Sharon Hurley Hall has been a friend for years. She is one of the best ‘self taught’ SEOs I’ve ever met. Not only can she market her websites – without understanding the methodologies behind bibliometrics and Latent Semantic Indexing – but her name is a ‘keyword string’ related to ‘get paid to write’ in both Google Search and Google AdWords. That is why I thought of her blog when I found this new tool.

Sharon is always teaching writers how to promote their websites with a clarity and simplicity that I find difficult. However, very few tools can be used by the average website owner to track their search engine results. Even the free SEO software packages can take weeks to learn how to use, and months to understand the significance of the data produced.

I found www.cuterank.net this morning and immediately thought of Sharon and her readers. It is a free little script, perfect for anyone with only a few websites and blogs. It lets you track your ‘rank’ in any of Google’s search engines.

Have you ever run a ranking report that stated you were at the top of Google – but you couldn’t find your website’s SERP (Search Engine Results Position). This little tool lets you pick any Google search engine and find your rank specifically – or find your ranking on a large selection of websites.

IT also tells you if you are in the top 100. This is very important. If you have a keyword in the top 100 – then you have done the ‘hard part’ of SEO. Once in the Top 100, just continue creating blog posts with a keyword density between 2 -4%, but a Keyword Weight of 70% or higher. Density is the number of times a keyword appears. Weight is the value of each keyword.

This is easier than it sounds. The average blog post has 400 words including title, links, menu, and footer.

First: Never use more than 4 keywords on a page. In fact, using only 2 keywords makes it easier to achieve a high Keyword Weight.

The keyword should always appear in the URL, Page Title, Meta Tags, and Description. Next, include the keyword in the Article Title. Your URL, Page Title, and Article Title do not need to repeat themselves.

Second: Add the keyword to the first 50 words of the page, the last 50 words. Hyperlink one of these to a relevant page on your blog.

This is all the average blog needs to generate a Keyword Weight over 70%. This is the first step to reaching the top 100 Keyword Positions.

Keep Track of the keywords and run them through www.cuterank.net . There is no upgrades, no members section. You do not need to buy a better version to see all your results.

Suzanne James is a professional search engine marketer. Find out more at Axiom9.

Editor’s Note: When I agreed to publish this guest post, I had no idea I was going to be heaped with praise – thanks, Suz.

Disclosure: I have received no compensation for publishing this review post.

Write Really Great Keyword Articles is today’s post from Dana Prince’s Writer’s Blog. I read this blog every day and it’s one of my favourites. This post will tell you why.

When you get an assignment that involves ten of the same keyword or twenty or more,it can feel like a bottomless pit at the start. How on earth can I write 10 keyword articles about a common word such as Google with a 1.5% keyword density?

Dana doesn’t just ask the question, she provides the answer and it’s easy to implement. If you’ve ever flagged when writing keyword articles, Write Really Great Keyword Articleswill help you.

On the surface, Squidoo.com may look like a free way to create a minisite and share information with others. In its simplest form, that is exactly what it is. But there are a lot of other ways you can benefit from having a Squidoo lens.

First Page on Google

One of the big perks is that Squidoo lenses tend to do well on Google, especially if you optimize for a certain keyword. For example, I have a lens that is optimized for the keyword “make money writing”. It spends a lot of time on the first page now and the rest of the time is spent on the second page.

In order to get your lens on the first page you need to do several things. Here is a short list:

• Do some keyword research and make sure they are in the URL.
• Put the keyword in the main page title and then scatter it throughout the page.
• Make sure you have 4 modules at the minimum. The more modules you have, the better.
• Update it often. In the beginning, you will need to update it every day. Small changes count, such as deleting a sentence.
• Promote your lens whenever you can.

Newsletter Subscribers

You can use your lens to get newsletter subscribers. You can put your subscriber box in one of the text modules. This requires that you use an “iframe” command. You can find some information online on how to do that. Or, click on my link at the end of this post and I’ll send you some information.

Affiliate Marketing

I promote affiliate programs on my lenses. In the month of June, I made around $40. Yes, you can make money through the modules on Squidoo, but you can make a lot more if you sign up for the affiliate programs yourself and add them to your lens.

Show That you are an Expert

Another thing that a lens does is that it shows you are an expert at a particular subject. If you want to develop a reputation that you know a lot about something, you can research it and create a lens. This is a tool that you can use for self promotion.

*****
Katherine Huether is a freelance writer who loves creating Squidoo lenses. To view a list of her lenses visit http://www.squidoo.com/kathography

Now, we all know how long it’s supposed to take to get your site listed in the search engines, right? Well, guess what? The home page of this site is already listed in Google.  This was before I did any search engine submission. So how did it happen?

Simple – it’s because of Stumbleupon.  One of my friends stumbled the site and now it appears in the search engines.

Of course, there’s still work to do. I need to get some of the other posts and pages listed. That’s why I’ve added an archive page and why I will add a sitemap. (The archive is for readers and the sitemap is for search engines.) But it’s a good start, isn’t it?

I’m always on the lookout for somewhere new to promote my writing and other skills, and a few months ago I made a couple of Squidoo lenses, one on SEO and another on freelance writing. Lo and behold, one of my current clients actually followed me around the web before contacting me through one of the lenses. So I’m a firm believer in trying lots of new forms of promotion, because you never know which one will pay off. Of course, that can make it difficult to identify the really effective ones, but I’m working on a way to solve that. A few weeks ago, I got a lead on a Squidoo like site, which I bookmarked and forgot about till last night.

It’s called HubPages. Like Squidoo you add modules which you can fill with text or images. I haven’t explored all the options yet, but it doesn’t seem to have as many advertising options as Squidoo. The interface is clean and it works fast. It took me only a few minutes to make my SEO hub, which is similar to my Squidoo one. Even if I’d had to do it from scratch, I don’t think it would have taken more than half an hour.

You can also earn money through your hub with Adsense, Amazon and Ebay. This didn’t work as well as it could have. I couldn’t get my Adsense account to talk to HubPages and my Amazon affiliate account is with the UK site, which doesn’t seem to be supported. But for those of you in the US it would probably work well. There’s not much more to say about it so far – I’ve only been on the site for a day. I’ll keep you posted on what kind of traffic it brings.

Website promotion works. I love the sound of this number. 1000. It rolls off the tongue and gladdens the mind. I’ll tell you why. That’s the number of unique visitors to my freelance writing site in July. These are my best figures yet and it’s all been done through free promotional techniques (and the contacts I’ve made here on WritingUp). Now, I know these are small figures compared to a lot of big league sites, but they’re not bad for a freelance writer’s site that’s just over a year old.

To get to this point I have used self-promotion of all kinds, including blog carnivals, writing free articles, and looking around for any articles that will help me find out what the next step is. I’ve taken advice from Mitch, Haven and gracepub and many others.

But this is not just about blowing my own trumpet. The thing is that you can do this too, if you want to. There’s no big secret (especially since I’ve been blogging about it for a year). It’s just a matter of taking the time to do it.

And by the way, just so you know, not everything’s going my way. One job has stiffed me for GBP150 – so I need to figure out how I’m going to recover it.

I’m falling in love with TodayBooks.com. This might be the honeymoon period, because I’ve just had my second book listed with them. And it’s one that’s grown out of this very blog. Remember when I did a series of posts on search engine optimization and website promotion? Well, that turned into a presentation for Inspired Author. One day when I had not much else to do, I converted the presentation into a Word document and sent it to TodayBooks.

A couple of weeks later I got back an email that said that they liked the book but felt it was a bit thin. Who could blame them? After all, it WAS based on a bullet point presentation, so I knew it was light on content. But sending them the presentation gave them the chance to assess whether it was something they would publish. After I thought about it for a while, I decided to beef it up by including some of my original blog posts from here, generalised so they didn’t just apply to writers. This book is the result of the combination.

The whole process has taken several weeks. TodayBooks are extremely slow at responding to email. What I like about them is that if they think changes are needed they tell me. They also promote the book on the home page. Most importantly, I get an ISBN, so I can list my book with Amazon and others.

There’s one thing I thought they could have done better. The suggested a new title and asked me to write sales copy. I had no problem with that – after all, if I wasn’t prepared to promote my own book, why should they? But … they’ve changed the title again and they didn’t change the sales copy to match. That’s why the title of the book is SEO Tricks but the sales copy refers to Web Page Action. That’s a bit careless, I think.

All in all, I’m happy. I’ve got my second ebook out and it’s a general one that I can promote heavily. It will look great in my profile on IFreelance and other places. And I may make some pocket money from it, too

You can’t argue with these figures. This month I had 843 unique visitors to doublehdesign.com (200 more than when I wrote about this in January). I had 17,000+ hits (only a small increase) and I had nearly a 50% increase in page views (to more than 10,000). This month I’ve also had a few emails a week from the contact form on my site and people have seen my stuff and contacted me about work. So I must be doing something right. The trouble is, when you throw everything at a problem, it can be hard to know which one has worked best. Here’s what I did. I hope following these steps will help you promote successfully too.

1. Choose A Domain Name

I bought my domain name almost a year before I was ready to do anything with it. That was one area where I made a mistake, going for a name that captured what I thought I wanted to do. Doublehdesign is ok, but SharonHurleyHall.com would have been better. I’ve bought the other one now, but I’ve put a lot of effort into promoting doublehdesign, so I’ll have to be creative in how I promote the other one. If you are blogging, choose the name of your blog carefully. Although you may be able to change it later, any links that you have promoted may show up as broken if you change the name (this happens on WritingUp). This will not help with site traffic.

2. Create A Website

I set up my site. This was quite simple when it started. There was a home page, a bio/cv/resume page, a ghostwriting page, a writing samples page and a contact form. This was enough to get me going. It was simple and I added the bells and whistles such as my photo, links pages, a sitemap and google ads later. I added one page a week to my site for about four months. I updated at least one page every week or two. If you’re blogging, add at least a couple of posts a week.

3. Promotion By Adding A Blog

I added a blog in November. This was a good move, because that’s when my traffic really started to increase. However, a month later, I got addicted to blogging at WritingUp, so it might have been just as easy to use a WritingUp feed on my site, with links back to the site whenever possible. This is a strategy several WritingUp bloggers use effectively.

4. Submit To Google, Yahoo, MSN

I submitted my site and blogs to Google, Yahoo and MSN. I also submitted my site to DMOZ, where it’s been listed at last after nearly a year. Then I submitted to other appropriate directories. The difficulty with this is that there was rarely a category that matches exactly what your site or blog is about. Some directories listed writers’ sites as personal, others as business, still others as arts. I just picked a category and hoped for the best. This added to my search engine hits and to my traffic. I submitted my blog to blog directories of all sorts. First of all I went for those that did not require a linkback, then I targeted a few that did. Traffic to my blog soon surpassed traffic to the main site. A word of warning, though. Sometimes you can get submit-happy and submit to sites that will bring traffic that you don’t want. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a month after doing an accidental mass submit to sites around the world, I got traffic from sites looking to sell Viagra, Tramadol and more.

5. Promotion By Writing For Free

One of my best promotion techniques was writing for free. I wrote free articles for EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, ArticleMarketer.com, ArticleBlast.com, SubmitYourNewContent.com and many others. These are the ones that have resulted in the most links back to my site. EzineArticles is the one that had the quickest results. Two of my articles got picked up by freelancewriting.com and I consistently get 10 or more hits a month from this site. I also wrote reviews on Dooyoo.co.uk, ciao.co.uk and Epinions.com. This allowed me to practice writing, earn some pennies, show some versatility and develop my writing voice. Again, many of these turn up all over the web.

6. Finding Opportunities Through Blogging

I signed up with freelance job agencies, looked on craigslist and looked at other job listings. These brought some work, but blogging has been even more fruitful. It was on WritingUp that I first heard about InspiredAuthor, Blogitive, Lifetips, IFreelance and other sites which are now the backbone of my freelance writing life. Taking time to read other blogs paid off in a way I could not have predicted.

7. Promotion By Exchanging Links

More recently, I have done link exchanges with writing sites, joined a writing web ring and changed my site template to be more seo-friendly. I am now getting more visits than ever. Figures for the year to date are nearly 4000 unique visitors, about 54,000 page views and about 86,000 hits. The figures were skewed slightly by the Viagra-Tramadol brigade in February. I have also used, social bookmarking, tagging and pinging.

8. Promotion Through Keywords, Tagging And Pinging

I’m also trying a new strategy. I look to see what people have been searching for (or in the case of my blog, which ads appear on the days I make most money) and then I blog about that topic again. I haven’t done this on writingup yet, but I have done it on my other blog. It’s too early to say how that will turn out. I do use keywords in my blog posts, though. If you want your blog to be known for a particular subject, research the keywords, use them in your blog, and use them as tags. If you look through my blog, you’ll find that tags on the early posts are all over the place, while tags on recent posts are much more focused.

9. Promotion: Keep Updating

Believe it or not, when I started my promotion efforts, I didn’t know much about what I was doing. I read, learned and tried new ideas, discarding the ones that didn’t seem to work for me. Now that I know more about what I’m doing, it’s time to look at my site and blog again and see how they could be improved. Some of the pages need some work on keywords; others need to be split into two. Of course, I’m so busy writing now that I have less time to spend on promotion, but I know I’ve got to keep up my website promotion efforts to keep the ball rolling. I hope some of these strategies work for you.

One of the topics I blog about occasionally is SEO and website development (see the list on my index). I’ve been getting emails this week from a site touting tag and ping for site promotion (who’s going to argue with that strategy?). I was a bit impatient to know what they were going to tell me, so I hunted around their site for the sitemap and I came across several useful articles in the seo-articles section. The articles are easy to understand and are aimed at beginners. I learned a few things myself, especially about WordPress plugins I could use on my other blog. Anyway, the info is there – have a look.

Last week I told you in detail how I optimized my website, based on the excellent advice from Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook. So how has it been going?

Stats on the rise

Swimmingly, as they say in the UK. This month, I’ve had more than 20,000 hits and, more importantly, more than 16,000 page views. That’s 7 pages a visitor (double what I was told a good count would be). About 40% of my visitors are staying longer than 30 seconds. That’s good, but there’s no time to rest on my laurels. I’ve still got to find a way to keep the other 60% on my site for longer. I’m learning a few more techniques that I’ll share with you once I’ve seen how they work out.

Using my traffic

So what am I going to do with all this traffic? Launch a monthly newsletter, of course. The newsletter will be available from the end of March and will contain freelance writing tips, resources and articles. I’m also going to add more free-to-reprint articles to my site to keep visitors interested in what I have to offer.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Related posts:
How I Put My Site On Steroids
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Research
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Placement
SEO: What’s Under The Hood?
There’s Life Beyond Google
How To Keep Your Website Traffic
Quickish Fix