Every week, I’ll be picking up a blog from one of the top commenters, and I’ll be reviewing the blog/website in an SEO perspective, dissecting it by the basic elements of SEO. The idea is to give readers an opportunity to learn the basic SEO by observing another blog, which should in turn help them improve theirs.

This weeks pick is Stephan Millers blog which deals with blogging, seo, wordpress and earning money online.

Site: www.stephanmiller.com
Page Rank: 3
Alexa: 169,139
Meta Keywords: Quite a lot.
Meta Description: None found.
Links spiderable: Yes
Google snippet data : “Popular Posts. Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin Security Issue · Moving Day · Google Adwords Industry Related Help · Google Just Gave Me the John Chow Treatment …”
Incoming links on Google: 69
No. of pages indexed on Google:206

What is good in the blog?

- Each article stands out with titles using bold and large font
- Well arranges sidebars with categories, top commentators etc
- What is exceptionally good is the popular posts highlighted on the top right corner
- Text is very well spaced and in good size, good accessibility
- Feed subscription options right on top, very easy to spot
- Stephan’s photo gives an identity

What’s not looking good?

- Somehow, I don’t feel like the theme is compact.
- Colors are missing.
- Stephan’s photo
- The footer seems to be out of shape with widgets aligned improperly

What can be done?

- In the footer, probably he should take out one of those widgets and cut it down to one “recent visitors” widget.
- Align the blogrush widget with the recent visitors widget
- Stephan should replace his photo with a much better one, the current one looks jagged
- Add a search button to the search bar
- Add meta description for the blog
- Stephan should work on link building, as the number of incoming links is not impressive at the moment.
- Reduce the number of keywords used in the meta keywords tag and keep only the most relevant ones only - it looks spammy now.
- The feedburner feed count is fairly low, so it can be removed until it reaches a “boastable” number.
- The title of the homepage is just his name. I think he should add a tag line to this like, “Make money online with Stephan Miller”. Of course, it’s up to Stephan to decide based upon what the objective of the blog is. Title tags for the articles seems cool, I think Stephan is using the AllinOone SEO pack for this.

So, those were some quick notes on the site. I’ve talked only about the basic stuff here. Hope it gave you some pointers as to what are the factors that count most.

I’d love to hear from you suggestions, opinions and corrections on the review.

I had to write about this. There are lot of fraud SEO’s around. No doubt. Many of them somehow downloads a pirated copy of some popular SEO book ( there are many around ) and becomes SEO’s overnight (That’s not my idea - I read it on the DP forums ). Now they go on to set up a one - page website with a Google, MSN and Yahoo logo with a dart picture (un-licensed) saying something like “The world’s best SEO - Rank No.1 guaranteed “. Have you seen one?

It’s easy to make them out as frauds from their overly detailed testimonials and super-duper client list (Some even have Yahoo on the client list - what the..?). It’s essential for genuine SE optimizers to make aware the public on these frauds and hence this post.

This post is inspired from this article by Philip Lenssen. I thought this post might enlighten you to make out between fraud SEO’s and genuine one’s from their claims. Though Philip has mentioned many white-hat terms here, I think it’s OK to assume that many of them are used by fraud SEO’s than genuine ones.

He says

In the SEO industry agencies, experts and even bloggers have adopted a special mode of speech not to say slang that might be misunderstood by outsiders like clients, website visitors or the general public. To help you understand what search engine optimization experts really mean I devised this real glossary of SEO speak:

And here is the article -

What they say…
What they mean…

We offer Search Engine Optimization/SEO
We assume you are the Google bot and want you to index this page for both keywords

We offer Search Engine Optimisation
Our SEO company is based in the UK

Guaranteed top positions
We place Google Adwords for you

We do SEO, SEM, PPC to increase your ROI
We do not want you to know what we do

We stick to the Google Webmaster Guidelines
We only break them in a way that we assume Google won’t notice

We tell you how to make money online
We want you to click on our ads

10 ways of making money online
Those are our 10 affiliates, please click on the respective undisclosed ads

We offer social media optimization
We got several accounts banned at Digg

We offer link baiting services
We want to put those drunk naked ladies video on your site

Our network
Our link farm

Authority sites
Sites that do no SEO

Black hat SEO
We do anything to get rich quick, even if your site gets banned

White hat SEO
We only cheat Google where we have to, others do it too, come on!

We optimize for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask
If we fail in Google you still have to pay

Search Engine Submission
We need your mail address, those guys offered us $$$ for each 1000 verified addresses

Partners
People we never heard of until we exchanged links

PageRank optimization
Sorry, we just started doing SEO and do not have a clue

SEO India
We offer 1000 links for 30$

Alexa optimization
All our employees have the Alexa Toolbar installed, it really works!

Yes, you heard me right - I’m gonna shout it over! There are lot of “Free” tools around - they either ask you your email id or give you partial information prompting you to pay for a full report. I’ve pulled off those guys from the list and this is the best Free SEO online tools compilation ever !
These are the best free search engine optimization tools around categorized and listed according to usability, quality and reliability.This edition is for keyword research and keyword related tools.As you know in SEO keywords play a vital role.An SEO campaign should start right from keyword research onwards as a well selected pair of keywords gives the best foundation for search engine optimization.

Keyword Research Tools

1. Keyword Search Tool - Searches out the best keywords
   
2. Keyword density tool-Digs out the best keywords fromOverture
   
3. Keyword Rank Checker -”FREE keyword position tracker” a simple service that automatically monitors your keyword rankings for multiple search engines using the top 100 results using latest technology of api.
4. Meta tag keyword research tool - Finds similar keywords from meta tags of websites.
5. Overture Inventory tool - Gives frequency of search on Yahoo.
6. AdWords External tool - Googles tool that shows frequency of search, advertisers bidding etc.
7. Keyword Density Analyzer - Analyzes the density of one or more keywords on a page.
8. Keyword Suggestions Tool - Provides keyword suggestions for a site.

Coming up…

Though i strongly believe that one should blog only on the topics that he is passionate about, you might have already learned that if you are looking for traffic and popularity, you just cant hold on to your favorite topics all the time.

You need to keep track of what people around the world are searching on google and other search engines. It’s impossible to blog on all the topics that are being searched, instead it would be a better idea to pick your topics of interest from the whole lot.

Suppose on Google, the top searches for this week are for Paris Hilton, Search Engine Optimisation, Sipderman 3 movie and George Bush - You can probably select Spiderman 3, because you’ve seen it the other day, and writing a review on it would be a cakewalk, right?

Now, the important factor is to find out the “hot spots” where you can actually find what people are searching for. Here are some tools that i use.

1 - AdWords keyword tool
This one comes from the Google stable - so you can rely on it very much. It is a neat tool that gives you suggestions on searches made on google relating to a keyword you suggest.
Example - you suggest the word mp3, it would give you - mp3 downloads, mp3 streaming, mp3 cd burning etc based on what people have searched on google.

How to
- Go to this page and type in the keyword that you are interested in.
- Then select the “Choose data to display” pull down menu. In the menu there are four choices -
Sort by “keyword Search Volume”, “Cost and Ad Position Estimates”, “Search Volume Trends” and “Possible negative keywords”.
- Select the third option “Search Volume Trends” and click on “Get more keywords”.

A list of keywords will be generated that will be related to your original term.

You can sort the keywords by two parameters - Search volume(current month) and Advertiser competition.
When you click on “Search volume” the keywords will be arranged in descending order of number of searches made on it. So the top keyword is the one that was searched most and the last one the least. This can be visually made out from the page rank like green bar seen next to the keyword.

The second parameter by which you can sort the keywords is the advertiser competition. This shows how many advertisers are currently competing for the keyword on google.
Example - For the keyword “Free mp3″, the advertiser competition is full or maximum - meaning that the number of advertisers bidding for that keyword is high.

Thought the figures can be tempting, one can easily go by the first keyword (maximum searches and maximum advertisers bid), I wouldn’t actually recommend it. Because, those are the keywords that have the highest competition, there are many other bloggers and website that may have already optimized their content on it (probably MFA’s for a keyword like Free Mp3), so it’s meaning less to enter that arena with your little starter blog(unless if you are sure you can cut the competition).

The idea is to find a niche keyword. So, you may want to select a keyword with lesser advertiser bid but a pretty good search volume. It’s up to you to select which one, i’m hoping that these can be found within the first Top 10 keywords. In this example probably “Mp3 converter”.

Before you zero in on the keyword, goto Google.com and search for the keyword, see how many results it brings up, would your blog be in a position to cut the first 10 sites? If yes, please go ahead otherwise try tweaking the keyword to fit another niche. Example - Mp3 converter review, Mp3 converter download etc.

Google allows you to save the keywords list in a CSV file ot TXT file, so that you can do your research on them.

2 - Now the second method of finding keywords is using a tiny program called “Good keywords“.
You can download it here.
This program helps you get an idea of the number of keywords searched on Yahoo (Not Google) related to a particular keyword you suggest, and it’s volume. For example if you suggest the word “cheap hotels” - It would show you the related keywords searched for the last month on Yahoo and the search volume in numbers.Pretty much the same way as it worked with the AdWords tool. One difference here to be noted is that - the figures are ONLY relating to Yahoo! So, in order to get an idea of the same keywords on Google, you can simply multiply the search number by 4 or 5, because considering the traffic on Google, Yahoo comes only upto 1/4th of the total search volume on google.

More information on where and how to find topics for blogging will follow in the next days.

If you don’t know John Chow - He’s one of the most popular blogger who writes about making money online, posts yummy pictures of dishes he had the other day at the restaurant, posts pictures of those snazzy cars and yet somehow manages to boast of a fat check he made that month end with his experiments with money making tools online.

He’s been running a Link back offer quite recently by which you can get a free PR4 link as well as some traffic if you review his blog and tag him with “Make Money Online” anchor text.

A bit of history here - John Chow had been running an IM Ad campaign on popular blogs like Problogger.net using Google AdWords and I’ve been doing the same thing on Labnol as well. Legend has it that i had copied his idea.

Well, as for me, the PR 4 thing was not at all attractive, what was actually attractive is that Traffic he would give me if he had reciprocated my link. So i did a quick review here on March 21. Before the post, i had infact checked out some already linked posts on his website so that i made no mistake. Since then, I’ve been watching regularly his “Reciprocation Links” - but in vain.

Wonder why John missed my blog linking to him? I see that in the current batches on his site, blogs that have reviewed him after i have is shown up - which leaves me to assume that my link is ignored.

Curious - probably John didn’t like me call him “Evil guy with huge head” - like Mubin did(who is already linked back by John!).

These are the scenarios when the blogosphere get’s rusty with poor linkers and people with no community spirit. Sad.