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COPYRIGHT, LEGAL NOTICE AND DISCLAIMER


This is not a free eBook, and shall not be distributed freely.
You can only obtain a copy of this eBook by purchasing it through http://www.nicolasprudhon.com or through one of our registered reseller. This publication is protected under the US Copyright Act of 1976 and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws, and all rights are reserved, including resale rights: you are not allowed to give or sell this Guide to anyone else without the express authorization of Nicolas Prudhon. 21 Days SEO Mastery is a registered trademark of Nicolas Prudhon and shall not be used by a third party without the express consent of Nicolas Prudhon. Please note that much of this publication is based on personal experience. Although the author and publisher have made every reasonable attempt to achieve complete accuracy of the content in this Guide, they assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Also, you should use this information as you see fit, and at your own risk. Your particular situation may not be exactly suited to the examples illustrated here; in fact, it's likely that they won't be the same, and you should adjust your use of the information and recommendations accordingly. Any trademarks, service marks, product names or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if we use one of these terms. Finally, use your head. Nothing in this Guide is intended to replace common sense, legal, medical or other professional advice, and is meant to inform and entertain the reader. - Take the next step and Unleash the power of Advanced SEO Mastery Page | 2

Copyright 2009. Nicolas Prudhon. All rights reserved worldwide.

TABLE OF CONTENT
Title........................................................................................................................... Copyright, Legal Notice and Disclaimer........................................................... Table of Content.................................................................................................... Introduction...................................................................................................... Part 1: Keyword Mastery ................................................................................. Day 1: Analyzing the Viability of Your Niche .............................................. Day 2: Building Your Keyword List ................................................................. Day 3: Qualifying Your Keywords ................................................................. Day 4: Grouping Your Keywords .................................................................. Day 5: Evaluating Your Keywords Difficulty ................................................ Part 2: Site Structure Mastery .......................................................................... Day 6: Mapping Your Site Structure ............................................................. Day 7: Understanding Link Juice Flow.......................................................... Day 8: Sculpting Your Site Structure ............................................................. Day 9: Cascading Style Sheet Design ......................................................... Day 10: Developing on WordPress Engine ................................................. Part 3: Onsite SEO Mastery.............................................................................. Day 11: Setting Up Your Analytics ................................................................ Day 12: Mastering the Title Tag ..................................................................... Day 13: Leveraging on the Meta Description ............................................ Day 14: Optimizing Your Content ................................................................. Day 15: Mastering Picture Links .................................................................... Day 16: Internal Link Structure ....................................................................... Day 17: Onsite Analysis with IBP .................................................................... Part 4: Offsite SEO Mastery.............................................................................. Day 18: Understanding Links ......................................................................... Day 19: Outrank Your Competition ............................................................. Day 20: Finding Link Partners ......................................................................... Day 21: Putting It All Together ....................................................................... 1 2 3 4 6 6 12 25 31 37 46 46 54 60 69 78 82 82 94 104 110 119 125 132 142 142 149 157 162

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Conclusion.......................................................................................................

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INTRODUCTION
Any Change, Any Loss, Does Not Make Us Victims. Others Can Shake You, Surprise You, Disappoint You, But They Cant Prevent You From Acting, From Taking The Situation Youre Presented With And Moving On. No Matter Where You Are In Life, No Matter What Your Situation Is, You Can Always Do Something. You Always Have a Choice And The Choice Can Be Power.

Let me tell you right away that by purchasing this eBook, you just made the best investment possible for your online business. This 21 Days SEO Mastery training course is designed to be easy to understand for the newbie, yet full of tips and techniques that even experienced online marketers will be delighted to learn. In this book, you are going to learn all the basic techniques of Search Engine Optimization that anybody can duplicate, apply and teach. Success is guaranteed to all of you, if you follow these techniques! Some of you have more knowledge or/and experience than other, youll just profit even more, but for the people with no knowledge or experience, this method will still make you succeed! And this is the true power of this program.
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In each section, you will be offered a lesson, followed by an exercise. Make sure that you follow all the steps in the right order. This training course is self sufficient, which means that by itself it can guarantee you success in your online business, regardless of your niche. My goal here is not feed you with all the search engine optimization techniques possible existing in the world, but with only those that have been proven fast and effective, and above all Duplicable! Before you even start, I want to make sure that you have the right paradigm to make your network marketing enterprise succeed: Although its labeled Online Business, you should focus more on the business side online, than being online trying to do business. Regarding the expenses (financial, time, personal) involved with your online business, always focus on the return, not the cost. Do not look at how much it cost to acquire tools for your online business, but rather how much money you can make with them. Then ask yourself if its worth or not.

If you dont, youll just spend your time missing great chances to develop your business, or simply not giving it any chance to succeed at all.

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John F. Kennedy once said:

We should not let our fears hold us back from pursuing our hopes. So, without anymore delay, lets get started!

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DAY 1: ANALYZING THE VIABILITY OF YOUR NICHE


Money isn't the most important thing in life, but it's reasonably close to oxygen on the gotta have it scale. Zig Ziglar -

Learn how to pick your own battles.


This may sounds like a joke for many of you, but this is the primary reason why many sites or online businesses fail online. Having a niche marketing strategy, that is focusing on a specific topic rather than a broad query allows you to perform better as you are competing with much less other sites on internet.

Your visitors will be much more targeted and thus will convert better.

Getting yourself into an overly competitive market is a recipe for disaster and a way to ensure that your site will never be found. On the other hand, entering into an overly niche market may result in insufficient traffic volume to monetize your site or store and ensure your survival. Remember, because you think you got a great idea doesnt mean that other people share your feelings!
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In the end, its all about money


Depending on the nature of your site, the way you plan to monetize your efforts may differ from site to site. However, as a general rule, youll be monetizing your site through one or more of those following methods: Ecommerce selling products, be it physical or digital. Affiliate Marketing selling other peoples product and getting a commission for it. Advertising selling ads space on your site. Services selling your skills.

Regardless of the method you intend to use, you should have a number in mind as to how much money minimum you expect or you need to make out of your website for it to be worth your time. I wont elaborate much on it as this goes with all the information you should have gathered already in your business plan. You have one right? It would be foolish to start a business without one! Ok, for the sake of illustration, Im going to say that I want to start a new business online selling nail polish. After my estimation, I also know that Ill be making $1 profit for each bottle sold, and based on the marketing strategy I have established, I estimate that Ill be able to sell 2 bottles to each customer in average.
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Now, based on my expenses and personal needs, I want $2,000 of net profit per month to make this project worth.

Converting Financial Needs Into Traffic Volume


The average conversion rate online is 1-2%, if you do better, good for you, but for our example, we are going to base ourselves on a 2% conversion rate. Based on the data we have, I need 1,000 orders to be placed on my store each month. With a 2% conversion rate, that would bring my required traffic volume to be 50,000 visitors each month, or about 1,700 daily. Analytics in SEO have demonstrated that a #1 in Google will get you about 30% of the traffic volume for that specific keyword, and having #1 and #2 listings (double or indented listing), would get you about 70% of the traffic volume for that search term. Although getting a #1 listing is our goal, its really not easy to obtain, but even so, it would mean that wed be getting only 30% of the traffic volume for a given keyword, which for us lead to the conclusion that the main keyword we should be targeting needs a search volume of at least 170,000 to be viable for us at the very least.

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Just to be safe, I would rather be looking into the 340,000 (double than the estimated) search volume at least for our example.

Its much safer to be in niche that delivers traffic beyond our expectations, rather than below.
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Checking the Analytics


In order to check the search volume for my niche nail polish I will be using a free tool called Google AdWords Keyword Tool (another reason to consider SEM part of SEO).

This will provide valuable information as to which keywords are searched on Google and what is the search volume for these searches. Another great point is that you have many filtering capabilities to target your market effectively including geographic location. In our example, Im only interested to sell to people living in the USA.

The process is very simple, just type the search term you want to analyze, enter the captcha code and click Get Keyword Ideas.
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A list of search results will be populated with different variations based on the popularity of a search term and the relevancy to your search query. As for our niche keyword, we can see a search volume of 1,000,000 this passes our test.

Although this passes our initial niche test, this search term is still extremely broad and may not reflect accurately the market we are targeting.

Nonetheless, its good to keep an open mind as it will give us some room to expand further down the road as our business will do better. Well learn more on how to qualify our keywords in a later lesson.
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Exercise
Whether you are starting a brand new site or currently are running one, check your analytics and ensure that your niche is viable for your business and your expectations (those may be higher than your business needs). Make sure that your niche is not too broad like gift where the competition is unimaginable, or too narrow like traditional chinese gift which may not have enough search volume to monetize your work. Keep in mind that because today you are selling Chinese gifts, doesnt mean that later on you may not want to sell Japanese gifts or Korean gifts; think about that and dont just corner yourself. If during this exercise you realize that your niche is wrong, just scale it up or down a bit (if you dont know yet how to do that, dont worry, in the next few days, youll know how to do all of that on your own). If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 2: BUILDING YOUR KEYWORDS LIST


What is the distance between someone who achieves their goals consistently and those who spend their lives following? The extra mile. - Gary Ryan Blair -

Its time to get the keywords that go with your Niche!


Keywords are at the core of your entire SEO strategy. No matter how much money or how much time you have on your hand, if you really want to get noticed in the search engines through organic search results (non-paid listings), then you owe it to yourself to have the right keywords. Selecting good keywords for which you should optimize your site is the result of many different steps. Without the shadow of a doubt, the first step consists in build a strong primary keyword list.

2 Keywords List Building Methods


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Theres basically 2 ways you can build your keywords list: Manually for free (except for the time spent) Automatically with paid software or tool.

Honestly, which one is the right one for you depends of your involvement online I would say. If you are only producing a few pages here and there from time to time, you may just do well by doing all the work and research yourself. On the other hand, if you have hundreds or thousands of pages to work with, youll love the way professional software can simplify the tasks for you.

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Now, even if you go for a paid solution, I strongly recommend you to learn how to do the research manually as this will help you build necessary experience in your keyword analysis to determine which keyword is the one you want to optimize for. Either way, just remember that when doing online business, time is your most valuable asset, so use it wisely!

Building Your Keyword List Manually


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Yesterday in our first lesson Analyzing the Viability of Your Niche, we managed to find or refine what our main niche should be. Today we are going to pursue on this work with building a specific keyword list for our niche. Yes, its true that theres an almost infinite possible combinations and thousands and thousands of different keywords that we could possibly use to build our keyword list; however, doing the work manually our goal is to optimize our time and effectiveness, so we are only going after the keywords that have volume. Well always have more time to chase after more keywords as time goes, but building the list of our primary keywords that will be used in the basic structure of our site is key for the moment. How to qualify those keywords is subject to another lesson, today well compile a descent list of keywords. We are now going to learn how to gather keywords from 3 different sources: Google AdWords Keywords Tool. Google Wonder Wheel. Wordtracker Keyword Tool.

Also, in order to better organize our keyword list work, I strongly


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suggest you to use a spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel (or any software alike) and set a template design like this:

Google AdWords Keywords Tool


Ok, so lets get started with the Google AdWords Keywords Tool we used yesterday to analyze the viability of our niche. Repeat the same search process as we did yesterday, but this time using your definite niche search term. By now, you should see 2 lists of keywords populated for you by Google: Keywords related to terms(s) entered

Additional keywords to consider


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At the bottom of each list, theres a link for you to download the keywords list, click on CSV(for Excel)

Depending on your browser, a popup alert will ask you whether you want to save or open the file. The choice is up to you, in this case, I will simply open the file.

Once opened in Excel, the list I just downloaded looks like this:

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We dont actually need all the information that is there, so lets refine the list to fit our needs. Delete the Advertiser Competition and Global Monthly Search Volume columns.

Can you see how some search results return a volume of -1? These are the same results we saw in the Google Adwords Keywords Tool that didnt have sufficient search data. They are currently useless for us, so delete them too. (Well find some use for them later, but thats another lesson).

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Ok, now just copy and paste those data onto your Keyword Research Spreadsheet.

Repeat the same process for both lists of keywords populated by Google.

At this point, we already should have a nice little list of keywords, but thats not enough, so lets dig a bit deeper with another Google tool.

Google Wonder Wheel


If you havent done so yet, I strongly recommend you to go and read my post regarding Google Wonder Wheel before going any further.
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Using Google Wonder Wheel, make a new search for your niche keyword (for me, Ill use the nail polish as example).

What is interesting about Google Wonder Wheel is the fact that it returns not only what Google considers highly relevant search terms, but also only search terms with sufficient volume to be worth mentioning.

Anyway, as we are on the Wonder Wheel first results, add to your list all the keywords that are suggested. Then click on one of the suggested term to get a second level of keywords, add them too and repeat this process for all the suggested terms. Once this is done, click

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again on one of the suggested keyword and add them all too to your list. You could go on forever like that, but for the sake of our example and first list building, theres no need yet to go further than 2-3 levels deep. Of course, theres no need to say that if the keywords suggested are already in your list, theres no need to add them again.

Now, for each of those keywords you just added through Google Wonder Wheel, I want you to go back to the Google AdWords Keywords Tool and research each of them to get their search volume data. Add this information to your keyword list. In order to expand our keyword list beyond Google, we are also going to use a keyword tool called Wordtracker.

Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool


Yes, Wordtracker offers both free and paid tools, but for this example, well use the free tool. As you can see the interface is rather simplistic.

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Just type the search term you want to analyze in the search box and click Hit me button.

You should then see a list of keywords populated as well as search volume information. Now, keep note that Wordtracker gives daily search volume information and not monthly like Google; also they are using different data sources so the results are different.

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Currently, we are just going to overlook the search volume, and copy and paste the keywords they suggest us onto our list. This first level of data should be sufficient for the moment, but just like Google Wonder Wheel, if you click again on one of the suggested keywords, another list with longer tail keywords will then be populated for you.

Just like for Google Wonder Wheel, I want you to research the search volume data for those keywords.

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For all your keywords in your list, you have the keyword name and search volume, I want you to go to Google and search for each of those terms, and add the result volume to your data list as per the template I gave you.

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Congratulation, you just have completed the basics of a keyword list building.

Automated Keyword List Using Paid Software


This kind of software cost money at first, but they really are worth it as huge time savers. Personally I use Keyword Elite. Let me show you how much easier the work is with this keyword software. Type the Niche I want to build a keyword list for (here Nail Polish), then select where I want it to find the keywords from, as well as how many keyword I want to have in my suggested list (up to 10,000 keywords!), then all I need to do is click OK. Once my keyword list is populated, I send them to another project which will then collect all the data for me, such as search volume, result volume, Search/Result ratio, KEI, etc

Done, heres my keyword list. That was easy!

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Theres other software like that out on the market, but Im not familiar with them, Keyword Elite is the one I use and recommend for the people who intend to purchase such kind of software. Since keyword research is at the core of SEO, dont consider these tools as expenses, but rather investments that will allow you to work faster and better in the future. If your niche doesnt have 200 keywords possible, then you are in an overly narrow niche, and you should reconsider you plan seriously before wasting any more time and money on this project.

Exercise
Well I guess its pretty obvious, today youll have to build a keyword list for your site. Try to collect at least 100-200 keywords. I know its not difficult but time consuming, but this task is very important you mustnt skip it as well be using this list throughout this entire course!

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If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 3: QUALIFYING YOUR KEYWORDS


High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation. - Charles Kettering -

Its now time to refine your keywords list


Yesterday, you have collected a list of keywords as per the suggestions of different tools and software. Thats good, but not enough. Theres a fact that a machine is nothing more than a machine in the end. Only you will truly be able to tell whether or not a keyword is relevant to your site or not.

Reality Check
The real success of a site doesnt come from traffic, it comes from targeted traffic. Theres no point to optimize your site for a keyword that has
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nothing to do or very little with your site, you may get some one time traffic visitors alongside suffering a loss of relevancy and credibility as per the quality of your content. If you are offering medicals services in Denver, theres no point optimizing for medical services in New York just because its suggested by a keyword tool.

Why Qualifying Your Keywords?


There are two major reasons as to why you should qualify your keywords: 1. As I just explained, to prevent time wasting by optimizing for irrelevant keywords. 2. To reassess your real potential traffic volume within your niche.

How to Quality Your Keywords?


Start by opening the keyword list you built yesterday, remember your list should look like that:

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For today, we are going to add 2 columns to our keywords list template: Site Relevancy Adjusted Traffic Volume

Your keyword list spreadsheet should now looks like this:

For each of your keywords, ask yourself honestly how relevant the keyword actually is to your site.

To simplify the work, well divide them in 3 categories: 1. Relevant the keyword will be attributed a 100% relevancy. 2. Somewhat Relevant the keyword will be attributed a 50% relevancy. 3. Irrelevant the keyword will be attributed a 0% relevancy.
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Now for each of your keywords, in the column site relevancy, add either 100, 50, or 0. Once you are done, your list should now look like that:

Heres the logic behind those few keywords examples: Nail Polish This term is what I want to sell in my online store, so I consider that it is 100% relevant to what Im doing, or planning to do. Fingernail Polish This term is a variation of the term nail polish and one of the primary products Im planning to sell, so I give it 100% relevancy. Nail Polish Remover This is another product that Ill be selling on my site, so its 100% relevant to what Im going to do. Free Nail Polish All what Im going to do is about selling products and not getting them for free, so this term is not for me at all, Ill give it a 0% relevancy. Wholesale Nail Polish My primary objective is to retail nail polish, but if opportunity comes, I may consider wholesaling some of my
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stock, so I would say that it is somewhat relevant to what Im doing, and give it a 50% relevancy. Finally, on the last column adjusted traffic volume use a basic formula (or compute it yourself) now returning the weighted Keyword search volume, where if the keyword is 100% relevant, then 100% of the search volume will be carried over; if the keyword is only 50% relevant, then half of the search volume will be carried over; lastly if the keyword is considered irrelevant, none of the search volume will be carried over. Once you are done, your keyword list should look like this:

Niche Viability Second Check


I now want you to sum up the weighted search volume of all the keywords in your list with exception for the actual niche term and any of its broad term components. In my case, my niche term is nail polish I will then exclude this term, as well as nail, nails, and polish, as being broader, they certainly carry more volume but also much less relevancy and are outside of our niche. With that new weighted search volume do a second check with
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what your minimum search volume for the viability of your site should be. If you pass the test, then you are doing a good job, if you fail the test, you may want to reevaluate your niche choice from Day 1.

Exercise
Todays task consists of qualifying your keywords in your niche following the different steps as explained in todays lesson. In addition, youll have double check the viability of your niche, and restart the entire process in case of failure. Lastly, sort your keywords in the 3 categories of relevancy; you may keep somewhere the keywords that where somewhat relevant for later use, however you can discard the ones that were considered as irrelevant during the qualification of your keywords. In the next lesson, well be working with your now refined list of 100% relevant keywords. Keep in mind that its much easier to write content for keywords that are relevant to your site and niche than trying to produce content for keywords that are irrelevant to what you are doing or offering, even if within the same industry. Tomorrow, well learn how to group the keywords within our refined list in order to make them more usable for us.
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If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 4: GROUPING YOUR KEYWORDS


If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business. - B. C. Forbes -

Congratulation to you on your hard work


Today, we are going to use the nicely refined Keywords list we build yesterday and start to sort our keywords into different groups. This task will give us a great head start as to how our site should be designed and which keywords should be optimized for, so be very serious with this task too.

Sorting Your Keywords by Search Volume


The very first step you should do with your list of Keywords, is to sort them by Volume. In order to do that, just copy your keywords list into another spreadsheet with just the keywords and Searches columns as the picture on the next page.

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The easiest and quickest way to sort your keyword is by using the sort & filter function of Excel.

Your keyword list should now be sorted from the keywords with the most search volume to the ones with the least search volume.

We now are going to create a new spreadsheet with 4 columns


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based on their search volume and copy our keywords in each of them accordingly:

Over 100,000 The main keywords for your site should be within this category.

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From 10,001 to 100,000 The keywords that will define the different categories for your site should be in this category. From 3,001 to 10,000 This category should contain potential primary keywords for your posts or pages on your site. Less than 3,000 This category should contain potential secondary keywords for your posts or pages on your site. Now I understand that some niche will still be viable with a much lower traffic volume, if this is your case, just scale down proportionally the numbers.

Deriving Categories for Your Site


Look at the list of Keywords you have in your second category, and group them thematically as follows:

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Through this process, we just found out what are the main categories of our site. Now, if you look a bit closer to the list, youll see that it is possible to refine it a bit more just look at the Nail Color Category: As you can see, there are some colors listed there, obviously those should not be categories despite their high search volume, however they certainly must be some of your top pages of content to optimize for. Nail Color, Nail Colors, Nail Polish Color and Nail Polish Colors are one and same category. OPI Color and OPI Colors are one and same category. Through what I see for the moment, my nail polish site would have the following categories: Nail Polish Color(s) OPI Color(s) Fingernail Polish Nail Polish Remover Nail Hardener This is not a definite list, but a great start already.

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Predefine your site content for each category


Repeat the same process for each column of keywords you have by grouping your keywords under each of the categories you just defined.

We now have a gross overview of what content should fit under each category for our site. In the process of adding more keywords under the categories, you may come across some keywords that dont fit in any of your primary categories, at this point; you may just have to create a new category just for them or consider whether or not they really are relevant to your site.

Exercise
Todays task will require a lot of thinking on your side, as well as organization! If all is well, by the end of the day you should have all your keywords sorted in such a way that you already have an idea of what your site structure should be since you already know your main theme, your site categories, and the primary content for each of those categories.

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We are not going too deep in details about the keywords for each post as this will be further discussed in a later lesson. Right now, we are trying to build a solid and sound base for our site. If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 5: EVALUATING YOUR KEYWORDS DIFFICULTY


Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result. - Oscar Wilde -

Dont bite more than you can chew!


This week, we have working very hard on our keywords, from assessing our niche, building a keyword list, refining this list, grouping and classifying our keywords, theres one last thing to do with our keywords, and thats evaluating their difficulty. Before you start, you want to make sure that you are going to optimize for the right keywords in the right order, or you may just fall into the swarm of sites that are never found on internet.

Forget about KEI


One of the most popular way people use to evaluate a keyword potential is the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). Thats a huge mistake.

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If the core theory of the KEI is correct, its real life application demonstrates that this index is very flawed. Your real competition is not the number of result pages returned by Google during a search query, thats only the virtual competition volume. The truth is that 99% of those pages are no competition whatsoever to you, especially considering how well we already have prepared our keywords already!

Your competition lies with the other people with the same knowledge as you, the people in the know about SEO.

SEO 101
Anybody with basic knowledge of SEO is a potential threat to you, so you need to identify those people quickly. In SEO its widely known that having your keyword in your page title is crucial and dramatically increase your chances to rank well in the search engines. Your first task is then to identify those people, and for this, Google has a command line that makes this task a breeze: allintitle. Since having your keyword in your page title is one of the most important on-page SEO factor, we must know who are doing so.
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In the search field of Google, type the following command:

allintitle:your keyword

The number of results returned this time is the number of pages that have your keyword (in this example nail polish) in their page title. Re-open your basic keyword list and add 3 columns: All In Title All In Anchor Difficulty Your keyword spreadsheet should now looks like this:

Repeat the process for each of your keywords.

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Good job, you know already a much more realistic number as too what your real competition is, we are not done yet!

Remember, SEO is a combination of Onsite Optimization and Offsite Optimization.

Obviously, the page title is an important component of on-site optimization, and we have covered this area with the command allintitle. Its now time to check the competition level at the off-site optimization level, and luckily for us, Google also has a command line for this: allinanchor. In the search field of Google, type the command:

allinanchor:your keyword

The number of results returned this time is the one of all the pages which are linked to by backlinks with your keyword in their anchor text. This is where the real competition lies! Repeat the process for each of your keywords and update your spreadsheet accordingly.
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Evaluating Keyword Difficulty


Aware of the information we just collected, heres the formula I came up with and use myself to evaluate keyword difficulty; some of you may want to adjust or not this formula to their own flavor, personally, I m satisfied with the results returned. Here are the three elements we must keep in check with this formula: 1. How many pages have your keywords in the page title. 2. How many pages have your keywords as anchor text of their backlinks. 3. How many pages have both keywords in the page title, and keywords as anchor text of their backlinks. Since someone who uses their keywords both in the page title and as anchor text for their backlinks is obviously somebody literate in SEO, I decided to attribute them double value. Since the raw number is quite big, I decided to divide it by 1,000 to simplify the results. So heres the formula:
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Keyword Difficulty = (([#allintitle] + [#allinanchor]) + ([#combo]*2)) / 1,000

Heres how I rate the difficulty scale: Less than 1 Extremely Easy Between 1 and 10 Easy Between 11 and 100 Medium Between 101 and 1,000 Challenging Between 1,001 and 10,000 Very Hard Over 10,000 Extremely Hard

Calculating the Value of [combo]


Heres the method I use to calculate the value of [combo], that is how many pages have the keyword in anchor and title. Im not aware of any real accurate way to know such thing for sure, so Ill just go with the difference between the allinanchor and allintitle (if you have one to share, youre welcome!). That is if 10 results have the keyword in their title and 23 have the keyword in their anchor text, I will assume that 10 of them have both keywords in anchor and title, and 13 only in anchor. Alternatively if there were 23 results with keywords in their title and only 10 with keyword in their anchor text, I will assume that 10 of
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them have both keywords in the anchor text and title, and only 13 with the keyword in title only.

Do not waste your time trying to get exact numbers as the results are ever changing, go with the best guesses and what makes sense for you.

Apply the formula and fill in the difficulty score for each of your keywords. Optimizing for low difficulty keywords will allow you to rank quickly and easily in the search engines.

Current Example
The best way for me to demonstrate this to you is to share an example with one of my recent post: Google Keyword Density SEO Tutorial. After researching the keywords about Keywords density, I found 2 different categories: Keywords Density Tools Keywords Density Information I chose to go with the Keyword density information selection, and got to select 7 different keywords, all complementary to the main keyword Keyword Density

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Here are the search engine results I got in a bit more than a week:

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As you can see, it works, and thats in Google alone, in fact I already have several #1 ranking in other search engines for those
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terms too, and yes they do bring me traffic from the search engines already! That was easy!. Going after Keyword Density directly would have been a very foolish move, so instead I went on with optimizing for 7 other super easy complementary keywords, which resulted in not only having me rank well for those, but also highly increase my ranking for the competitive Keyword Density.

Exercise
Todays exercise is the last of the first part of this 21 Days SEO Mastery course, and your graduation day as Keywords Master! For each of your keywords within the keywords groups your created, research the competition using the commands allintitle and allinanchor and evaluate your keyword difficulty. Re-organize your keywords within each keyword group based on their difficulty as this will make it clearer for you to know which keyword you should optimize for first. If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 6: MAPPING YOUR SITE STRUCTURE


Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. - Fred Brooks -

This is where you make your site SEO friendly


Before we go anywhere else in this course, I want to remind you that all the lessons we just went through represent all the homework you are supposed to do BEFORE you go and see your web designer, and not after! Today, we are going to take all the keywords we have selected, evaluated, grouped and analyzed, and organized them to start mapping our site structure and optimization strategy.

3 Tiers Structure
If you are not familiar with site structure or web design, I invite you to read my post Improve Your Crawling Rate.

Search engines spiders on your site are like a man in a shopping mall.
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As long as you have a main alley, shops on the left, shops on the right its cool to go around that, but if I have to start to go through one small door, and another one, and another one, I quickly become confused of what is where, and more importantly, I lose interest in finding out. The same concept applies with search engines spiders, if your navigation is too complex or too deep, the crawler loses interest to visit or index your pages. Keep it clear and keep it simple, it works both with the search engines and your human visitors too! That being said, the site structure we are interested in is the one called the 3 Tiers Structure.

In this type of structure, no page in your site is further than 2 clicks away. This is not only good for the search engines, but also good for your visitors, which is very important.
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Heres the summary of such site structure: Tier 1: Index page Tier 2: Category pages Tier 3: Content/Products pages By now, you may have already noticed that this is looking strangely familiar with the exercise I gave in Day 4: Grouping Your Keywords

Mapping Your Site


From this point on, use whatever tool is convenient to you, be it imaging software, mind mapping software, pen and paper, iPhone, etc

Tier 1: Index Page


The first tier of your site should be your index page, or homepage. Remember the keywords you grouped as your niche keywords, the ones with volume over 100,000? These are the ones you want to put in that box. Now, I also need a dominant term for my homepage that will allow me to optimize simultaneously for as many of my keywords as possible.
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In my case, I have 2 keywords nail polish and opi nail polish; obviously theres no need (and its not recommended either) to use nail polish twice as its already part of opi nail polish. By choosing OPI Nail Polish as my main keyword, what I accomplish here is: Optimizing for OPI Nail Polish Optimizing for Nail Polish Optimizing for OPI Nail Optimizing for OPI Polish Optimizing for OPI Optimizing for Nail Optimizing for Polish Im doing all of this at the same, staying true to my niche Nail Polish, yet optimizing for a term that is much less competitive. So heres my Tier 1:

OPI Nail Polish will probably be my page title. Nail Polish and "OPI Nail Polish may be my H2 tags onpage.
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Tier 2: Category Pages


Much less thinking here since we already have established our categories previously; however we want to make sure that they all are linked from the homepage of your site:

For categories like Nail Polish Colors and OPI Colors well apply the same blending technique as for the Tier 1 keywords, ideally making sure that those categories pages are linked to using the different variations of keywords to cover them all from different locations on your site.

Tier 3: Content Pages


This is where you list and link all your content keywords

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Just follow the same procedure you have been using for Tier 1 and Tier 2.

Special Note for e-commerce sites


Theres another Keyword element you must be very wary about for your product pages, and thats the buying/commercial intent of a keyword.

Understanding this difference is what makes a site converts like crazy, or one with a lot of traffic not selling anything. Theres a huge different those 2 keywords: Nail Polish Remover Nail Polish Removal In this example, its quite easy to spot the difference, if you are selling a product, you must optimize for the first keyword as people who search for nail polish remover are looking for a product; while people searching for nail polish removal are seeking for information on how to remove nail polish!
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So make sure that your content will match the intention of your visitors! Theres a neat free tool available online to calculate for you automatically the commercial intent of keyword: Detecting Online Commercial Intention.

URL Structure
Based on the diagram you just produced, you should be able to map your URL structure too like this: / /nail-polish-colors /black-nail-polish /china-glaze-nail-polish / /opi-colors /opi-nail-colors /opi-new-colors / /fingernail-polish /nails-polish /nail-varnish / /nail-polish-remover /nail-polish-remover /nail-polish-removal /
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/nail-hardeners /nail-hardeners /nail-top-coat /

Exercise
Todays exercise is to use your keyword research from Part 1 to produce 2 maps of your future site: One graphical map, that is visually appealing and easy to understand. One text map that will provide you with the recommended SEO URL structure for your site. At this point, even if you werent to complete the other lessons of this Site Structure Mastery part, if you were to produce these information to a web design firm, youd already slash down the cost of your service by half at least. Not only youd be saving money, but youll also be sure to get a site structure that does what you need it to do. If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 7: UNDERSTANDING LINK JUICE FLOW


It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense. - Robert Green Ingersoll -

Understanding links from a SEO point of view


Your ability to design a SEO friendly site comes from your understanding of Link juice flow and how you can leverage its power and compensate its weaknesses. The lesson today will help you have a better understanding of what is link juice flow and how it works.

Why Link Juice Flow?


In order for your pages to be indexed (yes, remember pages get indexed, not sites), they first need to be crawled. Using a proper site structure like we learned yesterday in Day 6: Mapping Your Site Structure highly helps and increases your chances to meet this first requirement.

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After a page has been crawled, if this one meets the minimum requirements of the search engines, it will be indexed. In Google a page can be indexed either in the primary index (that is where you want to be) or the supplementary index (for the pages that are relevant enough to be indexed, but dont have sufficient authority yet to figure in the primary index). When it comes to link juice, only pages from the primary index in Google can transmit some; that is strictly from a SEO point of view, backlinks from pages in the supplementary index are worthless. You can easily identify those pages as they dont have PR (not PR0 but really no PR).

Link juice is transmitted by links between different pages from the primary index only. Those links can both be internal or external. You can identify pages from the primary index as they all carry a PageRank score ranging from 0 to 10.

The higher the PageRank, the more link juice each link from that page can transmit.
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If you want to read more about PageRank, I invite you to read my old article Understanding Google PageRank.

How to Get a Page in the Primary Index?


For a page to get into the primary index of Google, it needs to receive a sufficient amount of link juice from other pages. For the sake of explanation, lets assume that what you need to get a page in the primary index is 10 points, and that each inbound link is worth 1 point; this would mean that this page would require at least 10 inbound links of 1 point value to be listed in the primary index.

How much link juice can a page give?


A page gives out about 80-90% of the link juice it receives.

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This means that if a page receives 10 points, it can only give out 89 points.

In addition, that point value is divided by the number of links on the page

Also, theres a restriction of 1 link value maximum from one page to another one. Any additional link towards a page already linked from the current page will not double the amount of link juice passed on towards that page, but instead half the amount of link juice passed on from each of those links.

Special cases
Under special circumstances, it is possible to prevent a link from giving away or sharing some of the link juice of a page.

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The most popular methods being: Rel=nofollow attribute on the link. Unreadable links like JavaScript link or Flash link (Recent news would indicate that Google may now be able to read those. But I have yet to confirm this information). Meta Robots nofollow. The link attribute rel=nofollow introduced by Google will prevent a page to give away link juice to the target page of the link, however it will not redistribute the excess of link juice and will absorb it just like a normal link. Unreadable links however will bounce the link juice as they are completely ignored, just as if they didnt exist on page.

If you are interested to learn more about this attribute, I invite you to read my posts:
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To DoFollow or to NoFollow that is the question Can we survive the NoFollow Black hole? Did The NoFollow Attribute Really Change? The Meta Robot NoFollow is an extremely powerful command and will have effect page wide. None of the links on that page will be followed or passed any link juice.

Exercise
The only assignment today is to read this lesson and make sure that you understand clearly how link juice flows and can be controlled. In addition, you must learn to identify links that wont give you link juice as they may end up being a waste of your efforts during a backlink campaign. If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 8: SCULPTING YOUR SITE STRUCTURE


Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. - Bertolt Brecht -

Its time to patch the holes on your site!


Despite the recent buzz about Site sculpting no longer working, I have to tell you that I dont buy that at all, and decide to share with you whats site sculpting is all about and how you can implement it on your site. Even if the situation was to be proven true, it cant hurt you to learn and how more about it!

Why Should You Sculpt Your Site?


Link juice flowing throughout your site is much like electricity. The more electricity you have at your disposal, and the more convenient it is for you to use powerful electric appliance that make your everyday life easier. Now, this doesnt comes free, theres a price to pay for this luxury and thats your utility bill each and every month.
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Being a person with no sub-standard, I would say that I dont intent to consume less to reduce my bill, but instead prevent to pay for wasted energy. Just ask yourself how many electric devices you have in your house that you dont use, but yet consume electricity, how many power switches do you have turned on, even though you dont use the equipment? Well, its the same with the link juice on your site. The more you have flowing on your pages, the more things you can do and the better you do it, and you certainly dont want to have less. Now, you worked very hard to acquire that link juice so I do believe that just like electricity you dont want part of your work going to waste either. What do you think is happening when the link juice on your site flows onto pages that you dont want or dont need to have indexed in the search engines? Arent you wasting some of that precious energy that could be better used on another page? This is what Im going to show you today.

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Site Sculpting Basics


Now that you understand how link juice flows onto your pages, its time to look at a bigger scale and consider the implications site wide Look at the diagram of a site without link juice control.

Now looks at the diagram of a site with link juice control.

Although not as important as it used to be in the past, the PageRank of a page is still a determinant factor for your search engine ranking position in Google.

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At equal factors, the page with the higher PageRank will be the one ranking better.

Since Google updated its rel=nofollow attribute control zone, sculpting link this way no longer work. That being said, I still believe that it is important for you to understand how this process works. In recent news, its even said that JavaScript links and Flash links are now readable by Google, I havent tested this information yet, so I cant guarantee it yet. I dont want to talk about the robots.txt here, as its really an overly powerful tool for beginners and any misuse could backfire on you in ways you cant imagine. So from this point on, Im referring to using a dynamic JavaScript link to do site sculpting.

What Links Should You Preserve?


I initially wanted to start with the links you should sculpt but I changed my mind and think its better to start with the links you shouldnt sculpt! You know, just to plays safe and prevent you to sculpt the wrong links

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So which links you shouldnt touch at all:

Do not touch any navigation link at all!


Messing up with your navigation links if you dont fully know or understand what you are doing is the best way to destroy your site. In addition, I would recommend you to take extra care and precaution with links that points towards a page that itself links towards other pages.

What Links Should You Sculpt?


Obviously, the links you should sculpt are the one that wont affect whats happening on your site and your search engine ranking position if they disappear As a general rule, the following types of pages can be safely sculpted. (Please double check carefully on your site nonetheless)

About Contact Shopping Cart Youd be surprise as to how many ecommerce sites have a Shopping Cart with a PR3-4, what a waste of resources!

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As you can see on my site, the About Nicolas and Contact Me pages are sculpted (red color); I like myself but I dont need to rank for those pages, so Ill save the link juice for the other pages of my site.

Another instance for which you want to sculpt a link is if theres a target repetition with irrelevant anchor text. Here are 2 examples of this.

Case 1: Homepage links


As you can see on my site, I have 3 links on each page of my site that links back to my homepage, each with a different anchor text: SEO Help by Nicolas Prudhon Unleash WEB2.0 Optimization for Human Visitors and Search Engines Home

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Having those 3 links may be convenient for navigation purpose, but when it comes to link juice and relevancy, only one of them is needed. Without Sculpting, heres what would happen:

With the site sculpting, heres whats happening:

Case 2: For Bloggers


If your site is a blog, (like me), set aside the template design, you are very likely to have at least 3 links to each of your post from your homepage like I do: Post Title Read more xx comments

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Here again, it may be convenient for your users to have those 3 links on page, but for the search engines, its not necessary at all. Without Sculpting, heres what would happen:

With the site sculpting, heres whats happening:

Exercise
Depending on your background, and assuming that you dont have a site yet, (after all, we are still designing our site structure)
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add to your sitemap design which page should be sculpted, and in some specific instances like the examples I gave, which rules should be followed. All of this will ensure that by the time you will need to design your site or hire a web designer, nothing is left to chance, and youll get a site readily optimize, rather than having to make changes over and over. Another reason for site sculpting is to reinforce your deep linking strategy. As you already know now, the deeper you link, the more you lose link juice in the process, and more often than not, by the time the search engine spider reaches one of your far far away page (especially true for people with a bad site structure, but that shouldnt be your case anymore, right?) there isnt enough link juice left to maintain the page in the search engine at all!

This is at that time that your pages are dropped from the search engine, and as a SEO Master you cant let that happened to your site! If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 9: CASCADING STYLE SHEET DESIGN


A picture must possess a real power to generate light and I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light. - Henri Matisse -

Developing a SEO friendly framework


Although more related to web design than SEO, it is important for you to understand some basics of HTML and other related languages if you really want to improve your SEO work. Whether you are going to implement the changes yourself or get a competent web designer to put your site together, the information we are going to discuss today will have a tremendous impact on your on-page SEO.

What Are Cascading Style Sheets?


Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a fairly new method of formatting and styling the content of your pages. Traditional HTML pages where quite limited in what you could
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personalize on page and how you could customize and style your design. All to this has changed with the introduction of CSS; you can now customize as many elements of your content as you wish! Not only CSS allows for much nicer web designs, it also allows much neater code as search engines dont read cascading style sheets.

CSS are the best method to show ethically one thing to the search engines, and another one for the human visitors, this way you have an optimized page both for the search engines and your visitors!

How Cascading Style Sheets Work?


Im not here to teach you how to program in CSS, thats not the objective of this lesson, but nonetheless, I just want to show you with illustrations what I mean. A traditional old HTML page would look like this:

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Cascading Style Sheets work differently; instead consider each styling information as a new layer that you apply on top of the previous one:

While the search engines will see the basic non styled page (as above) containing all what they need to know, the visitors will be greeted with a pleasant layout and overall design.

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Faster Loading Of Your Page


There are many reasons as to why CSS allows your pages to load faster, if you want to read more about that, I invite you to read my older post SEO Help about Cascading Style Sheets and HTML Tables.

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But basically, the fact of having shorter neater code makes a lot of difference by itself. Not only that, but having images loading as a styling sheet instead of inline content (except for your image links) remove all their unnecessary cluttering code work out of your pages, and doesnt require your browser to load the images first, as they will be applied later through styling. Heres the non styled version of my header, what the search engine crawlers see and index:

Now, heres the styled version of my header that you visitors see:

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Optimal Positioning Of Your Content


All the previous elements I talked about are important because the less junk code the search engines spiders have to go through; the easier it is for them to identify what is important in your page. Spiders are not very smart and thus only read from top to bottom; with the understanding that the more a content is placed towards the top, the more important it is, and the more it is placed towards the bottom, the less important it is too. Heres a traditional Table based layout

At first sight, nothing particularly wrong with this right? However everything changes when you toggle to Code view. I will spare you the details, but basically this is the order in which the search engines spiders read and evaluate the content of your pages:
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As you can see, for the search engines, the content of this page is classified as follows: Most Important My Page Header Important My Sidebar Not so Important Menu Not Important My Content Least Important My Page Footer In order to have the table to read in the order we want, the page would have to look like this:

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That may work for the search engines, but certainly not for your visitors! This is where the real beauty of CSS comes; you can not only edit and design styles in colors and images, but also in positioning! Thats right, CSS allows you to decide the order in which the search engines are going to read the content of your pages, as well as allow your visitors to enjoy a great web design! As you can see, in outside appearance, both the table design and the CSS design look exactly identical.

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However once you look at their source code, this is where the magic unravels itself!

Now your CSS code structure tells the search engines: Most Important My Content Important Menu Not so Important My Header Not Important My Sidebar Least Important My Page Footer

Exercise
Map out a potential site layout that you think would be interesting for you, and define in which order youd like each block to appear. If you have knowledge about CSS yourself, youll then be able to implement such changes yourself, if not, youll have to make sure
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that your web designer follows your instructions as he develop your site. Again, another reason not to rush by getting your site built too soon, knowing this from the start will save you huge amount of time in not having to modify over and over your template, as well saving you tremendous money and stress with the web design firm you hired to do the job. If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 10: DEVELOPING ON WORDPRESS ENGINE


Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. - Steve Jobs -

To be the best you have to use the best


WordPress is by far the most popular blog engine online and for a good reason; its not only open source, totally free, extremely powerful, its also loved by the search engines and Google in particular. WordPress is like a search engine spiders magnet, theres no reason why you wouldnt want to leverage on that!

The moment of truth


This is it; finally after 10 days of hard labor, you are finally ready to take the next step by officially designing your site. In the past 10 days, you have worked so hard and methodically to prepare a solid base for your site, from the best possible keywords, structure design and optimization, architecture and navigability; theres just a final step left for you before giving birth to your site.
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And that step is choosing the right engine support for your site. The time of static sites is over, we are in the WEB 2.0 era, whether you want it or not. Now, if you had to chose an engine support for your site, even if its a static one, which one would it be: Support static pages but not WEB 2.0 technology. Support static pages and WEB 2.0 technology. Of course, one should go with the one that supports static pages and WEB 2.0 technology even if you dont implement it, at least its available for you if you want it to.

Reverse Thinking
Everybody knows that blogs helps build traffic towards your site, and probably everybody also knows that WordPress is the best blogging platform. If you still dont know why, I invite you to read my article WordPress The Best Platform For Your Site. The common thinking is to build your site, and then add a WordPress blog to it. Thats not a bad idea, but I have a better one.

Page | 87

Why dont you instead start with a WordPress installation and build your site on it, so rather than having just your blog site loved by Googlebot, you could have your entire site loved!
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The best thing is that WordPress is so configurable that you could run an entire traditional site on it, without ever using blog at all! Thats right, you can create and/or recreate any kind of site you wish using WordPress, that is not only build blogs.

What kind of site can I build with WordPress?


Quite simply put, you can build any kind of site your want. You can append and build any combination you like: Blog Static Site Site + Blog Site + Directory Site + Forum Site+ Forum + Blog + Directory E-commerce Etc You are only limited by your imagination. The reason why this is possible is simply because WordPress offers
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you 2 ways to publish your content: 1. Blog Posts traditional blog components, although if you are good with your design you could integrate them easily as traditional webpage with all the blog post features and capability deployed if you wished so. 2. Pages Pages behave just like any normal webpage in appearance, but again, carries all the power and capabilities of a WordPress blog. In WordPress you have full control over the layout, and despite the fact that you can use a general template for your entire site, you also have the possibility to create custom individual template for each page of your site! Theres nothing WordPress cant do that an ordinary site can. I can easily build a site with WordPress that looks nothing like a blog, and youd never guess in a million year that its not an ordinary site, except for the search engines results it gets!

Exercise
Well, this is what you have been waiting for in the past 10 days my friends! Of course its now time to build you website! From a SEO point of view, you already know all what you need to know in order to build a SEO friendly site.

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This will conclude the second part of this 21 Days SEO Mastery course, make sure that your site is ready before moving on to the next lesson! If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 11: SETTING UP YOUR ANALYTICS


Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures. - Evan Esar -

Get ready to track your SEO performance


Now that your website is up and running, we want to make sure that we can monitor whats going on, and whether or not our hard work is paying off. The best way to do that is by setting up a couple of Analytics and Stats monitoring systems that will enable us to follow up with our progress.

Site Monitoring Systems


This type of monitoring system will analyze how your site fares within the specific search engine. Important data such as the crawling information, indexing of the pages, linking status, and other webmasters related information of your site will be provided.
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The service is provided free from each of the major search engine, so theres no reason not to take advantage of it.

Google Webmaster Tools


1. Go to Google Webmaster Tools.

2. If you already have a Google account, just enter your account information and hit the button Sign in.

If you dont have a Google account, click "Create an Account Now!" and follow the wizard.

3. Once you login to your account, add a new website.

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4. If all is normal, you should see a confirmation page like this one:

5. Just below the confirmation message, youll see a request to Verify your site, click on the link now.

6. On the page, you can now see that your status is NOT VERIFIED, so in the drop down box Choose verification method, select Upload an HTML file.

7. More instructions will then being displayed for you. Just follow the instructions and once you are done, click on the button Verify.

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8. If everything went well, you should see the following confirmation message.

Congratulation, you have finish to setup your Google Webmaster Tool system. Make sure to come back later on, and explore more of the tools and reports made available to you, also, youll be able to add a sitemap here too.

Yahoo! Site Explorer


1. Go to Yahoo! Site Explorer and login to your yahoo account or create one if you dont have one yet.

2. Under the menu My Sites, enter the URL of your new website, and click Add My Site.
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3. Your new domain should now be listed under Site, click on the button Explore.

4. On the left menu, click on Authentication.

5. Choose the first option By uploading a verification file to my site.

6. Follow the instructions, and when you are ready, click the button Ready to Authenticate.

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7. If everything went well (as it is supposed to), you should see the following confirmation message on screen.

Congratulation, you have finish setting up your domain with Yahoo! Site Explorer. Just like for Google Webmaster Tools, make sure to come back later to spend some time to browse around the different tools that are offered to you, as well as submitting your sitemap.

Bing Webmaster Center


1. Go to Bing Webmaster Center
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2. Click on Sign In to start.

3. On your Dashboard, click Add a site

4. Fill in the information as required, if you already have a sitemap, you can enter the URL now, if not, you can do that later. Once you are finished, click on Submit.

5. On the new screen, go for XML file authentication, download the file and upload it on your server as instructed. Once this is done, click on Return to Site List
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6. If all went fine, you should now see your site listed there.

Congratulation, you are done setting up your domain with Bing Webmaster Center, feel free to browse through the different tools and reports that are made available to you. For more information, I invite you to read one of my recent posts regarding Bing Webmaster Center.

Stats Monitoring Systems


The webmaster tools are great for general monitoring of your site,
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but if you really want to analyze in detail your traffic stats, youll have to go with more targeted tools.

Webalizer / Awstats
2 of the most popular traffic stats reports are from Webalizer (more numerical report oriented) and Awstats (more graphical oriented). Not only the range of details provided is incredibly detailed, they both are free to setup and use. In fact, they are usually already setup for you by your hosting company on your account for free.

Among all my analytical tools, this is probably where I spend the most of my time on.

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Google Analytics
This is another analytical tool provided by Google. The stats provided by Google Analytics are less detailed, but since they come from Google, people like to rely on them.

Its a matter of personal choice here again. Google Analytics can easily be setup on your site, either manually; either using the plugin Google Analyticator for WordPress (you are using WordPress, right?).

Alexa
Alexa is probably the most popular traffic volume scoring tool out there and used by many people as reference when it comes to evaluate the popularity of a site. With Alexa, the lower your score, the better it is. The score indicated your traffic volume position in comparison with all the others website on internet.

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As you can see on the snapshot for example, out of all the websites on internet, yesterday 31,651 had more traffic volume than my site, which place NicolasPrudhon.com in the top 0.11% on internet.

Quantcast
Quantcast is not so interesting as per the traffic stats it monitors, but is rather a monitoring tool focused on demographics. It will provide you all sorts of information such as the gender, age range, income, etc of your visitors.

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Depending of the industry you are working in, this kind of information can be invaluable for you and your business!

Setting up Quantcast on your site very easy and can be done using the Quantcast Quantifier plugin for WordPress.

Exercise
Before you start any promotion work with and for your site, take the time to setup all your analytical accounts as youll then be able to monitor in detail how much you have improved. Also remember that the key to successful optimization is testing, and unless you have some data to backup your actions, it will be extremely difficult if not impossible for you to define whether a change you made really had an impact (positive or negative) on your site. If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 12: MASTERING THE TITLE TAG


There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply. - Josh Billings -

A bit for your visitors, a lot for the search engines


Once you got your site structure right, the one piece of SEO that is the most important when it comes to on-page optimization is without the shadow of a doubt the Page Title.

Although the Page Title is originally designed to tell your visitors what your page is all about, in practice, its much more to tell the search engines what your page is all about.

What is a Title Tag?


Do not confuse the Title Tag, and the Post Title or Content Title. The Title Tag is the header line of text that is returned in the search engines result pages:

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And on top of your browser window:

While the Post Title or Content Title, are only visible on the page itself and in <header> tags.

The Title Tag is a piece of information that tells both your visitors and the search engines what is the topic of your page. The information should be enclosed by the <title> and </title> tags within the <head> tags in the HTML code of your page.
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When it comes to SEO, keep in mind that since each title describes a specific page, they each should be absolutely unique.

Why is it important to optimize for the Title Tag?


Like I just told you, or you may already know, the title tag is the most important on-page optimization factor for you. The search engines primarily identify the content of your page based on the Title you are using. If your title contains or matches the search query of a user, then you are much more likely to rank high for that search term. Not only do you increase your chances of ranking better for that search term, the search engines have a very neat feature that bold their search query in the results listed on the result page. That means, if you have the keyword the person is looking for in your Title, description, and URL, they all will be bolded, and trust me; this draws even more attention to your listing!

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The purpose of this search engine feature is to help the users recognize if the page returned is likely to be relevant to their search.

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How to optimize your Page Title


I will start with what is considered the good practices for general purpose of the page title:

Accurately describe the page content. Dont write a page title thats got nothing to do with what will be on that page. Save yourself and your potential visitors from a dreadful Untitled or New Page 1. Each Title Tag must be unique. Your pages are different so must be your titles. This is how Google differentiate your pages, if they all have the same title then its just one page, and Google will only index one, you really dont want that to happen to you and your site. Use short but descriptive titles. If your title is more than 70 characters in length, Google will truncated it and its not going to look too good for you. Dont write long and unhelpful titles for the users. Not only your title will be truncated, no one will benefit from an unhelpful title, the search engines wont know what your page is about, the users wont be interested in visiting that page, and you wont benefit either from a SEO point of view. Dont just stuff unneeded keywords there either. Cluttering unneeded keywords in your page Title works more against you than for you. Abuse of keyword stuffing is a spammer trademark, you wouldnt want to be labeled as such.

Ok, now that the great lines are clear for you, let move on to the real SEO stuff.
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Do you remember in Part 1 of this 21 Days SEO Mastery course, you learned how to group your keywords strategically. This is a process that should apply for each of your pages, in fact if you can its even better in you can repeat the entire Keyword research process by targeting your page content only, in the end, you are likely to end up with 3 types of keywords:

Global niche concept for the post. Highly relevant keywords. Sub-related keywords.

Lets take my recent post Google Keyword Density SEO Tutorial as example once again; so following those precepts, heres what I came up with:

Keyword Density would be my concept, but its too broad to be targeted for my post. (By the way, I now rank #14 for this term worth 32,000 searches monthly; after 2 weeks of publishing the post) Keyword Density SEO and Google Keyword Density are both on target for me from a search volume, relevancy, and difficulty stand. They will be my highly relevant keywords. Keyword Density Tutorial, Calculate Keyword Density, Optimal Keyword Density, Optimum Keyword Density, and Keyword Density Percentage are all sub-related keywords, they are on-topic with my current post, but dont generate sufficient traffic volume to be primary keywords. Nonetheless, their search volume is still consequent enough to have it returned in Keywords searches and suggestions on the search engines.

If I was a moron, I would want to write a page title like:


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"Keyword Density, Keyword Density SEO, Google Keyword Density, Keyword Density Tutorial, Calculate Keyword Density, Optimal Keyword Density, Optimum Keyword Density, Keyword Density Percentage."

Now dont laugh! There are many people who are doing this and think they are smart. So, can you tell me whats wrong with this title?

Obviously its way too long, well over the 70 characters limit. Im not sure its very appealing to the human visitors. I kind of repeat keyword density way too much in my opinion.

How can we correct this?


The title should contain what is the most important and relevant to your page content, so Ill start by looking at my main keywords: keyword density, keyword density SEO, and Google keyword density. Obviously, keyword density is repeated in each of those keywords, so I dont need to mention it by itself in the title as it will be automatically optimized for through any of the other main keywords.

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We are now left with keyword density seo and google keyword density; again I feel that theres too much repetition here, so Im going to blend them into one sentence: Google Keyword Density SEO Not the greatest copyrighting, but it:

still make sense is highly related to my content is optimized for my 3 main keywords

Now, with only 26 characters in use, and considering I have more keywords for this page (you may not have, but if you do, this could be interesting for you), lets make good use of the remaining characters space. Just like I did with my main keywords, Ill try to concatenate the remaining ones into a sentence. Based on the keyword difficulty analysis, Im pretty sure that if I add Keyword Density Tutorial in my page title, Ill get a top ranking or at least a first page ranking. (I actually have a double listing #1 and #2 for it now) Obviously I cant have Optimal Keyword Density and Optimum Keyword Density together in the page title, so Ill go with the one with the most searches: Optimal Keyword Density So lets see what kind of sentence I could come up with:

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Calculate Optimal Keyword Density Percentage Tutorial Actually thats quite good, although calculate keyword density is split, the proximity is still close so its still highly relevant, and the same goes for keyword density tutorial. So lets put my Page Title together: Google Keyword Density SEO Calculate Optimal Keyword Density Percentage Tutorial Thats looking pretty sharp, except for the fact that Im in excess of character use Calculate Keyword Density has one of lowest search volume so Im going to remove it. My title now looks like this: Google Keyword Density SEO Optimal Keyword Density Percentage Tutorial I still can see that I have one word too many here I have to choose between Percentage and Tutorial. Though choice, keyword density percentage has much more search volume than keyword density tutorial; however keyword density tutorial is child play to optimize for.

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Heres my decision: Google Keyword Density SEO Optimal Keyword Density Tutorial Since its a new page, I need traffic and ranking quick, this is what I can get for sure by optimizing for the easy keyword. Later on, once my authority is established through increased offpage optimization, Ill be able to change my page title to: Google Keyword Density SEO Optimal Keyword Density Percentage At that time, I still should maintain my rank #1 for keyword density tutorial, yet now being able to increase my optimization power for keyword density percentage too.

Exercise
Make sure that each of the page title for your new site is highly optimized the way I just showed you. That step alone will dramatically affect your search engine ranking because we follow 3 simple on-page optimization rules:

Keyword density: our keywords are well present, but not overwhelming (no over-optimization here). Keyword proximity: our main keyword is surrounded by closely related keywords.

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Keyword prominence: our main keywords appear first and at the top of the page, first to be read by the search engines.

If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 13: LEVERAGING ON THE META DESCRIPTION


Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit. - Elbert Hubbard -

Useless for SEO, but not for Conversion


If you have been following my posts in the past, you should be well aware by now that Meta Tags, in particular Meta Keywords and Meta Description dont carry the value they used to have. In fact, the situation reached an extend where they fundamentally are both useless for SEO, this is why more often than not, I strongly simply recommend people just to skip them as there are many other ways much more productive for you to get traffic towards your site.

What is the Meta Description?


The Meta Description is a small piece of text (150 characters long) that is used to describe the content of your page as a snippet along with the page title in the search results.

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The Meta Description is nowhere to be seen or found on the actual content of your page; it is purely designed for the search engines result page display.

In the past, the Meta description was useful as another place to add your keywords and increase your site relevancy just like the Meta keywords and page title. As SEO evolved, both the Meta keywords and Meta description have been rendered useless where all the weight of SEO has been carried over onto the page title. The snippet used as Meta description is contained in the header of your HTML source code and looks like this:

Why do I talk about the Meta Description?


Since I said its no longer beneficial for SEO, why do I keep talking about it and not the Meta keywords? Well, theres one major difference between the meta keywords and the meta description; the meta keywords have lost their value and are totally invisible, not to be seen by the search engines (it is assumed that some search engines now directly skip that meta

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tag), while the meta description is still displayed in all the search results.

Why I dont need to write a Meta Description?

Because you write your own Meta Description is in no way a guaranty that Google may use it as snippet for your page! Thats right, Google makes its own decision as to what it consider is relevant to the search query, so even if you have prepared a nice description for your page, if Google doesnt find it the most relevant to the search, it will then pick one from either of those 2 options: From the Open Directory Project if your site is listed there. From a relevant section of your pages visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a users search query. Its also important to remember that if the page description doesnt help your SEO, using a wrong one can hurt your SEO! Thats right, just like the page title, Google doesnt want you to have 2 pages with the same description. Since the pages should be unique and original, so should be their description!

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The easiest way to ensure that all your Meta descriptions are unique and always relevant to the content of the page they are describing is simply to skip them.
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Thats right, by not setting up a meta description for your pages, you are forcing Google to generate one for you, and if Google does the job for you, you can be sure that it will agree that this description is the best it can come up with for the matching search query based on your content, and will be unique for each of your pages.

I can do better than Google


The truth is using this method will save you a lot of time regarding those Meta description, until you find the time (if you find it worth) to add a really good page description that could help your conversion rate. So, if you ever where considering to write your own Meta description, how this one should be? The biggest mistake you could make would be simply to describe the content of your page! At this very moment, this is where you have to leverage on the other side of SEO, and thats SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Pay Per Click campaign like Google AdWords are only successful if you know how to write a real good ad matching a really good keyword. Now, tell me why this should be any different with your organic listing?
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At this point the only difference is that one listing (the PPC) you must pay for, while the other is provided free for you. Not only that, organic listing allows you more characters than in PPC. Now you are starting to understand where Im heading to, thats right I want you to write your description like you would with a PPC ad!

Or:

Write a description with your visitors in mind, not the search engines.

I mean, would you rather click on this listing: Traditional Chinese Gifts page.

This page is about the products I have in my online store such as traditional Chinese gifts and other related Asian gifts for you to offer as gift or use as personal decoration item. Or the following one: Get respect and acceptance from Asian families with our traditional Chinese gifts. Free worldwide express delivery, 100% satisfaction guaranty or your money back. Call 1-800-666-3245 now!
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Exercise
Meta Description cant really help your site from a SEO stand, but can harm it if used wrong. Nonetheless this is an important element of your site display in the search results and thus should be given a bit of consideration if you have the time. Your task today is to make sure that your pages descriptions are good the way they really should be, or you should remove them. If your site is new, you should spend some time to write nice PPC ad style descriptions for your pages. Either you write a good page description, either you leave that space blank, dont go half way or it may work against you. If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 14: OPTIMIZING YOUR CONTENT


Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won't taste good. - Joe Paterno -

Always write with your readers in mind


This statement is by far one of my favorite and one I abide to strongly. Now, because you should always write with your readers in mind, doesnt mean that you cant do something for the search engines too, right? Todays lesson is not focused on what you should do to write an article that is pleasing for your readers, but instead focuses on the small tweaks you can do to make your great post search engine friendly.

Why Should You Optimize Your Content?


I mean, if you have been reading any bit about SEO before, you may probably have heard things like:

On-page optimization doesnt matter anymore; its all about off-page optimization. Google doesnt care about keyword density anymore.

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Write for your visitors, not the search engines.

So why should you bother with optimizing your content?

The value of your off-page optimization is enhanced by matching on-page optimization. For an anchor text link to be really powerful, the same keyword should exist on the destination page. Google new algorithm is based on concept relevancy, which includes synonyms and related search terms within your niche, not just the keyword itself. Unless you have those terms on page, you may fall down in the relevancy scale. Write for your visitors to keep them on your pages, but dont forget that its the search engines that bring you those visitors in the first place.

Content Keyword Research


The very first step before writing anything is always the same, and thats keyword research. Go back to Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and run a search for the main topic of your post. For this example, Im going to use Keyword Density again.

Again, export the results to Excel, and refine your keyword list by relevancy only, not search volume (even if a search term doesnt
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have enough data for search volume, if its relevant, keep it in your list.)

Now, divide your keywords into 2 lists:


Keywords with search volume. Keywords without search volume.

By analyzing quickly the search volume of the keywords in the first list, you can come up quite easily with the following 3 categories of keywords (like we did for the page title):

Page Concept keyword density Main Keywords google keyword density and keyword density seo

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Secondary Keywords keyword density tutorial, keyword density percentage, calculate keyword density, optimum keyword density and optimal keyword density.

For all the keywords in the first list, strip down any duplicate word, in my example, my list looks like this:

Keyword Density Calculate Google Optimum Optimal Tutorial Percentage SEO

Now, for each of those terms, go and research known synonyms, and add those words to the list. Here are some examples of the terms Ive been able to add:

research search explore best calculate compute work out reckon figure

Now, just like you did for your list, go to your second list, and strip away all duplicated words. This time, it is not necessary to research
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synonyms, though if you really want to do if, you can, just know that its not necessary at this point. Ok, good job, this may not make sense to you yet, but it will very soon dont worry.

Optimize Your Content Structure


Like everything, you need structure if you want results, the same goes with your content. No secret here, we are just applying what we learned in school on how to write a good essay.

Our work is to prepare an optimized framework in which we can write our quality content to please both the search engines and our readers.

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Page Title
Based on the previous lesson, we already know how to write a SEO page title for our content.

Content Title
This title is the most important content you have on your page, so it must be enclosed with <h1> tags. If you dont know about <h1> tags, I strongly recommend you to read my article Did You Get Your Heading Tags All Wrong? Again, just like the Page Title, you want your main keywords to be here, the difference is since you already have a much optimized Page Title (probably with the same keywords), and its a good opportunity to write something more human visitors friendly. I chose Google Keyword Density SEO Tutorial, but I could have went with something like How to calculate Google keyword density, or something like that rather than just a mash up of keywords, but I thought that it wasnt so bad in that case.

Sub Title
The sub titles are the second most important element in your page content; therefore we must enclose them with <h2> tags. Since it wasnt possible to fit all our keywords in the Page Title or the Content Title, now is a good opportunity to insert our secondary keywords in key positions.
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In my post, I use two subtitles:


Optimal Keyword Density Tutorial How To Calculate Keyword Density Percentage

Introduction
Remember when I said optimization is about keyword density, keyword proximity and keyword prominence? This means that if you want your page to be highly optimized, the search engine should find a good deal of your keywords with related search term close to them, and as early as possible on the page. This is where the introduction comes in play. Heres the introduction I used on my post: Does keyword density still matters or not and how to calculate it. Proper search engine optimization (SEO) requires you to research and work out the best keywords. People always try to figure out how to calculate the optimum keyword density for their pages. Although research tells that Google doesnt care, I reckon that some of you would like to know how to calculate keyword density. In todays SEO tutorial, we will explore how search engines compute keyword density percentage. Now, did you find anything odd about my introduction? Probably not because theres nothing odd about it, its a properly written introduction.
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So what is so special about it? Do you remember when we created a list of our keyword with volume, and how we research synonyms for those keywords too? Look closely at each word in that introduction; all my keywords and all their known synonyms are in used here! That piece of text is not only full of keyword density about my main keywords (without obvious excess usage or keyword stuffing), with a strong keyword proximity as all the terms are very nearby one another, and highly relevant terms (use of synonyms) for latent semantic indexing (LSI) algorithm; since its the introduction, its placed at the top of the page which means huge keyword prominence.

Paragraphs
This is where you write your content, just do it naturally but take extra care to add all the individual words you stripped down from your second list (the one with dramatically low search volume). Having those terms (even if they are spitted) within your content gives you a chance to appear in the search results for those keywords, and also any kind of weird long tail search. Keep in mind that half of the searches made on the search engines are unlisted long tail search, they may not have a lot of search volume individually but theres truly a throng of them daily, so dont miss out on that!
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Exercise
Now that you know what it takes to optimize your pages of content and the reason behind those steps, its now time to put them into practice. The easiest way I found to do that is first to write your content naturally and then optimize it, this way your writing will have a more natural flow for your readers. If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 15: MASTERING PICTURE LINKS


A picture is worth a thousand words. - Napoleon Bonaparte -

Small trick, big difference


Its a fact today that images are an integrand part of most of the pages designs and content. Having pictures make your site more vibrant, alive, and user friendly in many instances compare to a boring plain text site. Todays lesson is about helping you understand how search engines see your pictures and what you can do to influence what they see.

What you see is not what the search engine gets


What you see and what the search engines see when they crawl your page is not the same, but you already know that. The reason is simple, many coding tricks, including the usage of CSS now allows us to make our site appearance much more user
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friendly, while maintaining a simple and easy to read page for the search engines without all the unnecessary clutter of layout junk. The easiest way to get an idea of how the search engines see you page is simply by looking at it from a text browser. You can do that easily by looking at the cache version of your page.

Heres my page as you see it:

And now, heres my page as the search engines see it:

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The problem with pictures


The main problem with using pictures on your page when it comes to SEO is the fact that the search engines dont read pictures. In a text version browser only (just like what the search engines see), pictures simply dont exist at all, no mention of them at all. Thats clearly another reason why when you use a picture link instead of a plain text link, this one has much less value. Search engines can read your text link through the anchor text of this one, but since pictures are not read, the links from them dont have anchor text! The image link will then be interpreted as a plain URL, which is by far the lowest value for the search engines.

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The ALT attribute


Do you remember the popular saying: Do good things and youll be rewarded? Believe it or not, but everybody isnt as fortunate as myself or yourself to be able to enjoy any type of webpages or browser display on internet. This is why accessibility functions and tags have been created to help people who cant enjoy pictures for example to still be able to comprehend what your site and the link of your picture (if you have one) is all about. If your heart is kind enough to take on the extra steps to help those people better enjoy your site, you are simultaneously doing yourself a favor.

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The ALT attribute has specially been designed to compensate for a picture that cannot be displayed, either because of a loading error, either because of the usage of a text browser only. That is, instead of a picture, what you will see in the information you entered in the ALT attribute.

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The ALT attribute is located between the <img> tags of a picture in your HTML source code:

The important point here is the fact that search engines cant read pictures, but they can read this ALT attribute!

What happened is that in the case of a picture link, the ALT attribute will then become the anchor text for the picture link!

Now you just dramatically increased the value of your images links!

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Word of Caution

The main purpose of this attribute is still to provide the best description possible of what the picture it replaces actually is or what the link does. Do not go in there stuffing loads of keywords, or you may just end up being penalized for over-optimization and being a spammer! That doesnt prevent you to have a nicely optimized picture anchor text link, just be honest with yourself and apply moderation.

Exercise
Todays exercise is to make sure that all your images on your site have an ALT attribute, regardless of whether or not they are picture links. Make the ALT of your regular pictures descriptive, possibly without keyword if its not related. Dont go call a table corner picture make money online, best way to make money, make more money online, make money online stuff, calling this picture border frame corner may be way better. Meanwhile, when using the ALT on a picture link, you can be more SEO oriented, but still with moderation, if you have a picture link for your newsletter, Join my Make Money Online newsletter may still be acceptable, but make money online, best way to
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make money, make more money online, make money online stuff still isnt. If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 16: INTERNAL LINKS STRUCTURE


Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself. - Thomas J. Watson -

More link juice and more pages viewed!


All too many people fail to leverage on the potential they have on their site alone. Remember that before off-site SEO became popular with Google, SEO was one entirely on-site. If off-site SEO has become dominant, this doesnt mean that on-site SEO doesnt have value anymore! Today Im going to review with you what you can do with your site links to enhance your on-site SEO.

What is an internal link?

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An internal link is a link that point towards another page within your site, in opposition with the external links which points toward an external source.

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Well talk more about the external links in the last part of our 21 Days SEO Mastery course. From this point on, when I talk about links, Im only referring to internal links. People like to talk about how off-site optimization is important for your search engine rankings, well Im here to show you that it all starts with doing a good job on-site. Why should you care about your internal links? The links inside your site have 3 major purposes:

Facilitate the navigation for your visitors. Facilitate the crawling of the search engine spiders. Build custom inbound links to your different pages.

Links for Navigation and Crawling Purpose


The main purpose of SEO is to bring targeted visitors to your pages, and retain them on your site for as long as possible. One easy way to do that starts by making navigation on your site simple to understand. When somebody lands on one of your pages, what are his options from there, where can he go, what can he do? Obviously based on our 3 Tier site structure, the following links are expected based on the Tier your visitor lands on.
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Tier 1 Homepage Internal Links

Links toward each category of the site. Links toward the general information pages (contact us, about, policies, etc)

Tier 2 Categories Internal Links

Link towards the homepage. Link towards the content of the current category. Possibly links toward the general information pages.

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Tier 3 Content Internal Links

Link towards the homepage. Link towards the main category. Links toward similar content. Possibly links toward the general information pages

By interlacing your content is this manner, you ensure that both the search engine spiders and your visitors will be able to navigate easily and efficiently throughout your site. Your visitors will be happy and possibly navigate on more pages, and the search engine spiders can crawl your site more easily which in turn enhance your chances to have your pages indexed faster.

Custom Internal Inbound Links


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Remember when I told you earlier than off-site optimization started on-site? By now you should also know that building quality inbound links toward your pages is extremely important if you want them to rank well. One fact that is all too often overlooked is that when we say a page needs a lot of quality inbound links, we dont necessarily mean that they must come from external sources! Thats right; a link from one of your pages pointing towards another one of your pages is still counted as an inbound link for that page! Now think about it for a second and imagine the potential at your disposal! Remember that you have full control over the content of your site, you are free to place the links you want wherever you want, be it inline within your content, or in a sidebar, at the bottom, etc In addition, you also have full control over the anchor text of those links! Lets review what qualifies a good inbound link:

From a related content From a quality site From within the content preferably With your keyword as anchor text

I dont know about you, but that sounds strangely similar with what I would get from one of my related page of content!
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One of the easiest way is to add a few links at the bottom of your content page pointing towards different related pages your have on your site, it not only enhance your visitors navigation and site crawling, but gives you the opportunity to build inbound links towards your pages.

Although it is a bit more work, this is also the reason why I dont use plugin for this. Im now free to choose exactly which post I want to link to, and more importantly, which anchor text I want to use; and since its my posts and my content, I can change or modify those information anytime I wish. Even better, if you can link from within your content, this will carry even more weight for the search engines.

One of the quickest benefit you can get from doing this is getting your pages in the primary index, since they already receive
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sufficient inbound link juice from your other pages pointing towards them; and thats only for low or no PR pages. Now, just imagine that you have a couple of PR2 or PR3 (even better if you got better PR) pages on your site, and that you place inline inbound links toward another of your pages, what do you think would happen? Thats right, this would count like this page is receiving great quality inbound links from PR2 or PR3 pages, almost instantly!

Exercise
Look at your linking structure on your site; are you following the different recommended navigation links? If not, place them now on your site. Also, make sure that all your links are optimized by using the appropriate keywords as anchor text as you previously defined when you mapped your site structure. Build internal links between all your related pages to enhance both your visitors and the spiders experience, this will result in more link juice and more pages viewed. If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 17: ON-PAGE ANALYSIS WITH IBP


Definition of a Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits than under analysis some of them won't stand up either. - Evan Esar -

You just need competition

to

be

better

than

your

Today is the last lesson of our on-site mastery course and we are going to invest it in getting a final overview of our on-page optimization work based on keyword density, keyword proximity, and keyword prominence. All those data could be a real hassle and extremely time consuming to compute and analyze but luckily for us, all those processes can be done very easily using a smart tool.

Getting Started with IBP


Ok, for those of you wont dont already have it or dont know what it is, IBP stands for Internet Business Promoter. This SEO software is available in 3 different versions, free (the one we are going to use today), and 2 paid versions.
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This software is a full SEO toolbox by itself providing you everything you need for your SEO work, from keyword research, submission, link building, etc; however the part we are particularly interested in today (and principally the main reason why I use this software) is the on-page analysis report it can generates for you. The first steps we are going to take consist of downloading and installing the software on our computers.

1. Go to Internet Business Promoter site now.

2. Click on the Download tab.

3. A download window should popup automatically, select Save

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4. Once the download is complete, run the program and follow the installation wizard.

5. As you run the program for the first time it will ask you basic setup information, such as your domain name:

And your main keyword:

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6. Once you are done with those, you should now see the following homepage screen.

Congratulation, Internet Business Promoter is now set and ready to be used!

Top 10 Webpage Optimizer


The feature we are so interested in is the Top 10 Optimization report. In order to access to this option, click on the Optimization thumbnail link on top of the page.

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On the Top 10 Optimization Report page, change the following as needed:

1. The Webpage your want to optimize. 2. The Keyword your want to optimize your page for. 3. The Search Engine for which you want to optimize your page. Once you are done, click the button Create Report (#4), and the software will start to run the analysis.

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Once the analysis is completed, the software will then generate a detailed report for you. The optimization report is mainly oriented on keyword density, keyword proximity, and keyword prominence factors, which are tedious data to calculate and compare on your own.

In order to give you an example of the report you are going to get, Im going to run a sample one for you both with the free version (with very limited or no advices) and a paid version (full explanation of recommended modification and strategy). Since Ive been talking a lot of my post on keyword density seo, this is the post Im going to use and try to rank for the difficult Keyword Density (I cant show you for my other keywords because Im already #1 or top 10 at least). The report is very extensive (about 60 pages!) and covers all the following information:

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Report overview Keyword use in document title Global link popularity of web site Link texts of inbound links Keyword use in body text Age of web site Keyword use in H1 headline texts Keyword use in domain name Keyword use in page URL Links from social networks Server speed Keyword use in H2-H6 headline texts Keyword use in IMG ALT attributes Top level domain of web site Keyword use in bold body text Number of visitors to the site Keyword use in same domain link texts Keyword use in outbound link texts

Keyword use in same domain link URLs Keyword use in outbound link URLs Keyword use in meta description Number of trailing slashes in URL HTML validation of web page to W3C standards Readability level of web page Keyword use in meta keywords Keyword use in the first sentence of the body text Keyword use in HTML comments Search engine compatibility Factors that could prevent your top ranking Table: Number of keywords Table: Keyword density Table: Keyword position Table: Number of words Table: Number of characters Table: Ranking factors digest

Overview of the Optimization Report


Ranking Requirement Score (Target 95%)

I may be doing very well for my other keywords, but it seems that I have a lot of work to do if I really want to be in the top 10 for keyword density! Search Engines Ranking Factors Performance
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As you can see, although my pages fulfilled most of the optimization requirements, the reason why my Ranking Requirement Score is so low is because I fail 14 of 24 essential optimization standards! The detail of each of those requirements is listed and scored in the detail report.

Detailed Optimization Report


With a free version of Internet Business Promoter, although all the items will be analyzed, you will only get the data and advices from a few of them. Nonetheless, its fairly easy to get an idea of the recommendation, as the scoring is still displayed at the very least:

Heres a sample of element not detailed from a free version:

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Heres the same from a full version:

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Exercise
Download a free version of Internet Business Promoter, and create a report for the page you want to optimize, even without details for all the elements analyzed, the scoring itself should give you a pretty good idea of what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. For the people who are curious about the paid version at $249.95, I have made available a free full report sample for you downloadable here. This may help you consider whether or not its worth the money for
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you (remember that this is only one of the many features of this software). If you are interested in receiving a full report for your page and keyword, but are not ready to part yourself with that much money, I can generate one for you for as low as $10 per report. Just send me an email with your page URL and the keyword you want to optimize for. If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 18: UNDERSTANDING LINKS


The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. - Sydney J. Harris -

Good links, bad links


Before going any further with our off-site optimization training, its important to fully comprehend our tools, here they are links. Today, we are going to learn what links got to do with SEO, what we should expect out of our inbound links, and more importantly, what kind of links are wasting our time and efforts.

Linking and SEO


When people talk about SEO, they only think of inbound links. Some become even greedy and start to stop linking out, nofollowing their outbound links, and other dirty practices. They are the kind of people who take it all and give nothing back. Though it may seems like a good idea for short sighted people, I
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strongly believe that theres much more to gain by being natural and honest. An external link is like a testimonial that you appreciate and refer whats on the other side. Most of the people who dont link out are afraid to lose their link juice, what they fail to see is that theres a lot more to benefits than it seems to link out.

Linking Out
History has show to us countless times over and over that the people who gain the most are people who give the most. In SEO and on internet in general, when you link out to a site, one benefit you can gain from the search engines is network association, and if that site is an authority one, you surely want to be associated with it, even if it is indirectly. When you link out, your visitors and your readers respect you more and find you more trustable and in turn are more willing to link to you.

Being Linked In
As I explained earlier, giving a link to somebody is like giving a testimonial or recommendation for this page.

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For the search engines, it would be counted just like casting a vote.

The more votes a page would get, the more it would appear to be appreciated and trusted by the internet users, thus the better the search engines should rank this page.

This concept is true with all the search engines, but especially with Google, which even has created a scoring system called PageRank. As you understand this, it becomes clear that our goal as SEO is to acquire as many backlinks as possible. Now, just like everything in the world, when it comes to SEO and link building, quality over quantity always prevails. Each quality backlink we will acquire will have influence over our Link Authority and/or our Link Popularity.

Link Popularity
Link popularity refers to how many links are pointing towards our specific page. Although the concept is simple, there are some simple rules to follow in order to maximize benefits from our work:

Pages with high PageRank score provide more popularity value, also called link juice.

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Multiple links coming from a single domain are highly discounted and hardly bring more value than having just one. Link popularity is more about how many links from different domain name source you are acquiring than how many links in general you have. Only links that can transmit link juice will affect your popularity score. Relevant links (coming from the same category topic) will carry more popularity than irrelevant links.

Link Authority
Link authority refers to what the links pointing to your pages are telling the search engines. Put simply, it refers to what anchor text is used by the person linking to your page. The anchor text is the small piece of text used when you create a link:

This anchor text tells the search engines what your page is all about. Understanding this concept, the more people link to your pages using your keyword, the more the search engines will consider that your page is relevant for that specific keyword. Using proper Anchor text is the key to successful off-site optimization.
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Keep in mind that the search engines like things to be or look as natural as possible and abusing keywords in your anchor text may lead to an over-optimization penalty. The best way to prevent this is to vary your anchor texts and make them look as natural as possible. This is also another reason why I recommended you earlier to optimize your post using multiple keywords, this way; youll be able to provide much more varied combination of anchor texts giving it the necessary natural feel that Google likes so much. I recommend you to have your anchor texts with a length of 2-8 words long in average.

Unhelpful Links for SEO


As I explained earlier, all links are not helpful for SEO, and some people are ready to play some dirty tricks with you.

nofollow attribute
Links that have this attribute attached to them do not pass link juice at all, you wont benefit from it.

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Meta Robot instruction


Another method used is to add a line in the <head> of the source code of a page with the following meta command:

Any link on such page will not pass link popularity at all.

Robots.txt file
Even trickier are people placing this kind of instruction in a robots.txt file.

No cache or with old cache


Regardless of the PageRank of a page, you want to check the cache history of that page.

If the search engine cant cache the page, they cant keep record of your link being there; likewise, if the cache of a page is old, over 2 weeks its likely that the search engines have stopped to crawl this page for whatever reason; this means that your link wont be crawled and noticed even if is follow and a high PR page.
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No PageRank
Pages with no PageRank cant help you improve your link popularity for the simple reason that they dont have any to give.

Also keep in mind that what count is the PageRank score of the page youll have your link on, not the PageRank score of the site linking to you. If a site has PageRank of 6, but it links to your from a no PageRank page, what you get is a worthless link from a no PR page, not a link from a PR6 page.

Exercise
Read and re-read this lesson until it all make sense to you, the understanding of those concepts is what will make the difference in your competition for the top ranking position for your keyword. Link building is one of the most important work you can do in SEO, and its extremely time consuming. Its very easy to waste a lot of your precious time building useless links for your site. Learn to identify quality links, and how to avoid useless one for your own benefits! If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 19: OUTRANK YOUR COMPETITION


Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities. - Walter Scott -

To be the best, youve to beat the bests


Top ranking sites all have something in common, and thats the fact that they have better SEO work than all the other sites. Not only did they do better with on-site optimization, they are dominating the search engines with their off-site optimization work. Today Im going to show you how to outrank those sites!

The Art of War


In order to get a top ranking in the search engines, you need not to have a perfect page, but instead, you need to have a page that is better than your competition.

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This may sounds innocent, but its a very important concept for you to understand when it comes to SEO. To outrank your competition, you need to be able to do better than them on 2 levels:

On-site optimization Off-site optimization

Now, what Im going to say may sounds over simplistic, but way to many of you overlook the importance of the following fact: If you dont know what your competition is doing, how are you going to beat them? You need information to be able to gauge their current level and where you stand in comparison. In general, having a very well optimized site when it comes to onsite optimization alone, will get you all the way to the top 30 results and maybe even to the top 10 depending of the difficulty of your keyword. That step was previously accomplished by following the recommendation we got from the IBP report yesterday. What is left for us to do now is off-site optimization. When you make it to the top 30, outranking your competition is all about your inbound links.
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The only way you can increase your ranking position is by building more and better quality inbound links than your competition. Your very first goal should not be to compare yourself to the top ranking page yet, but rather the lowest ranking page of the top 10 results. The reason is clear; this is the page you need to beat in order to make it to the first page of results. Being on the first page and being on the second page are worlds apart when it comes to SEO results!

Competitive Intelligence
In order for us to outrank this page, we must absolutely know the following information:

How many backlinks do they have with our keyword in their anchor text? The real ranking strength of a page comes from the amount of backlinks it got with the keyword in the anchor text, this is a number you must beat in order to outrank this page. What is the status of those pages that link back? All pages linking back dont have the same level and amount of popularity and authority, evaluate how many authority backlinks they are getting and get more and better ones than them. What are those pages URLs? Those people are linking towards this page that means if you were to get links too from those same pages, you could at least match that page, which is a first step to outrank them.

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How many different domains are they coming from? Remember that even more important than the number of links is also the number of different domains, the more domains is linking toward a page, the more authority and popularity it will acquire. What is the keyword density of their anchor text? Anchor text is very important but you dont want to fall into the Google Link Trap box where you over-optimize your anchor text and end up being penalized for it. Make sure to match the density used by your competitor. What anchor text variation are they using? Your competitor is likely to be using different anchor text variations, found out which one they are using, and leverage on this knowledge.

Not only do you need to know this information about your competitor, you also need to know this information about your own page in order to make a proper comparison.

Get the Right Tool for the Right Job


I wish there was a free way to do this, but honestly its just not realistic to go through the tens of thousands of backlinks a site has, look on each of those pages what is the anchor text, page rank and other info your need from each of those page, all by yourself manually. You must get a professional SEO software for this, and if you have any bit of understanding about ROI, youll quickly realize that using such tool actually save you money, not only for the results youll obtain, but for the time youll save.

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Remember that your time has a dollar value! That said the tool I recommend and wouldnt be doing SEO without is SEO Elite. The very first step is to make a search in Google for my Keyword, here SEO Help.

Since Im already in the top 10, my goal will be to become the top ranking site for this search term. Just from this page of results, I learn a lot:

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286,000,000 thats a lot of competition here, Im glad I made it to the top 10 already within 4 months! #2 is Google! This means that I will have to beat Google to become #1; easier said than done! #1 doesnt have my keyword in their page title, description, or URL! That means they are super duper tough dudes with their inbound links for that search term! (further analysis tells me that its a redirection of a former domain seo-help.com, that explains a bit)

Its now time for me to fire up SEO Elite! I run a new project to analyze the backlinks of my competitor:

And the keyword analysis of my competitor:

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From all the information collected, I now know that:

743 different domain names link to my competitor. 334 backlinks use SEO Help as part of their anchor text. 76.1% of the backlinks use SEO Help in their anchor text. 65.6% of the time, SEO Help will be the most prominent term in the anchor text. I also have the URLs, PR, Alexa, and other information pertaining to the page linking to my competitor.

The next step is to repeat the search analysis process for my site and compare the results.
Data Domain names Backlinks Backlinks Density Anchor Prominence Competitor 743 334 76.1% 65.6% My Site 1,536 130 48.3% 31.3% OK I need at least 204 more backlinks I need to increase by 27.8% I need to increase by 34.3% Actions to be taken

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I know now exactly what I need to do in order to outrank my competition and enjoy my search engine domination as #1 in Google for my search term! If thats not golden information for you, I dont know what is.

Exercise
If you can afford it, I strongly recommend you to acquire SEO Elite. If you are really serious about your SEO, this is probably one of the most important piece of software you could ever get. Seriously, even if you dont get any other software, this one is a must have, anyway, theres a 8 weeks full refund guaranty if you dont like it, but trust me if you try it, youll keep it! Try SEO Elite now! If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 20: FINDING LINK PARTNERS


Remind people that profit is the difference between revenue and expense. This makes you look smart. - Scott Adams -

Link building is the hardest part of SEO


Today is the last real lesson of our 21 Days SEO Mastery course, as tomorrow will be used to review all what we have done. You now almost know how to do everything regarding SEO, except one last point, and thats link building. In order for you to build backlinks for your site, you first need to find link partners; this is what we are going to review today.

Competitive Search
The best way is to start trying to get links from the sites your competition is getting their backlinks from. Ideally, you are using SEO Elite and you can directly focus your work on the best links matching your SEO needs.
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If not, another method is to look at the search engines backlinks results:

Type link:competitor.com in Google.

Type linkdomain:competitor.com in Yahoo.

Its definitely not as neat or refined as what you get with SEO Elite, but its better than nothing.

Article Directories
Article directories can be used in 2 different manners:

Getting one way links back through writing articles and submitting them.

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Finding link partners by looking at who uses the articles in the directories.

Keep in mind that the backlinks you get from article marketing tend to have a low SEO value, so their purpose should be more oriented towards deep linking of your pages than actually ranking high for a search term. Nonetheless, where article marketing lacks in quality, it makes up in quantity. Not the best trade, but better than nothing. The leverage obtained there for the amount of work required is extremely attractive.

Each article published will be reproduced and build backlinks for you over and over for the rest of your life without you having anything to do with it.

Link Exchange
This is probably the most popular way (and the easiest) to acquire backlinks. You basically agree to link towards another person site, where in exchange, that person will link back to your from your site so that youll both benefit from it. Please note that Google has been seriously catching up with this kind of link building technique bet it 2 ways linking or 3 ways linking and have severely devalued those links.

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Nonetheless, they still can help you in your backlink quest.

Different methods of doing link exchange include:


Links page directory exchange. Blogroll links exchange. Trackbacks.

Joining a link exchange network can facilitate your search of link partners. A link exchange network is composed of webmasters willing to do link exchange.

Search Engine Queries

Going for broke, in the last resort, use search engine queries to find link partners.

Since most of the people trading links or willing to do link exchange tend to have a link page themselves, the easiest way is to do a search in Google: links.html returns 381,000,000 results.

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links.php returns 180,000,000 results.

One very neat trick to refine your search is to type + and your keyword, so that youll find links pages that are relevant to your keyword:

Play around with broad search and exact search, to find what fit you and your site the best!

Exercise
Now that you know how many links you need, its time for you to use the method best fitting you to find the appropriate link partners for your link building campaign! Build your links naturally, and dont engage into link scheme promising you 10,000 links overnight or such, as this would raise a red flag towards your site and possibly lead to a penalty from Google! Give yourself a target and stick to it, like building 10 links each day for example.
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If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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DAY 21: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER


Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them. - W. Edwards Deming -

My last few advices to you


Today is the last day of our 21 Days SEO Mastery course. Its now time to review all what you have learned during the past 3 weeks and see where each piece of the puzzle fits in your global SEO campaign. Keep in mind that SEO is an art and not an exact science; we are dealing here with best guesses and probabilities to increase our chances of success.

Keyword Research
Even if you forget or want to skip most of the parts of this course for your own SEO work, theres one element that you must focus on no matter what, and thats proper keyword research. Strangely, most of the people will tend to skip this step or try to expedite it as quickly as possible; thats a huge mistake!
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Your entire SEO campaign, and then to some extent your entire business online, depends on the keyword you are deciding to optimize for.

Optimize for the wrong keyword, and all your SEO effort and advertising budget will go to waste, so take your keyword research very seriously!

Plan Your Work and Strategy


There are so many things to do in SEO that its very easy to just waste your time, doing a bit of this and a bit of that, and failing to grasp the big picture of what you are supposed to do. Plan your work carefully and stay focus by being accountable for your actions. Just consider steps like building 1 backlink per day, this may sounds like nothing, but if you are able to keep up this regiment, its worth 365 backlinks per year, and if you have been more genuine and build instead 10 links per day, you naturally add up 3,650 backlink within a year! Let me tell you that this is no small achievement, sadly, its very easy to skip your schedule and start to engage into procrastination saying that youll catch up the building of these links the following week, and before you know it, 2-3 months have passed and you didnt build any link while your competition is already 300 links ahead of you!

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Build a Solid Base


If you have done your homework properly, its very unlikely that your site structure will ever change, you may build up on it, but you are supposed to redesign it. Considering how your site structure is the foundation of your site, it would be smart to have it done right from the start rather than having to change it over and over. Doing the right thing from the start not only will bring better results faster, but will also save you valuable time afterward in comparison to the people who rush and then realize that their site is wrong and have to redesign it. If you are lucky, you are the one doing the work and all you wasted is your time; it you are unlucky you actually did hire a web design company to do the work, and youre going to have pay again to fix what you should have though in the first place.

Online Business is Still Business


Online business is really very attractive to everybody because of its low starting cost. Now, all too many people confuse low starting cost and no starting cost. I really want to stress that even if the fix costs of an online business are much lower than an offline business, its still a business and will have required costs involved.
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Ive been CEO of a $10,000,000 company, and associate in a $50,000,000 one, so compare to those figures having $100,000 of required starting funds for an online business is cheap change. That said $100,000 may be a lot of money for a lot of people nonetheless. Now, my example may be a bit on the extreme side, but anyone starting or wanting to start an online business should be ready to consider at least $5,000 of business cost.

People tend to be overly stingy, but the key in business is not how much you spend, or how much you earn, its all about Return On Investment (ROI). When you run an online business, the success or failure of this one is directly dependent of whether or not you are found online, and this is done by SEO. Trying to save cost by not paying for required education or acquiring the necessary tools is foolish at the same level as trying to run your online business without your own computer, internet connection, and domain name. If you think that because you are using the free computer with internet connection at the nearby airport is the way to run your online business because you are saving a lot of money on those expenses, think again and try to calculate your ROI. When it comes to SEO, ask yourself honestly what a first rank in the search engine for your main keyword is worth for you and your business compare that amount with the cost of the tool that can help you achieve that

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Recommended Tools and Services


Below is a summary of all the resources and tools I have been recommending you during the past 3 weeks. I vouch for those, not because of an affiliate link, but because those are the services I purchased and use in a very satisfactory manner.
Resource GoDaddy Recommendation Overview Recommended
GoDaddy is one of the cheapest domain name registrar on internet. Very reliable service and easy setup and maintenance of your domain name. HostGator may not be the cheapest web hosting company out there, but as far as I am concerned since I came across them, I never looked back. Their packages are so easy to understand (all unlimited) and their customer service excellent, with a server uptime of 100% since over 4 years for all my sites and client sites, its a sure value starting as low as $4.95 per month. This is the engine I personally recommend for you to build your site on. Doing so will give you a huge advantage with the search engines, and best of all its free. Powerful keyword software providing not only valuable information for SEO but also PPC work. All in one SEO solution packed in one powerful software, where the most valuable feature to me is the Top 10 Optimizer report that will provide you with information that can dramatically affect your search engine ranking. Doing SEO without SEO Elite is like trying to dig for gold without a shovel! For only a onetime fee of $167 only its the best investment of your business life! Talk about ROI, this is the onetime $167 that will bring you thousands and thousands in your pocket each and every month

HostGator

Highly Recommended

WordPress Keyword Elite

Highly Recommended

Recommended

IBP

Highly Recommended

SEO Elite

Must Have

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Exercise
This is the last post of our 21 Days SEO Mastery course, I hope that you had as much fun as I did, and hopefully learned something in the process! You are now fully equipped to bring your site to an all new level, closer to the top rank in the search engines! The last exercise consists of you applying the knowledge you acquired during the past 21 days rather than letting it die and rot in a deep corner of your memory.

Remember, even the best technique or strategy is worthless if no action is taken.

If you still have questions, dont hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson on my blog.

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CONCLUSION
Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. Its not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; its when you had everything to do, and youve done it.

I really must congratulate you for reaching this point. By your actions and decisions, you have taken control of your life and future. With the knowledge acquired from this course, you should be able to run a successful business online all by yourself, as you have now mastered all the required basics of Search Engine Optimization. Remember that knowledge without action is worthless, so put all what you have learned in practice and see the magic unfold! If you really want to take your online business to the next level, then you probably should be trying to get a spot in my exclusive SEO Support and Coaching Group:

http://www.advancedseomastery.com
If you have any questions, dont hesitate to ask, Im here to help. Nicolas Prudhon, PhD. SEO Strategist http://www.nicolasprudhon.com
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