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In my previous posts I have mentioned how important it is to become a pepperjam affiliate if you are serious about making money online. They have just made your work easier with the introduction of “pepperjam store builder”. Now you are just one minute away from building the perfect store for your website / blog.

The process here is very simple. Log in to your account and go to the pepperjam store builder page. You will see all the advertisers with product feeds in this section. Remember, You will only see a product feed if you have applied and got approved to that particular advertiser’s program. Select all feeds applicable to your web site or blog’s niche.

If you need, You can filter results to get more specific products. For example if your advertiser has a wide range of clothing products, you can filter it to show only t-shirts. If you leave this field blank, you will get all the products available in their program. You can also select how many products you want to display in one page. I suggest you to use at least 6 products to give your readers a good variety.

Once you finish selecting products, you can customize the look of the store. Don’t be lazy and Do not use the default settings. You can be creative here. Try testing with many color combinations as possible till you get the perfect store to impress your visitors.

You can build the store in your existing web site/ weblog or purchase a new domain just for this. I have seen many publishers built pepperjam stores on new domains. For me, I created a seperate page for my store here. The product feed will be replaced with t-shirts later on.

Doesn’t it looks good? And it can’t get simpler than that. No need to program anything. You just have to copy paste the code given by pepperjam. If you run on wordpress, Do not forget to tick the “Wordpress Optimized” radio button to get a wordpress optimized script.

And to make things much more interesting, they are holding a contest to select the best pepperjam store. If you emerge a winner, you will receive a grand cash prize of $1000. Isn’t that great? Even if you do not win, if you are among the first 100 blogs to showcase a store in your blog, pepperjam will credit $10 bonus to your account.

If you need to take advantage of all these and become a serious online marketer, I highly recommend using Pepperjam Store Builder today.

Do not forget to read,
Virus Guards Eating Your affiliate earnings?
Spy your competitors to become successful !

Although my blog is nearing to break in to alexa top 100k web sites, I am still not getting considerable traffic from Google and other search engines. Average organic traffic is around 8% and they are coming from keywords I never targeted for.

I do not have time to write everyday to get social media attention. Desperate for some Google love, I searched all over Internet to get some solid tips on SEO. After going through dozens of articles on “blog SEO” and ” wordpress SEO“, I did the following changes in my blog.

1. I changed my blog Title.
Title is the phrase you see in the top of your browser when you open a web page. My title used to be ” Turning cats into lions. Your success starts here.” Although it is a catchy title it has nothing to do with my targeted key words. So I changed it to a new one which includes few of my targeted keywords. Now it says “Money making ideas and opportunities to help you get started“.

2. I made the post titles to be H1 tags.
Any SEO expert will say how important it is to use H1 tags in your titles. By default it was H2. So I changed it to H1 with the help of my friend Nadeesha at rockfuse dot com. When I changed it to H1 initially it gave me a very ugly looking title.

To change that ugly H1 layout, go to your style sheet and find something like this,

{style type=”text/css”>
[!--
H1 { color: blue; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px }
-->

Change the properties to give it the look you always wanted.

3. Bold keywords.
In individual posts, I made sure to include a keyword in the first few sentences and I made it bold. I did repeat the keywords 3-4 times throughout the entire post and also made them bold. And I did the same thing towards the end of the post.

4. Optimized images and alt tags.
I normally tend to write long posts. I don't write just for the sake of publishing another new post and increase my posting frequency. So I always use few images in my posts to give readers a break.

See this post about drop shipping for an example. I started renaming these images to keywords I am targeting for. And I also started using the "alt tag" to it's maximum potential. These little things are important in blog SEO. Google still cannot read images. So when they come across an image they look at the image name and the alt name. So these days, I am going back to old posts and doing these necessary changes.

As bloggers, we tend to do lot of internal linking. They might be in the form of related posts or in the side bar or they might be links within the posts. When linking I started using keywords in Anchor texts.

For example, take a look at the previous paragraph. When I linked to a previous post without just using the “click here” phrase I used “drop shipping” as the anchor text. I learned that these all small tweaks add up in the final equation when it comes to best blog SEO practices.

6. I registered my domain for a lengthy period.
Google itself has mentioned that they are looking to the domain registration length when they are ranking web sites. There are too many web sites these days. Lot of them die within the first few months. If you register your domain for a lengthy period It gives an indication to Google that you are here for stay. Besides, it does not cost your more than $10 a year.

7. Solved the duplicate content issue in word press.
By default , word press and many other blogging platforms create dozens of different URL’s for the same content. Google will consider this as spamming, in order to avoid this problem use a robots text like this. It will not solve all your duplicate content issues but can consider as a good remedy.

This is what I have done in past few weeks and it has already started giving me results. Organic traffic has increased from just 8 % to 10.5% in this short time. I am expecting much better results once I get some more back links to my web site.

I have not mentioned any SEO techniques used out side the blog. These all are internal SEO attempts. I am sure I have missed many important points. You are welcome to share your ideas and enlighten us on the SEO work you have done in your site.

For more great articles on “blog SEO” and “wordpress SEO” please visit,
problogger
copyblogger
rockfuse

And also I found a great video on “blog seo” from mindvalleylabs.com, the only problem in this video is, they use overture to find keywords. Since it is no longer in use, you can use Google adwords keyword tool for the same purpose. This video is great. It explains how they come to the Google top ten results 10/10 times. Enjoy, And do not hesitate to share your knowledge on blog / wordpress SEO here.

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