Review of Free SEO Report, a new service by Shoemoney

I do not usually write about it much but I have always been fascinated with making money online.  I have never really figured out a way to make a bunch of money but that has not stopped me!  It would be awesome to stay home, work on a web site for a few hours, and then do genealogy all day.  So far, it has not panned out for me but that in no excuse to give up!
Over the years, I have followed several gurus in the field of SEO (Search Engine Marketing) and PPC/PPA advertising (Pay Per Click/Pay Per Action).  That may sound foreign to you but it all boils down to creating a good product, in this case a web site, that is optimized to bring in viewers who in return may buy your products, sign up for your services or click on the ads that you show.  In the case of Virginia Family Tree, I do show ads to help support the site.  I also will occasionally throw an Amazon link in for products that I write about.  If you thereafter go to Amazon and buy that product, I would get a cut of the money to use on the blog here.
Well, in this case, one of the guru's that I follow is named Jeremy Schoemaker and he goes by the name Shoemoney.  He is a pretty smart guy and has literally gone from working at a bank years ago to now practically printing money.  The reason he is so successful is that he is dedicated, personable and fairly open about what he does.  If you read his blog, over time you will see that he pretty much spells out all of the ways he makes money and his advice is ripe for the picking...by anyone, for free.  His blog is his personal outlet for venting, testing things out and communicating with his peers in the outside world.
Shoemoney's latest venture is called Free SEO Report.  Remember when I stated earlier that SEO stood for Search Engine Optimization?  Well, that is what Shoemoney is helping you do.  You provide him with your e-mail address, website address and the keyword your website is about.  In my case, the word I focus on is genealogy.  When I provided the information, his system generated a report for me that showed how my site stacked up against other top genealogy sites.  It also provided me with a list of items I could fix or change to make my site better optimized.
Why would I care if my site is optimized?  You never want to build your site to cater to search engines.  If you do, it starts to look and read silly because people and search engines see things differently.  If I wanted to rank higher in Google for the word genealogy, I could write sentences on my blog like.  "Genealogy is my favorite hobby.  I love genealogy, genealogist and doing genealogy research.  I consider myself to be a genealogist among genealogists in the field of genealogy."  Who would want to read that?  However, search engines may think that my site is REALLY an authority on genealogy....because I used the word so many times!  With that in mind, it is key to optimize your site for search engines without doing silly thing like keyword stuffing...writing a word over and over again, just to trick a search engine.
Examples of SEO practices would be making sure your site has a good title, that you are using the proper META tags, etc.  You may not know what that means or how to fix it, but the report helps to guide you along that path.  It does not cost anything for your first report.  I signed up this morning and received my report in about five minutes.  It will give me a lot to think about this afternoon and I am sure I will be tweaking my site this evening.  The better optimized my site is, the better it will rank in Google. That means more people will come to my site and maybe I will make a few dollars off my advertising and get to meet some new, interesting people!  Think about it...you probably found my site in a search engine originally.  I want to increase the number of people who are able to find me.
As for cost, Shoemoney's Free SEO Report seems to be free for the first report and you have to pay for future reports.  It looks like a monthly service fee.  I would imagine that it is like a free credit report type service where he will update your SEO report monthly and let you know how your site is improving.  You really only have to accept your free report and then you can cancel.  I did not have to provide my credit card or anything, it truly is no strings attached.  Shoemoney is a good guy and I trust anything he puts out.  He is not out to scam anyone.  He puts out good products that people actually want.  I would feel totally safe in telling you to sign up for his free trial if you have a web site and you want to make it better.

So what is in this for me?  Well, I really respect Shoemoney and what he has done for the Internet marketing community.  He also does a lot to help out the little guy.  He gave away a bunch of iPads at a recent trade show and he has one left over.  To help promote his new site, Free SEO Report, he offered that anyone who write a review would be entered into a drawing for the remaining iPad.  In this case, not only do I get to tell you about a product that I find helpful and a guy who I admire, I also have a shot at picking up a free iPad.  That would be a great asset in my genealogy toolbox.  I would look sweet at the archives, rocking my iPad!

Thanks for taking the time to read this and maybe give Free SEO Report a shot.

Check It Blog side Bar ........

General Test of Family Tree Child

General Test of Family Tree Child

no.	General Test Item	Point	Pass	Fail
1	W3C Compliant - XHTML	2
2	W3C Compliant - CSS	2
3	Browser Compatibility - IE7	1
4	Browser Compatibility - Firefox	2
5	Browser Compatibility - Chrome	1
6	Support from Designer	2
7	Special Effect: Featured Content, Drop Down Menu, Automatic Thumbnail, Options Page	4
	Total	14 pts	9 pts
	Theme Score	65%

SEO Test of Family Tree Child

no.	SEO Test Item	Point	Pass	Fail
1	W3C Compliant - XHTML	1
2	W3C Compliant - CSS	1
3	Home page Heading SEO	1
4	Post & Page Heading SEO	1
5	Post & Page Title Tag (Title as seen in SERPs)	1
6	Content Code Position	2
	Total	7 pts	5 pts
	Theme Score	72%

SEO for Surnames

Search Engine Optimization – SEO for Genealogy

Genealogy bloggers don’t write for the search engines.  Most of us write because we are passionate about genealogy.  We want to make cousin connections or we wish to share our research or expertise.  Writing for the search engines is usually the last thing on our minds.

But we do want to be found on the net. Writing in a vacuum isn’t much fun, nor does it make cousin connections.

Recent changes to the google algorithm had me reviewing my strategies for search engine optimization (SEO). I’ve studied this topic and have used SEO to my advantage on several of my non-genealogy websites.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

According to Wikipedia -

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a website web presence.

SEO is huge business. Large companies employ SEO teams because the pay offs are great. Free traffic generated by SEO is preferable to paying thousands of dollars for advertising.

SEO takes time and effort to do it well and I admit I don’t do it as completely as I should on a blog post.  But when I do, SEO for genealogy has proven effective especially for certain surname and location combinations.

One example is a surname post of mine featuring “Wilson Peterhead Scotland”. Google that term and you will likely find it is on page 1 at the top position.  (the position may vary a bit). I get connections from that post on a regular basis.

Being on the first page of Google is much more desirable than being buried on page 9….or page 99.

Taking a few extra minutes up front to work on SEO for genealogy can definitely help the odds that your blog post will be found.

There are 3 steps to effective SEO.

• Keyword research
• Writing content for SEO
• Backlinking

Let’s look at the steps in greater detail.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is probably the most important part of SEO for genealogy. How many people are looking for your search term? What particular words or keyword phrases are searched for more?

If you are blogging specific genealogy terms with low search volume it is quite possible you can rank highly in the search engines without to much effort.

It helps to be specific.

Enter the term “genealogy” into Google’s Keyword Tool and you will discover that over 1.8 million people search that term globally on a monthly basis.  There is NO chance your blog post is going to rank on page number 1 of google if you optimize for the search term “genealogy”. There is simply to much competition. The word “genealogy” is considered to be a broad search term.

On the other hand, if you search on “Wilson Peterhead Scotland” in the google keyword tool you get NO search volume. You may be wondering what good is that if no one is searching for this term.

It all depends on how people enter the search term into the search engines. Chances are they won’t use quotation marks around the term, or they will use a slightly different combination of words in the phrase – “Wilson in Peterhead” for example. In that case your blog post has a good chance of being found and noticed.

Remember, it just takes ONE cousin connection to give you another lead.

Results may not be immediate, but some day, some time there is a good chance someone will find your post.

Another example – People from Peterhead Scotland have been referred to as “Blue Tooners”. I did a blog post entitled “My Grandmother was a Blue Tooner” and optimized for the keyword phrase “Blue Tooner”.

That blog post is on the first page of Google in the top position for the search term “blue tooner”.

Does it bring connections?

Yes!

A few HOURS after I posted the Blue Tooner article a person living in Peterhead Scotland contacted me, said she worked at the Family History Library and offered to take pictures of Wilson gravestones!*

Without a search engine optimized post, I don’t think she would have found me. SEO for genealogy comes through again!

Writing content

In order to write for the search engines you need to include the keyword phrase in your post multiple times and in a certain way. This includes having the phrase appear in the title, H1 tag (header) and page description.

It is highly recommended the keyword phrase appear in the first 50 words of your text because of the way the search engines index content.

It is also recommended that the keyword phrase appear in 1 to 4% of the total text. Using those guidelines, a blog post of 400 words would have mention of the keyword phrase between 4 and 16 times.

I feel 4% is a bit much for SEO for genealogy and usually keep it to around 1%. Google and the other search engines are pretty smart – they discount articles that appear to use an over abundance of keywords. This is known as ‘keyword stuffing’.

I tend to write my article first without thinking about SEO to much then go back and optimize for the keyword phrase.

If you blog with WordPress I recommend using one of the following plugins for SEO:

• All in one SEO  or
• Platinum SEO Pack

These plugins allow a person to add a custom title (optimized for the search engines)  which will appear on the top of your webpage but might be different from the actual title of your post. They also allow for entry of a description that can include your keyword phrase.  For example this blog post has the title – “SEO for Surnames” although the webpage title is “SEO for Genealogy”.

For the times when I really want to get the SEO right I use a free tool called Traffic Travis.

Traffic Travis tells me how effective my SEO for genealogy efforts are, assigns a score and gives suggestions to improve. I aim for a score of A+ (ever the over achiever) but anything over B+ is good.

After getting feedback from Traffic Travis a few times you will quickly learn the tricks to get the highest SEO score thus eliminating the need to keep checking using the traffic tool.

Another tip is to write unique, original content.   Google penalizes websites that have duplicate content.  That’s why I don’t post a lot of press releases and I don’t do a lot of “memes” posts on my blog.

For example, my “Tombstone Tuesday” might be titled with a name, date and place but it rarely has “Tombstone Tuesday” in the title. The key is to vary it up and to think of unique ways of presenting your information.  The search engines are geared to pick up the different and the unusual and will present these results to their viewers first.

Tagging images properly with alt tags is also good SEO.  Alternative text tags (alt tags) appear in place of images when the browser preferences are set for text only.  Search engines index the text on the images which will help lead people back to your blog posts.

Backlinking

The more backlinks you have to a post the more popular it will be in the search engines. Google thinks it is valuable content if others link to your webpage.

Internet marketers use anchor text (the keyword phrase) linked back to their article. They will comment on blogs and forums, enter their keyword phrase as their “name”.    I don’t do that because I think it looks rather tacky.

I do use my name and a link to the article I want ranked. I sometimes include “Luxegen” along with my name as I have google alerts set to pick up any mention of my blog.  (Google alerts for my name “Joan Miller” are less successful – can you imagine how many “Joan Miller’s” there are in the world???  Lots!).

SEO for genealogy might sound complicated but it really isn’t once you’ve tried it a few times.  The Traffic Travis tool does help.   Perhaps I will cover Traffic Travis in another post if folks are interested.

I suggest you give SEO for genealogy a try the next time you are putting together a blog post.  It could find you new cousin connections.

—-

Resources:

Traffic Travis – Free search engine optimization (SEO) tool

*Note – having someone find you in mere hours is not the norm. Usually it can take weeks or months. SEO, while effective, can be slow. In this case I had also tweeted my keyword phrase linking back to the blog post. Google indexes tweets in the search engines almost immediately thus getting my keyword phrase (and backlink) active quickly.  This was SEO for genealogy with social media combined…but that’s another topic for another day.

55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.
2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.
3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.
4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.
5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.
7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.
8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.
9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.
10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.
11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.
12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.
Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.
13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.
14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.
15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.
17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.
19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.
20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.
21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.
22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.
23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.
24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.
25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.
26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.
27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.
28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.
29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.
30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.
31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.
32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.
33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.
34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.
35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.
36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!
37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.
38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.
39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.
40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.
41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:
(1) Log out of Google
(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar
42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.
43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.
44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.
45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.
47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.
48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.
49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.
50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.
51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.
52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.
53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.
54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.
55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Html Layout

Website Layouts

Most websites have put their content in multiple columns (formatted like a magazine or newspaper). Multiple columns are created by using "/"or tags. Some CSS are normally also added to position elements, or to create backgrounds or colorful look for the pages. HTML Layouts - Using Tables The simplest way of creating layouts is by using the HTML "/"tag. The following example uses a table with 3 rows and 2 columns - the first and last row spans both columns using the colspan attribute:

Use Code

/*
<html>
<body>

<table width="500" border="0">
<tr> <td colspan="2" style="background-color:#FFA500;">
<h1>SEO Back Links Pagerank </h1>
</td> </tr>
<tr valign="top"> <td style="background-color:#FFD700;width:100px;text-align:top;">
<b>www e-referrel com</b>
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
</td> <td style="background-color:#EEEEEE;height:200px;width:400px;text-align:top;">
BUSINESS / IT / SEO / WEBDESIGN</td> </tr>
<tr> <td colspan="2" style="background-color:#FFA500;text-align:center;">
http://seoback-links.blogspot.in/</td> </tr>
</table>

</body>
</html> */

SEO Back Links Example

SEO Back Links Pagerank
www.e-referrer.com www.e-referrer.com	BUSINESS / IT / SEO / WEBDESIGN http://www.economics4development.com/ PR 3 http://www.economics4development.com/economic_development.htm PR3 http://www.economics4development.com/economic_development_concepts.htm PR2 http://www.economics4development.com/economic_development_theories.htm PR2 http://www.economics4development.com/harris_todaro_model.htm PR1 http://www.economics4development.com/surplus_labor_model.htm PR1 http://www.economics4development.com/exogenous_growth_model.htm PR1 http://www.economics4development.com/harrod_domar_model.htm PR1 SEO/WEBDESIGN http://www.benalmedia.com/resources.html PR 2 http://www.economics4development.com/about.htm PR 2 http://www.3g-logic.net/seo-services-resources.html PR0 http://www.3g-logic.co.uk/seo-services-resources.html PR0 http://seo-techniqies.blogspot.com/ PR0 http://seo-techniqies.blogspot.com/p/links.html PR0 AUTO/CAR http://www.mybikelights.co.uk/links/ PR 0 http://chicagolimousinetransportation.blogspot.com/ PR 0 TRAVEL http://jordanselecttour.blogspot.com/ PR 0 http://chicago-limousine-service.blogspot.com PR0 http://chicago-limousine-service.blogspot.com/p/travel-resources.html PR 0 http://luxury-voluntourism.blogspot.com/ PR 0 http://luxury-voluntourism.blogspot.com/p/resources.html PR 0 SPORT http://kravfitnow.com/krav-fit-resources.html PR1 http://sportsclub4u.yolasite.com/ PR 0 WEDDING / DATING http://www.elegantevents.ie/links PR 2 http://www.photoglobin.com/?level=resources&link=3 PR0 http://www.photoglobin.com/?level=resources&link=1 PR0 http://elegantsevents.blogspot.com/ PR 0 http://charleston-wedding-photography.blogspot.com/ PR 0 FOOD http://www.thecarverycompany.com/link.html PR 2 PRINTER / COMPUTER http://re-inks.blogspot.com/p/resources.html PR 0 http://atlanticinkjet.blogspot.com/p/links.html PR 0 http://inktonersuperstore.blogspot.com/p/ink-resources.html PR 0 EDUCATION http://mbaadmissionsconsulting.yolasite.com/ PR 0 http://www.learning-school.webs.com/ PR 0 http://onlinespeeches.blogspot.com/ PR0 MUSIC http://www.photoglobin.com/?level=resources&link=5 PR 0 SHOPPING http://www.photoglobin.com/?level=resources&link=2 CASINO http://casinoroyale.webstarts.com/ PR0 HANDICRAFT / PAINTING http://www.photoglobin.com/?level=resources&link=4 PR 0 MOBILE http://mobilephone-jammer.blogspot.com/ PR0 http://mobilephone-jammer.blogspot.com/p/resources.html PR0 HOME / REAL STATE http://www.sidereturnextension.co.uk/links/ http://www.buildverticalgarden.com/link/ http://my-home-garden-space.blogspot.com/p/home-resources.html MEDIA http://young-india-minds.blogspot.com/
http://seoback-links.blogspot.in/