Matt Cutts Interview

I was listening to an interview with Google's Matt Cutts. Also, lately I've been going through some SEO books. I hope to improve myself as an SEO specialist by allotting some time at the start of each day to keep myself in touch with SEO principles and techniques.

The Matt Cutts interview lasted around an hour and a half, and I learned a lot from it. Many of my thoughts regarding SEO were confirmed, and some did not quite fit. For one, PageRank really is important. But I still believe that anyone doing SEO should not chase after PageRank alone, as it is only one of the HUNDREDS of factors to determine search engine placement. Relevance of links and content is also important.

The power of linkbuilding and anchor text is also affirmed. It doesn't depend only on the quantity of links, but also on the quality of links (based on PageRank, contextual relevance, position on the page, and several other factors). Google has developed complex algorithms to filter out the SPAM links, links that aren't really of any importance and are just there to improve link popularity for certain sites.

RankAlert.Net | Backlink Watch Tool

To check your backlinks, a useful tool can be found at RankAlert.Net. The quantity AND quality of your backlinks or inlinks have a great impact on your search engine rankings for your keywords. The quality of your backlinks is determined mainly by the following factors: PageRank of the page on where the link to your site is on, whether or not the page is relevant to your site, and the anchor text or the text on the link to your site (that is, use your keywords on the link to your site).

There are several other tools as well such a real PageRank checker, DataCenter Watch, Link Validator, and a lot more.

All these features are for free, all you have to do is sign up for a free account.

Hope this helps!

Article Marketer | Gaining Backlinks

On this site you'll find a useful tool for posting articles on the web and for gaining backlinks

http://www.articlemarketer.com/

GTrends Word Tracker Keyword Research Tool Down to Investigate

The keyword research tool Gtrends http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/ is currently down to investigate the problem about the keyword "Superconductors", because Google seems to be giving erroneous data.

Gtrends is something you can use to research niche keywords that you can dominate--those keywords that you can target without too much competition that you won't have a chance to rank at all.

Hope this service will be up and running again soon.

Some SEO tools for Keyword research

Here's some free online tools to help you with keyword research. These sites are phenomenal, and you should try them out.

www.spyfu.com
www.hittail.com
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Free SEO Course | Lesson 1: Introduction to SEO

Hi, and welcome to the Free SEO Course! This will teach you how to rank high in search engines and increase the amount of traffic to your site.

Let's begin!


What is Search Engine Optimization or SEO? What is it for?

Say you've built a new a site that features poetry. You decide to to call it www.TheBluePoetry.com.

So how do people around the world access your site? They could type the address "www.thebluepoetry.com" directly on their browsers.

But unfortunately, in the real world, this simply doesn't work.

People don't know about the address of your site, and they don't know that "The Blue Poetry" exists in the first place--unless they're your friends, or unless you've already told them, or maybe someone you knew told them.

Fortunately for us, that's not the only way. There is another, more efficient way that people who don't know that your site even exists are able to access your site. And that is through Search Engines, like Google, Yahoo, Lycos, AllTheWeb, and etc.


Search Engine Optimization, simply put, allows you to rank at the top of the search results for a particular keyword. So when people type the word "Poetry" on the search engines, www.TheBluePoetry.com appears at the first page of the results for people to click!

(still working on the rest of this SEO Course)

Free SEO Course

Hi,

I'm currently preparing a free SEO course that I'll be putting in this SEO blog.

It's a tutorial that I've tried to write in easy-to-understand terms, and I'm hoping that it will guide you step by step through the SEO process. I hope that this course on Search Engine Optimization will get your site more visitors from search engines, increase your online sales, and pull up your Adsense revenues.

Here's an overview of what the course will contain:

Lesson 1 will give you a brief introduction to SEO. What is Search Engine Optimization? What is it for? Why is it important? Why focus on Google, among other search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, etc?

Lesson 2 will teach you the difference between White Hat and Black Hat SEO. This session will teach you how to choose the right keywords to target your efforts on. It will help you to first, rank high for less competitive keywords, and later, rank high for more competitive keywords.

Lesson 3 will teach you how to format your website so that it will be search engine friendly! This is called Onpage Optimization.

Lesson 4 will teach you about Offpage Optimization, which will be very important for you to rank first page for your keywords. I will be recommending to you FREE softwares and sites that you can use on your SEO efforts.

Lesson 5 will teach you about how to make monitoring the progress on your keywords easier!

Lesson 6 tackles some Search Engine Optimization Myths.

Lesson 7 recommends some books, most of which you can get on the internet 100% free, and legally of course.

Lesson 8 recommends some websites, forums, and blogs that you may find as a useful aid in your journey towards becoming an SEO Specialist, or simply getting the amount of traffic that your site deserves!


Begin The FREE SEO Course