What is the SEO Dojo? It is a closed door, gated community which gives search professionals and those wanting to learn more about search engines a safe haven to study and collaborate.

There’s some serious educational material within the walls of the community (really, I kid you not, there’s lots of stuff there to fill your mind with). And of course, there’s a strong community of Seriously Obsessed Search Geeks (SOSG) discussing search issues.

The SEO Dojo is ideal for:

• Individuals who want to increase their SEO knowledge
• Professional SEOs looking for a quality community
• Webmasters and site owners seeking advice from top professionals
• Finding cross-site (and vertical) promotions and opportunities
• SEOs who want to learn more about how search engines work
• Anyone that needs to learn MORE about the world of search marketing
• Search geeks looking to interact with other SEO addicts

I recommend reading more about it here. It not only outlines more about the community itself, but it also tells you about all the extras you get – including free access to awesome tools (like Raven SEO tools, for example, plus tons more).

Another cool thing is that I’ve been given a special code that you can use to get 25% off of the price of membership (which is already reasonable) for the first 25 DD readers who choose to use it. Dave (the dojo leader) assigned my code to be “DonnaRocks”, so just use that coupon code to get your 25% discount. (Dave likes to embarrass me, I think).

If you are at all interested in search marketing, you should check it out. Dave’s done a bangup job of making a great community.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet Marketing, Search engine marketing, Search engine optimization, search engines, search marketing, search professionals, SEOs
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

UPDATE: I’ll try to update this post occasionally as time goes by.

Be The Go-To Blogger for Topical Event Curation

Your blog can become the “go-to guide” for event news curation in your niche. When an event occurs, you can be the one to build a collection of content that is worth a reader’s time. Here are a few tips on becoming a great event curator.

SEO Dojo Radio – the totally Dazzlin edition!

In the second half hour of this SEO Dojo Radio Podcast, I talk shop with David Harry and Terry Van Horne about SEO, making money online, marketing, and various things as we hold an informal industry discussion.

Discover What Google Really Thinks Of Your Pages

What does Google REALLY think of your site’s pages? Determine the rate of importance that Google places upon each of your pages, not by PageRank, but by analyzing crawl rate. Grab a free tool that tracks Googlebot and learn how to massage the data so that you can focus attention on those pages that you think are important, but Google apparently doesn’t.

Exhale Creativity: Inhale Buzz

Sometimes you jut get lucky and buzz spreads about your company, product, or service seemingly out of thin air. While it’s truly exciting when that happens, I wouldn’t sit around waiting for it. Sometimes you have to make your own luck. Buzz usually requires an excellent product or service that just knocks the socks right off everyone. If yours can generate that WOW factor simply because it is so great and solves a problem that everyone has, then you’re definitely ahead of the game. However, even WOW products can be overlooked in the daily stream of our lives. That’s when you need to help get the buzz started, and creativity is the best way to make that happen.

Streamline Your Content Creation Process With Time-Saving Systems

I run sites that are mostly informational in nature, and since informational sites need lots of actual … well … information, that means I spend a good deal of my time creating content. Creating good content takes time, and like most of you, I have very little time, so over the years I’ve created a “system” that helps me shave off as much wasted time as possible during the process. Here’s a glimpse at the content creation system that works for me. Feel free to use any parts of my system to streamline your own content creation process.

Intelligently Crafting Content

I could start off this article by saying that to succeed with SEO, you should create high-quality content, but if I did that, you would immediately think, “same old ‘content is king’ blah, blah, blah”, and you’d probably not read any further. So instead, let’s just start off by stipulating that creating great content is a given. So often, however, no one really goes beyond the phrase “good content” to discuss how to create that content, and just as importantly, how to plan it out, and effectively create a flow throughout the site.

Analyzing Your Text Content from a Graphic Point of View

“You can’t see the forest for the trees” is an old saying that holds much truth when we are trying to analyze our own content. You’ve looked at your own content so much you probably no longer see it the way your visitors do (or the way search engines will). Sometimes I find it useful to look at the words on my site in a completely different way. By viewing your content differently than you’ve ever done before, you open up the possibility of seeing the individual trees within your content forest again. Here’s a little exercise I like to use now and then.

Link Bartering

Link bartering is NOT the act of trading links (reciprocal linking), but is the act of trading services, which usually results in acquiring nice links and recommendations.

Creating Subliminal Connections Between Your Site and Hot Trends

What if you could associate your site, your niche, or your product with a hot new trend? What if the search results showed your site for that popular new gizmo or movie? What if I told you that you can create a subliminal connection between your site and any hot new gadget/movie/song/toy/etc. no matter what niche your site or product is in? And what if you stood a good chance of ranking well for that hot trend?

The Swirling Vortex of Social Networking

Social networking is increasingly becoming a vital aspect of our search marketing efforts. The connections we form amongst our online social communities can provide ever-expanding avenues of awareness of our sites, brand recognition, and ultimately buzz and link-love.

Sadly, however, there is a dark side to social networking. This dark side is one that we’d rather not talk about because we are afraid we might see it within ourselves. What could possibly be so scary? I call it the swirling vortex of social networking.

Using the Science of Social Proof in SEO

I’ve written about Robert Cialdini in the past and how his six persuasion principles can be used in search marketing. Briefly, the six principles are Liking, Reciprocity, Social Proof, Consistency, Authority, and Scarcity. All six are worth spending some serious study time with, but today I want to focus on just one – Social Proof.

Tracking Site Page Importance Via Crawl Cache Dates

A discussion centered around the realization that Google cache dates were the new PageRank and that crawl frequency is an excellent indicator of the importance of a page, which leads to an explanation in how to track this metric.

How To Create No-Fail Hot Content

Would you like your site content to rank well? Would you like your content to draw links like nails to a magnet? There is one strategy you can use to make sure the content you create is almost guaranteed to be a hit – and in the process it gathers backlinks and ranks well. This strategy isn’t some secret ninja tactic that would get your site banned if the search engines found out about it either. In fact, it’s a tactic that the search engines would be happy to recommend to all site owners.
And while the actual creation of the content may take some time and effort, the concept is extremely simple. So what is this awesome strategy?

Blueprint of a Successful SEO Campaign

The surest way to successfully construct a building is to follow a blueprint. A blueprint contains detailed plans and designs that enables skilled personnel to build the structure just from the blueprint. In the same way, a detailed set of plans is the surest way to build a successful search marketing campaign. And just like construction blueprints, while each SEO blueprint may be unique, each will also contain similar details to ensure success. What details should a search marketing blueprint contain?

SEO – Vital Inclusion to the Overall Marketing Mix

Companies are beginning to embrace SEO as a legitimate means of marketing, but they often throw a paltry amount of marketing dollars towards it, or they allocate most or all of the search budget to PPC only. That is a mistake, even for companies that don’t sell products or services online. Let’s take a look at some interesting statistics that will help show how important it is for companies to concentrate significant resources towards ranking well in the search engines’ organic rankings, which are the natural listings returned on the left side of the search results page.

When A Good Idea Goes Wrong – SEO Oopsies

If you search the Internet, you can find at least a few dozen lists that outline the common mistakes a newbie SEO might make. Just to make sure I don’t leave out the obligatory list, I’ll present it below. After that, however, I’ll detail what really happens when a beginner starts to see results from his or her first search marketing experiments.

This next batch is a series of posts I’ve done for SEO Chicks. Keep in mind that the SEO Chicks blog is a sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes just plain goofy look at the search world, so if some of these posts seem a little “less than professional”, that would be why.

Behavioral Based Ads Bad for Publishers and Scary for Users

Google just announced that it would start providing interest-based Adsense ads. I have a bit of experience with being a publisher that serves ad based on past user behavior and interests. That experience isn’t a very good one. If you are in the mood, follow along as I tell you my little tale of how behavior-based ads can be bad for everyone. (*names changed to protect the guilty and the innocent)

Dr. Phil Would Tell You That Stubborness Won’t Get You Higher Rankings

(A semi-fictional tale)

Despite the many changes, some folks just refuse to let go of the things they long to hold onto. Let’s consider the case of someone I like to call “Mr. Stubborn”.

If Google Is Unable to Remember Its Own Rules

Google, really, you just can’t expect everyone in the universe who owns a web site to follow your rules. You’ve just proven that by not following your own rules.

Finding SEO Inspiration

To be successful with your SEO campaign, you need to see beyond the simplistic ABC’s of search – looking past the typical optimization rules to get inspired. Find inspiration outside of the (chiclet) box, and you’ll likely find ways to improve both rankings and conversions!

Lets Call This Hypocrite Day Shall We?

There’s nothing new about this post. It’s been said before. But for those who still confuse ethics with believing whatever line of bull the search engines might be throwing out for their own betterment, I wanted to just put out a little reminder on this fine April day.

Link Building Ideas for the Link Building-Challenged

Since link building is about as fun as ripping off your own toenails with pliers, I thought it might be useful to spark some creative ideas into the heads of poor, depressed link builders. You know who you are. So without further ado, or maybe with lots of further ado, it depends on my mood …

The Evolution of a Newbie SEO

All the stages a noob goes through while learning SEO

SEO Conferences: Good Deal or No Deal?

I love SEO Conferences, but there’s a good possibility I’ll never attend another one. Why? Well, for one thing, after I tick off all the conference hosts today with this post, the SEO bouncers might block me from entering. But in reality, I may never go to another conference because the prices are just too freaking high. (please bear with me on this long rant, because really, you’ve GOT to read it all – seriously)

The Long Cold Wintery Days of SEO

The long, cold wintery days hold the same lures for SEOs. Trapped inside, bundled in warm, fuzzy pajamas or long-johns, the SEO prepares to strut his stuff. The goal: to seduce a bot into believing he holds the key to its spider-heart. Unfortunately, his mastery of the SEO process can be broken down into the same three primary stages as the lover.

Also, since most of these are SEO related, I thought I’d throw in a few posts that I wrote on my old SEO Scoop blog that might interest anyone interested in the above…

The 5 Goals of a Search Optimized Page

“How do I get my site to rank well?”. Start with understanding these 5 goals of a search optimized page, and then expand your knowledge with the resources compiled in the Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Blogging post.

Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Blogging

A quick roundup of ebooks and guides, both free and paid, that would be useful for anyone wanting organized how-to info to study on SEO, affiliate marketing, etc.

SEO for WordPress

The HTML version of a presentation I did at WordCamp Birmingham in 2008 which was all about, well, SEO for WordPress.

Finally, you might want to check out some of the back issues of Personal Branding Magazine to read my articles that focus on combining personal branding with SEO, along with fantastic articles from lots of other writers as well. Hope some of those are useful to some of you.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ABC, Birmingham, energy, Google, HTML, king, Link Building, online social communities, player, Robert Cialdini, search budget, search engines, search marketing, search marketing blueprint, search marketing campaign, search marketing efforts, search marketing experiments, search results, search world, SEO, SEOs, social media attention, social networking, Vital Inclusion
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

1. Organic search engine traffic – This is the granddaddy of all traffic. Visitors who arrive at your site from a search they’ve conducted are extremely targeted. This is what SEOs live for – high search engine rankings for popular phrases related to your niche. Bonus points if the great rankings are on Google, as that sends far more traffic than others. Don’t make the mistake of concentrating solely on search engine traffic however. If you lose your rankings, and you have no other sources of traffic, your site’s traffic will be devastated.
2. Sponsored search engine traffic (PPC) – Second best is the traffic obtained from visitors clicking on sponsored listings from those same search engines. Essentially, you get all the same benefits as above, but there’s one difference. You have to pay for this traffic. The major search engines have made it a bit more complicated to play the PPC (pay per click) game. No longer is it as simple as “the biggest spenders get the top listings”. You can be very successful with this method, and the fact that you have more control over placement is a big draw. Keep in mind, however, that without experience, you may end up spending a bundle of cash on PPC systems such as Google’s Adwords without reaping any profits.
3. Referrals from other sites – This could come in several forms. Other sites may simply link to you because they like your site, or you may have chosen to purchase advertising (either as a link or a banner ad) on others’ sites. Either way, if a highly-trafficked sites in your niche recommend your site, there’s a good chance that you’ll receive nicely targeted traffic from those sites.
4. Participation in forums/communities – If you participate in forums and communities related to your niche, you can build up an element of trust. That trust helps send others community participants to your site via any links that you’ve listed in your signatures or profile pages. This may not send large quantities of traffic, but it will probably be traffic that has a strong bond with you. Those visitors may then go on to either link to your site or recommend your site in other ways.
5. Guest blogging – Like the community participation above, guest blogging helps build up others’ trust in you, and your name becomes well known. This in turn builds up your personal brand, and you become more recognizable. At some point, people will know who you are, and that almost always translates into more site traffic. Obviously, you should be creating quality posts on others’ blogs if you hope to succeed with this method of traffic generation and increase blog traffic.
6. Social networking – Traffic from social networks such as Digg and Stumbleupon, or social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, or popular video sites such as Youtube, can be huge. However, the traffic comes in spikes, usually only lasts for a few hours or at most a few days, and the visitors rarely stick around. These visitors may not be very targeted, or they may just not be all that interested in what you have to offer. Nevertheless, you may get some much-needed attention (buzz) or a few nice links, so social networking traffic is worth getting. It’s just not worth as much as the factors mentioned above, in my opinion.
7. Article marketing / Directory submissions – Submitting your site to directories or writing articles that will be syndicated via article marketing sites are both useful for obtaining a few links to your sites, and perhaps a handful of visitors. You won’t see much direct traffic from these sources, so put this a bit lower on your list of things to do. It’s not a bad idea, and it can be useful for link building purposes, but it’s just not highly useful.
8. Purchasing traffic packages and traffic exchange programs – In general, you should avoid these, and I only include this in the list so that I can warn you about them. If you are tempted to “buy millions of visitors for only $99″ or whatever the offer is, ask yourself if you enjoy throwing money away. These types of programs may or may not send you traffic, but the traffic they do send will likely either be fake or it will consist of visitors who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in your site. You will be wasting money. Likewise, traffic exchange packages usually consist of webmasters visiting each others sites, just to obtain more traffic for their own sites. Again, they aren’t interested in your site at all. They only want to increase their own traffic, which won’t be useful traffic for them either.

I’m sure there are other traffic sources, but those are the ones that I receive the most traffic from. If you know of any other great sources, please share in the comments below.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 26 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: article marketing, directory submissions, forums, Google, guest blogging, high search engine rankings, Organic search engine traffic, search engine, search engine traffic, search engines, SEOs, social networking, social networking traffic, social networks, sources of site traffic, traffic exchange, Youtube
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.