Anybody who has ever built a website will know that getting visitors can be a daunting task if you've not fully mapped out every aspect of the site creation process. A lot of the time, luck can play a big part in achieving a top ranking for a website even if you haven't decided which keywords you're planning to target. But this is more the exception which is why it's very important to do a solid amount of research on the niche you're planning to hit, the competition you will be competing with, and the keywords you're hoping to rank for.

Sometimes one may launch a site and see a trickle of traffic coming in and then wondering why this traffic doesn't convert to sales or clicks. This is a result of untargeted traffic which primarily is traffic that has ended up on your site without intention.

To get a good look at who is visiting your site, you would want to make sure to install Google Analytics which will give you significant and detailed stats on just about everything that makes a site either successful or a bust. Everything from demographics, user behaviour, traffic sources, and site speed are shown. To install analytics on your site, simply go to Google Analytics and follow the basic instructions. You will receive a code which you will insert into the body of your html and then receive important data in order to help you understand and improve your website.

Analytics has been a very helpful tool for us to understand where our audience is coming from and how we can improve our visibility. So even if you start your online marketing venture by throwing up a site without full-on research of your keywords and competition, you can slowly fine tune and improve your site and make the necessary adjustments over time using some of the incredible free tools at your disposal.

For more information on web analytics and the role it plays in the day to day functioning of a good site, consider some of this reading material at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics

In the next blog post, we will discuss some of the other major tools used by SEO professionals which help to engage and pull traffic.

"Take Action" has become a pretty popular phrase in the online marketing world. Unfortunately for many if not most, these words are meaningless unless you have the knowledge necessary in today's internet marketing world to really know what you're taking action on.

Back in the day, overzealous and desperate marketers went to extreme means in order to get their sites ranked at the top of the search engines. Taking action was relatively easy since creating single-page sites with scraped or duplicate content took little time and commitment. Along with that, SEO was a fairly straight forward process where the quality of backlinks mattered little. Google hadn't put its foot down back then on the unscrupulous methods employed by many marketers who were more concerned about getting Adsense clicks and affiliate commissions as opposed to providing a positive experience for their visitors.
With the game having rapidly changed since then, it's now very well known that nothing less than a full time commitment to developing the best user experience possible for your audience will suffice. Google has made absolute sure of that!

Not too long ago, I was one of the IM newbies who strolled onto various IM discussion boards and wondered how certain marketers were making so much money. That was my introduction to affiliate marketing which I found very interesting because of how little effort was required in implementing such methods. Basically you would throw up a site, join an affiliate program, put their ads on your site and wait for the money to roll in.

Little did I and many other newbies at the time realize was that the real work was in trying to get traffic to the site and that was the most difficult task of all. That's where the importance of SEO came in which many IM newbies knew little about.

Not only was time and money necessary to create a site, but more time and more money was needed to make the site visible.

That's why people who jump the curb and decide to "take action" end up wasting their time and money and gain a false sense of hope that they will be rich simply by having an online presence and duplicating what successful marketers do. This is why it's so important to not blindly follow the crowd but rather to educate yourself before taking any kind of action. Those who tell you to take action are the same ones who are flaunting their signature right in front of you, trying to gain your confidence in the hopes that you will click and subscribe to them and allow them to be your mentor, even despite the possibility that they are just as confused about all this as you are.

Rather than spending your energy taking action left and right, perhaps make the effort to develop a well structured plan or blueprint and cover all bases rather than going full steam forward? Before making a website, you should consider your niche, the competition of your niche, and the potential keywords you may target. From there, you should consider your time and how much of it you can devote to producing unique content for your site while also looking for similar sites for co-promotional opportunities.

These are just a few of the things many newbie marketers dismiss because they're simply chasing the gold. But you can really save yourself a lot of time and headaches by learning the fundamentals of online marketing.

This is the reason why we at PLR Assassin provide so much information, instructional videos and reading material for beginners who are trying to learn the ropes. We fully advocate our users to not just use PLR for reselling purposes but also for learning purposes.

No matter which area of IM you choose to go in to, you will find a sufficient amount of learning material to help you get acclimated to this incredibly rewarding industry provided that you develop the base knowledge before taking action.

So before you take action, sort your plans, devise your strategy and decide how and what you are going to take action on and then....Take Action! :)

If you have any questions or require any advice, as always simply leave your questions and comments here or use our forum. We are always happy to help our members any way possible.

You may think it's not that important to backup your server, but it is and let me outline why:

• Your host could suspend or terminate your account.
• You could make a small file fault and need to retrieve the latest copy instantly.
• Your host will charge for the backup files to be retrieved.
• Hosts backup once a week.
• Your webhost could close down.
• Your webhost may hold your files to ransom and request extra money.
• Hard Drives have a short lifespan and will eventually break.

These are a small number of issues which you could face if you do not backup via a remote backup service.

...

Hi All,

In all honesty, it is unknown like anything else to do with Googles Serps. We can not tell for sure.

BUT....

Logic can be applied for an answer, we suspect that it does affect your rankings a small amount.

Google will 100% know of Alexa and it is very possible that Alexa is calculated into its Algorithm. It makes sense to think that the more people who visit your website, the more people must love it to other websites.

It will also help give users confidence. If they have the Alexa Toolbar installed and can see your rankings it will be more obvious if your website is safe to use or not.

We recommend installing alexa to your browser to help your SERPs and to also review data of your visitors. By installing it and visiting your website you will gain a better Alexa. Try it now and see if your rankings increase.

Here is the download link (oh and it's free, no spyware or malware) ---> Download Alexa

Many decide to go for the low cost no thrills shared hosting offered by the likes of Hostgator and GoDaddy.

What they do not realise is the speed of your server and site load does matter.

Fast Website Page Loading vs Server Load
You may be a little confused by this, you may be thinking 'If I have a fast loading website page, would that not mean the server is fast?' The answer is no, here is a brief explination:

When you load one page on your website you are using a small amount of RAM and CPU, the webpage may load fast. However when your website has visitors, each visitor will be loading different pages which will use more RAM and CPU due to the processing needed from the DB and website template.

You should always use a VPS or Dedicated server if you are serious about your website (if it is receiving regular users). Shared servers are generally over crowded and at peak times will become slow with a high CPU usage. Having your VPS guarantees your own dedicated resources.

So in short, a fast loading web page does not mean a fast loading website as Google, Yahoo and Bing will try to crawl hundreds of your pages at once.

How Can Google Help Me?
You may not no yet but Google has its own page speed test. This is not based on how fast or slow images load but how fast the structure of the website (coding/java) loads.

Google has a ranking tool which ranks your website and give tips on how you can increase the speed. If server/website speed was not important to Google why would they build an extensive tool related to Page Speed?

Here is the Tool -> Page Speed Online.

*It is important to have a fast loading website in terms of execution of images and content to allow your users to have a better experience.

Tips For Speeding Up Your Website
If you do not know what you are doing, hire someone from odesk or freelancer to complete the task for you. One incorrect line of code WILL break your whole theme. Also backup your whole website prior to allowing anyone to edit it and provide only a temporary password which you should change when finished.

Compress images using an online compression service and re-upload them. Do not use editors if possible (built into the website), we recommend using kompozer and copying the html code into the source editor of the website.

Do not resize images inside your website editor, your server will have to take time to process the conversion. Create the correct size images and upload them.

One of the biggest factors which effects the speed of your website is the HardDrive speed. If the HardDrive has a slow execution it will slow down your website. No matter how much you upgrade your CPU and RAM, if your HDD is slow, the website will not speed up.

There We Have It
Google offering a Page Speed Online test is almost certain proof that page speed does matter, if they did not care they would allow you to keep your website in a bad and slow condition.

If you want to start ranking better try and increase your page speed to start! At the time of writing this blog post PLRAssassin.com had a rating of 82 (room for improvement) when we started our score was 30!

Hi Assassins,

Do you pay for backlinks to your website? Maybe you use an automated software to build backlinks. Well, you may want to read on to find out whether spammy links with low PR can cause your website to end up being sandboxed!

Do Spammy Links Harm My Rankings?
To find out this answer we used a month old niche website of ours which wasn't performing very well and hit it with spammy automated links.

You will be suprised to find that our rankings improved a little and have stayed in the same position for the last 4 months.

We then applied quality backlinks to the niche blog we saw a sharp increase in our rankings (High PR pages with other SEO tactics).

The interesting part of this experiment was the constant increase in rankings with no fall even with spammy links.

Think about this logically, if spammy links caused your website to fall in the rankings your competition would be hitting you with spammy links all day 24/7 until Google Sandboxed you. Google know people build links as every website does. Based on the results of the experiment it is clear that spammy links have little influence on the rankings but they do still have some.

Why Has My Website Been Sandboxed Then?
Again there are many logical reasons:

• If you build links to a brand new website at a fast rate (even high quality) it will become obvious that you are trying to push the rankings up for your website.

• You have spammed your website with your target keyword over and over again. You should choose one main keyword for your web page and then 2-3 additional small target keywords for that same page. Think about it like this - If you build a website with a high density for your keyword, h1, h2, h3 tags for your keyword, meta description, alt image with your keywords and so on it becomes obvious that you are trying to push your website to the top.
• Your content has no use (badly spun content)
• You have copied a website like for like which has authority. You will not always be penalized for this, however you will be competing with a website which holds the same information as you and has done for a longer period.

Should I Build Spammy Links?

...

We thought it would be fitting to give details on how to eradicate your competition, seen as that is our slogan!

Here are a few pointers to start with:

1. Design
Cheap and nasty websites will never pull in money. Surf your website as if you had never landed on it before, do you like what you see? If no, Change it!

Odesk offers cheap services for web design so take a look in that direction.

2. Navigation
Is your website easily mapped out? How can members get from A to B? Do they have to click link after link to get to where they need to be? If so change it. I would recommend mapping out your site navigation prior to building the website.

3. Search Engine Optimization
To compete you need to be seen, get yourself listed on Google Maps Places to start with and get a few website reviews. This is an instant way to boost your rankings. For more information on boosting your rankings visit 'A quick few tips to fast rankings in Google'.

4. Price Point
If you are offering your services for $50 and your competition costs $25 who do you think your potential clients will opt to purchase from? My point exactly!

5. Uniqueness
Why should I join your website over your competitions website? What draws me in? Do you offer anything different?..

If you want to be the market leader you have to think out of the box, one step ahead. Do something that nobody else is doing.


If you have any ideas which could be added to this post please comment and we will consider changing the post with your added suggestions.

Everybody who has sense protects their property. Be it their car, house or personal belongings they are protected.

This blog will outline measures to protect your website/business.

1. Passwords
Never use the same password on more than one website. Whilst most websites encrypt your passwords, some do not. This means they or others could have full access to your chosen password.

Make them strong by adding additional characters into the mix, passwords like 'mike999' can easily be accessed in minutes from a home PC automatically. However, adding characters into that makes it almost impossible for it to be exploited an example would be MiK!e9$9"g.

2. Scan for malware/viruses
It is important to keep your malware protected up to date at all time. Personally we use Malwarebytes a free tool, alongside AVG (also free) and Spybot Search & Destroy. It is vital that these are up to date at all time.

Keyloggers are becoming very popular making it easier for others to grab your online world and turn it upside down. A keylogger copies everything you write, copy or paste into a database and sends it back to the intruder and allows them to access your accounts.

3. Hire a Server Administrator
Although you may think this is an expensive option in the long run it may not be. Server Admins will be able to scan your server for malware and trojan viruses and keep it safe from exploits. Note: Always verify the users details and preferably use somebody you personally know.

4. Backup
It is VITAL to backup your website/server on a daily basis to avoid having to start all over again if something goes wrong. Remember to use reputable backup companies like WebbyCart.

5. Domain Locking
Believe it or not, if you do not lock your domain name within your account it can be moved out of there within minutes. If you are unsure how to lock your domain contact your registrar.

6. Domain Protection
Protecting your domain name by paying an additional $20 a year is a must. Using this option adds masses of protection to your domain to help avoid intruders transferring without your knowledge.

7. Do NOT use FTP
FTP is only safe if you do not save your passwords to your FTP client, which I bet you do. Never save any password within your PC as it is an easy exploit hole.
Try to avoid using FTP all together by using SFTP (SSH FTP) which is much more secure. (your server admin will help get you setup with this)

8. Expired domains on account
Always make sure that your domain registrar has an up to date email address on file. Wondering why? This is the easiest method for outsiders to access your account. If they find your email address via whois and find the email domain is no longer owned by anyone it can simply be bought and a password reset can be sent to that email address. Think smart!

9. Use Sandboxie
Sandboxie is like a VPN system which removes any malware from its system on closure. It is recommended that you browse the internet in this environment instead of on your normal desktop PC as any viruses will automatically be shut out when the program is closed.

10. Choose a good host
Always go with the more reputable web hosts as they have more security and higher technical knowledege available. Think about it logically.... If you decide to go with a smaller cheaper host, do you know who runs the company? What if only one person runs the whole company? What if they decide to close down or die? (You may think I am going over the top, but it is a possibility).

11. Chosing your domain registrar
You may think it is a good idea to go with who ever you like, but remember, your website name is the one most important factor of having a website. You can always backup your website files and push to another server if you have issues, this is not the case with your domain name. It is recommended to use english companies like GoDaddy as they are easier to communicate with if issues arise. Remember to always check if the website has a phone number, if it does call it. No answer? Do not go there!

12. Do not share information
Do not share your passwords via email or any other form of online communication e.g. skype/facebook. Call/fax or visit the person who needs the information and provide it in a way that cannot be digitally traced or stolen.

13. Is that Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal/..... Plugin Safe?
Before adding plugins or modules to your website have them checked by a professional for backdoor functions. Odesk is your best bet to finding a low cost professional coder.

Remember to always backup your online portfolio and secure it in any way possible.

We hope this helps keep you safe.

Everybody wants to know how their website is ranked within Google, Yahoo and Bing (all being important).

I have been keeping a keen eye on PLRAssassins rankings VS our competition for months now, checking weekly. The issue is this, we have over 100 keywords that we rank for and manually checking each keyword has become a massive chore!

I stumbled across SEO Panel a free open source ranking tool which audits your website, checks PR, checks for broken links, gives daily keyword reports automatically without having to lift a finger and a hell of a lot more!

Remember, it is free with no upsells and works a charm. I can now spend my time doing other things instead of spending two hours once a week checking my rankings against my competitions.

Here is the link: http://www.seopanel.in

Long-tail keywords are simply a long keyword using more than one word, for example instead of using the word 'weightloss' you may use 'weightloss for lazy people'.

Very few newbies understand the reason for using long tail keywords, many ask me "Why would I use all of those words instead of one word which people are more likely to search". The simple answer is this, with short keywords like 'weightloss' the competition is saturated and it would be almost impossible to rank for they keyword unless you had a very respected and busy website (backlinks).

Through using long tail keywords you are cutting down the effort you need to make to rank on the first page of Google. There may be less search volume for that particular keyword, but it will gain you traffic fast and there is a reasonable chance that you will rank.

One tip I would give is this; when you are looking for long tail keyword head over to google and add " " around your chosen keyword and search the keyword. The results should be no more than 250,000; if they are more, ditch the keyword and look for another as the competition is too high.

If you have any questions, please comment and I will be happy to explain more and remember, if you need some products to accompany your long-tail keyword signup today by clicking here.

Everybody uses Google (well almost), Google is the main reason PLRAssassin gains members every day, without it we would have very high advertising costs.

We get thousands of free hits daily thanks to Google and I will now share with you a simple few tricks on how to rank FAST with Google.

1. Think of a niche any niche, even if it seems saturated.

2. Research that niche via Googles Keyword Tool by typing in the main keyword for the niche, you will be given a list of additional long tail keyword relating to that niche.

3. Use the Advance feature and chose Global Traffic => 3000 and <= 10000 and search again.

4. Pick out any keywords you think are relevant and look good to you and head over to google.com

5. Type in the keyword with " " around it, so for example, if my keyword was how to start a dog walking business I would type in "how to start a dog walking business." This will give me my competition which is the number of results. In this case it is high, find keyword with competition lower than 25,000 results.

6. Now grab a domain name with the same URL as the keyword for example www.howtostartadogwalkingbusiness.com/info/org, it really does not matter which extension your chose as long as it is not country specific (e.g. .uk or .us)

7. Now go to your website, install a simple wordpress theme and put the website name as your keyword.

8. Write an article within the website using H1 tag as your main keyword and throughout the article type your keyword around 3-7% of the time. Remember to bold, italic and underline every now and again on your keyword. This also helps.

9. Find a relevant copyright free image and add it to the article. Remember to call the image name your keyword and the Alt Tag as your keyword.

10. Wait a couple of days and you will be on the first page.

11. To get higher up the first page backlink using your chosen keyword.

Hope this helps! (..... I know it will, as this is how I do my SEO)

Enjoy
Owen Smith