Being the SEO geek that I am, I had to create this page for no other reason than have a way for myself to access the code quickly in the future.

The Problem

When you migrate a static HTML website to WordPress, in many cases the static website included a file called index.htm or index.html. If this page is indexed in the search results, it will produce a 404 error after you upgrade to a platform like WordPress.

As a Webmaster, you might think that simply adding this code to .htaccess would fix the problem:

RedirectPermanent /index.html http://www.yournewwebsite.com/index.php

You’ll find doing this creates an endless loop and breaks your website. The other pages will redirect to their new pages just fine, but the index page remains a real pain.

The Solution

Pop the following line of code into your .htaccess and problem solved:


RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]


Why Bother Redirecting?

Consider the possibly hundreds or thousands of links you might have pointing to index.html. Google’s PageRank™ algorithm is structured mainly around popularity (links, mentions, CTR and overall visibility). If Google’s determination of where to rank your website is dependent on your website’s popularity, why send all of those potential links to a 404 error page? Think about it. Redirection saves your PageRank™ and could save your ranking in the search results.

Thanks for reading.

Then I watched this video:

Wow, I Mean WOW Man!

I like to think of myself as an educator because I teach people how to modify their website and get others to hyperlink in to improve Google’s impression of their popularity. I teach strategy and help my clients get higher ranking and significantly more traffic.

After listening to what salespeople and their managers say about Bodine, it’s apparent that I have much to learn.

Improve Your Sales Immediately

Here’s my blatant advertising for my friend and associate Bodine, “One of the Top 21 Speakers for the 21st Century” (Successful Meetings Magazine): If you have a team of sales agents, who meet with and influence people on a daily basis, Bodine’s sales motivational speaking will absolutely deliver a boost in sales that will push SEO back into the 90′s – guaranteed.

To learn more about Bodine and watch the incredible videos that mesmerized me while working on his site, visit his Sales Motivator page at BestBusinessSpeaker.com. Then come back and tell me what you thought of Bodine and his new site in the comments below.

Thanks for reading!

Why Should You Care?

I attend as many conferences, workshops, seminars, webinars, and Meetup.com groups as I can afford to. What I’ve learned in the last 3 months is that we are going through a revolution in mobile marketing. I’m not talking about an increase in use, I’m talking about a 674% explosion in real mobile purchases from iPads alone from April to June of 2010.

Don’t believe me? Check out this screenshot from one of the Google Analytics accounts I monitor:

Yah, that’s 674% growth my friend. Now let’s compare tablet revenue and order data as compared to Blackberry, iPhone and other mobile devices:

As you can see, the day of the Blackberry is over and our emphasis must now shift to optimizing our websites for iPad and Google Tablet users (don’t think it’s not coming). Here are some tips that may help you get started:

• The same principles apply to organic SEO as they would to iPad and tables (Google.com is still Google.com)
• Using browser detection, you can send your iPad user to a Special Offer for iPad (or GT) Users page
• Add iPad and Google Tablet to your Quality Assurance and Usability checklists
• Make your checkout process as quick, easy and tablet-friendly as possible
• If you provide services to a specific geographic are, spend some time reading local SEO tutorials
• Offer a way for users to toggle between iPad and “normal” view that only appears if the browser detects the iPad
• Larger fonts are definitely helpful on mobile devices
• Adobe Flash does not currently work on an iPad without applying a hack
• Get your website listed on Apple’s iPad-ready website list. There homepage is only a PageRank^™ of 9!
• Use the pages already mentioned in the last bullet as a guide to reconstructing your own website

Are You Ready for iPad Sales?

You better be. I’ve learned that the days of the laptops and desktops are going to come to an end over the next few years. Tablets, mobile devices will be in every school backpack, attached to walls in public buildings, available for lease in public libraries, and will eventual replace the need to view the internet on our mobile phones. You know what that means right? Mobile phones will be integrated into Bluetooth devices that connect to iPads and other tablets, so you’ll dial from your tablet or dashboard device and not have a need for a big ‘ole clunky phone any longer.

It’s coming. Are you ready? Share your thoughts below.

For those of you who know me, you know I’ve been working on this in the back of my mind for years. It’s been called several things over the year. Each time I start it, someone close to me blindsides me and takes it away. This time, it’s all mine baby! I busted my you know what for the last week to get this new training website up. Today and going forward I’ll be adding one page per day (it’s a goal not a promise – calm down), spilling everything I know about internet marketing into streaming video and article content.

SEO agencies and SEO companies are going to hate me for giving out all the DIY tips to online marketing – trust me on this one (I use hate in a very literal way). Wow, emails are coming in while I’m typing in response to the 50 free Premium memberships – nice! Okay, if you’re reading this and want a free 1-year membership, you better hurry, I’m only giving 50 away.

See you at http://www.blogmarketingtoolkit.com!

During a 10 minute break from a 2 day work marathon, I decided to experiment with posterous.com. My goal was to leverage its syndication power to post video straight to my blog from my Droid.

The error in judgement was thinking Gmail would allow for large files and that posterous.com would syndicate first to YouTube.com, then to my blog. Neither happened.

So here I am, traveling to the top of Mount CDN and all I got was this lousy photo of my SEO Lab. Mark, help a guy out, what's the magic real-time video syndication from Droid strategy? One step from record to post-to-blog. Anyone?

Posted via email from seosteve’s posterous

As a seasoned Webmaster and Search Engine Optimization Strategist, I’ve written dozens of articles, features, and eBooks (uh hem…SEO in a Day) on how to use WordPress to get higher ranking in the search results.

Watch this video to see exactly why it might be the right move for you:

Save Money – Fire Your Webmaster

Okay design community, shoot me now if you must, but keep in mind that I’m looking out for the business owners who are suffering through what might be a double-dip in economic recession.

You will still need occasional THEME updates from a designer, but you’ll no longer need a $125/hr Developer to “program” your website. With WordPress, you are in control of your content and can add, delete, or edit content whenever you so desire.

Fire Your SEO Company

I’m not trying to shoot myself in the foot here, you should always keep a Consultant or Strategist in your back pocket. However, you can now get rid of those $499/mo fees you’ve been paying to get listed in link farms and have your great content bloated with keywords.

With our optimized installation of WordPress combined with our almost-completed training website, you’ll have all the tools and guides you’ll need to write your own content. Heck, even this article is being written in WordPress. After the last paragraph, I’m going to edit two fields: Title and Meta Description, which will appear in the search engine results and hopefully be clicked on by people searching for “migrating to WordPress” or other related queries.

How to Sign Up

At www.seoinaday.com, I’ve created a way for you to get the guide that’s been called the “SEO Agency Killer” and a way for you sign up to have us handle all the work for you. Give it a look and if you’re interested but have more questions, call me directly at (562) 732-4417.

The best part of their strategy is that they are providing something useful and responding to a demand in their community. There are two parts to this link building technique that make it brilliant: Link Bait and Automated Link Building (white hat SEO).

Part I – The Link Bait

As of 2010, nurses in Australia are required to follow a continued professional development (CPD) plan and have a minimum number of CPD hours (appropriately nicknamed as ‘points’). There are a number of tools online to help nurses manage their goals, activities and hours, but they come attached with a hefty fee. But not the CPD Organiser (as they call it), which comes completely free for members and non-members of AusmedOnline.com.

So you’re a nurse and know other nurses who pay for the other services (which aren’t nearly as robust I might add). What’s the first thing you’re going to do after signing up? That’s right, you’re going to tell your friends and share with as many other nurses as you can. Hopefully, even producing a link or two from your blog, Twitter profile or Facebook page. Link bait at is finest.

Part II – Automated Link Building

Enter “the badge”, a brilliant widget-like method of sharing something that includes a link back to the website where it can be downloaded by others.

The Ausmed widget is the most brilliant link building strategy I’ve ever seen. It dynamically grabs the CPD hours from the associated account, creates a link for others to get the widget and includes a static link back to a deep page on an Ausmed online property.

I know what you’re thinking, “Google will flag and filter tons of new identical links”. Ah ha! Not if they are constantly changing when the user picks up their code, both in destination and semantic link text.

Way to go Ausmed Team! Keep up the great work and I’ll be watching to see what you come up with next!

Consulting Services

Thanks to my unbelievable team, I’ve picked up a few new consulting clients, and am just about at my capacity based on my FY10 goals. If you follow me online or offline, you’ll know that my goal is to eventually have one or two semi-major search events per month and spend the rest of the time with my family and return to my long-term goal of being a History Teacher (maybe Jr. High).

Check out the results my clients have been getting from their SEO Strategy:

Meetups and Workshops

The iSuccess Summit has been postponed for a few months. My team collectively made the decision to postpone the event since we’re so tied up in other things at the moment (and haven’t had the time to market the event).

We delayed two Meetup groups because my schedule got a little out of control last week and this week the family got hit with a virus that’s been going around. We’re back on for next week. Here are the topics and links (hope you’ll join us or at least subscribe to get updates and meeting notes):

• Orange County SEO Meetup – Topic: Link Baiting Strategies (get 30+ ideas from attendees – FREE)
• Search Marketing Workshops – Topic: SEO Fundamentals ($10)

Below is a video taken from our last Meetup Group featuring Dave Jesch. Dave discusses how to quickly install and optimize WordPress and WordPress plugins to make a website search engine friendly and it’s content optimized for high search engine ranking.

Saturday morning breakfast workshops will begin in just a few weeks. We figure they’ll be more affordable and intimate, as compared to having a larger event. The first few events will be here in Orange County, most-likely selling for $59 per ticket.

SEO Websites Powered by WordPress

One of the services I decided to pilot to help fund our workshops was setting up and optimizing websites using the WordPress platform. It’s been a few weeks and the orders are coming in, but I’m learning that there’s a huge learning curve for many businesses. My biggest challenge has been allocating time to produce more training videos at my new subscription site (HelpRankMe.com). Hopefully I’ll get some time this weekend to add more content. The clients have been really great so far. Getting Affiliates to sell website enhancements as opposed to separate websites has been another challenge. Two clients have already said “I didn’t want another website, I just wanted SEO”, so you can guess what part of my weekend is going to look like.

Fortunately, I have the process partially streamlined. Here’s how it works (at the moment):

• A client purchases a website
• Account Manager (AM) sends welcome email
• I personally setup the project in our system
• One of my (now 4) trained resources follows ~40 setup steps
• AM does a quality check and assigns to me
• I give each site a little Wiideman Love and assign back to AM
• AM sends the client their login credentials (WordPress, Google Apps, etc)
• Client visits HelpRankMe.com to learn what do next

What’s Next?

We have a long way to go before we hit that profitability benchmark, but the progress and sleepless nights are finally starting to show the light at the end of the tunnel. For those on my team, thanks for your loyalty and support. We’ll be in Vegas celebrating our success as long as we stay the course, do right by our clients and do we can to make our jobs simpler and more enjoyable.

Till’ next time….(thanks for reading)

Why You Don’t Want to Use Garbage Content

1. Your reader will know it’s garbage and they’ll return to Google
2. Google will learn from bounce-backs that’s it’s garbage, and penalize you
3. Spun, wrangled, mixed, or reused content usually spits out garbage
4. It’s just lazy. If you can’t commit an hour a week to your website, turn it off

Get My New Writing Guide on SEO Below

No opt-in’s or registration required. Click, download, and share all you want. If you decide to share the information in the Guide on a webpage outside of the PDF, please be sure to link back to this page, that’s my only request.

Benefits of Optimized Content

There are hundreds of reasons why you should create awesome content and tweak specific focal points to include keywords. In general, here are several benefits of creating SEO-enhanced web content:

• People will link to great content (think of Wikipedia)
• Good content educates, informs, and SELLS your stuff
• Unique, hand-typed content won’t be filtered by Google
• Bing is an ORGANIC search engine that looks at keyword prominence
• Bing will have 30% market share after the Search Alliance concludes
• People will tweet and “like” (Facebook) a noteworthy page
• It’s the right thing to do

So what are you waiting for? Grab Version 1 of my SEO Content Writing Guide and get to writing great content! Need a way to keep track of your content? Try my SEO Content Tracking Spreadsheet, designed to take the thought out of the individual focal points by creating columns for each SEO attribute you’ll want to include on every page.

Let me know what you think in your comments below. Thanks for reading!