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Paradux Media Group Completes 10 Week SEO Course

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presentation Paradux Media Group Completes 10 Week SEO CourseMike Frey, Chief Visionary Officer at Paradux Media Group from Eagle Point Oregon just completed an intense 10 week SEO course I offer as part of my Training and Coaching package and here’s what he had to say after a few weeks from completion. . .

Rick,

I wanted to take the time to let you know how much I appreciated your 10-week SEO class.  Knowing absolutely nothing about SEO I was a little bit intimidated going in, coming out I am very comfortable with every aspect of SEO.  I know look at every website differently, every Google search I do, and how I treat my own website and blog.

I am amazed at all the little things that I was so unaware of and how they all add up to a big thing, creating landing pages for popular blogs, adding SEO to our images and the cool analytic tricks.  Our website has seen a dramatic change in just a short period and has already paid off in new clients and conversations with new potential clients due only to our improved SEO.

The timing could not have been better, as in the middle of our training a popular television show announced they were coming to our area, (ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition Show).   I decided to blog about the event and using what I had learned from you about SEO my blog was at the top of all local Google searches regarding the event.  I have since written a follow up blog and now both blogs are at the top ahead of all the news media and other bloggers.  Just good SEO.  The increase percentage in how many hits my blog has gotten has a lot of zeros and commas.  I can only thank my SEO training for that.

I would highly recommend your SEO classes to any business owner.  If your SEO techniques are applied, a ROI will be achieved.  Even with this thank you note, I think I did ok with achieving the proper keyword density for SEO.  Thanks Rick.

Mike Frey
Chief Visionary Officer Paradux Media Group
Eagle Point, Oregon
(email and phone provided upon request)

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Before You Upgrade WordPress..

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Must Know Information About Upgrading to WordPress 3.1!wordpress logo cristal thumbnail 300x300 150x150 Before You Upgrade WordPress..

Every time a major WordPress release arrives, people get scared!

Why? Because just like nearly everything in life… the upgrade procedure can be dangerous.

Point #1 When you know the facts and know how to play safe, the risk is minimized. Why do people get scared? Because we’ve all heard of people losing their websites to a failed upgrade. Yup. It happens. However, no website that is backed up properly is ever really lost.

Point #2. You must upgrade but you should not upgrade until you have a complete backup. This has been one of the smoothest version upgrades I’ve seen in a long time. All of the conflicts I’ve run into are plugin related.

Point #3 You will very likely have zero trouble completing the upgrade successfully. Yes there are going to be hiccups for a few websites, it always happens but I and most others in the WordPress support community feel REALLY good about this release’s stability.

Point #4 This release was probably two additional months in the making due to incredibly strenuous attention to details. WordPress 3.1 is live – meaning you’re going to start seeing a small upgrade notice in your Dashboard.

Point #5 It has been through an extended beta test and five release candidates. It’s just been given the green light!  However, even though it is now live, I highly suggest waiting one week (no more, no less) before upgrading.

Point #6 This gives the masses time to upgrade and find any unspotted flaws. Generally these flaws will be in plugins that were not extensively tested by their developers. By waiting a week and keeping your ear to the ground for a green light from support staff like myself, you ensure the best probability of a trouble-free upgrade. You can further ensure you will have a smooth upgrade by going to the wordpress plugin repository (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/), searching for any plugins you use, and ensuring they are listed as known compatible with WordPress 3.1.

Point #7 Delaying upgrading your blog more than a few weeks after a major or security update (which this is both) greatly increases your risk of your blog being hacked or infected.

Point #8. Generally speaking the damage done to your business and to your nerves by being hacked and infecting your clients and having to do a long cleanup procedure is far more devastating to your business than a failed upgrade that needs to be recovered from a recent backup. Recoveries aren’t fun but they aren’t so bad either… infection cleanups (particularly including cleaning up your soiled name if you do not realize your infected in time) can be incredibly painful.

If you’re either too uncertain of your ability to upgrade your blog successfully or would rather not be bothered with it, I offer both hourly and contract based support time.

Point #9 This means I can assist you with your backups, upgrades or both. My clients know that as soon as the green light is given, their blogs will be taken care of by me and my team!

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Using Google Webmaster Tools For SEO Checkup

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g1b e1293234673485 Using Google Webmaster Tools For SEO CheckupOn December 2,2010 Ian Lurie published an article: 9 Step SEO Checkup Using Google Webmaster Tools within www.Searchengineland.com website as a senior contributor.  Matt McGee welcomed the idea of writing a summary.  The article was one of the best articles written on the subject, and I wanted to summarize the article as well as highlight some extremely important key points.

Setup Is “Extremely” Easy

As you know I’m a website designer, as well as a trainer/coach and SEO Consultant.  WordPress is the only website building platform I work with to design clean and professional websites.  However, I use it more because of the SEO capability than its design flexibility.  So, if you’re using WordPress, you can use one of many plug-ins to handle this part of the setup.   Then you’ll have to Sign in to your Google account, and go to Google.com/webmasters/tools and follow the instructions. You’ll either need to upload a single file to your site, or add a simple META tag in the header.php file.

Once you have the initial setup up and running…its time to turn your attention to the actual Tool.  You may ask yourself, why is it so critical to learn before your Google Webmaster tools account starts gathering data on your website? Mainly because you want to learn the key areas of this tool so that when your website starts gathering this data you’ll have a better understanding on how to fix the problems before they become huge problems.  And believe me…the task will be daunting at that point.  Most people won’t know where to start so I always suggest my business owners to start learning early.

Your Starting Point

1. Crawl Errors: I always start with this diagnostics for Crawl Errors.  This report will show you all the broken links the crawler either couldn’t find or the path simply went nowhere.

Simple Fix: Recreate the page or use a 301 redirect. WordPress has a very simple plug-in that provides an admin panel to handle 301 redirects.  Part of the simplicity is that you already know which links are broker, just look at this report.

2.  Duplicate HTML: The very next diagnostics I work on is; HTML suggestions.  This report will tell you if you have duplicate meta descriptions within your site.  So if you made the mistake of creating meta descriptions with the same meta on two or three pages….believe me you will see it here.  I’m a big SEO junkie and this is a HUGE No No!!

Simple Fix: Re-evaluate your meta descriptions on each of the HTML suggestions report and then re-create or edit the meta descriptions within your pages or posts in your website.

3.  Crawl stats: The next diagnostics; Crawl Stats, which is a little different than the crawler errors.  This report will tell you how many pages are crawled per day, kilobytes downloaded per day and the time the crawler spent downloading a page.  This report will pinpoint exactly the “speed” in which the crawler is able to crawl your whole website.

Simple Fix: Although this seems very complicated…it doesn’t have to be.  The best way I’ve learned how to keep this straight is by following the numbers…in other words, if I have 100 pages I want to see my “average” to never be lower than 100 pages.  At the same time I want my Kilobytes and Time spent downloading to either follow the graph or be lower than the graph of my pages crawled per day.  Anytime the two lower reports have a higher graph than the higher report..it means my website is performing badly…Images may not be compressed, bloated coding and possible server problems.

4.  Are you relevant: This is my favorite report because it tells us what are the most common keywords Google found within the website.  In turn the “significance” of these words should “reflect” the subject matter as a whole of the website.  The key is how relevant is your subject matter in relation to the keywords?

Simple Fix: I’ve been using a rule of 10 for the past 10 years and its seems to help my clients.  My rule of 10 is this:  If the top 10 keywords in this report is NOT indicative or “related” to your subject matter, then you’ll either have to edit or rewrite your pages and posts and/or redo keyword research.  Concentrate on the top 10 keywords..and then concentrate on the next 10 keywords and so forth…before you know it…your relevancy factor will come closer and closer to your subject matter.

5.  Search Queries: Your website on the web; Search Queries.  This report will list the queries people are typing and that will give you insight into which searches will get you clicks.  In other words it will focus “exactly” on what search queries people are typing.

Simple Fix: I had a client who said “who cares what people are searching for”…Ahhh..poor boy….Understanding that this report essentially hands you not just queries but more importantly “keywords.”  By finding the most clicks it will narrow your keywords versus content for pages and posts.

6. Link Strategy: Commonly called the “Links To Your Site.”  This report not only provides who is linking back to your site but also the anchor text that they’re using to link back to your site.

Simple Fix: Look to the content on your site that most people are linking to….this will  be your best content for back linking.  Secondly, look at the anchor text people are using to link back to your site.  If its not consistent with what you’d like…contact them.  I contacted 10 sites who back linked to one of my sites and they had no problem changing the “anchor text.”  If you don’t ask…you’ll never know!

I wouldn’t kid you……there’s a lot of data here about your website, however by studying what the “Diagnostics” are showing you…you’ll have a better handle on how to fix some of these problems before they become huge problems.

For more support and resource material visit Ian Lurie’s article as well as Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

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Google Visual Snapshots

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Google Instant e1284219867507 Google Visual SnapshotsIf you haven’t heard yet, Google is rolling out a new feature on Tuesday.  It will enable people to call up large snapshots of Web pages.  What Google is trying to do is increase and build upon the elements or “snippets” already found within a search result.

If you’re an internet marketer, small online business as an affiliate or an eCommerce its obvious that this will affect you and your business. But how is it going to affect my business??

Key points that supporters agree on:

* People will be able to call up large snapshots of Web Pages
* Another key element for people to have to narrow there search
* Builds on text “snippets” that already accompany a Google Search
* Using Instant Previews will increase the search result satisfaction

Key points that proponents agree on:

* Click-throughs for search ads will affect advertisers
* The snapshots or Instant Previews cover up text ads in the right-hand side of the results   page
* Ad visibility and effectiveness will be affected by Instant Previews

Those are only a few of the key points.  Whether you agree or disagree with Google Instant Previews or Snapshots…they’re here to stay and you want to make sure that you keep in mind how this will affect your potential visitors/traffic.

How Does Google Instant Preview work:

A visitor will see a small “magnifying glass” icon.  Clicking on the icon will call up the snapshot and will also turn on the feature for all other results in the set. The snapshots are static images; people will be NOT be able to click on links within the image, nor can they zoom in or out of the image.  However, Google will highlight the search query terms and other relevant content in the snapshot.

Take Advantage of Google Instant Previews/Snapshots:

I can list a lot of advantages but I really want to concentrate on two.  First, if the Instant Previews is only a static page and the search queries will be highlighted in the pop out of the Web page Instant Previews…then you need to double your efforts and make sure you’re integrating “keywords” in the body text.  I analyzed 22 website in the month of October and 21 of them were not effectively using their keywords in the body content of their website.  So I know the problem exist far too many times than I think it should.  Second, if the Instant Previews will in fact not show the right-hand side of the Web page (I’ve tested it several times this morning and it does cover up that area).  Then you may consider changing your WordPress theme to one that has a left hand sidebar and or multiple sidebar features.  It does not cover up the left hand side or the middle of the Web Page.

Take advantage of this new feature, integrate it within what you’ve already implemented in your website…the longer you fight with integrating Instant Previews new technology the higher probability is that your competition will pass you up.

Don’t wait…be proactive and start today!!

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