To understand how to get ranked on Google, you need to understand the
mind of Google. In other words, what does their ranking system require for
the page to have ‘high authority’ and rank in the first few slots of a keyword
phrase. The Search Ranking Factors article, written by the authoritative
seomoz.org, attributes 54 factors to rank – some off-page, some on-page.
The 29 off-page factors relate to the Domain Age and URL choice, which is
out of the scope of WordPressDirect’s functionality. Of the remaining 25 onpage
factors, WordPressDirect takes care of an impressive 19 factors.
Examples of these 19 factors include but are not limited to meta description,
title tagging and topical relevancy of the internal linking structure.
What about the remaining 6? They are simple to solve but must be handled
manually. The four biggest ones under user control are:
- Don’t link to spam pages. Link to only high quality pages
- Use good spelling and grammar
- Choose a keyword-relevant title and description.
- Don’t over-stuff your page with too many keywords. Keep the keywords
to a small number and use them often in good, relevant sentences.
Therefore, you can virtually guarantee effective on-page optimization with the
above four rules and the use of WordPressDirect, the simplest solution to
SEO optimization to date.

Lawyers have never been known as a technical bunch, but more and more often you see a lawyer with a palm pilot making appointments and a blackberry for those urgent messages. Electronic gadgets are now common in the courthouses across the US. Lawyers have increased productivity by utilizing technology so it should come as no surprise that lawyers are using RSS feeds as a means to grow and manage their practices.

Lawyers are using RSS feeds a number of different ways to increase efficiency and productivity.

Law Field and Legal RSS Feeds
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Here is yet another way of visualizaing the data presented by Google Trends for Websites. It’s called BigPicture and is a mashup of data which represents recently searched items, sites that are losing traffic and sites that are gaining traffic. Simply hover your mouse cursor over the lines in the graph to see emphasis placed on their line to view the domain name. To add your domain to the graph, simply type it into the search box. Naturally, I submitted Performancing.com. Based on the results between July of 2007 through July 2008, we have peaked at or over 10,000 visitors but have leveled off since then.

Brightly colored lines were recently searched by other visitors to this site.

Red lines indicate sites which are losing traffic. Blue lines are gaining.

Of course, the sites with lines at the top of the graph include Yahoo, MSN.com, Live.com, Microsoft.com, and Wikipedia.com. One thing I didn’t see was Google.com. Even if I went to the Google Trends website itself, I couldn’t do a trend search for Google. Did they design it that way or is there another reason?

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Pageflakes RSS aggregation page). And when I ‘feel the urge’ I will blog about something related to these materials in my regular blog here - I’ll be sure to add the tag CCK08 to the postings. I have no specific goal (or expectation) in mind as to the number of readings I will complete each day nor the number of blog postings on CCK08 I will make each …
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Last summer, we had a couple of interns on the RSS team here in IE: Nate Furtwangler, a developer intern, and?Chrix Finne, a?Program Manager intern. Nate and Chrix both did an amazing job helping us to ship IE7 and Vista, and they also found the time to knock out a really cool project. Here’s a big thanks from all of us to them.

I’ll let Chrix describe the project (and their experience) in his own words. In case you’re wondering, the “where’s Sean’s office” thing is a reference to Chrix’s decision that?it would be fun to relocate my office to the roof of the parking garage while I was on vacation. Good times.

- Sean

?

Hi! My name is Chrix Finne and this past summer I was an intern Program Manager on the IE RSS Team â?? also known as â??Team RSS got new digs so the interns got a window office.â?? I had the privilege of working on several cool projects this past summer, and had a blast while doing it. Shoutout to my officemate Nate Furtwangler, developer intern and my partner in crime. Though they consumed far fewer Swedish Fish than Nate and I, my mentor Jane â??whereâ??s Seanâ??s office?â?? Kim and my manager Sean â??Romulusâ?? Lyndersay were also awesome and kept me on my toes. Congrats to the whole team on IE7 and Vista RTM!

We are proud to announce that our intern project, Feeds Plus also shipped! Itâ??s a free IE7 add-on that adds two features to the Windows Feeds experience: aggregation and notification. We hope that Feeds Plus will help users get more flexibility and engagement with feeds in Windows.

Feeds Plus, running in the background, can combine multiple feeds into a single,?river of news-style feed.?All the user has to do is turn on Feeds Plusâ?? aggregator, and every folder of feeds will sprout an aggregate feed at the top. This can be very useful â?? for instance, I can make a folder with all of my news feeds and then read all my news at once through the Newsâ?? aggregate feed. Read/unread information is synced between the aggregate feed and its children, and aggregate feeds are searchable just like any other feed. If multiple feeds use Simple List Extensions (SLE) then the corresponding aggregate feed will as well â?? this is cool because you can combine multiple different eBay feeds, and use SLE to sort by price across all of them.

A pop-up feed notification reminiscent of Outlookâ??s is the second feature in Feeds Plus. The Windows Feed Download Engine always runs in the background, so users have to check to see if new items have arrived. With Feeds Plus, the user can choose which feeds matter most to them and get a pop-up â??toastâ?? as soon as those feeds have new items waiting. The pop-up is designed to be unobtrusiveâ??it fades in and out and wonâ??t go crazy and flash every half secondâ??and it includes a handy link to the feeds that itâ??s announcing:

Feeds Plus is an unsupported IE7 add-on (meaning that itâ??s not supported by Microsoft technical support or by the IE development team). One important note is that it does not have accessibility support in this release. Don’t use it if you’re uncomfortable using unsupported software.

Download Feeds Plus here.

So, thatâ??s Feeds Plus. I also had the chance to help design the Feed Headlines gadget on the Windows Vista Sidebar. Feed Headlines shows the user a scrolling list of headlines from one or many feeds with a nice little preview window and links to the browser. Itâ??s a great way to keep content handy â?? I keep an instance pointed at Engadget that I use to procrastinate all the time.

My favorite thing about Feed technology in Windows is how much freedom it gives the user to choose how, when, and where to consume different types of web content â?? from news feeds to Craigslist searches. I think that itâ??s critical to provide different ways to read and consume the feed content thatâ??s coming in, so I hope you enjoy these little feeds extras.

Yours,

Chrix Finne

PS â?? One shameless plug: Nate and I were lucky enough to get interviewed by Channel 9, so if you want to see those Swedish Fish for real, keep an eye on Channel 9?(hint: they have a feed). Theyâ??re on the middle shelf above the demo laptop.

A crucial part of getting your web site noticed by the search engines is having lots of fresh keyword-rich text content on your site. Fortunately, there are many efficient and affordable ways to add new content to your site. Here are just a few of them.

Hire a Ghostwriter

Hiring a ghostwriter to produce text content for your site will obviously incur costs that you won’t have with free articles. However, with a paid ghostwriter, you can expect a higher level of quality in the writing, and also specify which keywords you would like to appear in an article. By publishing free articles on your site, you will be adding content that appears on dozens of other websites. With a ghostwriter, however, you can be sure that the content will be unique to your site, which something else search engines consider when ranking a site. Ghostwriters can be found by registering at www.elance.com or www.directfreelance.com and posting a simple project outline. Writers will bid on your project, and you accept the writer with the qualifications and bid that best suits you. If you go to the trouble of hiring a ghostwriter, it is probably a good idea to get them to research and write a number of articles, rather than just one.

Keep a Blog

If you maintain a blog to give your site visitors news and information about updates to your site, it is important that you publish your blog on the same server as your site. Blogger.com　is a free blogging service that allows you to host your blog on your site rather easily. You simply need to go through the “Advanced” set up when creating your blog and enter the ftp information for your site’s server. If you already maintain a blog that is NOT hosted on your own site, you are wasting a valuable resource for SEO, as search engines do not recognize that keyword-rich content as part of your site. You should check the help section of your blogging service to learn how to republish it as part of your site.

As with an article archive, it is important to link to your blog from the main page of your site, or at least from one of the upper level pages, so search engines can easily find and spider your blog.

Many webmasters don’t maintain a blog, simply because they do not know what to include in them. If you start an article archive as suggested above, you can use your blog to announce new articles. Rather then making a short post such as “go check out the new articles in our archive,” include the article titles and the first line or two of text of each article with “read more…” or “continued…” linking to the full text in the article section. These is a simple trick for getting some of your keywords to appear in two place on your site.

Create a Forum on Your Site

A forum or bulletin board on your site will appeal to both search engines and human users. Search engines like forums because they are constantly being updated with fresh content. Human visitors will often return to sites with forums to ask questions, seek or give advice, or to make contact with other people with similar interests. As with keeping a blog, it is possible to maintain a forum either off or on your site’s server, and it is very important that it appears on your server, with links to and from your main page. Again, this is so important as this is the only way that search engines can recognize all of that content as part of your site. Setting up a forum does require some technical skill, but it is not as difficult as you might think. PhpBB () offers free forum software with templates and set-up tutorials.

If you would like to add a forum to your site, but lack the technical skills, you can easily outsource the work through www.elance.com .

Finding the right path to earn money online can be a vexing experience especially for those who haven’t done it before. There are so many ways to begin that many people typically give up because they get overwhelmed by the number of possible paths and online experts.

If you follow these simple steps to get started, you will find that earning money online does not have to be quite so difficult.

1. Find Your Idea - Your own knowledge and passion is the place to start. Many who attempt to earn money online tend to focus on money for money’s sake and not their own interests and passions first. What most online marketing guides do no cover is the core starting point of your online business - your own knowledge and interests.

For example, imagine your real passions are mystery books, coffee, and gardening. Besides that you are an expert at fixing small engines and have a lot of knowledge on that topic. The key is that any of those topics can become a means that can be managed to an income source.

If you love to fix engines then build on small engine repair - if you love gardening then build your online sites around gardening. Always remember that it will be five times easier for you to create and maintain original content to anything that you really care about.

2. Create a Blog - I’m always surprised when people go out and try to create websites by hand and spend literally hundreds of hours learning HTML and paying for hosting centers. Unless you are passionate about page layout and want full control of your page design this is truly a waste of productive time.

Free blogs such as Blogger and Wordpress allow you to pick your site look and focus directly on the content. Some worry that blogs are not well ranked in the search engines. That is not true, however. Some of the highest ranked and traffic heavy sites on the internet are blogs. They provide a huge jump-start to your online business without paying a single penny.

Plus, with the vast number of blogging search engines you can submit your blog articles immediately while you are building out your daily content.

3. Use Ads - Now that you have your idea and site created you now need some means to build income. Ads are one of the best ways to start generating simple income on your site. The concept is easy - you just place ads on your own sites. Each time someone comes to your site and clicks on the ad, you make a small profit, or, a portion of the advertising costs.

Advertisers love this because they can spread their ads across thousands of sites and rely on the ability and creativity of the site owners to get ad clicks back to their products.

Ad profit varies widely based on the popularity and competition for the advertising space. Depending on your site topic this could range from $.05 a click to $1.00 or more a click. Google Adsense is the easiest and best place to start.

4. Find Affiliate Products - Don’t forget that many people worldwide share your interests as well. In fact, it is almost certain that someone has written an ebook or created a product that matches your interests exactly. The catch for them is that they need a way to sell their products and services.

This is where you come in. Most online products allow you to sell them on your own sites and keep a portion of the revenue. If your site becomes very popular with a large amount of web traffic you can earn a significant amount of affiliate revenue because people will want to buy the products you recommend.

I know of one man who became a millionaire in only 2 years on this concept alone. He focused on his interest; laptops, and built an online business that gave him both affiliate and advertising revenue. There are many affiliate directories that you can use to find a product that matches your site. Great places to start are Clickbank and Linkshare - both are free to use.

5. Write Articles - If there is one point to take away these steps on how to earn money online, it’s this one. Articles are the best means to driving traffic back to your site and increase your profits.

Why is this? People are constantly looking for information on topics that are similar to yours. If they find your article and like it they’ll be very likely to go to your own site to get more information.

There are a large number of article directories available today that you can submit to for free. Your articles are simply classified and categorized in the topic areas of interest and then publicized for distribution. Others can use your articles on their own websites which gives you the benefit of having links back to your own site.

This is a very powerful way to promote yourself and your interests. Remember, getting traffic to your site is the only way to earn money from your ads and affiliate products.

Remember to stay focused on your topic of choice - if you stay productive every day you will learn how to earn money online.