OneOnOneCoach, Web Design & SEO Analysis!

Website Design for $5.95 a Month

Rick Cano — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:58:48 +0000

The most common question I get in my SEO Consulting, Web Design and One On One Coaching practice is “Why is it so expensive to get a Website Designed and Built? The easiest answer I can give is that it really isn’t that expensive!! Most of my colleagues of course will disagree with that statement. But I’ll give a caveat to that statement by saying that if you’re looking for a very customized and specific look it can get pretty expensive. However, if your looking for a very simple website it can be very, very affordable and the key is to learn how to do it yourself and know where to go to get help!!

How to create a basic website:

1. WordPress: One of the easiest and least complicated Website platform and universally popular!! (Free)

2. Hosting: If you’re paying more than six bucks for your hosting per month….you’re not paying just for hosting.

3. FTP: Learning how to access your internal folders within your website will cut down your time to build a simple website. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol…and its a simple software you use to upload just about everything into your website. (Free)

4. Domain Name: For as little as 1.99 to 3.99 you can own your very own domain name. However, most hosting companies will provide a Free domain name when you purchase a hosting service. (Free)

Here’s the best news…I’ll teach you how to do it for FREE! From September 1st to October 1st I’ll teach anyone how to set up a simple website for free!!

Website Design for $5.95 a Month originally appeared on OneOnOneCoach, Web Design & SEO Analysis! on August 28, 2010.

Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips – Part III

Rick Cano — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 22:16:27 +0000

Part III – Link Building in SEO Wiki
I know some of you out there may have never heard of SEO wiki or the SEO Wiki Effect? I’ve done a lot of research on this topic and you’ll be surprised that its really not all that new or unique or different or even genius like. What?? Yes, I’ll have to break it to you….it is merely a reinvention of the same wheel that has been around for over 10 years.

The Truth about SEO Wiki:

Lets first give you a bit of history and then we’ll explain the two distinct strategies that make up this SEO Wiki effect. First of all, you have all heard of Wikipedia on the internet. Wikipedia is simply a free dictionary online that provides definitions, information..much like those old encyclopedia’s some of us used to use to conduct research for a project. Except you can research darn near anything and at the speed of light and with remarkable accuracy.

Find out more about Link Builder

Second of all, you’ve all heard of adding links to a website to both bring more traffic and satisfy search engines for the purpose of SEO. Okay, now add both concepts – Link Building and Wikipedia, equals the SEO Wiki Effect.

The Wiki Effect: Practical Application

Let me walk you through how a person would go about applying these two concepts into one giving them the Wiki Effect. This process can be complicated so I’ll try to make it as basic and easy to understand by giving you an example of how one would go about implementing this concept. First, you create a new website….say we decided to create a website about composting. The key is making the site look and feel like a “Wikipedia” looking site and believe me you can find them, they call them “clones.” I found several template themes that looked and felt exactly like a Wikipedia, You Tube and even CraigsList and I found them fairly easy. Next, you add definitions, information, articles, content within the site along with a free membership to allow members to add information on the site. Of course you’re the moderator and administrator so you’ll be able to sift through the various entries and critique or edit the information. In the meantime you openly offer linking to the site or creating a reciprocal link back and forth. The object is to get as many back links to the site to make it an “authority” for composting.

Find out more about Link Builder

By combining a free wiki looking website and free linking to the site you’ve created the SEO Wiki Effect. User generated content. Topical area…internal link structure…the list goes on and on and you can find hundreds of these “Wikipedia” type sites.

Part of the reason why I came upon researching this subject is that I have a business idea that I’d like to utilize to create my very own SEO Wiki Effect!!

Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips 5 Part Series

Click here for: Part I – What is link Building on Websites all About

Click here for: Part II – Link Building Tools

Click here for: Part III – Link Building in SEO Wiki

Stay tuned for Part IV

Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips – Part III originally appeared on OneOnOneCoach, Web Design & SEO Analysis! on August 21, 2010.

WordPress 3.0.1 Download

Rick Cano — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 22:19:19 +0000

Maintenance Release Only

Don’t fret my friend….the WordPress 3.0.1 is merely a maintenance release to address about 50 minor issues. I had a half a dozen clients email me, skype me and instant message me in a panic.

Considering there were over 11 million downloads of WordPress 3.0 in just 42 days, they decided to release WordPress 3.0.1 with the following requisite haiku:

Three dot oh dot one
Bug fixes to make you smile
Update your WordPress

The testing many in the WordPress community contributed prior to the release of 3.0 helped make it one of the best and most stable releases they’ve ever had.

Download 3.0.1 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area.

Note: If you downloaded 3.0.1 in the first 20 minutes of release (before 2200 UTC), you’ll want to reinstall it, which you can do right from your Updates screen. Our bad.

WordPress 3.0.1 Download originally appeared on OneOnOneCoach, Web Design & SEO Analysis! on July 30, 2010.

Recent WordPress 3.0 Download Release!

Rick Cano — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:27:58 +0000

WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress is finally on the market. It took nearly half a year with over 218 contributors to get it out. I’ve had the opportunity to test it on 9 different websites and you’re going to love all the new features and the smooth sleek feel of the new default theme. The new default theme called “Twenty Ten” is a sexy looking theme that allows you to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, short links, custom menus, post types and taxonomies. In addition it has finally merged MU and WordPress giving us a new multi-site functionality which makes it possible now to run one blog or ten million from the same installation. You can even upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click. But the feature that will be get the most praise, especially from beginners and novice’s will be the new contextual Help on every screen with a quick pop down menu.

WARNING: Before you get too excited with all these new features you MUST perform a few functions before you upgrade to the new WordPress 3.0. Read below and don’t forget to watch the enclosed video(below)

WordPress Backup – 2 Easy Steps for Back up

Heed the warning I posted above. In less than a week I’ve had a dozen clients who upgraded and now they can’t recover their posts…so they’ll have to recreate every post, comment and links they had in their website. Follow these basic steps and you’ll be able to upgrade and continue on with your website with virtually no issues.

Back up your WordPress Site includes two parts: Files and Database.

Files: In this first step we’ll walk you step by step on backing up your Files. The easiest way to do this is to check with your Website Host and see if they provide backup software, and if they do simply follow the instructions. However, if they don’t provide that kind of software simply access your control panel commonly referred to as CPanel and then copy your Files within the public html folder. And yes, all of them…and save them to your desktop, (you can reduce their size by creating a zip file on your desktop). If you’re more comfortable using an FTP client, simply create a folder on your desktop and then copy your sites Files using your ftp client software and save them in that newly created folder.

Database: Back up your WordPress “database” should be done regularly so if you’ve never done this, this is a good time to learn how to back up your “database.” phpMyAdmin is one of the most popular database management systems used by most website hosts. Simply access your CPanel, Direct Admin, Ensim, Plesk, vDeck or Ferozo. All of my sites utilize CPanel so I can give you the step by step instructions how to back up your database using this tool. If you need help with the others…feel free to email me or consult your website host administrators. CPanel: On your main control panel look for MySQL logo and click the link to MySQL Databases. On the next page look for phpMyAdmin link and click to access. Next, click on the “Database” link to open your database…typically you can find this at the top left hand corner. Look for the database you created for “a” particular website. If you have multiple database its because you have multiple websites within your Web Hosting account(i.e., I have 5 sites with one hosting company). Once you’ve clicked on the database you’re backing up you’ll notice an “Export” button at the very top. Another screen will open and it will require you to select specific boxes…use this list below to select the correct ones:

Select ONLY those that hold your WordPress site.
Check the “Add DROP TABLE” box.
Check the “Complete inserts” box.
Check the “Save as File” box
Check the “None” for compression. If your database is very large use a compression method.
Click Go. The data will now be saved into your computer.

Once you’ve backed up both your websites Files and Database go ahead and upgrade your version to WordPress 3.0, either within your WordPress dashboard or download the zip file and then manually upgrade using an FTP client. Use either one of these links below depending on the option you decide:

WordPress Download

Upgrade within your Dashboard

Recent WordPress 3.0 Download Release! originally appeared on OneOnOneCoach, Web Design & SEO Analysis! on June 29, 2010.

Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips – Part II

Rick Cano — Sat, 22 May 2010 23:16:02 +0000

Part II - Link Building Tools

Before we get into discussing link building tools lets remind ourselves again that the main purpose of building links to our website is primarily to increase traffic as well as a better response from potential visitors. However we also do it for the purpose of satisfying search engines and our SEO ranking.

Take a risk-free 7-day trial of Link Builder.

What are some link building tools?

1. Should you buy links? The answer is Yes and No! It is true that if you purchase links it will boost your site’s performance on a Google organic (not paid) search result. Two problems arise with this strategy. First, you’ll find that the cost continues to go up and pricing most of us out of buying “page rank” links. Secondly, Google will recognize that you have purchased “page rank” links and if you purchase too many your website can be banned.

Tip: Did you know that if Google ban’s your site you will NOT get any more traffic for awhile.

2. What is a quality link? A quality link is typically defined by at least nine criteria. However, I’d like to concentrate on three specific criteria; Relevant, Appropriate Traffic and Visibility. First, the link must be relevant to your business or your websites subject matter….not exact matches but it has to be related to your website. Second, appropriate traffic refers to whether the link is driving the right kind of traffic..especially if you allow comments to be logged into your website…having a lot of comments will significantly increase your Alexa Rank. Third, when we refer to link visibility we’re referring to popular sources of information in your particular industry and having your website “seen” on those kinds of industry type sites. Google will recognize those types of links as coming from authoritative sites and will regard them very, very high.

Tip: Did you know that there is more to Google ranking than PageRank?

3. What is link building mindset? In order for your website to get noticed, acknowledged and/or recognized you have to be constantly vigilant always keep your my opened up for every opportunity for linking. Always remember that the majority of quality links will come from the online community around your industry. We’re talking about blogs, websites, forums and associations within your industry.

Tip: Did you know using a Google search engine you can find just about every major association relevant to your industry!

4. How much is a link worth? I like to call this Cold Hard Cash!! If we play the numbers game for a minute you’ll see what a lot of us have discovered over the years. Simply, the more quality links to your website, the more specific and targeted visitors to your website = the more visitors who actually purchase. The beauty is that you don’t need a lot…let me give you an example; If you have just one quality link providing you one visitor per day that converts to 365 visitors per year and if you use a typical conversion ratio of 3% your converting 11 per year for just that one quality link. Now multiple that figure to five visitors or ten visitors from one or more quality links. Now you’re getting the idea…

Plain and simple, Link Building strategies will increase your Traffic, Responses and SEO which ultimately means more cash in your pocket and that’s always a good thing

Take a risk-free 7-day trial of Link Builder.

Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips 5 Part Series

Click here for: Part I – What is link Building on Websites all About

Click here for: Part II – Link Building Tools

Click here for: Part III – Link Building in SEO Wiki

Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips – Part II originally appeared on OneOnOneCoach, Web Design & SEO Analysis! on May 22, 2010.

Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips – Part I

Rick Cano — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:00:22 +0000

Part I – What is link building on websites all about?

As I had said earlier, your overall goal should be to attract and drive specific traffic in order to get the most bang for your time and effort.

Find out more about Link Builder

In this Part One of five series we’re going to discuss 4 areas:

Back Links
Directories
Reciprocal Links
How to check for back links in my website
How to check for “key” directories for my website

Back Links:

These are simply links to your website from other websites and in the process they bring “traffic.” Google and other major search engines consider the number of incoming links to your website, what we refer to as link popularity, as an extremely important factor when ranking your website. You’ve heard of PageRank right? Essentially this ranking system indicates the quantity and quality of incoming links. But be very careful here! Not just any kind of link is good for your website….in fact sometimes the wrong kind of link to your website can have negative repercussions on your website.

Directories:

In the back link section that we talked about above we hinted at good links and bad links to your website. Submitting your website to “key” directories can get your website very quality type links. Getting a link from a directory helps your ranking because it’s coming from a very strong link partner and it will drive traffic to your website as well. The mistake that most clients make here is that they often times will submit their website to just about any directory on the planet. Finding specific and key directories will help get the right kind of links and traffic to your website. We’ll show you how to find key directories in another section below.

Find out more about Link Builder

Reciprocal Links:

The key to requesting reciprocal links is to find complimentary websites to your website and to make sure they are smaller websites that may consider linking to your website. Clients sometimes try to go after very large websites that have an enormous amount of traffic. Most of these webmasters either don’t have the time or really don’t have any incentive linking to a website that has less traffic. Try concentrating on websites that have a similar amount of traffic that your website is getting. An effective way to find similar website is to Google link exchange or value exchange services. They’ll match your website with similar theme/topic content.

How to check for back links in my website:

There are primarily two ways you can check for back links to your website. First, type this format for your individual website, link:domainname.com in a Google search engine. Be careful that you do not put any spaces in it and make sure you put your correct extension. For example if your domain name is a .net then replace .com with .net etc. The second way to check for back links to your website is logging into your Webmaster Tools account within Google then access your Dashboard area and you will see a section labeled “links to your site.”

How to check for “key” directories for my website:

The easiest way to find key directories for your website is to type one of your keywords+directories in a Google search engine. For example if I were searching for my website it would look like this; coach+directories. The result will include key directories for your niche.

Find out more about Link Builder

The main thing to remember is that link building will bring more traffic to your website and it will also effectively increase your PageRank.

Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips 5 Part Series

Click here for: Part I – What is link Building on Websites all About

Click here for: Part II – Link Building Tools

Click here for: Part III – Link Building in SEO Wiki

Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips – Part I originally appeared on OneOnOneCoach, Web Design & SEO Analysis! on April 19, 2010.

Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips

Rick Cano — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:24:19 +0000

A huge amount of attention has been focused on link building and with good reason! There are many many reasons why you should incorporate link building strategies into your overall strategies to bring more traffic to your website. However, not all traffic is always good just like not all link building strategies are good or effective. Your overall goal should be to bring specific and a more focused type of traffic in order to get the most bang for your time and effort. Most of you know that it takes a huge amount of time to integrate these strategies.

Take a risk-free 7-day trial of Link Builder.

In the coming weeks and months I’ll begin a 5 part series dealing with the most effective and time saving link building strategies and tips to help you with this daunting task and hopefully make your lives a little easier.

Future article series dealing with link building:

What is link building on websites all about
Link building tools
Link building in SEO wiki
Link building campaigns
Link building cost

Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips 5 Part Series

Click here for: Part I – What is link Building on Websites all About

Click here for: Part II – Link Building Tools

Click here for: Part III – Link Building in SEO Wiki

Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips originally appeared on OneOnOneCoach, Web Design & SEO Analysis! on April 15, 2010.

How To Make Money Blogging With The Right Keywords

Rick Cano — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:43:18 +0000

I’m often asked why Blog? Very simple and not at all very hard to understand if you understand marketing and promoting technique’s online. Blogger’s online have tapped into one of the fastest ways of getting traffic. Ah, but it’s not just any old traffic….it’s a specific audience they’re trying to direct to their blog and website! You see, most people setting up a new business online think that all you need to do is bring “traffic.” But its not general traffic we need to get, it’s a specific audience we’re looking for. By tapping into specific keywords we’re able to direct a specific audience to our blog and website.

Before you can start blogging about a specific topic you really need to have a set of keywords to at least begin your blog. You need the right keywords and to get the right keywords you need a very good tool that makes this process very simple, straight forward and very quick!

I prefer to use the Wordtracker SEO Blogger 1.0.3 tool. I’ve listed a few of the benefits of using this tool:

Once downloaded you can start using it immediately within your Firefox browser as it comes as an extension for a FireFox. Internet Explorer is in the works.
No need to go off to do separate keyword research.
You can use this tool with absolutely any blog publishing software.
You can stay focused and concentrate your research only on the post you’re writing and not having to keep going back and forth from your keyword research tool and your actual posting software.
You can compare keywords instantly to find out which ones pack the most SEO Punch.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this is the best tool…what I’m saying is, this is the “only” tool that allows you to do keyword research at the same time as you’re writing your post! Now how convenient and time saving is that?

Learn More….

How To Make Money Blogging With The Right Keywords originally appeared on OneOnOneCoach, Web Design & SEO Analysis! on January 30, 2010.

Building A Customized Website – WordPress

Rick Cano — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:42:32 +0000

From time to time I will post an occasional “recommendation” or “testimonial” from a recent client simply because the project may have been a very unique project such as this one. I was contracted to build a very unique and artistic web creation with certain parameters and I had to stay within those parameters.

However, instead of telling you what the parameters are let me give you a list of customized items I coded or embed the code within this WordPress website:

Graphic pages only, no content at all.
Invisible navigation menu that appear when hovering.
Image mapping with multiple links on the graphic images.
One color on website.
Shopping cart integrated with WordPress’s log in system.
Navigation menu to be placed at the bottom, not at the top.
Website page that can download music, images and video’s.
Member area and separate log in for members area.

I could go on but you get the picture. It was fairly easy to customize this particular website, especially because I was using WordPress. I have had projects that can be a little nerve racking but anytime I use a WordPress platform it is fairly easy to custimize.

I wanted to share this project mainly to reiterate to you that if you’re wanting to use a Website platform that requires a few or a lot of customization using a WordPress platform makes your job much, much easier and it simplifies your life. And simplifying your life is always a good thing.

See Testimonial…

Build A Website For Only $50 an Hour!

Business Class Hosting – Starting at Just $5.95 – InMotion Hosting

Building A Customized Website – WordPress originally appeared on OneOnOneCoach, Web Design & SEO Analysis! on January 12, 2010.

Websites and its Weaknesses

Rick Cano — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:06:19 +0000

If you recall a few weeks ago I provided a test case in which I showed you how a website performed or lack thereof!

One of the largest myths I run into in my private practice is that a majority of clients I talk to think that content alone is the driving force for traffic? Yes, it is one of the elements needed but not the sole element.

Lets see some of the more typical weaknesses within a website:

1. General Keywords vs Long Tailed Keywords: A very large portion of the websites I analyze each year have what I call very general keywords(Broad) in that if one research’s their keywords they will find an enormous amount of competition for those keywords. Of course the reason why they’re selected is because they have a humongous amount of traffic. I say, so what! What good is it to use very broad keywords if you have to compete with three million competitors. If the number one goal is to get to the first page of a Google, Yahoo or Bing search result these sort of words will never get you to the first page. I’ve had people try and they all have failed. It is far more important to find “long tailed keywords” that have low competition and a reasonable amount of traffic.

2. Title, Description & Keywords: I once explained to a potential client that if her website had very little traffic one element that may be contributing to this issue is that her website may not necessarily be indexed or categorized properly. Its complicated but lets just say that a websites title, description and types of keywords have a lot to do with how the search engines accomplish this. When we conducted a “search engine crawler simulator” we found that the crawler could not see her title, description and keywords. Yes, Wow!! Apparently she or her coach never created the title, description and keywords for her website. There are some specific rules that we need to follow in order to insure that our websites have a well constructed Title and Description and of course we MUST have keywords.

3. Images: I once read somewhere that people have a tendency of responding and reacting better when see images on websites. Mind you, they don’t have to be huge images. People have a tendency of responding positively to images of guess what? People, babies and pets are always a huge attention getter as well. Of course having the images alone is not enough you must also “label” the images and if those labels happen to be “long tailed keywords you have a double whammy!!

4. Social Networking: Sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Biznik.com are great sites for posting a business page to garner support from these social networking sites. Really well thought out websites that have social networking connections get on average about 25% of their traffic from potential clients from these networks. It amazes me how many websites I see that have NO social networking links or plugins.

5. Product Selection: I analyzed a website a few months ago and I was a little shocked that when he gave me his web address and I visited the site the keywords he was using didn’t match the products he was selling. In other words the “relativity” of his keywords sometimes had nothing to do with the products he was trying to sell? He told me that his coach or guru told him just add as many products as you can. What?? Your products and/or affiliate links of products should be relative and consistent with your keywords and content.

6. Google Analytics: If you spend hours and hours and days on end to research, then create your website you’ve done a great job. However, if you don’t have a really good analysis tool then you’ve basically wasted your time developing your website. There are lots of tools out there that you can buy or for free. Most of my career I have used Google Analytics because its free and easy to learn and use. Think about it…this tool will tell you who your visitors are, what search engine or traffic source it came from and then it will tell you which pages your visitor is visiting most often. Very, very powerful stuff.

In a nutshell, this is a business and therefore you need to approach it as a business and therefore learning some of the basic rules on making money online will go a very long way and it just may put some money in your pocket!

Websites and its Weaknesses originally appeared on OneOnOneCoach, Web Design & SEO Analysis! on December 16, 2009.