Safer than drugs, but no less potent for those of us who need a fix of online marketing tips and ideas on multiple occasions.

But…one of the big problems is that aside from there being thousands to keep tabs on (and I mean that literally folks), we want the best ones.  The ones that are tended to on a regular basis like a well-kept garden.

Those that talk our talk, walk our walk and do it frequently.

It’s hard to find these – especially if you’re trying to do it on your own.

Enter—–>  The Big List.

The Big List is a listing of over 400 blogs that cover the SEO & SEM world.  And unlike a list that gets thrown together by some newbie programmer just trying to automatically generate content, this site offers hand picked blogs that have proven themselves to talk about the topics at hand as well as frequently tend-to-their-gardens (post).

Interested?  Just head on over to the Big List and take a look around.  I’m sure you’ll find plenty of information there to get that daily marketing fix you need.

If you’re trying to establish yourself online, you might have found that locating content to use on your own website is difficult. There are PLR (Private Label Rights) products that you can buy and even full PLR memberships that you can purchase that will give you access to content to use at your discretion, but in many cases, not all mind you, they’re not typically of the best quality.

Aside from PLR products, you can always write the content for yourself which is very time-consuming or you can hire someone to do it for you; the higher the cost of the writer, generally, the better kind of content that you’ll get.

Now, while I will always advocate doing most of the work yourself, or at least having people who are trained by you do the work, even with PLR content, I also understand that writing day after day can suck away a lot of your time, when you can be using that time to create your own products or advertise your business or products your affiliated with.

That’s where a new Google Advanced search feature can work well for you in finding content to use as well as pull double-duty by generating links back to your site.

Here’s how it works.

First, visit Google.com. But before you search on anything click the link to the right of the search box entitled “Advanced Search”.

Next, enter in a keyword or keyword phrase at the top of the list just under the heading “Find web pages that have…”  I suggest that if you’re locating content for use on your own site that you only enter in one keyword or keyword phrase related to the content you want to locate.  When you use this search feature and you have multiple keywords in this area, the search will only pull back sites that contain ALL of these keywords.

Additionally you can also use the second option of “this exact wording or phrase” which will find the entire phrase in any web page or you can also use the third option of “one or more of these words:” where you can specify a variety of keywords and keyword phrases.

To make the job simpler for you, I would just use the first suggestion, and only search for one keyword or keyword phrase.  If you’re using a keyword phrase, just place that phrase in quotes in the first search box.

Next, click the plus sign next to “Date, usage rights, numeric range and more.”  And then narrow down your choices from what’s listed.  The most important point here is the “usage rights” link.  This allows you to filter content that allows you to do a variety of things with the content (and where all of the magic happens).

You have 5 options from this list.  Here’s what they are and what they mean:

1. Not Filtered – Exactly what it means.  The content you get using this search is not filtered in any way.  Not recommended if you’re attempting to locate content to use on your own site.
2. Free to use or share – These pages are labeled “public domain” or carry a license that allows you to copy or redistribute its content, as long as the content remains unchanged.
3. Free to use or share, even commercially – The same as “free to use or share” but for commercial sites.  So if you have a website that sells products, information or services, this is the option you want.  Note that this does NOT allow you to modify the content.
4. Free to use, share or modify – This search will only pull back those web pages that are labeled with a license that allows you to copy, modify or redistribute in ways specified in the license.
5. Free to use, share or modify, even commercially.  The same as “free to use, share or modify” but for commercial sites.  When you’re looking to reuse content on your own site that you can re-word as you wish, this is the option you want.

Once you’ve entered in the terms you’re interested in and chosen a license, click search and Google will return to you a list of websites that have these criteria.

The one thing I recommend is to double-check the license itself.   The way that Google is able to determine this kind of content is by using the “Creative Commons” filters. So once you’re at a web page that seems to have some content you’d like to use yourself, check for the “creative commons” license on the page.  When you click on the license link, you’ll get more details about the license.  The site may require you to link back to them in exchange for you using their content which can help boost their incoming links.

At this point you have to consider at least one thing – whether or not you want to link back to the site that has the content you want to use.

What this means to you in this instance, is to consider if it’s worthwhile to link out to the site whose content you want to use.  If you don’t feel comfortable having the link on your web page then keep on looking through the search results that Google gave you to see if there’s a site that doesn’t require a link back to them.  While few and far between, this little bit of extra work can mean a great deal of fantastically free content for you.

If you believe that the site will be a good resource for your site visitors, then by all means, link back to them.  If you question it in the least bit, it’s best to refine your keywords and find a better resource.

On the flip side of this coin…you might be wondering “Well, if this is how THESE sites are getting incoming links, how can I get one way links to my OWN site?”

Glad you asked!  Here’s how to do that:

Visit http://creativecommons.org/choose/ and license your own work.  You can also visit a website that is also using the license, click on the Creative Commons link or icon, and then scroll down the page that you’re taken to on the Creative commons site which lists the details of that sites license.  If you’d like to use the same kind of license that the site owner is using, click the link that says “Use this license for your own work”.

My suggestion to you when making use of the Creative Commons license is to be careful what you’re licensing. If you only want to license a single blog post that you made (and it’s entirely your own work), then only place the license on that blog post and choose “text” from your list of choices at http://creativecommons.org/choose/ .

If you license your entire blog, then this allows all of the content on your blog to be used by anyone depending upon the license you chose to use.

The reason that choosing text, audio, video, image, or interactive when specifying your license at Creative Commons is because this allows your license to only be used on your text, or your audio, or your video, etc., not the entire blog as a whole.

Secondly, be absolutely 100% certain that it is your OWN work you’re granting a license for.

Using a Creative Commons license will help you generate links for your site because others will find that they can use your work as content for their own sites and, if you’ve specified in the license that they have to link back to you, can generate lots of relevant links back to your own web pages.

So the bottom line is, when you’re looking to find content to use on your own site, use the advanced search feature in Google to find those sites that allow you to use and modify their work.  Ideally you’d like to find that content that doesn’t require a link back to their site, but, as I said, these are few and far between.  Just keep in mind that if you do want to use someone else’s content, and they require a link back, be sure it’s a site you do in fact want to link back to.

The Google Analytics program also allows you to track conversions and find out which of your web pages offer the highest returns.

There is a lot of information for the website owner on the Analytics website which can sometimes be intimidating.  That’s why I’m glad they’ve finally offered training for each section of their site.  These are short easy-to-understand videos and you can simply take it at your own stride.

To visit the free training for Google Analytics, visit http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/.

Highlights

1. Google trends discovers the search volume differences between keyword phrases as well as using Google Trends for websites to see what the search volumes look like for a set of websites.  It will also show you related sites so if you typed in MattCutts.com then you’d see a list of sites that people also went to (latent sites).
2. Google Ad Manager – allows you to manage all of the ads on your site including whatever third party ads you want to have.
3. Google Ad Planner – let’s you choose demographic areas.
4. Google has introduced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) in some PDFs.  Some PDFs only contain a snapshot of what the page would look like.  With Google’s OCR they can take those pictures of text, run the OCR program and then index those just like regular text.
5. Better crawling of Flash.  Always good to have static HTML in addition to flash.
6. Better processing of JavaScript.
7. Better at keyword spam.
8. Show URLS that link to the 404 pages on your site.
9. Custom 404 pages.  Using 14 lines of JavaScript in your 404 template so the JS will run and suggest other pages on your site that would be useful.  Find within Google Webmaster Central Blog.
10. Advanced segmentation introduced in Google Analytics.
11. On-demand indexing for Google Custom Searches.  You can request that Google index a certain page “on-demand” and “usually within 24 hours”.  Note that this does not affect search results as a whole but will affect Google Custom Searches.
12. Webmaster Communication with Google.  Including webmaster chats.  Many times there will be a Q&A at the end.
13. If you register for Google Webmaster central they will hold all of your messages for you.
14. Identified sites that are hackable.  The message center will notify you if they believe your site falls into this category.
15. Produced a 22-page PDF talking about SEO.  “Google does not hate SEO.”  They use internally and those outside of Google can also use this as well.  “A good SEO can help you put your best foot forward.”
16. They see a continuation of Black Hat trends.  People grabbing expired domains and put p0_rn on it.  You’ll also see it get more vicious.  It will be more common to see your site hacked.  Mainly due to the openings on a web host provider.  Blackhat moves to the outright illegal.  Using DNS subdomain hijacking.  You try to take control of another persons sub-domain.  They’ll also use and take advantage of a cross-site scripting flaw and then try to install malware on your machine.  “If this is what it takes to compete in the black hat SEO world, is it worth it?

It’s the Wordtracker Keyword Questions lab and it just might be one of the best tools you can use for your industry.

What the Wordtracker Keyword Questions lab does is let you enter in a very generic search term and once you submit that term, Wordtracker will return to you a list of questions that people are asking right now within your industry.

Take for example the keyword “Twitter”.  If we head on over to this tool (which is free by the way), and enter in this generic phrase, we’ll see that people are asking all kinds of questions about “Twitter”.

Or, let’s take a look at the generic term of “jewelry”:

Whatever term you enter in, Wordtracker will give you back a list of questions that your market is currently asking about.

By taking a look at the questions above regarding “jewelry”, if we had a website about jewelry, these would be questions that I could answer regarding jewelry.

I could dedicate a page to “how to make jewelry” and create yet another page on my jewelry site about “how to make beaded jewelry”.

Since I already know that people are asking these questions, I can then answer these questions and use website optimization on a web page to do so.

This resource is just another way to make use of phrases that people are searching on right now.  By incorporating these questions (and answering them on my site), I can then add this to my ever-growing arsenal of keyword phrases surrounding the main topic of my site.

Recently Google announced that they now have a format that you can use within your web pages that allow you to specify which URL you prefer to use for your web pages.  This helps to alleviate the duplicate content issue that many site owners and SEOs have been dealing with for years.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say that someone linked to one of your pages using the following URL:

http://www.SomeSite.com/cart.php?item=someitem

But this same item on your site could also be accessed by the following URL as well:

http://www.SomeSite.com/cart.php?item=someitem&category=somecategory

Since both pages contain almost identical information, search engines may consider this duplicate content.

Now, all you need to do is add a line of code within the “<head>” section of your web pages code to specify which URL you prefer your site to use.

Here’s what the code would look like:

This tells Google (as well as Yahoo and Microsoft) the preferred way you want this URL to appear.

Why this is so important is because it will help to make sure that things such as link popularity all are pointing to the page you want them to.

Keep in mind that this code should only be used for pages that are either absolutely identical or so similar to one another that it would cause a duplicate content issue for your site.

Within their post, Google answers a lot of questions about this format but probably the most important answers are:

1. The rel=”canonical” code above CAN be a redirect.
2. It CANNOT be used to link to a completely different domain.
3. This standard can be used by any search engine when they crawl and index your site.

So now that you know how to use it for your website, what about your blog?

Luckily, there’s already been a new plugin developed just for this purpose which you can get here.

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UPDATE

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Google engineer Matt Cutts has created a 20-minute video on the canonical link element.  I highly suggest that you watch this video in order to get a great grasp on what the canonical link element is.

The Question:
Hello,
I have a burning question and I can’t find an answer in SEO course available.
If you do this search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=kurir&btnG=Search

You’ll notice the first result has 8 other links besides the main one (Crna hronika, sport etc.). That must increase the CTR a lot.

The question is: what makes Google do that for one site and not for another one?
What should you do with your site to get such extra links in the results?

Best Regards,
Eko

Here’s an example of what they look like:

These are called “Site Links” and the bottom line is that Google does not tell you exactly how to get these sitelinks for your own site.

However, each website that contains these sitelinks has a few common denominators:

• They’re typically an authority site.
• They have an easy-to-navigate hierarchical structure.  In the case above, there is a section for “Sports”, a section for “Stars” and a section for “Politics” as Eko pointed out.
• They have lots of incoming one-way links from a variety of sources.
• The sites are easy to navigate.
• The age of the site tends to be a defining factor.

If we pick apart the site above, there’s a few things to note about it:

• The site has a PageRank of 6.
• It has over over 100,000 links pointing to the site itself including internal pages.
• Sites such as these generally have been around for years.
• The site has lots of useful information that readers enjoy by clicking through to various pages.

You’ll generally find these sitelinks on major news sites like CNN and highly visited sites such as Oprah’s site at Oprah.com.

So while these sitelinks can be a huge boost for your search engine traffic, they aren’t easy to come by.  Google must deem your site “worthy” enough to receive these sitelinks.

If you use Google Webmaster tools, at http://www.Google.com/webmasters/tools/ and you’ve added your site, you’ll be able to navigate to the section where Google tells you whether or not any sitelinks have been identified on your site as candidates for the Google Search Results page.

The bottom line is that there is no hard and fast rule to getting sitelinks placed on your site aside from some of the factors that are believed to be important as mentioned above.

If you’d like more information about sitelinks, visit:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334&topic=8523

Kristine

1. intitle – intitle:keyword – If you want to know what web pages are optimizing for a keyword phrase you’re considering, type intitle:yourkeyword in the Google search box.  This will return to you a list of web pages that are using that keyword in their title – an important on-page SEO technique.  If you’re looking for a particular keyword phrase in the title use quotes like this:  intitle:”Keyword Phrase Goes Here”.  And finally if you want to see who isn’t optimizing their pages at all, just for fun, try intitle:”Untitled Document”.  You can also use this for a specific command we talk about below called site.  To see the web pages that are optimizing their title for a certain keyword or keyword phrase within their site then use:  intitle:”Keyword phrase” site:nameofsite.com.
2. inurl – inurl:keyword – If you want to know what URLs contain a specific keyword phrase in their URL (web address) then simply type inurl:keyword.  If you’re looking for a phrase in their URL then type inurl:”keyword phrase”.  Note that this will pull back the pages on a website that contain this phrase in their entire URL including any web pages within their site.
3. inanchor – inanchor:keyword – If you want to know what web pages contain a specific keyword within their anchor text on their page, then simply type in inanchor:keyword.  If you’re looking for a specific keyword phrase, use quotes: inanchor:”keyword phrase”. Alternatively if you want to find a link on a specific web page that contains certain keywords, you’d then type in: inanchor:”keyword phrase” site:nameofsite.com.
4. site – site:nameofsite.com – If you want to see how many pages of a website are indexed in the search engines then type in site:nameofsite.com.
5. link – link:nameofsite.com – If you want to know how many links are pointing to a site you can enter in link:nameofsite.com.  Note that Google is notorious for not giving you all of this information to take it with a grain of salt.
6. filetype -filetype:file_extension.  If you want to know how many web pages have a certain filetype extension you can type in filetype:fla for example.   This will show you all of the pages indexed with the .fla extension.  A great way to see how well Google is indexing flash.  Also try filetype:pdf.  This also works well with the site search.  If for example you wanted to locate a pdf file on a certain website you’d then enter filetype:pdf site:nameofsite.com.
7. intext – intext:Keyword – the intext command allows you to find all web pages that contain a certain keyword within their text.  intext:keyword.  You can also use this with the site command as well to search for a specific word or phrase within a websites text: intext:keyword site:nameofsite.com.  Use quotes to search for a phrase intext:”keyword phrase”.
8. cache – cache:nameofsite.com.  If you want to see the last cached version of a web page or site type in cache:nameofsite.com.

The first is RavenSEO – This program is for those of you who are looking for a way to keep track of all of your own campaigns or even your clients SEO campaigns, or even if you’re a business that needs to keep tabs on its rankings in-house through your IT department.

Within our Bonehead SEO courses we’ll be teaching you how to do a variety of these same tasks manually, however, if your intention is to use the SEO information you learn here to open up your own SEO business, use the SEO information here to add to your current business or if you keep track of multiple websites, then RavenSEO will save you time and money.

The next tool we’ve added is RankSense.  RankSense is a revolutionary new Search Engine Optimization Software suite that will help your site rank well in the major search engines easier than you ever thought possible.  Plus, you can try it out for free for 90 days.