO Forum is relatively young, but already there is much good information available there. There are also a couple of other tools available and more to come. Membership may be of value to you in your Internet Marketing efforts. Getting full value from your Article Marketing efforts is certainly worth a few minutes of your time.

I have been pinging the site feeds through the Ping-O-Matic service for the past couple of weeks. With Ping-O-Matic it only takes a couple of minutes to set up and then to reping your feed it is only a matter of clicking a bookmark for the ping page. Pinging your feed alerts the services to the fact that new material has been added to the feed.  If you have a good title you may catch an occasional human visitor, but the real value is getting your content in front of the search bots. It is possible that your content may be indexed faster if you ping your feed whenever new content is added.

My directories are set to send an email when your article is published on one of the sites. If your articles are published on several of my sites it would be best to set up a separate ping for each feed. I chose to use Ping-O-Matic but there are other services available that ping even more sites. PinGoat and Pingler are two other services with which I am familiar.

The directory script builds an individual feed for each author as well as the main site RSS feed. I ping the main site feed whenever I add content. You would want to ping your author feed when you receive an article acceptance email. To obtain your feed url, click on the article link in the email. When your article opens on the site click on your author name. This will take you to your profile page. Under your profile is a list of your articles in the directory. Right under the heading, before the first article, is an RSS icon. Click on the RSS icon and copy the URL from your browser address bar. (You could also right click on the icon and choose copy link location.) This is your feed URL.

Ping-O-Matic has three entry boxes to fill out: Site Name, Site URL, and Feed URL. Their form has a list of sites that they will ping. The left of the form lists common services with an option to check all. With the information at the top filled in click the check all for the common services and then click on the Ping bar at the bottom of the form. When the ping page comes up bookmark it. The next time that you want to ping your feed just open that page from your bookmark. You will not need to enter the information again if you have saved your ping  page.

PinGoat works much the same way and requests the same information. I don’t know if you can bookmark the page for future pings, but whenever I open the page the last information that I entered is there. If you are just dealing with one site this would be fine. You may need to re-enter information each time if your articles are submitted to more than one directory.

Pingler only has two entry boxes and a category dropdown. You would put your feed URL in the url box. Many of the sites that they ping require that the URL is a feed URL. A few on their list will accept a site url. You would need to fill out the information each time you visit, so it would be best to bookmark your feed url and open it in another tab.

Depending on the volume of your submissions you may want to schedule pinging once or twice a week, although it would not hurt to ping whenever you know that content has been added to your feed. Once it is set up it only takes seconds to submit your feed. If your content gets indexed faster it is worth the time, and if you should get direct traffic from this it would be a bonus.

Some time ago I had recommended to my authors that they use social bookmarking to call attention to their posts. I have seen some results in my analytics reports that prove that this works. Most of the traffic that I had seen was coming from FaceBook, but there were occasional visitors that came from other social bookmarking services.

This morning I noticed a bump in the traffic to one of the article directories. I went to the server log to see if there was an indication of the reason for this. I found that the traffic was coming from a post on the Washington, D.C. Craig’s List. Author Ed O. or an interested third party had posted a link to an article in the personals section of the list. Several visitors had followed the link to the article.

The real news came when I looked to Google! I first searched for the article title. The article was not listed as being on my site. I then did the Google ‘site:’ search and found that the article was listed. This was less than 12 hours after the post to Craig’s list. This site has few pages listed under the site search. The fact that this article is listed proves the power of Craig’s List.

This appears to be an effective way to get your articles indexed. It is not enough to just write an article and toss it into the wind. Getting the article indexed means that your backlink is also indexed. With just a few minutes of work posting to social bookmarking sites or, perhaps better, Craig’s List you can increase the value of the content that you have submitted to various sites.