If you are interested in discovering how to go about ranking well in the search engines with free, organic traffic then you need to learn about Search Engine Optimization(SEO).

I had the pleasure of interviewing the creator of one of the best SEO “how to” video courses I’ve seen, Emmanuel Betinis of SEO Help Videos.

Emmanuel provided awesome SEO tips and shared his favorite SEO tools with us!

Emmanuel knows SEO. He outranks the merchants website he promotes as an affiliate in their own keywords!

So take a listen to learn how to get organic free traffic to your websites:

I was reading BJ Wright’s SEO blog and he had a very interesting post about how a simple change on one of their landing pages increased their conversion rates 84%!

The change the picture they used of a dog.  Everything else was the same except the picture of the dog.  I beleive the second version (see BJ’s post) converted better not as much becasuse of the dog but the position of the dog.  In version one he’s looking right at you so you focus on the dog.  Version two the dog is looking at the form so your eyes drift to the form which must snap people from lookning at the dog and thinking oh yea pet insurance…I’ll fill out the form.

Aside from the fact this illustrates on how every little thing counts when putting an ad together even more importanlty it underscores the importance of testing.  As I mentioned before in my post about the importance of testing in Internet marketing, BJ’s post is a shining example of how important it is to test.

Had they just gone with the one dog picture instead of testing two they would have had not had a landing page converting 84% better!  I bet they’ll be using even more dog pics, cat pics, brid pics, etc. to keep testing and keep improvement their conversion rates.

This is an interview by Dr. Ralph Wilson with Mike Grehan. Some pretty good tips on using video, RSS, podcasting to optimize your site and Mike’s thoughts on the future of SEO.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Affiliate and Internet marketing has changed dramatically in the past couple years as Google tweaks it’s algorithm codes to ensure folks experience a positive search experience by having their searches produce relevant searches.

The days of making money with a crappy site with no real content but affiliate links is coming to an end (some say it’s ended already).

That doesn’t mean you can’t make a living as an affiliate marketer but you have to produce quality content and sites that actually help users and not just being slapped together so it can make you a few bucks.

Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO expert makes it very clear, don’t design sites for search engines, design them for people. If you follow that simple rule your site will rank well and you will make money but you must have a quality site.

Most experts agree that one of the best ways to rank well with the search engines is have a blog. The search engines like Google and Yahoo LOVE blogs. In an article about blog marketing by Mark White he writes:

“What has also become clear is that Blogs (and Business Blogs in particular) tend to rank highly in the Search Engines, making them an important or even key part of Search Engine Marketing.”

The nature of blogs which is a web log or journal and the community feel of web 2.0 means that if you have a blog which is updated frequently with quality posts which entices others to link to your blog. It’s web 2.0 101.

The fresh content and link love found in blogging causes your blog powered site to be indexed fast and to rank well. I’ve yet to have a blog that isn’t ranked quickly by Google without even submitting it to them for indexing.

That is the reason I recommend using WordPress Blogs to power your website. It’s easy to setup especially if use a host company like Dream Host which offers a one-click install.

But even though you can quickly setup your WordPress powered site there are ways to optimize your blog even more! There are many blogging ebooks out there that are worthless but don’t worry there is one gem out there it’s called Optiniche (Optimized Niche) by Teli Adlam.

I highly recommend this ebook to anyone who wants to get the most out of WordPress. Optiniche is the best book on WordPress SEO. Read my full review of OptiNiche here.

Optiniche was written by Teli Adlam who is a leading expert in WordPress SEO and Blog Marketing. She is also a moderator at Lynn Terry‘s SSWT forums which is an extremely helpful forum.

You can read my full of review of Optiniche here but even if you don’t order Optiniche you should see the value that WordPress blogs can have for your business site.