Here are 5 excellent WordPress plugins that you can quickly add to your blog, and use to help increase your web presence

HeadSpace 2: – dead simple tool to help you identify the right keywords, define your page titles, update your meta info, and so much more.  Here’s a quick video to help you see what HeadSpace2 can do for you.

SEO Slugs – strips the common words out of your post slug, helping your new post get found faster.

SEO Smart Links – automatically links relevant keywords and phrases with other posts, increasing your relevance on that topic.

WordPress Related Posts – While not specifically SEO related, this plugin will find relevant posts within your blog, and share them at the end of each post.  This way, people reading your blog can easily go to different pages with additional content.  Viewing more pages and staying on your site longer is a good thing.

WP-Super-Cache – Now that Google has said that page loading times will contribute to SEO, caching utilities like WP-Super-Cache are that much more important.  Helping your page load faster for your audience is a good thing.

So – there you go.  5 simple tools that you can use to get more eyes on your website.  But, please remember that the most important tool you can use to get people to your site is to provide them with content.  Write, write, write, and then share with everyone.  Not the other way around.

You’ve probably heard about the millions of dollars being spent on the internet every day, but have you thought about ways to put that money right into your own wallet?

Here are 5 tools that you can use to monetize your own website

PPC Advertising – Google Adsense, Bidvertiser, and RevenueWire are just a few ways that you can add advertisements to your website or blog.  Every time your visitors click on the site, you get paid.  If you have a website that has substantial traffic, this can be a good residual income, but typically PPC only pays pennies per click.  There seems to be a general feeling that PPC ads make your website look cheap, so make sure you consider your brand reputation before choosing PPC.

Sell Your Stuff – Write an ebook on a topic that interests you.  Sell your own stock photography.  Create unique iPad or iPhone backgrounds.  Think of something that might be interesting, and valuable, to your readers, and then fin a way to give it to them.

Direct Banner Advertising – Create a banner for your website (there are many WordPress themes that are already built for this) and then find an advertiser who should be interested in your current audience.  You will need to be able to give them information about the kind of people that visit your site in order to demonstrate why they should advertise with you – and rankfanatic.com can help you with that.   You can even give them a sliding scale for payment.  As your traffic increases, so do your prices.

Affiliate Marketing – When your readers click on your affiliate ad, and then make a purchase, you get a cut of the sale.  Amazon.com, ClickBank, and even Sony have popular, and lucrative, affiliate programs.

Pay for Review – This option can be a bit tricky, as there is a perceived (and in some cases, real) bias in favour of the company or product that you are reviewing.  Regardless, if you have the traffic and can write in a way that doesn’t come across as a corporate shill, you might find that paid reviews are a good fit for you.  Check out blogsvertise.com, reviewme.com, or payperpost.com.

Now that you know how much traffic you are getting, it’s time to start using it to your own benefit.  With rankfanatic.com, you can get real time results that you can use to tweak your website to get more traffic, and more clicks, to give you more money!

Every online entity is here with some mission, be it making money or propagating a cause. So, each one may be enjoying presence through multiple links, including affiliates, online ads and public profiles at social media sites, including but not limited to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace et al. This is all a part of online marketing strategy to gain maximum visitors and hence maximize conversions. However, how do you know whether your online presence is working for you or not? If you would just sit down and wait patiently for the results, it may take you years to realize the kind of commercial success you can achieve. On the other hand, employing a good web ranking tool can assist you at keeping an absolute track of your performance online.

All web ranking tools available today aim to empower you with information regarding your visitors. These tools record and maintain information in respect of all the unique visitors who made it to your links. The tools avail you details of their activity while they spent time on your links to draw important conclusions. The data gives you important inputs to improvise your message and handle your visitors more tactfully and in a prepared manner.

Google’s Keyword Search Tool – Starting with the most obvious one, this is Google’s easy to use tool to find the right keywords for your next web page or blog post.

WordTracker – Good and easy tool.  Enter one keyword and it will spit out a list of related keywords, and their relative search results.

Wordze.com – Not a free tool, but has a 30day free trial.  The wordrank tool looks very promising.

Wordstream – I’m intrigued by the keyword niche tool – enter your topic, and it will find the relevant keywords. Worth investigating.

Webmaster-toolkit – Useful tool that lets you find your keywords based on a variety of search engines.  I’d prefer the search engines were listed in order of popularity instead of alphabetical – but I guess this works too.

There are many other tools available to help you find the right keywords for your post, but it’s important to remember that it’s people that will be reading your page – not search engines.  The words you choose need to fit in to your post, so focus more on what you have to say instead of which keywords should be added.  We provide these tools so you can incorporate them into your next post, but don’t focus on the keywords alone.

What tools do you use to help your blog post or web page get found?

One important ranking tools available for your website is the Google PageRank system.  On a scale of 0 to 10 – the higher the number, the better your PageRank:
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• www.google.com – PageRank 10
• www.microsoft.com – PageRank 9
• www.twitter.com – PageRank 9
• www.facebook.com – PageRank 10
• www.ibm.com – PageRank 8
• www.brandscaping.ca – PageRank 0

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So what does this actually mean?  It’s a measure of how relevant your website is to the rest of the internet.

Just like the real world – if you have a bunch of influential friends that are connected to you, you are probably perceived as being more influential yourself.  PageRank works in a similar way.  The more high ranking sites that link back to you, the higher your PageRank.  A website with a few PR5 sites linking back to it is going to have a higher PR than a site with 100 PR1 sites linking back.

Does a Higher PageRank Mean Better Search Results?

Short answer – no.  This doesn’t mean that your PageRank isn’t important, it just means that quality content is more valuable in the eyes of the search engines.  Provide your audience with interesting information that they are looking for, and you will find your SERP (search engine results placement) increasing.  People don’t look for websites based on their PageRank – they search for the terms they are interested in.

So go and build your website with quality content that will engage your audience.  But if an opportunity comes up to link back to your influential friends – make sure you capitalize on it!

If you are present online for a purpose – be it to earn money or promote a cause – you must gather as much attention of your target audience groups as possible. The more relevant visitors will glance through your links, the more effectively you would achieve your business goals.
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Merely sporting accounts across Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn et al cannot be useful unless these profiles are monitored to maximize visitors and turn them into customers. Here, a web traffic analytics tool can help you ascertain the activities of your unique visitors across social media sites.
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A good website analytics vendor site will aid you at improvising and enhancing your overall online presence. The site will provide you real-time statistics on web traffic to your own website, social media profiles and other referring web pages. The vendor site will provide you with exhaustive statistics on the performance of your keywords including their respective rankings across Google, Yahoo and MSN-Bing.
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What’s more, as you cannot afford to be always before your computer, the vendor site will send you these statistics on your iPhone to keep you well-informed on real-time basis. So, with the help of web traffic analytics tool under your belt, you would be always be up to date with your best keyword rank, your most popular web pages/ links and the most searched keyword(s) that attract highest number of visitors to your online profiles.

Companies use web analytics tools to monitor the visitors on their online profiles, including websites and accounts across social networking media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and so on. A good Web analytics tool thus enables you to measure the effectiveness of your online advertising campaigns beyond your websites and ad links. The tool organizes your web traffic and keyword statistics into graphs for easy viewing and comparison.

Web analytic tools implement log file analysis and page tagging system. Log file analysis is the method in which the tool analyzes the log file created by the server for all the data exchanges it makes. The other method uses tiny bits of java script codes that send data to analysis tools, whenever the webpage is being hosted by the server.

A good web analytics tool package lets you discern the behavior of all your unique visitors and monitor your site’s traffic on real-time basis. Selecting the right tool helps you track exactly what the visitors did on your website; what appealed to them more and which keywords brought them to your site/profile etc. Web analytic tools, if utilized optimally, can make sure that you stay ahead of competition and have a distinguished web presence.

You might have heard about some of the ways that you can tweak up your website so the search engines can find you, but one of the common questions is “Which is the best SEO technique?”  Remember, SEO means “search engine optimization”.

Well, that’s like asking “What’s the best way to build a house?”  There are many different ways to do it, depending on your budget, your timeline, your location, and what your final goal is.

But just like building a house, there are good ways to do it, and not-so-good ways to do it.

Today, we’re going to have a quick look at the good ways to do it.  These techniques are referred to as “White Hat SEO,” and this normally means creating results through organic, or unpaid, methods.  The bad ways are called “Black Hat SEO” – and we aren’t going to tell you how to do them, because, well, they’re bad!

Why do you want to use White Hat methods over Black Hat?

Organic search results are preferred because they don’t manipulate the search engines into thinking the site has what the user is searching for.  Organic results are usually found from sites that are relevant to what the searcher requested, and this earns them a higher placement in the search engine results page (SERP) – and that’s a good thing.  Paid techniques often use link farms, article spinning, and keyword stuffing to build a fake positive presence in the SERPS.  The major search engines regularly look for these techniques, and will punish those that use them severely.  So instead of having a poor placement, you can end up with no placement at all.

With the building the home analogy, Black Hat techniques will tell you that they will get you the results you want, either cheaper or faster than doing it right.  But like many shortcuts, choosing this technique can often cost you big dollars in the long run.  If it’s your home, it might cost you expensive repairs.  If it’s your website, it could cost you your ranking and reputation.  Fixing your home is a whole lot easier, because you likely won’t need to start from scratch.  As well, White Hat SEO techniques ensure that the people who visit your site get the information that they were looking for.  Remember, you want to build your website for people, not search engines.

When you are looking for techniques to bring more traffic to your website, o ryou are choosing a team to deliver SEO results, ask them how they are going to do it, and what the ramifications could be.

Helping people find your website through the search engines is a great way to increase your traffic.  You can use www.rankfanatic.com to measure and analyze the results in real-time, so you can make the best choices for your website experience.

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Amy Campbell of Blue River, WI

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Jennifer Salie of Shohola, PA (joining our fanpage during her wedding weekend – how about that!)

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Umoh Luna of, well – we’re not really sure.

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And Tina Martin Forsyth of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada

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Thanks so much to all of the fans that have joined the page.  We are grateful that you took the time to add us, and we want to make sure we can provide you with excellent content on SEO, SEM, real-time Analytics, and anything else you need to make your mark on the internet.

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If you would like more information about anything relating to your website, please leave us a comment here on the blog, or on our Facebook Fan Page

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Looking forward to excellent conversations,

@brandscaping