(Click to Enlarge)

China will eventually fail.  It won’t be 50 years from now, it will be much sooner.  The reason behind it is simple.  People can only have one child.  What?  Wouldn’t this prevent overpopulation and lower need for resources?  On the short term yes.  On the long term there is a much LARGER problem that looms a couple generations in the future.

The problem is that nobody takes care of China’s old people so the responsibility falls to their child (Not Children because they can only have 1).  When their child gets too old, the caring for them falls to their child’s child.  1 “Working Class” person might have to take care of their parents and both sets of grand parents (or even great grand parents).  This means 1 person would be taking care of 6+ other adults.  By 2050 about half of the population is over 50!  Does this sound like a powerhouse to you?

About this time I suspect China’s ultra-controlling ways will finally meet the breaking point and the few youth left will finally be able to overthrow what is left of the communist ways.

While it’s all milk and honey now for China, what brings them down will eventually be the very people that built them into a financial power house.

Part 7 of our series on How to Rank for Keywords

In the past 6 parts of how to rank for keywords, we showed you how to use a FreeSEOReport to find out where you rank for keywords and how to change your pages to rank better.  The last part of the puzzle is how to get links to your site.

A link to your site with keywords is a vote from that site saying “This site is about [THIS]”.  There are a couple of things that people argue about when trying to rank for keywords.  These things include “How old is the website”, “How old are the links”, “Are the keywords in the domain name?”, etc…

The only things that people don’t argue about is “More links are better” and “Content is King”.

More links means you are getting more votes.  Not all votes are equal, a link from the NY Times is way better than a link from Joe Schmoe.

“Content is King” means that you need more and more content in order to rank well.  For many people this means more blog posts.  It could also mean more reviews, more products, bigger product descriptions, more photos/pictures (with alt tags), etc…

There are a ton of ways to get links, the easiest ways though are by using sites like.
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- Twitter
- Facebook
- Digg
- Delicious

You need to use other ways too.  These however are the easiest ways.  You want to sign up for an account for each.  Every time you post a new article (remember, content is king!) you go to each of these websites and link to your page (more links are better) with a description of your article.

A lot of people out there will stop posting after a few weeks and won’t make it part of their process to get external links to each article.  This is why people fail.  They put in a whole bunch of initial work, get distracted by something new or get bored and leave something to wither and die.  You have to constantly be adding content if you want the search engines to like you more.  You also can’t really “Fake” a good user experience.  It is so difficult to fake that a user had a good experience that you might as well just give the visitor a good experience.

Up Next:
- Getting Bigger Badder Links

Geiger Counter : A device for measuring levels of radiation.

With the recent big radiation scare in Japan it pays to be prepared.  For that reason I am showcasing 2 devices that make you aware of high levels of radiation.  Devices that measure radiation are called Geiger Counters.

The first and more expensive of the 2 Geiger Counters is for professional measurement of radiation.  This one costs nearly $400 and is a little more complex to use but HIGHLY accurate.  Also this one can take 6 to 9 months to arrive as they seem be very back ordered.

The second Geiger Counter is more practical and useful to carry around everywhere.  This Geiger counter is called NukAlert.  The NukAlert can even attach your car keys.  Odds are, if the NukAlert Geiger Counter alerts you of high radiation you will need your car keys to get to a safe place.  This is about half the price and a lot more practical for every day radiation awareness.

Chances are that you will never need either of these Geiger Counters, but if you are extra cautious, we have done the research for you.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Part 6 of how to rank for keywords was originally supposed to be update on adding keywords to my blog on every page and how to build some backlinks.  As is life, sometimes things don’t go according to plan (sorry for the cliché)

I just got this email from FreeSEOReport with some really good information so I thought I would delay the original lesson for next time.  The email is as follows.

Its been a couple days since we ran your initial report on geiger for http://www.jaygeiger.com.

I wanted to alert you of 2 things.

1. We took the liberty of asking Google what other keywords you should think about for http://www.jaygeiger.com.
2. We looked at what keywords your competitors are getting the bulk of their traffic for using the SemRush toolset.

We did both of these things for you 100% for free because we know the importance of these items and we want you to get the most out of freeseoreport.com.

The only thing you know for sure is that you don’t know anything .

What I mean by that is there are tons of keywords that people are searching for in Google that are very closely related to what you are optimizing your website for now.  These keywords are low hanging fruit for you to nab and put in your basket.

At the same time there are keywords out there that are your competitors have been holding close to their chest that you are probably not even aware of.   They have had it too good for way to long with these “secret” keywords and it’s time for you to get your share of the pie!

So log in now here => http://www.freeseoreport.com/reports/
And in your dashboard you will notice a new column called “Keywords
Found“.
See this image if you have issues finding it:

Click on the numbers there and instantly you will see a listing of keywords that your competitors are using to increase visitors to their websites.

Then if you want to know how you can rank your site better for those keywords just click the “run report” button next to the icon!  It’s that simple!

If you have a subscription to freeseoreport.com you can run reports for every single one of these keywords if you want!

As always please let us know if you have any questions,

The freeseoreport.com team.

So following the instructions I got 2 lists at the bottom of the post.  The original report includes search volume, number of Google results and a link to delve deeper, I just “copy and pasted” them here so that other information isn’t included.  Some are generic and others are not.  “Teddy Geiger” and “Geiger Counter” are 2 big phrases I could blog about as well to help my site rank.  Using “Geiger Catalog” and other Geiger products from Geiger Promotional Products might also be a good idea as well as misspelling Geiger a couple times on purpose. (Gieger, Giger, etc…)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

In Parts 1 through 4 we showed you how to get your keyword status report from FreeSEOReport.  From that you can start looking into where you currently rank and also how to make sure your web pages are valid and why each page needs a unique Title Tag.  We also showed you how we use it to rank in the top 10 for Geiger.

The next thing we need to talk about are “alt tags” and “keyword density”.

An alt tag can be thought of as a title or short description for an image.  Here is a small example…

That is a picture of me with the alt tag “Geiger”.  The alt tag is only shown to the user if the image was not available.  To the normal user this has no effect whatsoever.  Alt tags to affect Search Engines such as Google though.  Alt tags are good because the count as keywords but don’t get in the way of the user’s experience.  It is necessary to use keywords to get ranked for them. (There are exceptions, but for now we will ignore them).  A website about ponies should have “pony”, “ponies” and other pony related words mentioned through out them.  Alt tags are meant to explain what is in a picture as well as serve as keywords to search engines.

This brings us to our next topic, Keyword Density.  Keyword Density measures how often your keyword is used on the page.  Rule of thumb is that you never want your KW Density over 10% and I think that may be pushing it.

Opening up my FreeSEOReport we scan down to the section labeled “Body text” we can see what it says.

Well, other than number 5 and 6 of the search results, all have a higher keyword density than I do.  Looking at the suggestions on page…

Suggestions
- Make sure that the keyword you are targeting with this page really is in your body text
- Avoid keyword stuffing in body text. Remember – each page should be targeted to different keywords.
- Put main keywords closer to the top of the document
- Don’t hide text through color by blending text color with background color
- Avoid too high keyword density (>10%) as it may lead to penalty (use synonyms, related words and LSI words this will help you find them)
- Using the table above to compare your site to your competition (pay attention to keyword density)

So we can see that we might want to consider adding a blurb that uses “Geiger” in it a couple more times to raise our keyword density at least up to 2-4%.  Doing so might really help out our ranking.

We will be adding a little something to our WordPress template so that Google knows for sure that we are about “Geiger”.  Before we do, we need to make sure we can measure if we are getting improvements.  To do so we need to track our keywords and if they fluctuate up and down.  Luckily FreeSEOReport does that for us if we get a paid subscription.  Better yet, the first month only costs $1.00 for now.

Luckily we did this before making changes…

We fell from 9th place to 11th place.  This happens often for some websites.  It is good to know that now because we wouldn’t want to second guess ourselves after we add “Geiger” to the main page of our website a couple of times.

Next:
- Update on our Keyword Additions
- Building some backlinks

Click Here to get 1 month of Advanced Tools from FreeSEOReport while the offer lasts.

Previous “Rank for Keywords” posts…
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

The Basics of on Page Optimization

There are 2 ways to rank better for your site.
1. Change your site (add content/change format)
2. Get Links

Your site is 5% of the work.  Links are 95% of the work.  However, bad site content/format might make the links less effective.

Going through the FreeSEOReport let’s look at the part we can change immediately.  Title and Validation are the easiest things to change.

In the FreeSEOReport search for Document Title.

Title is VERY important in SEO.  Each page needs a different title.  Without different titles the Google and the other search engines initially think each page is the same.  Imagine a world where all of your friends have the same name, how would anybody know who you are talking about?!  So each page must have a title unique from the rest.

For my Geiger website I have Geiger in every title.  The part 3 post had the title “How to Rank for Keywords Part 3 – Geiger”. Maybe it would be better to have Geiger first, but if my main purpose is to rank for the keyword “Geiger” somewhere in every title.  This blog uses WordPress so that is very easy to do in the admin panel.  If you use another software or build your own website, you will want to be sure that each page is unique and contains keywords what that page is about.

To a lesser extent you will also want a unique meta description for each page.  Keyword tags are even less important and usually ignored by search engines because they are so spammy.

Next if you go to the “HTML Code and page load time” in your FreeSEOReport you will see something like the following.  We underlined our site.

From this page you can view the general size of your main page, click “Check” to check the validation of the page or click “view” to view the load time.

You want a page to be mostly valid.  Being valid means that you don’t have any broken tags and the HTML is all 100% acceptable.  This can be a harder thing to fix than one would think.  My personal rule of thumb is to try your best as I don’t think search engines penalize too much for a few missing closing HTML tags.

The load time may also be very important.  Maybe you images are huge or you have a lot of off site content that takes a long time to load.  Clicking on view will point that out.  Remember, if it is legal to host the content on your site it is much better SEO to do so.  Linking/embedding images is like a “Vote” for that image, so why not vote for yourself instead of a strangers website.

Your Tasks:
1. Make Sure your pages have unique titles
2. Check to make sure your pages are (mostly) validated.

Coming up Next in Step 5:
- Alt Tags
- Keyword Density

Step 6 and beyond – Link Building and tracking

If you are following along and haven’t gotten your free report yet, do so now
FREE SEO REPORT

Graffiti CMS was once a great up and coming blog software running on ASP.net.  Unfortunately, the company that was programming this free software gave up on it for a good reason, they focused their resources on software that actually made money.  Graffiti then went open source and can still be downloaded here. Download Graffiti Link

WordPress exists as another free option but is written in PHP.  A lot of people out there want something in .Net (don’t worry PHPers, I’m not trying to talk you out of loving L.A.M.P.)

Thant’s when I found BlogEngine.net.  The only problem was how do I export my posts from Graffiti to BlogEngine.  BlogEngine uses BlogML as their import/export format, Graffiti does not.

I ran off to Google and found only complex ways of getting my blog exported to BlogML.  Who wants  to copy DLLs all over the place, use wrongly coded stuff, etc…

Since I needed those posts for my own reasons I decided to pass on my code to you too.

Simply extract from THIS ZIP FILE (Export.aspx and Export.aspx.cs)  into your Graffiti install then browse to www.yourblog.com/export.aspx and you will get the BlogML.  Save it to a file and you can import it right into your BlogEngine blog.

Good luck!

If you haven’t read part 1 and part 2 yet, please do so first!
How to Rank for Keywords Part 1
How to Rank for Keywords Part 2

A case study on how I will improve my rank for the keyword Geiger.

As we detailed before, the first step to ranking for a keyword is to find out where you rank first.  For that we used FreeSEOReport.  Today we look at the results of that.

(Click here to check your ranking using FreeSEOReport)

You basically can get started with the report by clicking on Keyword/URL or Keywords Found or the Full Report.  Each take you to a different report.

For us we will click on “Full Report”.  You can download the PDF and follow along as well (here)

At the bottom of the first page of the PDF (at the top of the screen if you are viewing your own report in your internet browswer) you will see “Report overview- analyzed web pages”.

We can see that we are #9 and on the first page of most Google results.  This is good news.  Moving up a couple of positions should not be too hard.  We will explore some link building steps in the next steps and go through other ways that will allow us to become more trusted for the “Geiger” keyword.

Some methods will be free and others will be paid.  We will be experimenting with various “legal” ways to get Google Love.  Stay tuned.

Rank for Keywords Part 1

By now you should have received a confirmation email from FreeSEOReport that looked something like this.

Click on the confirmation and you will be prompted with a password screen.

Enter your new password and click “Proceed”, you will then get a message saying that you can login.

After confirmation I got the following message while the report was being generated.

The above message mentions “Conversion Doubler”, if you look back at PART 1 it is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to CONVERT your visitors.  This is the #1 reason why people fail online.  50% of the work is getting people to your site that want to buy/test/demo/sign-up.  The other 50% of your time is spent trying to find out what converts.  Changing the background or a sign-up button can double the amount sales you receive.  That’s why when you get the above email, make sure you look at the special Conversion Doubler link in the email.  This will give you 1 month free.  We can’t give you the same deal here so make sure you use the link in the email.

Sorry for the tangent, I just feel that the best nation in the world it the kind of place where everybody knows how to succeed.

After a few more moments you should get another email with something like this.

At this point you have done everything you need to start reviewing where you stand.  That is A LOT of work.  Some other sites out there promise a PR or SERPS checker.  All of the ones that I have ever tried were broke or simply put just wrong.  FreeSEOReport was started by Jeremy Schoemaker who has a lot of success with websites.  So he had his team package up the tools he uses and built FreeSEOReport (think FreeCreditReport but without the SPAM or krappy theme music)

If you haven’t signed up for your report yet, here’s the link again.
FreeSEOReport