Howie Schwartz from SearchingDot.com recently interviewed Jerry West, an SEO expert. I just finished listening to the MP3. I found the interview very useful. Jerry knows SEO.

Here is some of Jerry’s helpful advice.

Before targeting a keyword, research its competition on the SERPs.
Jerry advised on using these Google commands: allintitle, allinanchor, and allintext. And then, he said to compare the top 10 results from those commands with the top 10 results on the SERPs. If the results are similar, then the competition is too tough. The top 10 sites are well-optimized.  If the results are not similar, that’s evidence that the competition is not too tough.  The top 10 sites are not well-optimized.

Before targeting a keyword, test its conversion rate with pay per click.
Jerry gave 500-1000 uniques as a good testing number. Jerry said each keyword you optimize for should convert at 0.5% or higher. Obviously, Jerry is talking about affiliate offers or sales of your own product. Even if you lose money with per pay click, you will gain information about the most important metric: conversion rate. Also, if you’re using pay per click, don’t use AdSense. You want the whole focus of your webpage on your affiliate offer or your own product.

A quick aside about AdSense: Stop using AdSense if you can help it. Affiliate offers make much more money than AdSense. Even if you’re in a high click value niche like credit cards, you can find an affiliate offer that makes a lot more money. Affiliate marketing takes more work and skill than AdSense, but the payoffs are huge. Affiliate marketing lets you make more money with less traffic.

Once you’ve found a low competition and high conversion keyword, start an SEO campaign.
Begin to build links. Don’t spam with your anchor text, but use variations of the keyword. For example, if you keyword is cheap flights, use other anchor text like find cheap flights, inexpensive flights, and cheap flights here. Also, optimize your webpage by including the keyword in the title tag and body text. If you’ve done your homework well, Jerry predicted you should be able to rank within 30 days.

Conclusion

Research is very important. There’s no point in going after a keyword that’s too competitive or has a low conversion rate. Before you spend time and money trying to rank, make sure to do your homework on each keyword you have in mind.

If you want to get more great SEO advice, download the MP3 and listen to it. It’s only 30 minutes long.

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Don’t you love it when you need an SEO tool for a specific task and then you find a blog post linking to the exact tool you need? I just found a great tool that helps you determine if a site is linking to bad neighborhoods. I found this tool at mikaelrieck.com.  It’s called the Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker Tool.

Right now, I’m doing SEO work for client’s website. He wants me to improve his rankings for a couple of keywords. I know of bloggers that are selling content-based links on their blogs. This tool is helping me evaluate their blogs.

This tool looks through a URL’s links and finds out if there are any questionable links. Also, it goes to the webpages being linked to and finds out if those webpages are linking to questionable sites.

The tool gives warnings if a webpage has a high link density, too many links from blogs (possible sign of blog spamming), or anchor text related to industries where search engine spam is common and non-family friendly industries.

Check it out: Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker Tool

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As an SEO addict, I dream about the perfect link.

This link is on an authority, trusted domain. The domain ranks for a highly searched two word search term. The page the link is on is linked to from the home page. The link is content-based in the body of a high quality article. The link is the first link on the article. Also, the link is above the fold. The article has been dugg, stumbled, and bookmarked. The article is highly relevant to my website’s niche. The link has my desired anchor text. The link points to one of my high-profit pages. The link is the only outbound link on the page.

Examples

If you’re a basketball blogger, you write a great post about basketball shoes (with affiliate links) and True Hoop picks it up.

If you have a tech site, you review an new tech product and Slashdot links to you.

If you’re a left-wing political blogger, you get your commentary piece talked about on Huffington Post.

If you have a social media site, you get reviewed by Tech Crunch.

If you have a productivity blog, you write a tutorial and get mentioned on Lifehacker.

What’s the point?

Why dream about the perfect link? So you can have something to aim for. So you can have a big goal to achieve. And even if you never get the perfect link, as you’re striving for it, I’m sure you’ll get links that aren’t as perfect but are still high quality links.

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Here are my favorite link building resources. Of course, because SEO changes so much, these may not be useful in the future. However, for now, they are immensely helpful. I didn’t include linkbaiting resources. That’s for another post. These resources focus on traditional link building.

12 Different Types of Links and How To Get Them
This article gives practical ways to get different types of links. The types of links include authority links, run of site links, .edu and .gov links, and even offline media links. The article has tips on what to look for with each type of link as well as specific places to find them.

Balancing the Link Equation
A balanced link profile has a much better chance of staying under the radar of Google’s filters. This post gives several ways of balancing your link profile: get different kinds of links, vary your anchor text, and get deep links.

101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website
This huge list of link building tips covers everything from easy free links, directory submission, local links, syndication, and even using pay-per-click as a link building tool. Also, it has 30 link building methods to avoid.

Link Development vs. Traffic Development and Staying with the Times
In this forum post, Sugarrae states, “Link development has morphed into traffic development.” Then, she gives examples of outdated link development methods and contrasts them with the more effective traffic development methods.

Five Link Development Experts: A Group Interview
Another Sugarrae resource. This one is on her blog. It’s a very informative group interview with five of the top link building experts. The questions from the interview came from the experts themselves. Each expert contributed two questions.

Google Search Engine Ranking Factors
SEOMoz gathered 37 search marketing experts and asked them to rate numerous search engine ranking factors. Then, SEOMoz crunched the data and came up with the most important factors. This resource gives a score for each of the factors based on the 37 experts’ votes. I’ve been blogging through the top 10 factors. Right now I’m on the 7th most important factor.

John Scott on Link Buying
I trust John Scott to give good link building tips. He runs a great directory and forum over at V7N. In this article, he gives 10 tips for buying links.

What are your favorite link building resources?

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I have some friends looking to start their first website. They knew I make money online so they asked me for advice. Here is what I plan to share with my friends. These following principles can help new webmasters have a great start in internet marketing.

Follow your passions.
Too many new webmasters build sites on niches they’re not interested in. That’s a recipe for failure. There are so many benefits for having passion for your niche. You won’t run out of things to say. Webmastering will be enjoyable, which gives you long-term staying power. Your passion will attract like-minded people. Your passion will attract links. Building a successful website as a beginner is already difficult. Being passionate about your niche makes it easier.

Pick a low competition niche.
This is an non-intuitive principle for some internet marketers. A lot of them advise differently. They say, enter a niche where money is being spent. Now, I don’t disagree with that statement. However, much of the high-profit niches are very competitive. For a new webmaster, it will be discouraging to enter these niches. Can you see a beginner trying to rank with his site in the credit card industry?

New webmasters should narrow their niche to a less competitive sub-niche. Remember there are only 10 spots on the SERPs. If you want to get into the credit card industry, build a site about rewards credit cards. Or be more specific and build a site about travel rewards credit cards. I bet there’s even a market for airline travel rewards credit cards. The more specific your niche, the lower your competition. And the lower your competition, the more likely you will rank. Also, your conversions will be much better because your site will more targeted than the general industry sites.

Choose a profitable niche.
I’m assuming you want to make money Some niches don’t have a big enough market to support a webmaster financially. For example, the boardgame niche. I actually love boardgames and thought of starting a boardgame site. However, in my research, I realized not a lot of money is spent on boardgames.

What if all the niches your passionate about aren’t profitable? Then, you need to find a profitable niche and develop a passion for it. You don’t have to become a guru or an expert (although, that could definitely help). You can build a site where you write about what you’re learning in your niche. You can get links as experts may link to you and want to help you learn. Also, your site would be a great place to hang out for other beginners in the niche.

Conclusion

What do these 3 principles have in common? Research.

Research is the basic foundation of quality webmastering. Just because you want to start a site, doesn’t mean you should build it without doing research. Think about the niches you’re interested in or might be interested in. Check the competition and profitability of those niches. Finally, when you have all 3 principles in place, start building your site.

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Years ago, Google didn’t have so many spam filters. Today Google filters sites for many reasons. Here are 7 of those reasons.

90% of your links point to the front page, or top-level domain.
Most spammy sites don’t get a lot of links to their internal pages because they have low quality content. It’s easy to forget your internal pages. Build backlinks to them.

90% of your links are site-wide links. Most spammy sites don’t get a lot of content-based links. Yahoo and MSN put a lot more weight on site-wide links, but Google penalizes sites with a high percentage of these links. Focus on getting content-based links.

90% of your links come from 5 domains. This looks like you’re linking from other sites you own. You can have hundreds of links, but if they all come from a small number of domains, you’ll get filtered. Build links from many different sites.

90% of your links come from low quality sites. I’m not just talking PR. PR is just one of the equations. What kind of sites link to you? Do they have good link profiles? Do they have many links? Do quality sites link to them? Get links from quality sites.

90% of your links come from the same type of site. You may love article directories, press releases, or directories. Just don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Google likes sites that get links from different kinds of sites. Get links from blogs, forums, static sites, wikis, web directories, bookmarking sites, social voting sites, article directories, press release sites, etc.

90% of your links are reciprocal. Reciprocal links are so 2002. Reciprocal links should be less than 15% of your profile. Focus on getting one-way links.

90% of your links have the same anchor text. Can we say manipulation? This might work with Yahoo and MSN search, but Google is smarter. Vary your anchor text by using synonyms, related terms, non-keywords (”click here”), and even images. Also, don’t tell people what anchor text to use. You may not rank as quickly but at least you won’t lose your rankings once Google realizes what you’re up to.

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I’ve already talked about free SEO tools, but I found 3 new tools that are very helpful.

Social Poster

I found this tool from Raj. This tool prefills the submission forms of 40 social sites including the high traffic ones like Digg, Netscape, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us. If you use social media to drive traffic to your sites, this tool can save you a lot of time. Before using Social Poster, just make sure you’re logged into the sites you want to submit to.

Also, Social Poster has a submission bookmarklet that works with FireFox. The bookmarklet saves you even more time. Simply go to the URL you want to submit and then click on the bookmarklet. It will fill in the all the fields in the submission form except for the description field.

SEO Digger

I found this cool tool on Sphinn. (By the way, Sphinn is a great place to chill with other search marketers.) This tool holds a lot of promise. I’ve been waiting for somthing like this.

SEO Digger goes through popular keyword SERPs and gives you the top 20 rankings of your site. Basically, this tool tells you which popular keywords your site ranks for. SEO Digger has 44 million keywords in its database. Also, for each keyword you rank for, it gives the keyword’s search volume data from Wordtracker and Overture. Nifty.

If you don’t see your site while using this tool, you’re not ranking for the keywords in SEO Digger’s database. However, you can send keywords to SEO Digger and they’ll add them.

Make sure to register or you won’t be able to use the tool on your internal pages.

Internal Pages PR Checker

I found this tool via Bob Meets World. This tool looks at a domain and spits out the PR of the internal pages in the domain. Also, it can sort the internal pages by PR. You can use this information find high PR internal pages on your site and then sell links on those pages. Also, using this tool is great way to see if your internal pages are getting enough link juice.

New Features On Our Backlink Checker

While we’re talking about free SEO tools, check out our backlink checker. We recently added two new features. It now tells you if a backlink has the nofollow tag. Also, it gives the anchor text of each backlink.

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I just found this SEO story on Sphinn. It’s about a teenager named Chloe Spencer. Her dad, a search marketer, helped her start a blog about Neopets. Neopets are virtual pets that many teens love.

Early last year, Chloe started doing keyword research on Neopet