We Do Search Engine Optimization.

WordPress is a great platform for websites mostly due to the amazing flexibility and simplicity. Optimizing your WordPress blog for SEO can be easy as well. There are a variety of WordPress SEO plugins available for free that can give your site a huge boost in the SERPS. In most cases, all you need to do is upload the plugin and activate it! Here’s a list of some of the top WordPress plugins to help you with your SEO effort.

All In One SEO Pack

The All In One SEO Pack is a vital WordPress SEO tool. Most importantly, it allows you to write custom Meta Title, Description and Keywords tags for each individual post you write. It also allows you to noindex your categories and archives pages, which will prevent any duplicate content penalties. This plugin takes seconds to install, is frequently updated by the author, and an absolute must have!

Google XML Sitemaps

Another great plugin – Google XML Sitemaps is pretty self-explanitory. Once installed and set up, it will automatically generate an XML sitemap and submit it to Google and several other search engines every time you add content for your site.

AddThis Social Bookmarking WordPress Plugin

This plugin automatically adds a small social bookmarking bar at the bottom of your blog posts. This will help you, and your visitors easily bookmark your new posts with all the popular sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Propeller – just to name a few.

Popularity Contest

This is a great plugin that will automatically calculate your most popular blog posts based on a variety of different factors that you can modify. You can display the most popular posts in your sidebar, and the plugin will update them automatically. This is a great way to drive traffic to your most popular pages, and also to get more of your blog posts well indexed, and pass page rank on to those pages.

FeedBurner Feedsmith

With the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin, you can submit your feed to FeedBurner, then download the plugin. Once you activate the plugin, it will redirect your regular RSS feed through FeedBurner.

Sphere Related Content Plugin

Here’s a great plugin that very few people are taking full advantage. Sphere matches news articles from around the web with related stories on blogs. Joining the Sphere network and adding the plugin will give you a chance to get featured on websites like CNN, Time, AOL, Reuters and more, potentially driving hundreds of visitors to your site for free!

Google Webmaster Tools can now display on your igoogle.com homepage. This is a huge competitive advantage for google, as having your website stats on your start page is convenient and helpful. One more reason to use google.com/ig for your homepage – I do. GWT is the only location that shows accurate link count data and any website spidering issues.

Steps add your website stats to your Google homepage

1. Login to GWT
2. Navigate to Tools -> Gadgets
3. Choose the datapoints of interest

Now you can see all your important website data and get immediate alerts to any potential problems with the Googlebot. Gbot now has one more hook into webmasters screen real estate, and it is slowly taking over our lives.

I’m a sucker for good data, and the GWT doesn’t disappoint. Hat tip to Shoemoney for this Google gadget.

Google just released Ad Manager, their custom ad serving tool. This slick program allows you to serve different ads on your site through one interface.

So for example if you have sold targeted ads for 1/3 of your pages you can display your own ads, and the rest can be adsense/doubleclick backfill. This gives you the most targeted ads, and highest monetization opportunity.

Some benefits of using Google to serve your ads

• Interface available in 32 languages: Do you prefer to work in French or Vietnamese or Hungarian? Now you can – Ad Manager also supports international currencies .
• Ad network management: Easily manage your third-party ad networks in Ad Manager to automatically maximize your network driven revenue – upload your own advertising graphics.
• Automatic macro insertion: Save time and avoid tagging errors since Ad Manager now automatically detects and inserts macros from most popular 3rd party vendors.
• Creative preview on live site: Preview the look and feel of ads on your live site to ensure ads look as expected before you start a live advertising campaign.
• Day and Time Targeting: Don’t want your orders to run on weekends? No problem. Set any new line items you create to run only during specific hours or days, in 15 minute increments. Use day and time targeting in addition to geography, bandwidth, browser, , operating system, language, domain and custom targeting.

Ad Manager requires an adsense login so apply for an AdSense account if you do not have one.

Unfortunately the adsense referral program appears to be discontinued so you cannot receive commissions for sending new signups. The new Google Affiliate Network site is here and currently is not integrated with your existing adsense login account.

This is a threat to OpenX, an onpen source software solution known previously as OpenAds and phpAdsNew, for managing the advertising campaigns on websites. I first used phpadsnew in 2000 just after they forked the code from phpads. My only criticism of Openx is the cumbersome interface which is not intuitive and is very difficult for clients to learn.

Read about the Ad Manager feeatures on the Adsense blog and at TC.

Use Google Base, Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com and Shopzilla can help your site achieve better traffic. It is better to be a part of online shopping networks if you sell products. Joining shopping aggregators broadens exposure and gives you access to third party review sites, but can also produce low ROI.

Essential Feed Checklist

1. Do everything you can to get reviews. Reviews will increase secondary sales, and store reviews can have independent search engine results, possibly giving you more than one position on page 1.
2. Watch your ROI. Shopping aggregators do not allow you to set CPC prices, so you are at their mercy. If you don’t make sales from shopping network clicks, lower your spend or choose a different ecommerce aggregator.

An anonymous retailer says that using Google Base has helped him/her get an increase in traffic and the person encourages others to try it out.

“every[site] we’ve submitted a product feed for is doing surprisingly well with it.”

Reviews are hard to get with only 3% of the people who buy actually leave a review. One way to encourage users to leave a review is by offering a coupon or discount for reviews.

Here is an example of what one ecommerce vendor did to encourage reviews:

Break out the adwords budget a bit, get that nice shopping cart logo on adwords and start driving traffic to your top 10 selling items. If you use two or three check out methods, a discount for using Google checkout. We used a 5% off your order type of coupon we made in our Google Checkout panel, leading to a review page.

The more shopping engines you advertise on the more reviews Google will pick up, assuming you get reviews on those other shopping sites.

Leverage online sites to maximize product reviews. Social shopping is the promise of web 2.0 retail.

Pepperjam Network is a new affiliate network that has won over the affiliate marketing world. They have taken the best features of Commission Junction, Linkshare, Connect Commerce and created a great affiliate platform with personalized service and true customer support.

To inspire new users and existing publishers, Pepperjam is offering bloggers $10 for every post about Pepperjam Network news or tools. Bloggers also receive an additional $7 for every new affiliate you refer to the program. Your new affiliates receive $10 as a sign-on bonus.

So start writing about pepperjam to increase your blog income and give new Pepperjam affiliates a $10 signup credit. This is equivalent to a $10 copuon just for signing up to this affiliate network.

I have used Pepperjam for nearly 6 months and have found many exclusive affiliate offers including SEOmoz & ebay. They provide the only 3rd party Ebay affiliate program, so if you dispute the tracking system on the Ebay partner network ebaypartnernetwork.com, try Pepper Jam instead.

If that’s not enough incentive to post about Pepperjam consider the 2008 Inc. 500 list was officially released today announcing that Pepperjam ranks as one of the top 100 fastest growing privately-held companies in the United States of America.

Pepperjam’s 2008 Inc. 500 ranking is #70 with three-year revenue growth of 2,447.5%. Pepperjam must have an extremely satisfied clientele that is driving it’s growth.

I have used Twitter.com for several months and love it. I have found real value in public microblogging and consider it an important part of social media marketing.

Follow me at Twitter.com/Cvos

Checking my account today I saw this unique color collage from my random followers. These people created unique color shifted avatars to increase their exposure, and it has worked. Publishing your unique thoughts, insights, and comments to relevant stories will incease your twitter authority. Make your tweets count and you will be rewarded – quality rules over quantity.

This graphic illustrates the value of using unique social media avatar images and changing them often.

Some of the SEO’s that Google loves to hate have been on a green trip recently. Can you identify these savvy SEO’s that have gone green?

There are several ways to make money online, and some of my favorite are affiliates and CPA. Affiliate networks are regular sites that have signed up to give an advertiser a specified percentage on all completed sales. A webmaster places a targeted link with affiliate tracking code on their site, and if a user clicks through to the publisher’s website and makes a purchase, the affiliate receives a portion of the sale, generally between 5% – 10%. To learn more about how to make money online try going to industry conferences and local events. We have a discount code for Affiliate Summit which is the largest affiliate marketing conference in the world.

Affiliate networks

• Commission Junction – the largest affiliate network, with most recognized brands. CJ grows by 3-10 new affiliate publishers per day. Good reporting and a fairly easy to use layout. Reasonable response from customer service. Offers brands on five different national markets, including Sweden, Germany, France, United States and United Kingdom.
• Shareasale – has the best reputation among affiliate managers and super affiliates. SAS is the most affiliate friendly program available, and while it does not have a lot of big name companies they are a quality company.
• Pepperjam Network – PepperJam is a new affiliate network run by a gregarious search marketer, and I have high hopes for this affiliate program. Many of the sop search engine optimization consulting forms and conferences including Search Engine Strategies and SMX have signed up with PJ. This is a very positive indicator of a trustworthy program.
• LinkConnector – technologies, provided by LinkConnector, are the Naked Link Technology and Affiliate Connections. The Naked Link Technology allows you, as an affiliate, to link directly to the merchant’s site without using a third party URL. This gives your site more of an editorial feel and mayincrease your earnings. Affiliate Connections helps to find optimal promotions and maximize EPX. If you choose various promotions to put on your site this technology will know which one that’s the most profitable at the moment and optimize its display.
• LinkShare – this affiliate program was a dying dog before being purchased by the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten. They have a new admin interface and better management tools. Second only to Commission Junction for big brand representation – most mall department stores are represented in Link Share.
• Performics – lots of large companies, decent interface but substandard support. Performics and Connect Commerce seem to not want you to know they have real people running their website.
• ClickBank – good solution for digital downloads, ebooks, subscriptions, writing and one off items. Huge downsides to Click Bank are they require 5 unique purchases before they will send you a commission check
• Share Results – smaller affiliate network with less recognized brands. There is very little data on shareresults.
• LinkTrust – another small affiliate publisher network, unsure if it is worth signing up for.
• DirectTrack – Old school affiliate program that serves niche markets. Good affiliate system if you like the specific publishers
• Kolimbo – notable for the myaffiliateprogram.com system which lets you run your affiliate program from your own domain name. Affiliates never leave your site. The downside is it is harder to attract super affiliates who may be running hundreds of offers concurrently.

CPA networks

• Azoogle – long standing cost per action affiliate network with a reasonable selection of affiliate publishers and good affiliate support. I have always been able to reach Azoogle Ads via phone if necessary.
• Incentaclick – Recently renamed to CX Digital, this cpa affiliate network
• ClickBooth.com

These are good at their intended purpose and are optimized for sending traffic to landing pages. CPA leads can convert well if the traffic exactly matches the offer and landing page setup. These users are not looking to browse, they are looking to buy.