Most of these sites are written for search engines and not you the reader. Here lies the epic fail as they are trying to convert you to actually buy. Nobody likes a bloated speech and these sites are the internet’s equivalent to a fast talking crook out to get your money. Sure all that text and keyword stuffing will lead people searching online to the water but will they drink? Probably not.

Recently ProBlogger recommends Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets 4.0. I normally don’t even go to such sites as all the adsense info you need is already available for free all over the internet. So why pay for it? ProBlogger recommends it? Shady? Maybe. I checked out the site anyways and once again “scam design” at work.

There are two reasons why I would be weary of such sites is the fact they have outrageous claims, like this:

From just $30 per day, I had ‘Shot Up’ To $500 PER DAY with just a few tiny changes the majority of AdSense users didn’t even know about. I looked at my first 5+ figure check of $11,823.65 and thought I must be dreaming!

Also, If it’s so easy to make a butt load of cash from adsense, then why is Joel peddling this piddly ebook?

Now I’m sure Joel has good content about the inner workings of adsense but the fact is you need serious traffic to make major adsense bucks. So if Joel has info on generating huge traffic I’m all ears!

So “scam design” as I call it is a one page sales pitch that steals from late night TV. But wait there’s more! These sites all have the same characteristics.

• Outrageous claims
• User testimonials
• Repeating the same info over again
• So much text you go cross eyed
• Text is center justified
• Designed like it’s 1994

Joel Comm’s adsense site could use a little face lift. Firstly, the header is great, simple, to the point. What lies beneath how ever is a mess of text. This site should be Broken up into 4 pages.

• Homepage
• Info and a real excerpt from the book
• Testimonials
• Purchase page

The homepage should consist of the header, a brief explanation of the ebook with a learn more link to the info page, a buy it now link to the purchase page and a testimonial link to user testimonials.

What can bloggers learn from this “scam design”? The amount of text vs. keywords are important when writing blog posts, as well as, the actual keywords themselves. If people can’t find a way to get to the info they are looking for then they get frustrated and leave. Place your categories list and search form at the top of the page for easy access. Use “read more” effectively. Always paraphrase the post in the first paragraph so readers can decide if they want to “read more”. Use read more for anything over two paragraphs in length. A homepage is where readers want to see all you have to offer without having to scroll down forever.

Jakob Nielsen the king of webpage usability gives these top ten tips for homepage useability:

Make the Site’s Purpose Clear: Explain Who You Are and What You Do

• Include a One-Sentence Tagline
• Write a Window Title with Good Visibility in Search Engines and Bookmark Lists
• Group all Corporate Information in One Distinct Area

Help Users Find What They Need

• Emphasize the Site’s Top High-Priority Tasks
• Include a Search Input Box
• Reveal Site Content

Show Examples of Real Site Content

• Begin Link Names with the Most Important Keyword
• Offer Easy Access to Recent Homepage Features

Use Visual Design to Enhance, not Define, Interaction Design

• Don’t Over-Format Critical Content, Such as Navigation Areas
• Use Meaningful Graphics

Remember these tips: A reader should be able to see at least three of your blogs titles above the fold. Also paraphrasing the blog posts in the first paragraph works well for RSS feeds because people can get a synopsis of what’s to come and encourages them to click and read more.

If you are one of those people who view Google analytics just to see how much traffic and where its coming from are missing the point of Google analytics all together. Watch this video for great insight into how to disseminate the information.

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Using more than one category for blog posts creates duplicate content and SE’s do not like this. They assume you are trying to trick them into thinking you have more content on your site. Back in the early days of SEO webmasters would create pages and pages of duplicate content to make their site rank better. SE’s caught on and put and end to it by checking sites for duplicate content

You can avoid this by choosing one category for each post and only choose 2-3 tags. Don’t bother going back and changing all the old posts to all have the same category as your post have already been searched by the bots and the damage is done.

Moving forward you need to make a list of the categories you will be using in the future. The shorter this list the better. Why? You will be creating a tighter focus on your niche. Your blog postings will become more focused and The SE’s will go through your blog category links and when all the links have the same keywords the ranking will go up.

Think about these two scenarios. Google comes to your site with 100 blog posts and 25 have the same category and 75 are all random or Google visits and all posts have the same category that reflects the content. Which do you think Google will rank higher? I vote for scenario two.

So what have we learned in this post? That too many categories can cause unnecessary duplicate content and less categories forces you to write more focused blog posts that will organically enrich your SEO.

If you need to separate content then use tags but do so sparingly as these too create duplicate content. A lot of people think tags are keywords for search engines and its not true. A better option if you are on Wordpress is the all in one seo plugin . This plugin allows you to add keywords that get written into the head of the html and SE’s will read them.

Hope this helps your choices when creating categories

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Are you ready for it? … There really are no top secrets! SEO masters want companies to think there are all these secrets so they can charge a lot for doing simple tweaks that get Google juicy. If you are using Wordpress then you are already ahead of the game. A few wordpress plugins are available that do the job for you.

Lets go over a few SEO tricks, they are not secrets they are known facts.

SEO and Titles:

To get the best bang for the buck the title of the post should have keywords or key phrases that people actually search for in google. Example- if someone were to search for a tutorial they would not just type in Photoshop, as this is too broad, they would type in “how to remove background using photoshop” or something to that affect. I did a keyword search using Google and found photoshop tutorial to be a highly searched term so you could include another keyword search term into the title by titling it “Photoshop Tutorial: How to remove background using Photoshop”. Now you have two keyword phrases in the title.
What you read in the browser bar title is important. The post tile should be before the blog name or do away with the blog name all together. Anything more like categories or dates added to the title in the browser bar just waters down the SEO power you built up writing the post title. Think about it, if you added that text each time you wrote a post your readers will be confused and SE’s will be too.

SEO and Keywords:
So you’ve learned about keywords in titles of post. Keywords or phrases in the post body are no different. You want to repeat the keyword 2-3 more times throughout the body per 500 words of text. Keep it natural. Too much keywording and you will get punished. Using the example above you would start out your post with the keyword in the first sentence. Why you ask, because the first few sentences are usually what google will scoop up to place below your listing on the search results page and this will get syndicated through RSS. So first sentence would read “In this photoshop tutorial I will easily show you how to remove the background using photoshop”. Easy. You’ve just added the keywords two more times, that equals 4 times and you’ve only written one sentence. A word about creative writing. I know some people like to write creative post titles thinking it will get visitors. You are wrong to think this way as most people online are looking for something specific and will not search for those words. If your title wont stand on its own and tell you exactly what the content is then you have failed. An example is Perez Hilton, the titles are vague. You would never guess what he is talking about. One last thing: Bold those keywords throughout your post.

SEO and Anchor Text:
What is anchor text? It’s the Perez Hilton link above. You see a lot of blogs and they link using “get the rest here” or “source”. Stop this now! Tell people what the link is going to and you tell Google you are a resource for that keyword phrase. So above I linked the text “Perez Hilton” to an blog entry at Blizme. This tells the reader and Google that you will get information on Perez Hilton. Make sure what you are linking to is about the anchor text link otherwise you get spanked by Google. If you are using trackbacks for your posts that is essentially a recipricol anchor text link and your blog is getting Google orgasms. It’s why so many spammers are using trackbacks to vampirize your page rank.

SEO and Internal Links:
I’m sure you’ve heard that more links from other sites back to you the better. This is true but you might not know that internal links are just as good. What’s an internal link? They are anchor text links that link to pages on your own site. If you can’t link to pages on your own site because each posts topics are too different then you will loose the Google game. Each post on your site should be able to reference another. Start writing posts to accommodate this habit. Using our post tile example above you can easily anchor text link the “photoshop tutorial” text to another photoshop tutorial on your site and then in that post link back creating an internal reciprocal link.

SEO and External Links:
It’s been said that external links drain your page rank. This is true if you haphazardly link to irrelevant things. You want to link to things that back up what ever you write about in your posts. I use Matt Cutt’s Linkify tool. Drag the tool link to your browser bookmarks bar. Switch to html edit mode in your text editor and then select the keyword text you want to link out to. Hit linkify on the bookmarks bar and a sidebar will open giving you highly ranked google links to anchor to. I always use the Wikipedia link as it has a bunch of information about that topic. You are positioning your post as a resource and Google and your readers will thank you. If you look at the first sentence in this post I have anchored SEO to wikipedia. It will let the SE’s know that this post is all about SEO.

SEO and Linkbacks:
Linkbacks work just like internal links. You’ve heard about blog commenting as a way to get linkbacks right? Well they do you know good coming from a blog with content that has nothing to do with yours. Only post your link on PAGES that have content that is relative to your blog. Remember its called page rank not site rank. If a blog is about Britney Spears and you write about photoshop and you link back to your blog you are confusing the SE’s. I’m not saying you can’t comment on Perez Hilton. Just don’t leave a link in the url field to your photoshop blog insert a link to your facebook.

SEO and Images:
This is huge! So many top bloggers screw this up. You must name your photos with keyword phrases. Lets use Perez Hilton for example. He posted recently about actress Cynthia Nixon and cancer . The title of the picture in this post says nothing about the content. The title is wenn1809295__oPt.jpg. Obviously its the designation for Wenn the photo agency. Perez should have renamed the photo with “cynthia-nixon-breast-cancer-confession.jpg”. Use the title post name and put dashes between each word other wise you get the ugly %20% in between each word when viewed in browsers. If your blog software lets you add descriptions and alt text then fill this info out. If you start titling images like this your Google search traffic will double. Just make sure the image title is close to post title, that way people will not be turned off when they go to your site and you titled every image Paris Hilton naked and the content is about photoshop tutorials.

Good Luck on your SEO journey!

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Everyone knows more links back to your blog the better. Here is a massive list of blog directories to submit to. Do 5 a day till you get through them all.