Thrive Learning Institute - "Show more options" tab

Recently Google has come out with a little tab that you can click on with the text "show more options" and at Thrive Learning Institute having multiple options is paramount. When you click on this link you'll see a side bar pop up to the left side of the screen that has a few different options.

One of my favorite options is the Wonder wheel. This is a great tool to use for brainstorming keywords and topics to write about for a blog, to create a niche website around and to analyze competition. When you click on the wonder wheel option a wheel will appear in the middle of the screen that contains your keyword and then on a number of spokes coming out of the main wheel there will be related more long-tail keywords connected to it. This is great because you can see variations of the keyword you may not have thought of before.

Additionally you can click on one of the related terms and that will then become the main wheel and you can see terms related to that one. So you can "drill down" as many in the internet marketing world say and find unique little niches that you can exploit and profit from.

A few other features in this side par that i really like are the forums link and the videos link. If you need to find some forums to get involved in with your niche all you need to do is type in your keyword come tot he "show more options" tab and click on "forums" and a list of all the forums talking about your niche will come up. This a great way to get involved in your community fast and easy.

The Video link is also good because generally there will be less competition for videos than for text and many times you'll be able to find keywords that don't have ANY videos indexed for it. You can then quickly whip out some videos and get ranking highly for your keyword with those videos and start driving traffic to your website. There are more options on the "show more options" tab but I'll let you explore those for yourself ;)

Read more from Thrive Learning Institute to get yourself a better understanding of our philosophy and how to make money online.

Simple SEO Tips - Thrive Learning Institute

Here are a few tips and simple rules from Thrive Learning Institute you should follow to improve easily your rankings in the different search engines. Nothing new and nothing very complex but good tips that work straight from the knowledge base of Thrive Learning Institute.

So, I hope you enjoy reading this little "SEO Beginner Guide" and I hope it helps you grow your traffic.

Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's a set of techniques and strategies to optimize websites for the search engines and get better rankings on the search results of those engines.

There are a few more abbreviations and terms you should now if you start learning SEO, among others:

SERPs: Search Engine Results Pages.

Anchor text: Text used as a link.

Backlink: Any link pointing to your web site. Also called Inbound link.

One-way link: When a site or page has a link to your site, and your doesn't have any link back to it.

Keywords density: Relation of a keyword to the other words in a web page element. For example, the web page title <>This is just an example for a web page title< / title > has a keyword density of 20% because 7 out of 35 characters in this title make the word "example".

Outbound link: Any link on your page pointing to another site.

So, let's start working on it right away!

Tip 1 - Anchor text
When you create a link to another page or another site of yours, don't just use "click here" or "go" as the anchor text. Basically, don't do this:

To join our online HTML training, < href="001.html">click here< /a>.

Instead, use the keywords related to that page:

Join now our < href="online-html-training.html">online HTML training.

Try also to use these keywords in the name of the HTML file.
Search engines algorithms are taking into consideration the text used for the link itself. (anchor text)
"click here" is meaningless. But "online HTML training" correspond exactly to your subject, and this specific page, even independantly of its content, will be considered as an interresting page for "online HTML training" by the search engines.

Tip 2 - Backlinks
Spend time to contact other webmasters who have a site about the same subject as yours and exchange text links.
Again, use the keywords that you target in the anchor text of those links. Don't always use the same keywords but sometimes, use synonims and variations.
Only consider a link exchange with sites treating the same subject. Try to get at least 40 backlinks on 40 different websites.

Tip 3 - Pages title
Give a different title to each page, use keywords related to the page.

Tip 4 - Content
Search engines (through their spiders) are indexing text content from your pages. So the first thing you have to do, is make sure you have plenty of text, related to the subject of your web site. The context of the words is also very important, so don't just list hundreds of keywords. Write correct sentences, repeating several times the words you want to focus on. Try to use all the synonyms you know. Eventually, don't correct your typos or mistakes, people will do the same typos when they do a research!

Plus:
Always set the value of the alt="" tag of your images.

< src="html-training.jpg" alt="HTML Training">

Set the description and keywords metas. If possible, write different metas for each page.

< name="description" content="...">
< name="keywords" content="...">


Tip 5 - Content Actualization
You have nice content? Plenty of backlinks and optimized pages? Great, but don't start sleeping on it.
Update your content as often as possible. Add pages, articles, news... Grow your site.

Tip 6 - Web Hosting
Make sure your site loads fast and your hosting is good. A slow web site is no good.

Tip 7 - Clean HTML code
Try to have your HTML code as clean as possible. And try to reduce it a maximum. You should have a lot of text content and a bit of HTML code, not the contrary.

Tip 8 - Directories
Do not forget to post your web site to all the Internet directories related to your subject. These links are better than links exchanges as usually, directories do not require a link back to their site. These one-way links have a very good value for search engines.
Also submit it to DMOZ directory. It will probably take a few months to get your sited indexed, but the backlinks you will get there are worth gold.

Tip 9 - HTML tags H1, H2, B, U...
Use the headers tags for your titles and subtitles, search engine will give more importance to those texts.

<>HTML Training< /h1>

The look of these tags is not so nice but you can use CSS to redefine it.

h1 { color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px }


Tip 10 - Domain name
The keywords used in the domain name have great importance for some search engines, such as Google. If possible, register a domain name with your target keywords.

A domain name like http://www.buy-flowers.com has good chances to get ranked well on "buy flowers" with a bit of SEO and appropriate content.

You can also try subdomains for your most important sections. Subdomains will usually get indexed much faster than the sub-pages and directories.
Taking our example, you could create http://roses.buy-flowers.com, http://tulips.buy-flowers.com, ... generating a kind of "mini-site" for each.

Tip 11 - Inbound/Outbound links
Make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links on your pages. If you have too much outbound links, search engines will devaluate the importance of your page, considering it's just making a gateway to other sites, without having a good value for the surfer.

Tip 12 - Experiment!
Try new things. Play with the keywords density, your site structure, HTML tags and elements.
Some techniques work good with Google, not for Yahoo or MSN and vice-versa. And moreover, the search engine algorithms are changing all the time! Some old strategy might not work anymore but suddenly work great for one of them.

Well, that's it for today! I think that covers most of the SEO Basics you need to know to start optimizing your site. Thrive Learning Institute thanks you for for reading!

5 Ways to Build Links to Your Site

Dominate the Niche you choose with Quality Content

If you've done a lot of research on blogging or on internet marketing in general you've probably heard a lot about how important it is to have valuable, quality content. Like an echo I and Thrive Learning Institute are going to say that this is absolutely true. If you're just rehashing other people content chances are your blog or website will turn into another one of the mediocre, lost websites floating around on the web that no one reads. You'll be shouting as loud as you can in the middle of a forest.

You need to come up with interesting insights and passionate rants. You need worthwhile how-to's and engaging guides to draw people in and make people want to read your content and want to link back to it.

Find a topic you won't mind spending a lot of time with and then start asking yourself or others what they want to know about it. Then get started creating content that thoroughly answers those questions. As you increase the quality of your content the quality and number of back links you get grows exponentially.

Get Involved

One principle that I learned very well from Thrive Learning Institute is that once you have created a nice helping of yummy content then go join the community surrounding your niche. Make a list of some of the best and most authoritative blogs and websites on your topic ans start commenting, helping and answering question they have.

If you do this with gusto and always provide your own website in your signature you garner a lot of respect, a lot of traffic and unsolicited back links from others in your community.

Get Press

Obviously the more press you get the better. You can submit your press releases to free online press release directories that the big news chains sift through to find good stories to include. If you write a good article with a compelling headline you could get picked up by the new york times, The Globe and any number of other reputable newspapers and media companies. Its always a good idea to ask them specifically to link to your site because a link from a big news conglomerate will have a ton of weight. And will help out a ton with your rankings.

A great tool that Google provides is the ability to search for news stories by keyword so you ca keep track of the latest happenings in your niche. When you catch the latest news you can blog about it as soon as it comes out or contact the reporters doing the stories to build good relationships with contacts who could potentially give you a lot of press in the future. You may even be able to provide them with a source so they refer to you in their next story.

Directories

It's always smart to submit some articles to the best article directories out there so you can get some quick back links. You'll need to be careful though to make sure you vary the anchor text as Google will penalize you for what is called “Google bombing”.

Its very important not to get too stuck on this one method. It very easy to just because you can do everything yourself and its not dependent on someone else liking your content. Know that having pure article back links will not take your website to the level you probably want. Related niche sites linking to you and news companies linking to you are much more valuable.

Give people incentives to link to you.

Often times it'll feel like your trying to pull teeth to get bloggers and webmasters to link to you so you'll need to devise some potential incentives. You could propose link trading, writing a featured article about their website, or allowing them to write a relevant, valuable article that will give them some attention and allow them to demonstrate their talent and the value they can provide to your community.

When all else fails you can always offer to pay them to put a link up on their site but if you can avoid that if you create great content. So do that instead :)

Whatever you do don't give up on link-building. The heed you give to link-building alone can make or break your website. So have patience and stick with it. Get into a daily habit of link building and you'll see success sooner than you might think. Remember, if you have any questions be sure to give Thrive Learning Institute a call and discuss it with your team.