Hello dear readers, I got another guest surprise today! Assuming you’re one of the few that hasn’t seen him around the sphere yet, I’d like you to meet Nicolas Prudhon, PhD.

As an Internet Marketer & SEO professional with over 10 years of practical experience, he’s gonna tell us a little something…..

Search Engine Optimization is essential to the success of any website or blog. When talking about intrinsic value, SEO is (when applied properly) absolutely invaluable for it may bring tons and tons of potential prospects to your doorstep as no cost.

I’m not talking about PPC campaigns, but really about achieving a high organic search engine ranking position

It used to be a battle of keyword density, positioning, image tags and others… Yes, I said – It used to be – because the rules of the game have changed!

Back in February I put out the call for guest bloggers so I could get some much needed work completed. John Clifton from AskDeb was the first to respond, give him a warm welcome if you please…

Writing for the search engines requires a writer to speak the language of the search engines. When writing a page of content, consider that you’re writing to two audiences: the reader sitting at home on the computer and the search engine robots. You have to keep the attention of both of these audiences if you want to see the largest possible number of visitors to your web page. Since you probably know how to write to keep a person’s attention better than a search engine’s attention, I’m going to focus in this article on three secrets to writing for search engines.

Important updates to blog improvement review contest, please re-read; leave any comments on that post .

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No I’m not keyword stuffing the title, but it has a good effect. And no it’s not my Google adsense account either; no reason to close what’s not in use.

As I was making some rounds this morning I came across my buddy Mike at IM Is Easy and he had a VERY interesting story to share (not his account either).

Now I’m not a Google hater per-say, but most will agree that it’s always satisfying to hear of David taking a piece of Goliath, even if just a small piece…..$721 in this case.

Read the full story (new window). Pay close attention to the end where Google’s paralegal protested (quite loudly I’m sure), “What if everyone whose account was canceled sued Google?”

Only 12 more days to go for $100 + massive prizes!

OK yea, a large part of this post is self-serving, however it definitely should help others along the way as well.

Back in the beginning of December I was getting fed-up with the uselessness of the wordpress dashboard and went looking for quick and easy ways to check incoming links. Although many link checking tools were mentioned, all but Google alerts fell way outside my immediate criteria…..

Something simple to merely check who is currently linking to me so I could link back/thank them in some way.

Most, if not all backlink checking tools, were not made for such simplicity. The wordpress dashboard was perfect until they changed the way it reads pages…but I’m not going to get into that now, there are blog articles all over with people complaining about the same thing.

A very important post on DennisEdell.com and $500 to be won on EasyCashContests!

OK so everyone else already did there page rank update posts; what the hell, dare to be different, right? Anyway, I’m happy .

I blogged after the last one back in September about going from 3 to 2 and the reason I thought it happened. Now I got my 3 back and I have YOU to thank for it! All of your very generous outgoing links to me and ULTRA generous blog comments definitely contributed to me raising back up a point; thanks!

Tip: For those that may not realize it, blog comments are Google feeding content just like anything else!

I haven’t checked ALL my inner pages yet, but three of my most popular scored a 2! Another scored a 0, which is different from nothing at all. (Ask if you dare, but it’ll give you a headache.) Hopefully those will score more next time.

First, a little horn tooting for reaching 50 posts! Woohoo! Yippie!! Yay for me!!!

Don’t worry, I don’t dare to openly compare myself to Darren Rowse again

All kidding aside, I sincerely hope they have been good quality posts for all involved

Hmm, it seems though that the good quality posting is at least half the reason I got a PR downgrade from Google - I went from 3 to 2 during the last dance at the end of July!

Huh? What?! Penalized by Google for quality content?? Well, in a round-about sorta way…

Those that have been with me for awhile may remember that I had well more then 50 posts at one point. However, realizing that the posts weren’t even close to stellar (not by a long shot), I removed about 40 of them.

A short post today but with a bullet! In regards to splitting categories when necessary.

Perhaps it was laziness, I dunno. When I first started categorizing this blog I had “Traffic & Promotion” as one category.

Well, they DO go hand-in-hand don’t they?

Yes & No.

Here’s how I see it - all promotion is meant to bring traffic. But, not all traffic is a result of promotion…..at least not “direct promotion“.

Do you see it? Think about it.

The more I market and blog, the more I see differences, sometimes vast differences in traffic strategies and promotion techniques.

This also mean that it makes good “user-friendly” sense, to separate the two for readers. Let us never forget, without readers, we’re just talking to ourselves ;).

You don’t want too many categories, but you don’t want separate issues all clumped together either. That just leads to frustration and the dreaded backspacing right off your site.

You need incoming links! They shout. And it’s true, you do and lots of them. But what they weren’t shouting until recently is that you should have a fair mount of outgoing links also…

You’d be really surprised if you knew how many online marketers either don’t know, or completely ignore the “simple” fact, that if you want your website to have lots and lots of traffic, you need LINKS. Both incoming AND outgoing; yes that’s right, I said OUTGOING.

And that’s what this tip is based on…

There are two different ways to accomplish outgoing links, a good way and a better way.

If you simply reference someone else’s blog in your post and link to it, you won’t do your traffic size much good. You won’t do it any harm either though and you will in fact help your site some.