Product Creation and SEO QnA

I’m going to warm you up with some short and sassy QnA today, and then Rick Porter will finish you off with another SEO lesson to help you get more traffic.

Q: I’ve been searching for quite some time for some accounting software (preferable online based) that lends itself for online businesses like you are describing. Problem is I haven’t found one yet. What do you use or recommend for financial accounting software? Thanks! – Scot

Answer: I use a spreadsheet. One column for description, one for date, one for expense, one for income, one for total, and one for calculating Canadian tax, if applicable.

My life is made easy by Clickbank, because I just get 2-3 checks every month, and so I don’t have thousands of entries to make.

Q: Almost done with my free e-book that was inspired by you.
Want to get it all fancied up. Anyone you can recommend to me?  Or just use e-lance? – Chris

Answer: No idea, sorry. I just create word documents and turn them into PDF’s with Adobe Acrobat. If any readers have a suggestion on fancifying ebooks, drop a line on the blog here.

Q: I want to knock out my yoga DVDs and get them online. I’ve wanted to make this series for sometime … And I’m finally ready to take the plunge and do it..
.

I don’t know a lot about the production of videos for sale online…I’ve bought your DVD set in the past… To me it looks like you set up the camera and went for it with what you do best, AND it was awesome, it totally worked!

Do you have any suggestions for me? – Stephanie

Answer: My assistant and good buddy Dan films everything I do on a digital video camera I purchased in 2006. Dan also does the editing, which takes quite a while and is the biggest cost.

Q: How long does it take Google and other search engines to index my pages, whether those pages are new articles I’ve written, or older pages now that I’ve applied some new SEO strategies? – Geoff

Answer from Rick Porter: The higher the page rank of a site the higher the importance
Google places on it and it seems to get spidered more often.

(Spidered means crawled. Crawled means looked at by the Google robots. Gosh, that has a creepy matrix-y vibe to it, doesn’t it? – Craig)

Usually a new article that you write on one of your sites is probably indexed within 10 minutes to an hour.

When you write a new article on a blog that has an RSS on it, the article is usually going out to a lot of RSS directories, which helps it get found quicker.

Plus, if you have lots of traffic to your blog, Google is indexing the homepage quite often and a new article is always on the homepage and will get indexed.

When you make changes to an existing post it’s important to help Google find it and “recache” the page.

Here is a way to check to see if Google has found the latest changes.

1) Go to Google.com and put a URL in the search window. For
example:

http://www.ttfatloss.com/transformation-contest/rise-of-fasting-expert/

2) Now you will see search results come up with that URL and next to the URL you will see this “cache”

3) click on ‘cache’

4) You will see the last snapshot that Google took of the page

For example:

This is Google’s cache of
http://www.ttfatloss.com/transformation-contest/rise-of-fasting-expert/.
It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on May 16, 2011 04:47:12 GMT.

5) If you are seeing an old snapshot without recent SEO changes then you know that it still hasn’t been re-crawled and cached by Google.

6) To get older posts recached you can Twitter or social bookmark the link, or build a link to the old post from a brand new post. The brand new post gets crawled by Google and it follows the link to the old post getting it reindexed.

Usually if I make any changes to a post to give it better SEO I just throw the URL into one of my social bookmarking programs giving it 15-20 brand new back-links.

(Duh. Oddbviously. Who DOESN’T do that? – Craig)

Stay sassy,

Craig Ballantyne,
http://www.InternetIndependenceUpdates.com
– The Facebook Page

“The number one sin in marketing is being boring.” – Dan Kennedy