Ninja SEO Quick Tip: Hide Your Links From Your Competitors

In a domain name, a hash mark is used to relay the browser to an anchor placed on the page somewhere. It also allows you to hide your back links. A hash mark # acts as a stop symbol in the url bar. Everything before the # gets SEO credit, everything after doesn’t. There doesnt actually have to be an anchor set up, it can just be jibberishif you want. I usually keep track of the word I use though, so I can check and see my own backlinks. but when your competitor looks at your link profile it wont show up.

For instance, I hide the link for my domain name page in a tag Cheap Domain Names

Once it is indexed You wouldn’t finding it in a link:url search for that page. But it still give the page full link juice.

Posted in Link Building, SEO | Tagged as: backlinks, competitive SEO, link building, SEO link building, SEO quick tips

Want Your Own Squidoo Lens? Step By Step How To For Squidoo Lenses

What is Squidoo?

There used to be a time when only those who possessed programming skills were able to create web pages. However, over the last decade, a lot of platforms have been developed with the purpose of allowing anyone with an internet connection to create a strong online presence. Some have stood the test of time, while others were instant failures. A noteworthy member of the first group is Squidoo, a community website which has been launched in 2005 and since then has helped thousands of people to create over 1,5 million web pages called lenses, each of them focused on a specific subject. The creators of these posts are referred to as “lensmasters” and they are not necessarily required to be externally recognized experts in the area they are writing about.

The main reason why Squidoo has gathered so many followers is the option of writing about what you love while making money out of it through ad placements. Although lensmasters only take around 50% of the earnings, creating decent passive income off a few high ranking lenses has proven to be relatively easy and does not require any programming knowledge either. How to make a Squidoo lens is one of the first things you should get handled if you are an aspiring internet marketer.

How do I get started?

Before going any further, you must have:

• an e-mail account

• an idea for your first lens.

It is highly unlikely that someone interested in this subject does not already have an e-mail address, so let us focus on the topic choice. You are probably wondering why pages on Squidoo are called this way. In order to understand the concept, think about how the lens of a camera can be manipulated to focus on a single subject. Similarly, a Squidoo lens should only be about one topic.

Creating your Squidoo account

Go to Squidoo.com and click the big orange button. You can’t miss it.

Squidoo Lens

You are going to be presented with a form that looks like this:

Squidoo Lenses
The username you choose does not have much relevance, so just type something easy to remember. However, you should treat your password with great care because once you are going to start earning money with your lenses this account will turn into an income source.

An excellent way to come up with ideas on how to improve your lenses is to check the “I want to know who wins…” box. The best approach to learning how to do something new is to look at those who are already successful.

Check your e-mail account and click the confirmation link you received from Squidoo. Your account has been created.

How to make a Squidoo lens

Log in with your username and password. You will be redirected to the Dashboard, where you are going to click the “Create a Lens!” button.

Making A Site
Next, you must enter some basic information regarding what your first lens is about.
how to get a website started

The lens title is where you should describe the subject you want to write about as briefly as possible. If you are building this lens with the purpose of targeting search engine traffic, make sure you also include a keyword or two in there. Furthermore, you must put yourself in the place of someone who is researching the topic you are writing about. Think about what titles you would be most inclined to click on.

NOTE: Be careful when following that last piece of advice. Entering a title that does not describe your content is called link-bait and is considered SPAM. There is no point in shooting yourself in the foot before you even start, so stick to an accurate title.

The URL section may confuse you, but the concept is quite simple. A URL address is what follows after the “http://” near the top of your browser. This is what you have to type in your browser whenever you want to access your lens, unless you have bookmarked it. It is a unique string of characters and you will be notified if the one you have chosen is already taken.

NOTE: Once set, the URL cannot be changed. Double-check before clicking the “Continue” button, because you cannot go back to modify your lens’s address in case you change your mind later on.

One may be tempted to think that picking a topic is just a formality and will not affect the way your lens turns out. However, Squidoo provides special designs and header for many of its categories, so make sure you pick something relevant. Nevertheless, you can change the category and the design at any point in the future.�
make my site

For SEO purposes, Squidoo allows you to enter more than one description for your page. These tags are used to help people who are researching your subject to reach your lens.

Step 4 is the place where you can choose where the revenue from your lens will go. You can choose to donate the money to various charity funds or have them sent to your PayPal address. Don’t worry if you do not own one yet, you can change this whenever you want.

how to set a website

After you click “Continue” you will be directed to “My Workshop”, the place where all changes to your lens are going to take place. Most things happen in the middle left area, the part of your lens that visitors see when they access it. The building blocks of your page are called modules and they can be found in the right part of the screen. Take your time and experiment with some of them to get an idea of what can be achieved.

where to build a website

Specific methods to adding and editing various elements such as text and Amazon modules have already been presented by the makers of Squidoo in the workshop’s video tour, so there is no point in covering that here.

Filling your lens with content

An old meme when organizing or building a website states that “Content is King”. The only way in which your lens can achieve success is if it provides interesting and helpful content that is relevant to the topic you have previously chosen.

Again, put yourself in the place of someone who is researching that specific topic. Make a list of things you would want to know about, types of products you would be interested in, frequently asked questions, common misconceptions, etc. This is the most important part of how to make a Squidoo lens, so take your time.

Publishing your lens

A lens on a subject you are passionate about will probably undergo many changes throughout time, but there is nothing wrong with publishing the first version, even if it is just a draft. Ranking well in search engines greatly depends on a page’s age, so publishing your lens as soon as possible is crucial if you are going to rely on organic traffic.
how make a site

Click the big orange button and you will see the result of your work. You will notice your bio does not say much, so the next step is to get that part handled.

Letting people know who you are – Edit your Squidoo profile

You may be tempted to edit the bio right on the lens, but it is better to access your dashboard and do it there instead, so you don’t have to repeat the same action for every new page you create. Go to your Dashboard and click the “Profile Settings” link located in the right.

Check the box that says “Yes, allow readers to email me”. Before thinking about spam bots you should know that Squidoo does not publicly reveal your e-mail address, but it can forward messages to your inbox. You never know who visits your lens and wants to get in touch. Some lensmasters have received interview requests, invitations to join groups, link exchange requests and many more. The networking possibilities are endless.
how to make a website

Furthermore, unless you want a weird looking squid to be what people see next to your name, you might want to add a profile photo. It does not necessarily have to be a real photo; just upload something that is relevant to what you are writing about.

Getting paid

As has already been stated earlier in the article, one of the main contributing factors to this community site’s success and something that has inspired many people to learn how to make a Squido lens is revenue share.

Whether you like it or not, your lenses have ads on them. Nevertheless, a decent amount of what Squidoo gains from those ads is going straight to your pocket. Basically, there are 3 ways to make money:

1) Your lensrank. According to how well his or her lenses perform, each lensmaster receives a monthly payment.

2) Affiliate links from modules. Remember when we talked about modules? Whenever someone buys from your Amazon, Zazzle or CafePress links, your lensrank increases and you also get a percentage of the sale.

3) Your own affiliate links. This is probably the most effective way of making money with lenses. Once you rank high in search engines, it may be a good idea to learn internet marketing, because any revenue that is made through your own affiliate links is not shared with Squidoo. Once you get the hang of this, the possibilities are truly endless.

Conclusion

When learning how to make Squido lenses, the process itself is not very difficult. In just a few hours one can probably cover the whole array of tools necessary to build good looking pages. On the other hand, the real challenge comes when trying to create quality content and learning how to monetize it. That part however cannot be summarized in a single article and will require hard work, proper research and enough willpower to not allow anything to discourage you from achieving your goals.

Posted in Link Building | Tagged as: backlinks, build squidoo lens, how to build a squidoo lens, link building, squidoo lens, squidoo page, web 2.0

Strategies For Marketing Your Facebook Fan Page

If you’ve just created a Facebook Fan Page, you may be at a bit of a loss as to where to begin marketing toward those 500 million active users! How do you take your brand new, unknown Facebook page and turn it into a viral success?

Aside from a certain ineffable quality which goes with really successful marketing, there are some basic steps and tips which you can follow to get started.

Start by sending invites to the friends you already have on Facebook. On your Fan Page, on the left side of the screen is a “Suggest to Friends” link. You can use this feature to send out invitations to people either individually or in groups.
Use the Search function on Facebook to find new fans. You can use the “Posts by Everyone” search function to search inside peoples’ posts to discover who is interested in your niche and actively talking about similar products. This is sometimes easier than searching for communities or groups or trying to look through other Fan Pages for new fans.
Run an ad campaign. These paid ads appear on the sides of pages based on contextual relevance. You can set whatever kind of daily spending limit you are comfortable with. You can also start and end your campaigns at any time.
If you have Twitter, you can use the Facebook Fan Page Twitter Application to post an update and backlink to your Twitter feed time every time you update your Fan Page, automatically!
If you have your own website, you should add a Facebook Fan Box Widget which gives people a way to “like” your Fan Page directly from your website or blog.
Socialize. This may seem like a given, but to a lot of people it isn’t. You need to interact with people about a wide variety of topics in order to gain their trust and respect.

A Social Marketing Secret … Quality, Not Quantity!

Ever seen Fan Pages with thousands of fans and no substantial success? One of the big secrets in social marketing is that numbers do not translate directly into sales. While in some ways Facebook is so important precisely because it has over 500 million users, not all 500 million of those people will matter to your campaign. One survey by Forrester Research revealed that among European adult internet users, only 11% created 80% of the influential content online. Only 4% of European adults who shared content were believed to build influential impressions—these users were found on average to only have 425 friends. The figures in America were similar, with only 16% of users creating influential content.

What does this mean for you, as a marketer of your own business, organization or brand?

It means that the overwhelming majority of internet users have no influence and are not going to do much good for your campaign in the beginning. It means having 100,000 friends on Facebook or a thousand likes on your Facebook page may be utterly meaningless. This isn’t a cause for despair though! Having realized this you can finally focus your campaign on cultivating quality friends and quality likes. You would be better off with finding just a dozen truly influential friends than hundreds of thousands of friends who can’t help you. Those dozen truly influential people are connected to dozens more, and the word will spread like wildfire if you can find them. Isn’t it easier to contemplate finding a couple dozen really helpful people than face the prospect of hundreds of thousands of Facebook users who are deaf to your campaign?

So relax, and slow down … use a rifle to target your campaigns, not a shotgun, and you will find social media marketing success!

Posted in Social Media | Tagged as: Facebook, Facebook fan page, marketing, marketing fan page, social, social marketing, social media, social media marketing

Using Google To GEO Target Specific Countries

Living in the United States, many searchers go unaware that there are different country versions of Google and that they redirect users to local versions of SERPs based on a visitor’s IP address. For example, if you lived in the UK and went to Google to look for something you would be directed to Google.co.uk and have a completely different set of search results. Possibly even a different language. These searchers will never see your listing even if they type a keyword you rank #1 for on google.com. If you do business in other countries and want to reach those customers, you need to take steps to make sure that Google finds your website relevant to your target country.

First, get a country specific domain name with the correct TLD. If you want high rankings in Germany’s google.de, its much easier if you have the corresponding .de top level domain.

Second, secure an IP address in that country. Rent a hosting server from a company in that country for your TLD. This indicates to google you are targeting that market.

Third, establish that your website is located in the targeted country. Use a postal address from the country and put it in your site footer. Add a small snippet to your about us page about the region.

Fourth, use country specific content on your webpage. If you are targeting Germany for example, why wouldnt your sales copy be in Deutsch? Native languages are a quick way to improve your chances of being listed in Googles results. Even things like tweaking the dialect or adding some common slang words from the region can help.

Fifth, acquire backlinks from other websites in the country you are targeting. Not necessarily simple, but can be done with some research, work and a dash of luck.

Follow these steps and your chances to dominate your targeted country’s SERPs will improve immensely.

Posted in SEO | Tagged as: geo targetted search marketing, local search advertising, search engine marketing, search engine optimization

How To Create A Facebook Fan Page

Facebook is the most popular social networking site with over 500 million active users, half of whom log onto Facebook on any single day. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and according to the website’s statistics, these users spend over 700 billion minutes per month combined! If you do the math, you’ll see that the average Facebook user spends over an hour a day on the site, totaling more than 40 hours a month!

If you want a really broad reach, Facebook is the way to go. Whatever kind of customer or audience member you’re searching for, odds are they’re represented somewhere on Facebook among those many millions of users. Most marketers join Facebook in the hopes of starting a “viral” marketing campaign. Word of mouth campaigns are some of the most effective in converting loyal customers.

If this is you, you may be wondering how to take the very first step and create a Facebook Fan Page. Facebook’s user interface is fairly simple, but not necessarily intuitive to a new member. Here are step by step instructions:

Steps to Creating a Facebook Fan Page:

Sign up for a standard personal account on Facebook. You can’t actually start a Fan Page without some kind of personal account to “administrate” the page. So don’t go searching all over the site for how to open a “business account.” It doesn’t exist.

Once you’ve opened a personal account and set up a basic profile, you can go about setting up a business page. Do you see the panel on the left side of your screen with “News Feed, Messages, Events, Friends” and the like? If you click on “More,” you’ll see another icon which says “Ads and Pages.” Click on it.

On the top of the page, you’ll see a link which says “Pages.” Clicking on it will reveal the following message: “You have not created any pages. Create a Page.” Click on “Create a Page.”

Now you’ll be shown some basic options for your page. You can select from “Local Business or Place,” “Brand or Product,” “Artist, Band or Public Figure,” and several other options. Once you select your choice you’ll fill in several more data points including a name for your Fan Page, category, location, etc. Once you read the Terms of Service (the most important point being that you must officially represent the entity or organization in question in order to create a Fan Page), you can check the ToS agreement box and your page will be created!

Now that your page exists, you can start personalizing it. Click on the big question mark to add an image which will be your page’s avatar. If you then click on “Edit Info” near the top of the screen you’ll have an opportunity to fill in a lot of information about your business or organization. Once you finish filling in the information you can start posting to your Wall and adding photos to establish your presence.

�

A Facebook Fan Page works just like your administrative profile; you can make your page public or private—since you’re running a social media campaign, you probably want to make your page public! You can post to your own Wall and give others the right to post to your Wall. When you post to your Fan Page, it will show up in your administrative stream. When you post to your personal Wall, it won’t show up on your Fan Page. You should make a point to go back to your personal profile and add a link to your Fan Page somewhere in your information where it can be prominently seen. It’s often easier to find friends than fans, so you can cultivate fans via your administrative profile.

There is also a “Discussion” feature which you can use to get the conversation rolling about your product, organization or brand. The “Reviews” section is a good way to start building up testimonials, which are one of the most influential marketing tools you can use to find new fans and customers.

Your Fan Page comes with a photo album. It’s important to note that if you upload photos to your personal photo album you cannot easily transfer them to your Fan Page photo album; you will need to upload them again from scratch. You can’t upload photos to your Fan Page and transfer them to your profile either. This is highly inconvenient, so plan accordingly!

Page Insights is an analytic feature which you can use to find out more information about your active users, new likes and lifetime likes. You can see which users are active over a daily, weekly or monthly period. Further insights break your users down demographically to show you what percentage of your fans are male or female, and what their age brackets are. You can also see how many users you get from each country and what languages your fans are speaking. If people are finding you from backlinks elsewhere on the web, they will display here. You can also check out who is viewing or listening to your videos, audio and photos.

The last step of course is to go find some fans for your Fan Page! Start with friends, business partners or family members who you know will be interested and then start reaching out to the community or industry which you’re a part of. Exchange Facebook likes with other people and support their Fan Pages. Take some time to really interact in the community—part of social media is to actually socialize with people about other topics. You need to show people that you care about them in order for them to start caring about you or whatever it is you are trying to sell or promote. Marketing a Fan Page is not as easy as it sounds – you’ll need to find quality likes, not just a large quantity of likes. This is another topic for another article though!

Posted in Social Media | Tagged as: build, Facebook, Facebook fan page, fan, how, how to make a facebook fan page, media, page, social, social media marketing, to

Quality Signals – The Google Panda Undressed

In the world of search engine marketing, the nickname of the latest algorithm update from Google has internet marketers contemplating an early extinction for pandas everywhere. Short of a shooting spree that still wont help your ranks, a closer look at the beast can help you grasp what Google now considers important about website content and if you have it or not.
Many have argued that quality doesnt matter and search engines aren’t smart enough to know what is good or bad quality. Countless debates have ranged in countless forums and chats on the topic. Most everything is speculation anyways. Until of course, the search engine confirms it publically. Which is what Google did at their webmaster blog last May. It still amazes me when someone is complaining about their ranks dropping while arguing quality doesnt matter. Well, it does folks. The ones that get this are the ones that are still at the top of the SERPs.
If you were affected negatively by the Panda update, there are a few things you can do to bring your ranks back. The first is to make sure all your on page SEO points are covered. If you arent sure what these are, either read up on them here or use our SEO software to analyze your pages.
The second is to use Google’s checklist of quality questions they provided and compare it to your content. Here is what they say are the main points to look for:

Would you trust the information presented in this article?
Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
How much quality control is done on content?
Does the article describe both sides of a story?
Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

They then recommend you either delete your low quality content outright or rewrite / improve it with as much value and uniquness as you can. Developing high quality content is the name of the game now. Even one or two pages of low quality amongst the others can bring the whole site’s rank down. Straight from the horses mouth – “we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.”

Posted in SEO | Tagged as: google friendly, google SEO, search engine optimization, SEO

Research, Analysis and SerpIQ

Have an idea for a website? How about a product or service to sell? Do you even know if there will be any demand, any customers searching for you or your item? Many who start down the path of building a website and doing business online usually start with the website. But success starts with knowing what to build, how to build it and how strong the competition is.
Noob SEO Analysis
You need to research which keywords are used and determine if there is enough online demand to justify the project and it’s expense. Then you need to take your keywords and analyze the top 10 competitors to judge how hard it will be to enter the market. I say the top 10, because the first page is all that matters. Those 10 are the strongest and are your rivals. Look at their on page optimization, analyze their content, research their back link profiles, see their presence and popularity on social media, research their domain authority and in general gauge the difficulty of ranking up against them. Does it have the potential for profit when you factor in all the variables?
Doing the competition research on just one keyword can take several hours. Combined that with your keyword list that could be a 100 terms long, you are talking a significant part of a week to get a good assessment on whether your website can be successful or not. However, you can’t afford not to do the research. You need a solid foundation of knowledge and facts to build your website out on or all your hard work could come crashing down around you and out of the search engine results pages.
A few months ago I was fortunate enough to be in the right time at the right place and got in on the launch of a new website. It was a site that was designed by internet marketers, specifically for internet marketers. These guys have been in the industry quite a few years now and really know their stuff. Some of the things they scan for, I didn’t even know I was overlooking. The whole site is designed to be beginner friendly but has enough in depth information to satisfy even the most anal experts among us. To date their software has saved me literally hundreds of hours of research. I can do much more in less time, can afford to be very thorough even on the smallest of projects. Hell, once I get an idea for a website within 20 minutes I will know whether I want to run with it or move on. I would consider paying double what the monthly subscription is if I had to. Do I exaggerate? Not really. Since I started on, the amount of daily keyword researches I am allotted has tripled, they have added keyword discovery which takes a seed keyword and generates a list from several different sources and even added the ability to white label reports and brand them as your own. All this, without raising the price even once. To me, that is what I look for in a service. I can guarantee you I will be a loyal customer for a long time to come.
I believe in promoting things that work and I will never, ever come to you with something that hasn’t passed the highest of standards (meaning, mine and my colleagues). While there isn’t anything wrong with promoting affiliate services or products, as I do other places every day, I am not an affiliate of SerpIQ. I want to stress this, so you realize how much I value this system. Tool. Software. Whatever you want to label it.
Now, they have a free trial that lets you run a couple keywords through and see what the system can do. Believe me, it will blow your mind at the information it can generate in just a minute or two. Just to whet your appetite though, to tickle your inner eye, dingle your dangle or whatever other stupid idiom you want to use, I am going to share a report with you that I use myself. I run this report once a week, to see how the front page shifts and make sure I’m not missing any edge that could mean a position or two in the SERPs. It lets me keep track and see if any new competitors show their faces or any old ones learn a new trick.
The report is based on one keyword: Domain Name Registration. I set it to compare the page I have optimized for that term with the current top 10 on Google. Right now the page is ranked #13 and has been holding steady for a couple of weeks. A good part of that is due to the research SerpIQ provides.
SerpIQ Competition Analysis Report
Now if you are just starting out and have never done this type of research, this report will show you what you should be looking for and focusing on. If you are a veteran, this report will likely cause you to grab a tissue to wipe the drool off your keyboard. One last point to impress after you’ve looked that over – it took less than 60 seconds to generate. How long would it take you to do it manually? Could you even do it manually?
So if you want more, without further ado, or adont (hah), go check it out.
SerpIQ – The Ultimate SEO Research Tool

Posted in Competition Analysis | Tagged as: measure website competition, search engine competition, seo analysis

Categories
iNinja Blog

Welcome to our new home! The blog has moved off the Domain Name Ninja subdomain onto its very own domain name. Conversations will focus more on marketing and search engines and less on web design since software has made many lessons and skills unnecessary. What software can't teach you though is how to get your website seen. No beating the dead horse of HTML, or rehashing old information or someone else's innovations. Just pure knowledge and thoughts you wont find anywhere else.

Pages

Categories

iNinja Blog