We now have a significant opportunity with Lavalinx that wasn’t available to us a couple years ago. Because of the advancements in the technology and functionality of Wordpress (WP), we can now create a Lavalinx plugin that will allow a WP user to do all social and contextual link exchanges in the WP interface. We can utilize the WP’s UI, look-and-feel and styles to create a plugin that will function and look like every other WP tool.

We plan on growing the Lavalinx network dramatically by catering to WP. Here’s why:

1. There are about 50 million WP sites http://en.wordpress.com/stats/
2. Most if not all SEOs use WP
3. There is no social/link exchange plugin available for WP
4. Guestposts have been one of the fastest growing SEO methods in the last couple years. With Lavalinx we can accomplish the same links without the cost and man hours required to write an article and find publishers
5. As mentioned above, the plugin will allow a WP user to do everything in WP, it’ll be fully integrated
6. WP can provide Lavalinx with all the information needed regarding posts, tags, titles, descriptions etc. making signup and integration easier than ever
7. Every SEO knows that contextual, keyword-based links on a relevant page is the best link they can get

Keyword research. We’ve all heard it said, and I’m sure we’ve all given it some thought. But do we really understand what it means? There is more to it than meets the eye. It is not just looking at numbers and statistics, or worse – picking keywords out of thin air. It is the meticulous planning and mapping of your SEO strategy. Remember, the goal of Search Engine Optimization is to move your site up in the rankings to drive targeted, relevant and converting traffic to your website. In order to do this, your entire site planning all begins with keyword research. This is what will make or break your site in the long run, and it’s not something you should take lightly. Are you intimidated now? Don’t be. This post will guide you through all the steps necessary for studying keywords and choosing which of those will work best for you.

Keyword research can be preformed through tools such as Google Adwords, Word Tracker and many other systems, or you can also research it by hand. To be most beneficial, you will probably want to use both.

1. Start off by asking yourself this question: What is my site about? Try and narrow it down to the main topic, with a few subtopics as well. You don’t need to list every category your site will have, only those that are directly relevant to your main subject. For example, you might have a site about cars. Instead of listing everything relating to cars, narrow it down to three or four things, like cars, parts, repairs, and auto listings.
2. Now that you have the direction you want to go with your site, think like the average web user. If you were going to try and look for information in your sites’ subject, what keywords would you use? Write these down as well. They may be similar to the above, or somewhat different. That’s okay for now. We’re still in the beginning stages of keyword research, so any and all thoughts are welcome.
3. Using the list that you’ve created, go to Google Adwords or a similar keyword research tool and look up the statistics of the words you’ve chosen. Here is a good rule of thumb to remember: the smaller the phrase, the bigger the amount of traffic but the tougher the competition.

Pay attention to the perimeters you can set on your research. To give you an example, the word “cars” has over 151,000,000 searches a month. Or does it? 151,000,000 is actually the broad match number, meaning it includes any and all searched phrases that include that word. We want to look at traffic results that are a little more specific, so set the search to only view exact results. Now if we search for “cars” we get 11,100,000.

4. Next, don’t start with the keyword you want to be ranked for. You might say, “This sounds like bypassing SEO. Why would we want to ignore the very thing we want to be ranked for?” Well, like the example above, the keyword you want to be ranked for may have too tough of competition for you to compete with. So where do you start? With long tail key word phrases. Instead of optimizing your site for “cars”, you might try “custom cars for sale”, or another keyword with less traffic and less competition. This way, you have your major keyword in the phrase (cars), while still seeing some return and some movement on your rankings.
5. Checklist: you have your site demographic. You know what keyword you’d like to go after and you’ve picked a few smaller key words to target first. You’re done right? Wrong. One last and very important thing to do is to research your keywords by hand. The research tools may tell you the amount of traffic the word gets, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the sites that are ranked for that. Do a few simple searches for that keyword in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Look at the competition, their page rank, the age of the domain, the number of cashed pages and the number of backlinks the domain has. This can be a huge determining factor for if you should go after that keyword or not.

One major mistake people make when choosing keywords is they optimize for their own brand name. Now, if you have a huge brand, this isn’t a big deal, but chances are you have a little known brand. You want to optimize for what people will search for, so if your brand isn’t known, it’s not going to get searched for. This doesn’t mean that your brand won’t get out there if you didn’t optimize for it. There won’t be any competition for your brand name, so you will get ranked for it with little to no effort. Spend time chipping away at the smaller keywords and work your way up from there.

The key factor to link trading is not the amount of time you spend doing it (although, time can be a huge factor to those who have none), it’s the way you go about link trading. You have to do your research and prepare a plan before you begin trading with just any site. Your effective site plan always begins with on-site optimization.

You may be starting this whole process without currently having a domain. This is not a bad thing, in fact, this allows you to research different domain URLs and decide which one will best match your niche. There are different types of domains out there from .com, .net, .info and even .gov domains that can usually be purchased for around ten dollars. However, if you are looking for a specific URL, or if you are trying to purchase an older domain that already has link worth pointed to it, be prepared to pay some serious cash. Either way, keep in mind the target audience of your site, and try and pick a URL with the keywords that you would like to go after, which we will go over in another post.

Now that you have a domain, it’s time to discuss the SEO optimization that needs to be done in order to maximize the effectiveness of your link building campaign. One of the most overlooked (and possibly most important) things you can do is add H tags throughout your entire site. These tags are one of the first things that search engine spiders will see upon entering your site, and they also help your user to understand the content that will be on that page.

A good practice is to place your top two key words first on the H tags, and your site name last. This is because you will already be getting “weight” for your site name from the URL so it’s not as important to have that be first. Another good idea is to always add meta descriptions and meta key words to your pages, for the same reasons as the H tags: it’s going to be some of the first info search engines retrieve from your page.

But your hard work isn’t done just yet. It is crucial that you write interesting, key word rich content on your website. All the prior prepping is only to back up your website, not to forefront the SEO itself.

On the next post, we will discuss the value of key word research and how a little more time spent there can greatly affect your income later.

Geographical customization does make sense for certain industries. However, for many online industries, it makes no sense at all. If you were searching for something like web hosting services, online education resources, or product reviews, wouldn’t you want to see search results that are actually relevant - not ones where the company headquarters simply happen to be local? I know I would.

Customized search results can make SEO more complicated. What happens if you have SEO clients? They will probably be seeing very different results from the ones you are seeing. Until you are in the top spots where you see major traffic increases, how can you effectively measure your progress? How will search engine ranking tracking services report their results?

When it comes to Google, there are always changes and surprises around every corner. It will be interesting to see how this plays out and how it affects traffic across the board.

To help you better understand what we’re doing I have included a few frequently asked questions and our response to each.

What is a Social Page?

A Lavalinx Social Page is any page in your site that you want bookmarked in social sites. You can bookmark these pages yourself with our easy-to-use bookmarking wizard, or you can initiate social bookmarking trades with others and have them bookmark them.

Why should I bookmark my pages using Lavalinx?

Current bookmarking tools help you to effeciently bookmark your own pages on multiple social sites, which is great if you want to fill your social accounts with all of your own pages. The problem with this is that, by bookmarking too many of your own pages, you’ll eventually be marked as a spammer by most of the social sites, and could get your account banned.

With Lavalinx you have the option of bookmarking your own pages, or entering into social bookmark trades that would have other users bookmark your pages. For social bookmarking, this gives Lavalinx a huge advantage because now your social accounts will be filled with diverse, interesting pages from other users, and you will be getting other users to discover and vote on your pages.

How many social sites can be involved in a bookmark exchange?

In a social bookmark exchange you are only limited by the number of social sites you and your trade partner have. In a each trade scenario an equal number of social sites are used for fairness in trading. If you have 10 social sites and your trade partner has 10, you can trade with up to 10 social sites in a single trade. If you only had 4 social sites and your trade partner had 10, your trade would be limited to 4 social sites.

Does social bookmarking help my organic rankings?

Yes! Most of the social sites that have been added to Lavalinx give you a hard “dofollow” backlink.

Does Lavalinx automatically add links to social sites?

No. All links posted to social sites are made via a wizard that populates your page information into a submission form. We make it easy as possible, but it is not automated.

What’s the difference between a Public and Private social bookmarking site in Lavalinx?

All social bookmarking sites in Lavalinx marked as “public” are social sites that offer a public and spiderable user account. Because these sites are spiderable Lavalinx can verify that social bookmarks have been made or not. So, in a social bookmark exchange we can verfiy that both parties fulfill their side of the trade.

All social bookmarking sites in Lavalinx marked as “private” are social sites that can be used for your own bookmarking, but cannot be used in a social exchange.

Does Lavalinx keep track of the pages bookmarked?

Lavalinx will keep track of all the pages you bookmark yourself and the bookmarks that are received via trades and exchanges. Lavalinx also keeps track of which social sites your pages are bookmarked on ie. StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx etc.

How many social bookmarking sites can I submit to?

Right now Lavalinx has over 80 social bookmarking sites, but we are adding more weekly. We make every effort to add social sites that will either have social traffic value, or SEO link value.