It’s an amazing free tool to help you in online marketing. It’s especially helpful for doing that “off page” SEO and getting some ideas on a variety of topics that may be of interest to you…

1. How strong is the competition in a particular niche you’re targeting?

2. What do you have to do to effectively compete in this niche… I.e. what’s it going to take to get a high ranking on page one of the organic search results?

When  you install the add on to your Firefox browser, you know the tool is working when you search for basically anything.

Under the search results the tool displays a variety of data that you’ll find interesting…:

• PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
• .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
• .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
• .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
• Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
• Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
• dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
• WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

Here’s a glimpse of what you see when I typed in the keyword “dog food”. I have no particular “dog in that race” to make a sick pun, it’s just the first random keyword I came up with.

You can’t really get a good look at it on this blog. I’ll just put a thumbnail up and you can click it to see the full image… ok?

When you click on the actual results, you’ll see a bunch of question marks because this tool isn’t going to query these site unless you request it. But when you’ve identified a possible keyword niche, click these question marks and you’ll start to see what you’re up against.

Very handy.

If you’re competing to dominate the dog food marketplace, you’re going up against a site that has been around since 1998 with a Page Rank of 4.  It has 6 bookmarks at Del.icio.us, 9010 links according to Yahoo!, and even 10 links from .edu domains. It’s ranking on Alexa is under 50,000.

Unless you’re a “big dog” in the dog food marketplace, this one could be tough to beat unless you’re going to spend big bucks – or attack the niche via another keyword.

But with the SEO for Firefox Plugin, at least you know!

One of the reasons people absolutely LOVE Word Press blogs is because, well, Google seems to really like them.

1) They’re blogs which Google likes because they tend to update frequently.

2) As a fullblown CMS system, Google can usually spider the Wordpess blogs easily and get everywhere from any page and index more material. No “deadends” or “loose ends” in other words.

As a result Wordpress blogs and websites have fewer impediments to doing well in Google search results.

But that doesn’t mean you can throw a Wordpress site together and be rich tomorrow! Far from it.

There IS search engine optimization that is still involved. There are actually problems that are caused by Wordpress which you need to take steps to overcome if you want your Wordpress blog to rank as well as possible.

The free ebook WordPress SEO for Beginners will help you get a handle on how to make YOUR WordPress powered blog or website even more search engine friendly and, therefore, more likely to make money for you.

It’s a short read – 5 pages. It contains some excellent simple steps.

There’s just one problem… One of his links is dead. Go here for the No Ping Wait  module. I suggest using Plugin Central to install it.

It’s the issue of “plug ins”.

Once you start feeling comfortable with the power of Wordpress for website creation, you naturally begin to wonder “what if I could do __________?”

Usually there is a bit of software called a “plugin” that helps you do these things. You can find a directory of these plugins here: Wordpress Plugin Directory.

Till Lewis Smile told me about – another Plugin! That plugin is Plugin Central 

Once you find plugins you like, you tend to want to use them for all your blogs.

Fair enough.

So whenever you create a new blog, you had to FTP all your plugins into the new blog, activate them, and update any outdated ones.

With a fast connection speed, it’s not that bad… unless you forget some of course.

But the Plugin Central plugin lets you…

1. Import and install plugins without FTP required.

2. Lets you install your favorite plugins on a new blog super quick. Here’s how.

You can also list all of your plugins (or only active). By pasting this list into the install window on another blog you can basically move all of your plugins from one blog to another. More precisely the latest versions of selected plugins will be installed on the target blog.

Wow. I look forward to using it!

I think you will too!

Here’s what it looks like in operation.

Here’s Part 2

OK, now that we’ve set up HomeBizSpaceBlog.Wordpress.com we have to choose a theme. There’s page after page of templates. Just scroll through them till you find one you like.

The most common one people seem to choose is Rubric.

Because it’s so common, I’d say stay away from it, but since this is just a learning experience, do whatever you want.

For this blog I’m going to choose…

(thinking…)

I tried one, but when you click it on you can preview how it will look. I thought it looked bad in practice so I’m sorting through those 5 pages of themes again. I see no why so many people like rubric.

But on your own blog, there are many, many more options available. The problem will be too many to choose from, not too few.

You can see which one I chose here HomeBizSpaceBlog.Wordpress.com just because I got tired of thinking!

I also have experience with another version of this theme and it’s pretty interesting.

Oh well, we’ll start cleaning it up next time.

I decided to create a blog for the HomeBizSpace group on Facebook. I hope you’ll join that group and that we can get it to be one of the Home Business Groups on Facebook. It might need a blog some day so I’ll start one now.

I was going to use HomeBizSpace but here’s the message I got when I tried:

Probably someone was using the blog to spam.  Here are the rules about that -

the Content is not spam, is not machine- or randomly-generated, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);

So that’s a reminder it should be used as a real blog.

We’re only doing this to get you started on your own site, so don’t worry too much.

After you fill out your  user name, password, and email address you’ll see this screen:

After you submit this, you’ll have to verify your email.

When I get something up, it will be at HomeBizSpaceBlog.Wordpress.com

But to begin to see how Wordpress can be used in your online business, you have to stat SOMEWHERE.

I’ll be doing a multi part tutorial on WordPress.

To get  you started … first don’t spend a cent.

Instead, go here to WordPress.com

When you find this button, you’ve come to the right place!

Sign up now and after you do, we’ll get back together to discuss how to use this site to get started with WordPress.

Now this is just for fun, but if you were using this for business purposes, you might conceivably identify the keyword niche you want to serve and make that keyword part of your user name. But you don’t have to do that right now if you’re just getting started.