I really can proudly say now, that I have improved my Google rankings, because of appropriate and extremely related tags (note: not meta tags, but post tags). Yeap.. those tags, that most of us hide or set to “noindex” (at least I have been doing like that before).

Google now even indexes my pages much more faster. Probably, because of improved tags as well – no other logical explanation.

I will show how I find appropriate and related tags in a second, but now – let me explain why…

…my Google ranking is improved because of tags?

First, picking every time from 5 to 10 new tags gives you thereafter 6-11 new pages (1 is your latest post plus 5-10 tag pages). You have heard, probably, that Google loves sites with a lot of pages, right?

Second, you might be thinking, that those tag pages have duplicate content and they are not supposed to add any value. It can be true, if you don’t have meta tag “canonical”, which says:

“Bots and crawlers from search engines, wait! Do not think that I create duplicate pages!! I just want to make my navigation easier, so that visitors could find needed stuff faster!“

Guess what – bots and crawlers treat this “canonical” meta tag just like that.

How to pick appropriate tags to make Google ranking better?

When you search for the proper title for your new post, you, probably, find several variants and then you pick the best one. But wait.. what about other variants? Too competitive or not that competitive? Don’t think about that – just let them be your tags. You can see that I have done just like that in this post (and in several latest too).

And, believe it or not, sometimes tag pages rank better, than my main post! Why? Because they all have different search competitors.

Therefore, you should also consider to make your tags capitalized, because they should look like common pages, when people see them in search results. Simply treat them like your common posts considering SEO factors.

Tools to improve Google ranking

I use only related searchs, that Google suggests. How you can do that too?

Step 1: Type in your main keyword phrase and click “search options”

Step 2: Switch from “Standard View” to “Related Searches”

Step 3: Pick suggestions for your tags, that relate to your topic

Find the line: Related searches for “improve google ranking”. You can see, that there are lots of variants. They are not random. Google knows what to show you, so why don’t you use it?

That’s it. This will definitely improve your Google ranking. Just try it :)

***

It’s All About Results™ – Google AdWords

Video Dessert: How To Improve Your Google Ranking?

Ever searched your name on Google? Did you come up on page 1 or 17? What about your web site or blog? Are you showing up for the ideal keywords? Watch this Daily Idea and learn how to improve your Google ranking in a few easy steps.

Though it sounds impossible for a blog like mine… with Pagerank 1 – I did it! I got to the first page of Google competing with 106 millions other pages.

When I first time saw it… I didn’t pay any attention, because this number of competing results didn’t mean anything for me. And the post itself, say, is not that worthy to burst with joy… but the fact, that my blog is shining on the first page of Google, made me crazy just about a week ago. I have finally realized the reasons and the things I have accidentally done, which made this post jump THAT high.

Why and How I Got to the First Page?

The post, that is currently on the 1st page of Google, is about the value of play factor in blogging.

Check the result of Google’s first page for that certain phrase:

Results 1 – 10 of about 106,000,000 for play factor. (0.26 seconds)

Why did Googlebot like this post to let it reach Google’s first page?

Let’s see what I have done there:

1. The word “play” was used 33 times (on the whole page, not just in post);
2. The word “factor” was used only 5 times;
3. The whole keyword phrase “play factor” only once;
4. The word “play” was used 7 times between < strong >< / strong > tags;
5. “Play” was also used as a part of the title of 5 pictures out of 5;
6. I didn’t make any external links using “play factor” keyword phrase or part of it;
7. I was using the video of Stuart Brown, where he speaks about play in general. The video is 30 minutes long and without a real interest to the topic, you would have, probably, turned it off at once;
8. As you can see, the number of retweets is not huge at all.. It means, that there was not much attention;
9. Meta keywords that were used there: “play”, “blogging”, “value”, “stuart brown”;
10. I should also admit that I have been asking too many questions instead of making statements or answers, which usually brings more value;
11. The post itself appeared to be boring for most of you.. at least I thought so, because there were made no comments;
12. Because of the previous reason, I have decided not to submit it to social bookmarking sites etc;
13. I didn’t show it commenting on blogs with CommentLuv as “my recent blog post”;
14. And according to Google tools for webmasters my strongest keywords are “blog”, “google”, “post”, “traffic” – not “play” or “factor” or “blogging” at all;

Find the Answer and Win!

So, which of the above reasons helped my blog to get to the first page of Google? I know it would be too easy to reveal the truth, but I promise to confirm it, if you say it in the comments!

Follow the 14 facts I have named above and read 2 more clues below!

***

Here is the clue #1: Watch the video to help you. It mentions the true fact, which I didn’t know before.. though it was so natural and logical.

Video: Dominating First Page of Google

Clue #2: My stats from Google webmaster tools showing traffic that Google sent via “play factor” keyword phrase.

***

It turns out, that in order to get to the first page of Google.. you need only this…

What am I talking about? The first one, who answers correctly, gets free banner spot until the end of February.

Waiting for your answers!

Update: The answer is given in the comments.

This time let me show you several dozens of saved bookmarks on my Google Chrome browser’s bookmarking panel.

I have been saving them during several months so far. And I thought this would be a great idea to put all of them here, in order to empty my bookmarking panel and to share with you this wealth from all over the Internet.

These websites, services and web tools will be extremely useful for beginning webmasters and those, who want to find something new to track visitors, to make some money online, to improve your website or blog, to grow the number of backlinks and simply to get more web traffic.

I’ve devided the collection into two parts, because there are, let’s say, too many of saved bookmarks for one post.

All of the them are logically categorized.

9 Tools and Services for Beginning Webmasters and Bloggers

1. Page Rank Checker is a free tool to check Google page ranking of any web site pages. You also can display your site or blog’s PageRank value on your web pages using its special html code.

2. Web Site Popularity Checker is also a free tool, but this one has more features. It checks Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati and more. It also allows you to see how many times your site was bookmarked at del.icio.us. And a bunch of features more!

   I used to use only this one, because of its speed and accuracy. And you can also find useful its html badget for your website or blog to show your stats to the world.

3. Free Webmaster Tools is a multi-service full of amazing tools to improve your SEO ranking and website optimization. The first page of this site displays 8, I’d say, best tools, such as Backlink Checker, IP Address Number Converter, Meta Tags Extractor, Position Checker, Fonts Collection, Keyword Density Checker, PageRank Checker and Spider View.

   Though I’ve never used it, I’d say, that I should get back to it sometime.

4. Blog Tracker is an invisible tracker that will count your blog visits and other blog statistics. It is also free and I should say, that it works better, than Google Analytics, from the standpoint of data display. It means, that you will be able to see your last visits and hits earlier, than Google Analytics would show.

   In general, this counter has less built-in features, but faster, than Google one’s. It depends on your needs what to choose.

5. Bookmarking and Sharing Service is a free way to boost traffic back to your site by making it easier for visitors to share your content. That’s how this service describes itself. If I’m right, then AddThis really was one of the first ones of such kind. So, it’s tested by time.

6. Social Bookmarking Service, which is called SocialMarker. This service recommended itself as a free tool for spreading your links on 48 of the best social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, Del.icio.us, Propeller.com, Slashdot.org, Technorati.com, Reddit.com and many many more. They promise you, that you’ll be able to manage with it in 15 minutes. Not sure about this one, but it definitely reduces submission time.

   And you can also use their social button, which in my opinion looks not that pretty, like AddThis button :)

7. Social Networks Updater or Ping.fm is a free and simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.

   If you don’t mind URL shortening, then Ping.fm is, probably, the best one for you. But, I’m not the one and I still don’t use it. Why? I’ve explained it in my recent post about SEO risks involved with URL shortening.

8. HelloTxt is one big social network, because it allows you to read, update and organize all known social networks like Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn and tons more. Its Alexa Rank is worse, than Ping.fm’s, but it’s just a matter of time. I think HelloTxt’s future is much more better.

9. NXY.IN – URL Shortener is too awesome to be a simple URL shortening service. It has built-in analytics, popular/upcoming articles feature and a feature to make money using your AdSense ID.

   It has ~38k Alexa Rank, which is not bad for a new service, but it’s PageRank is 1, which means, that Google somewhy doesn’t trust it. So, for this moment it would be better to refrain from using this URL shortening service, if you use them at all.

12 Google Resources: Visitors Tracking, Keywords and Money

1. Google Translate – this is my number 1 service. If your English isn’t your native language, then this service is indispensable. It is fast, accurate and easy-to-use. Plus – you can listen to pronunciation of some of them.

2. “Define” trick by Google – this is a simple command to search any word’s meaning. It may help you to find more keywords to the one you already have. You can also get the idea of what you should mention, when you have some exact keyword/s.

   Examples: web service, webmaster etc.

3. Introduction to Google Adsense by Lisa Irby. Simple and clear. I guess I have started iWoodpecker, because of this article. Who doesn’t want to make money online?

   Though now I have a different opinion on Google AdSense topic..

4. 7 Ways to Make Money with Google Adsense Using Only Free Tools is an article by Christopher Kyalo. These ways are, indeed, powerful. You will find this explanation useful only if you already know something about Google AdSense. I’ve bookmarked it 7-8 months ago and I still keep it. Use it for your sake!

5. Google AdSense – Display targeted Google ads on your website’s content pages and earn from valid clicks or impressions.

   Well, it’s not hard to guess why I kept it in my bookmarks. This link leads to Google AdSense account. You can register one for yourself, if you still don’t have it.

6. Google AdManager – You can manage your online ad sales and inventory. Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory.

   In other words – for advertisers. Keeping it for future.

7. Blog of Google Analytics – have not heard about this one? Then go ahead and subscribe. You will be provided with latest trends and news on Google Analytics. You can also try to ping one of their posts, in order to recieve a trackback. I bet you will be surprised with your result.

8. Google Tools for Webmasters – saved as a bookmark, because of too frequent use of it. Yeap, I’m still addicted to statistics.

   This service of webmaster tools is a straight way to high rankings. Absorb everything that Google suggests and fix anything he doesn’t like. You can also see your website or blog’s strong positions in Google real-time search. This is great, when you want to improve your best results!

   People somewhy used to ignore those errors and site defects, that Google shows.. Don’t do that. Be smart and dominate your niche.

9. Google Analytics – is another famous Google must-have-tool. Track your visitors and set goals. Discover site referrers and keyword phrases, that people were using to get to your website or blog. You’re the king here, so rule it.

   The only thing, that I’m still not used to is the amount of time you should wait until Google shows up your latest stats. It usually happens only on the next day.. but sometimes even on the 2nd day.

10. Keyword Tool by Google AdWords is a tool, which helps you to discover keywords and its competition strength. You can also see PPC prices set by AdWords. It gives you the idea of how important is a keyword, which usually lets you decide – to compete or not.

11. A Web Page Full of Google Tools – it was saved on my bookmarking panel very long time ago. This site was useful once. May be it is now for somebody..

12. Install Google Toolbar for Google Chrome If you have Mozilla Firefox, then, probably, you have heard of Google Toolbar. Well.. this is pretty much the same, but for Google Chrome. To be exact, this is an alternative way of having Google Toolbar on Chrome, because the real toolbar is not available yet. Well.. I use it this way and I must say, that there were no problems yet. Try it.

10 Twitter Tools, Services and Other – for Twitter Fans

1. TweetDeck is the leading browser for the real-time and social web, allowing users to connect with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. It is also available as a tool on your desktop.

2. HootSuite is another Twitter client. I prefer it rather than TweetDeck, because of its simplicity… I guess. It has less features and it looks not that cool, but it is still my choice. It manages with 4 networks: Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and Ping.fm.

3. TwittGeek is a marketing tool, which helps you to follow a limited number of people per day (it’s 150). Though you can purchase a PRO access, which is pretty much the same, as the free version – PRO lets you follow 300 users per day. I used to like it, but now I prefer buzzom (it’s a secret!) for this kind of following users.

4. Buzzom lets you follow, unfollow and reciprocate. Great tool for boosting your Twitter list of followers. It also has such features like cross-following and following targeted Twitter users using search by keywords.

   I like this service, because of seeing its growth and development. I remember the time, when it was incredibly slow and buggy. Now it looks much more promising.

5. FriendOrFollow.com works faster, than Buzzom, but has less features. Though.. I should say that sometimes it finds who does not follow you and who you are not following back more accurately. I use it, when I have several users not following me back (..another secret!).

6. TwitterCounter is the very known service, that offers widgets for your blog or website like Twitter Counter (which looks just like Feedburner’s Subscribers Counter), Twitter Widget (shows Twitter users, when they visit your site) and more.

   The TwitterCounter.com site itself has a lot of things to promote your Twitter account, like tops and lists. But don’t even think about getting there, those tops and lists are already dominated by web gurus like Pete (from Mashable!), Britney Spears and Twitter itself.

7. Oneforty – lets you find, collect, rate and share Twitter apps from all over the Internet. Visit them, when you’ll have some extra minute. You may find there a lo-o-ot of interesting freebies for your future tweets.

8. Revtwt is the advertising network, to help you to earn money on Twitter.

   I’ve tried it and it didn’t work for me. But if you have more than 1,000-2,000 Twitter followers (targeted, not internet marketing bots and scams), then don’t listen to me. Go ahead and test it. They have really large network of advertisers and offers. You can even make them send daily advertisments directly to your email box, which you can use or not.

9. 5 Twitter Directories – a post by Geoffrey Gordon, who introduces us to 5 best Twitter directories in his opinion.

   You should try them. Don’t leave it for tomorrow, like I do :) I still haven’t tried these directories.

10. Twitter Search is a search for Twitter, where you can find out what is happening right now. It works the same way as the search you see above your lists in your common Twitter account.

    I’m not sure why I’ve bookmarked it… :)

3 More Great Bookmarked SEO Articles for Dessert

1. Keyword Research – big article on keyword researching methods. The site itself looks ugly and I remember the time when it was full of ads by Google, but the article is a real treasure.

   I hope you will enjoy it just like I did a year ago or so. It’s good and simple for beginning webmasters or those, who don’t even know how to find out what keywords you need and how to look for them.

2. Sebastian’s Opinion on URI Shortening – find out why you kill your traffic, search engine rankings, and revenues on the long haul using URI Shortening. And note, that he doesn’t like when you say “URL” instead of “URI” :)

3. Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic by CopyBlogger. This post itself consists of various tops on backlinks and web traffic topics. If you haven’t read that one, you will, probably, keep getting your usual amounts of web traffic instead of more.

   I still come back to this article, when I have some extra time, to discover something new. And guess what, everytime there is some kind of another case study..

PS: I have a new record. This post was indexed by Google in less, than 37 minutes without any submissions. I should find out later what were the reasons.. :)

***

Video Dessert: «Bride Can’t Stop Laughing During Vows;

Her husband accidentally pronounces ‘lawfully’ as ‘wawfully,’ and she cracks up so much that they had to take a break in the ceremony.

Recently, I’ve been trying to get to the top of Google with the certain phrase – “getting website traffic“. I, actually, haven’t managed. Let’s analyze this problem.

What things I did one-by-one

1. I’ve analyzed the first 10 results of the search query – getting website traffic. I even made a table with the stats of those competitors.. but I’ve deleted it, so I’m showing you the approximate variant, in order to make you see the main principle of my work. As you can see from the above screenshot, the competitors are pretty tough, but most of them have much smaller articles;
2. I’ve decided to make the big article, because my pagerank is only 1, which means, as I thought, I should compensate it with a huge post;
3. I’ve used the word “getting” 14 times, the word “website” 52 times and the word “traffic” – 46 times. The whole keyword phrase – 6 times, including the “H1″ title. I knew, that my competitors from the top results are using keyword phrases a lot – from 8 to 40-50 times (for each word separately);
4. I’ve tried to speak about the most important factors related to my topic;
5. The keyword phrase was used in the title, in the “H1″ tag title and as the first keyword for the post page;
6. I’ve submitted that post to about 6-7 do follow social bookmarking sites with PR 5+;
7. I’ve left about 5-7 comments on do follow blogs with CommentLuv enabled and PR 3-4;
8. The total number of characters in the title was 31;
9. Finally, I’ve used the keyword phrase as the first words in the title;
10. That’s it, I guess;

How Google was showing the results during the first days

On the next day after publishing, I had a great result of getting to the 5th page of the search query;

The 2nd day gave me the 3rd page;

But.. when I began to comment, my result dropped to the 7th page. That was already the 3rd day after the publishing. A coincidence?

This is the funniest thing, that Google still didn’t count any of a backlink to my post;

Now Google is playing with the post showing it somewhere between the 10th and the 13th result pages. And I think it’s getting worse each day. Will see what happens, when Google would count those backlinks, I’ve made;

Why I haven’t got to the top results with that certain keyword phrase?

I’m not a SEO expert at all. I don’t have 10 years of experience. So, my opinion may be wrong, but I think, that this whole thing is about 2 factors. Backlinks to your website is the number 1 reason. The second reason is still your website’s pagerank. Now look at the above screenshot again and tell me why I’m not right, because I really lose to those competitors only because of these 2 factors :)

PS. By the time you’ll get to this post, my results may change significantly.

***

Video Dessert: «The Sneezing Baby Panda»

Baby Panda sneezes and scares her mommy :)

Now you don’t have to tweet about your new posts. Feedburner will do that for you.

Yesterday, it was announced on adsenseforfeeds.blogspot.com.

Great idea. But.. I don’t think, that it should help a lot. It’s just another news, that made too much shout about it.

Moreover, I’d say, that this is a pure promotion of Feedburner. Why not Twitter? Do you think, that Twitter needs to be promoted? Today it is the most popular chat-service. What’s the point of spending money on another way of promotion? It’s better to earn money. It’s better to make your name work for you at this stage.

Why am I talking about it? I just wanted to pay your attention on how the “Giants” promote themselves. This is a great source to learn from. So do it :) All those common ways are helpful, but they are still common ones. And day by day the get older. That means, that maybe tomorrow they will be useless.

I’ve recently got the main idea, how Google decides whether to come on your website or not. The most ridiculous is that it’s all said by Google. Somewhy we ignore what Google offer us to learn about indexing. But still.. this is all so true.

I won’t write a book about this. I’ll just show those things, that really matter, when it comes to indexing your web pages by Google.

Why Google stopped indexing my website?

• You’ve deleted lots of URLs from your website;
• You spam. That’s not good;
• You’ve used duplicated pages;
• Your robots.txt file blocks too many pages. Google bot doesn’t like you;
• Your updates are rare. Maybe you should make them a little bit more often?
• You have too small total number of pages. Less than 50-100 pages, right?
• You have an ugly code;
• You don’t have any external link, or there are only some of them;
• You overuse the “noindex” tag;

The above events are the most common ones. How you should fix them? First of all, read the above events once again and do exactly the opposite. That’s really it.

How long you should wait until Google again indexes you?

• Don’t wait, he will;
• Focus on publishing;
• Focus on your external links;

The most important thing, that I’ve got is that all the mistakes, that you make in the beginning do not mean anything, when you have tons of good and quality content/pages.

2 little advices

1. Do not write too quality content in the beginning. But write a lot. When you have several hundreds of pages, Google bot indexes you a lot more often. When he does, you shouldn’t be afraid, that someone would steal your content before it’s indexed.
2. Trust Google, not Blogs.

Have you heard about Google Keyword Tool? The tool that is extremely useful if you want to compete with search requests in Google. It’s very simple, though it needs some attention in some places. So let’s look how it works.

Step 1. What Do You Need First of All?

Look at your website. It might be your blog, youtube channel or any other type of website. Try to get the idea of what keywords you need. Write them somewhere.

Step 2. Meeting with Google Keyword Tool.

Let’s have a quick look at this tool. Here’s the first thing you need to do. Choose the language and the country:


Isn’t that great? For example, if you’re living in Africa and want to promote your website in United States then all you want to do here is to select “English” and “United States”.

But that’s not all. Let’s go further. See this?

Two options. Whether you enter your own keywords and see how popular they are… or you enter the URL of your website or some text from your page. Then Google suggests you almost all possible relevant phrases that had been searched within last several months from the region you’ve selected.

Step 3. My Example of Keywords Research.

I’ll show it working on my example. Firstly I take 2 words from the topic of this post – “keywords research”. Here’s what I get:

Click to zoom
We can see here lots of stuff. “Advertiser competition” info we need least of all. Just because it’s more likely for Google Adword owners. All the rest info is what we really need.
“Local Search Volume: October” shows us the amount of requests of similar or exact phrases in the specified country. Since we’ve chosen “United States” you can see on my screenshot that only 390 people looked for it from United States during October.
Next column “Global Monthly Search Volume” shows the statistics of all requests of this phrase for the last 12 months from all countries performed on Google and Search Network. That’s 60,500 for now. Wow.. At this stage I don’t think that iWoodpecker could compete that number, because there are already tons of relevant material on much older websites. But… I don’t belive that I should choose instead – “google keywords research tool” (global statistics is 28 requests) because it has less of requests which means that I could be better searched with this phrase. Why? I’d rather wait till my website grows up a little bit and I’ll pick something average now like “google keyword research” (global statistics is 3,600 requests) instead of “keywords research”(global statistics is 60,500 requests). Anyways, it depends on your plans and strategies for your promoting.

Step 4. Let’s Go Deeper with Google Keyword Tool.

Look for “Choose columns to display:” and choose: Estimated Avg. CPC, Search Volume Trends and Highest Volume Occured in. These info columns are made for some detailed information. Don’t we need that? :) Sure we do..
“Estimated Avg. CPC” shows the cost per click of the specified ad related to requested keyword phrase. These numbers are useful if you have Google Adsense, though numbers would be a bit different for you because the shown costs relate to Google Adwords. What you have to note is that the more money pay advertisers the more you earn from visitors’ clicks on your ad blocks using Adsense. Got it now how helpful are these average CPC numbers?
Now.. “Search Volume Trends”. They show us just months when people mostly performed requests with our keyword phrases. With these stats you know that sometimes the decreased visitors number on some of your pages are not because of your bad SEO knowledges. You can also calculate when you can wait for increasing of your visitors.
The last one is “Highest Volume Occured” column. That’s not that important because it shows us only the month when was the highest volume of requests of our keyword phrase. We can look for that info from “Search Volume Trends”.

Step 5. Generating our keywords from the content.

Click to zoom
Here we may choose whether a URL of our page or the content of this page. I like the second variant because I can pick a specific part of my page’s text, where the entire content is described mostly. That’ll give me much better result than pasting my URL or the whole content of the page. But look for what works best for you.
When the above part is done click “get keyword ideas” button and choose the variant/s you like according to my example from the above “Steps”

Step 6. When You Rush.

You know that when it comes to optimizing of your pages (I hope you do that sometime) you rush. Yes, you go through your pages superficially and I understand that. That’s why my advice on this topic is to use only 3 columns. The listed keywords that Google generate and 2 other columns: “Local Search Volume” and “Global Monthly Search Volume”. I hope you’ve figured out why.

You should remember that all this stuff brings you free traffic from search engines.