Everything that follows should be viewed from the #1 operating principle within Google, Inc.: Serve the users (i.e. searchers) with the best value we can. Every single tool they offer webmasters, marketers and companies is done with the searchers best interest in mind. Google wants only to serve their users. I hope that makes sense.

Latent + Semantic + Indexing = Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Latent means "present and capable of being, though now now active". It applies to "a power or quality that has not yet come forth but may emerge and develop." Latent is derived from words which mean "to escape notice".

Semantic means "of or relating to meaning in language", and was derived from words which mean "to signify meaning".

Now we get to the fun part. Where everyone seems to have focused on "semantic" in their explanations, gone crazy with complicated symbolic logic, and endlessly discuss words, the real "secret" is in the word "indexing". This will get a bit longer...

Indexing as a transitive (active) verb means "to regulate by indexation".

Indexation is "a system of economic control in which certain variables (as wages or interest) are tied to a cost-of-living index so that both rise or fall at the same rate and the detrimenal effect of inflation is theoretically eliminated".

"But that's economics and crap like that!" Yeah, yeah. Economics is presently considered to be the study of the distribution and allocation of scarce resources. Page 1 rankings for "convert-able" keyword phrases are definitely a scarce resource! (In economics, scarce means "not an infinite supply of".) High quality pages that give a high probability of providing what someone is searching for are also a very scarce resource from the viewpoint of any search engine.

Some terms just need to translated. I don't know exactly HOW they're translated, but that will have to be the topic of another post. Got some work to get done.

Have a phenomenal day! :)

It was December, 1999. I was a "web designer" trying to help my clients to actually *have* Internet profit centers. But they wouldn't do anything I said had to be done to start having an income from their website. It was irking me, but I knew there had to be a way to get through to my clients. There just had to be a way.

I mean, the little things that have to be done once the site is online: url on their business cards, having a communication device like a newsletter to capture names and emails to communicate helpful stuff to the prospects and customers/clients. Providing value, educating prospects to appreciate what you do for them. You know, Abraham 101. Autoresponders were just starting to catch on and were usually not used very well, ppc was was being a dismal failure except for goto.com (became Overture, later bought by Yahoo!).

Corey Rudl, Mark Joyner, Marlon Sanders were the big guys. Yanik was hardcore into copywriting, Stephen Peirce was already moderately successful, having sold some chicken-something site I can't recall the name of, and some other stuff he was doing, and Jim Daniels was on the verge of greatness, too. This was infancy for Internet Marketing. Pre-Filsaime-ian, Pre-Schefrenian.

So to teach my clients what should be done, and to "duplicate my time" more efficiently, I wrote a stinkin' eBook: The Ass-Kickin', Name-Takin', Money-Makin' Internet Success Home Study Course. What a terrible name. The url was even worse: buttkickincourse.com. Ick. I said from the start that it goes off the market once 2000 copies were sold (or distributed to my clients). The highest profitability profit price was $79. There were no bonuses really. There were no testimonials to speak of (and I never added any, either), but the conversion ratio was 8-12%, which was disgusting to me. I just couldn't get it any higher than 12.5% on the best day. Why wouldn't the other 7-11 people buy? It was totally beyond me! (Later I found out from that copywriter Mark Joyner was promoting as "the best copywriting teacher" that 2% was very good, and 4% was just amazing. He said it must have been how I was promoting the site and the types of people attracted to those ads. Whatever. I've duplicated those conversion rates in systems I wrote copy for, for a LOT more expensive services.)

Anyway, the "selling out" phase took 2 years. Not much of a "product launch", huh? The funny thing is that Yanik and I traded emails for a short bit. I emailed him the course and he emailed me an awesome "swipe file" sort of thing, but much better. Stephen Pierce bought my course, and short time before it sold out emailed me to see if he could sell it. I was working on an update because things had changed a LOT over the previous 23 months, I was to be including re-sell rights and free upgrades to all my customers, and I'd learned more. I changed the name and all that, but before I could finish it, the damn thing sold out, actually two over. (No, I didn't return the payment to the last two folks, but I did take the site down.) I was mad because I thought it would make me liar to release another version, even updated, after I said only 2000 copies were available before the revision was done. THEN everything changed for me.

The same day that I sold out, my best friend, Dave, brought a business idea to me and we went forward with that and the revision process stopped. We went on to another field entirely, and I took my knowledge with me. That was January, 2002. We kicked in our businesses into 2006, when my brother-in-law was diagnosed with leukemia. Everything changed. I couldn't trade anymore because there was a great hacker who kept hacking in and tried to steal my money (and the money I gave my sister to start trading a couple years earlier).

See, we moved to Florida and did everything we possibly could to help out. All 6 of us, our four kids, Sheilah (pregnant with our 5th) and I just moved. It ended up a total disaster, and I had to bring out what I "knew" about Internet Marketing since I was actually not able to trade there. But SO MUCH had changed online. Google had become the dominant force, there were highly successful IMers I had never heard of. It was just too much. I got caught up in the details rather than the concepts (big duh, right?). I studied the heck out of SEO and SEM stuff - even got certified. But I was all over the place.

Yanik became a multi-millionaire. So did Stephen Pierce. (Funny story there. Quick: I went into trading and teaching people trading. I found Stephen with his Fibonacci Secrets course and bought it, then bought a lot more from him, and a LOT of others, too. Neat turn around that Stephen found me through IM and my course, and then I found him again doing stuff I was doing. What's with that?)

When Joel released the Secret Classroom and my wife bought it for me for Christmas, I was on the verge of "getting a job". I hadn't had a job of any kind for a LONG time and really didn't want one, either. Anyway, the info in there is unbelievable. I got stuff from The Secret Classroom that I had forgotten, stuff I'd never heard of, stuff I never really understood, and regained the motivation and drive to keep going online.

I'm now focused, and except for being "social" and being here trying to help whoever asks for it, I'm starting to really kick some more butt online. I don't have any interest in getting back into selling IM info, but I still love learning new, workable stuff. Now I look for the concept behind WHY things work rather than just That they work. You know?

So the whole point here is that I've been through the ringer, just like almost everyone here. I've been successful online. I've been a jackass. I've been a total failure. I've been lost. I've seen people I taught something to become very successful. And I want to help people here on the TopOneNetwork because I am very grateful for Joel having the courage and vision to co-produce the Next Internet Millionaire.

I'm totally willing to help anyone here. Just ask. And leave a comment, too, if you would. Please? Have a truly remarkable day!

I was doing some research onto the top sites on Earth. Top 500 according to Alexa: Something bizarre - a few social networking sites nobody is talking about (well, almost nobody).

hi5.com
bebo.com
badoo.com
tagged.com

See if you can find out how to get people to share your site on facebook, too. Submit some documents to docstoc.com and that might help with google (not sure, but theoreticall it makes sense to me, though I can't explain it...oy).

Those are quite in addition to the normal social sites you do hear about (twitter, facebook, myspace, linkedin...).

Do you have your own profiles on those sites in the list above? (and are they all themed so anyone who searches for flash tutorials on the sites will find you automatically? Join all the related and decent groups you can in each.) Take on only one site a week, so you can learn the "rules" of each, and how to do stuff. See who are the most "liked" and most disliked, if any, in any group. It's valuable research that takes serious time, but will pay dividends forever once mastered.

Have you read the Attention Age Doctrine 2 from Rich Schefren? Great info there on why you want to do that, and more that I haven't talked about yet. It's amazing (IMO) once you get to page 35 and start with the steps of

1. Map your market.
2. Monitor your market.
3. Join your market.
4. Build your market.
5. Lead your market.
6. Sell your market.

He tells you more in there if you haven't read it. Read it, *at least* pages 35-44.

Stay great!

This is how to use the keyword research (from Keyword Elite at www.keywordelite.com):

1. Pick a main word or phrase to be the overall theme for the site. In other words, everything - everything - will be tied directly to this one phrase. As an example,  "work at home" is good, because on a different piece of software "work at home" recieves over 90,000 world searched a DAY. Work from home is not even half of that. Your main page, index, should be on that topic and tell people WIIFM (what's in it for me? Why should I care? Why should I stay here? What will I get out of reading this stuff?)

2. One each page, pick ONE main keyword or phrase to focus on. Don't worry, in time you'll have lots and lots. Work on ONE category at a time for your site. Pick ONE. Focus on one word at a time.

Tip: Download the free version of webceo (www.webceo.com) and work with your site. When you're doing the "explore niche" tab and find out the top 5-10 words that top ranking sites have on their pages and meta tags. Make sure to use those top words on the page you're writing because that's "semantic" crap you read about in SEO forums and stuff. That's all there is to the semantic stuff SEOs talk about - what are commonly the words used in association with the word/phrase you're targeting? That that.

3. Do that for every keyword phrase within the topic. Make sure the keywords are actually search for. Another free tool is at seobook.com from Aaron Wall (the dude is awesome!) and there's even more there. It's a VERY powerful tool when used properly.

Please do not try to put every word into one page. Focus on one per page, except perhaps the index page, but mainly focus on what people are searching for.

There's more useful stuff about MSN and Microsoft Advertising, but we'll cover that another time. Have fun. That's such a huge key. Have fun. If you're not having fun, it'll ring through in the rhythm of the words you type. (Did you know that a poem read in any language gives nearly identical rhythm patterns? That's a huge "secret" in copywriting that I've used, and have NEVER read from any copywriter!)

Anyway, that's a little bit for you to get you started. Enjoy! (And USE the info. Let me know your results, please.)

Mercy! I've been weeks on just a few social media sites learning the "group" rules finding the "mavens" and what it seems my market wants - but it takes half of forever to do that! I know it'll pay off because Rich Schefren talks about needing to do it in the Attention Age Doctrines, but gooood NITE! The time I'm spending is cutting into production time.

Do you have any tips on really getting in to the heat of things AND building the relationships (the longest part) AND being very productive?

Anything would be welcome right now. I do all I can to help here, too, and OH MY do I need some useful tips. (Yeah, I'm talking to you, too, Gordon - you seem to be kicking major butt in doing so!)

Have a phenomenal day!

Russell

You want to know about getting Yahoo! to index your pages, and MSN (Live.com) to index more of your pages? I'll tell you how, and without spending any money.

There's a couple things about the search engines and their respective companies that you should know:

1. They like to be helped.
2. They own different "properties".
3. They all like fresh content, especially fresh content that is better than anything else they're listing.

Just as an example, some seem to be appreciating the help I'm giving; you "like the help". You also own different "properties" (domains). The "help them" part combines different properties, so if you want Yahoo! to index some or all of your pages, you help them in a few different ways. The help that is acceptable to the can be summed up in two words:

1. Visits
2. Value

The value is information that their users want and can use - useful information that can be immediately applied and that helps bring about the desired result by the user. And that info is *agreed* to be helpful and useful, specific and problem solving.

The visits that you give them, and the resultant visits that they get from others because of the value you provide in the form of unique, useful content will be rewarded when done properly. That reward will be the indexing of the pages that you want. (As far as ranking, that's a bit different.) Or, you could just pay the $300 per year of listing with Yahoo! They want value either way: Your money or your help.

That said, do you have a Yahoo! email account? If not, get one. If so, use it. It's free. Yahoo has their 360, so set up a page on it and use it to link to your primary site and some others that are your favorites (and be sure to actually go to your 360 page, too, so set it up as a home page in a browser you use. Also, Yahoo has answers.yahoo.com so you can help them provide unique and useful content to people who actually want to know about it. So find some questions in your category(ies), answer them really good and then.... and then...

Vote for every single one of your answers when it's time. One single vote will win you the "Best Answer" about half the time. Three votes will win it over 75% of the time. I hope that gives you some ideas.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's the part of "agreed upon" useful that matters. When you have a Best Answer with a link to a page on your site, that's a good vote for "agreed upon". Now all you need is some more links from sites that Yahoo! thinks are great for your keyword phrases.

Go to Yahoo.com and search for your primary keyword phrase plus "blog". Then go to every single one of those blogs, check out the source code to see they have the rel=nofollow tag in their links. If not, you want to become well-known and respected there. If the nofollow tags are there, pass it by until you have some time you want to waste.

Now,to have your fresh content be better than anything else they're listing, you've got a few barriers to overcome. First, the content you create to help someone really should be very (good, useful, unique...). Second, you have to have some links pointing there. Third, you have to understand and apply the definition of the word Social.

The word "social" means "of or having to do with human beings interacting together in a group so that their dealings with one another affect their common welfare." It's an adjective, as in "social media". When everyone in a group contributes to the growth and success of a group, that group grows and over time becomes more and more successful.

The biggest, most successful groups on Facebook, MySpace and so on, have a common goal of it's members, and that common goal is agreed upon somehow by the members of that group, that "society".

That common, agreed upon goal is almost always stated, in writing, and is already agreed upon by a new member when they become a new member. An example would be this group, TopOneNetwork, where the common goal is, as stated on the home page, "TopOneNetwork is an internet marketing community and social network that facilitates joint ventures and partner opportunities as well as provides invaluable resources to Top 1% Members."

So we have here, as the top 1% of Joel's customers, a beautiful opportunity to contribute to the success of each other, find others within the group that we can JV together with, and provide and find invaluable resources.

"Social" is about group contribution and agreement for the group, not just for every "me" in the group. I'm avoiding the striking temptation to get all philosophical on you (my nickname in the Army was Socrates, as in Bill and Ted's pronunciation: So-crates").

The point here is that in order to get "agreement" going, there has to be a "group". If you're an "only one", you'll never be a group all alone. When there's a group, a real group, there's strength in agreement of multiple viewpoints. Got it?

All this means is that getting to know others, gaining strong rapport with others, contributing to the success of others, linking to others, being involoved in forwarding the success of the group (that you create or join) will help you be more successful. This is like one giant mastermind, you know? The more you're involved in a group or groups, the more friends, links, recommendations you will get from others.

And that is all I mean by "agreement" that your material is "better" than anyone else's: More links. More links from more people all over the place, and not just on your own domains. It's not about one person pretending to be a group with multiple domains on the same server, same IP address because that just doesn't fool any search engine. It's about getting actual links to your pages, posts and articles.

How do you get the links? Unique, useful content. Get Cosmo for the "headline" forms that are working best today for your blog posts. Look at the National Enquirer for the form of the content, and notice how many times the main point(s) are repeated through the article (at least 3). Then other real people will tend to find your info, posts, articles more enticing to link to. That's agreement online - links to your cool stuff.

Mercy, I hope this isn't too much to absorb, but it's all in getting Yahoo to index some of your pages, MSN to index more of your pages, and Google to rank you higher.

SUMMARY: Provide unique, useful info that people want to know, help out people where it will be noticed by the search engine bots (and not with the rel=nofollow in the href tags) unless you just want more traffic from those sites. Actually contribute, be active, communicate. In short, put yourself out there to be noticed. Keep putting yourself out there to be liked (or "controversied" if you prefer).

I hope that this can help you, and I'd love to hear your opinion on this article. If you have any other tips - definitely contribute!d Stay great everyone!

Russell :)

Have you noticed that all the big guys you listen to already have their big businesses? Have you noticed that they seem to get a LOT done? I mean, look at Eben Pagan and Joel Comm, for example. They already have their businesses. They're giving advice from the perspective of already having their own business.

Joel is great at making videos to answer a lot of questions that get asked from his fan base. The content he gives is just amazing - and it only costs the time to read it or watch it. He's great at distilling down information to a really basic perspective. Few are.

Eben is releasing video after video - and they're long videos, too - of just mind-blowing information to get you to grow your business. It's incredible what this guy reveals to us.

How do these "giants" have the time to run their business, create new products, create and give all kinds of free content, and still have any life at all? The answer is really quite simple:

They have an established business. Eben runs an empire that pulls in over $20 million a year. Joel runs a publishing company that pulls well into the 7-figures every year.

But they both started where we are: non-7+-figure businesses. How did they get there? What did they do that we're not doing? What secrets are there to reveal that we just don't know? None. They tell us all the time what it takes.

Persistence, determination, and a plan (for starters). They kept on going when most of us would have quit. They kept on pushing, producing and improving what the already had in place.

What they already had in place. Did you catch that? Something has to be there before it can be improved. Putting something there, establishing something, has to be done before it can be made better. There has to be something there to convert people to - from browser to subscriber, from subscriber to client, from client to enthusiastic client to a testimonial that helps get other clients.

They do what needs to be done to make sales: Getting subscribers, building relationships through the myriad ways we all do, and making sales. And they improved what they already had established.

What's different about Joel and Eben from me? From You? The courage to persist toward achieving the dreams and goals they had envisioned in their minds. The smarts to study from others where they knew they needed to improve. And the action taken to build their little empires. (Hey, they're not multi-billion dollar empires yet, so they're really pretty darn small - but that's more than I've got!)

Here's the neatest thing: You can do it, too. So can I. Despite having lost the dream a couple years ago. Joel helped me with that through the Secret Classroom (which is still my most referenced and watched info-series ever, and the only reason I decided to get my butt online again for business). People like Joel and Eben and a few others are there to help us.

Their joy actually comes from watching us turn into successful giants in our own endeavors. It's quite amazing.

Have a truly phenomenal day and week ahead!

If you're an avid attendee of conference calls that have US numbers and you live outside the US, there's a neat little device called the Magic Jack that will allow you to call the US for an unlimited time for US$20 per year. Yep, that's per year.

The little device plugs into a USB port, then you plug your phone into the built-in phone jack (I don't know if any adapters are needed), and you can dial up on your phone. It's pretty neat.

The voice quality is like a good cell phone connection - it's voice over IP (VOIP). We've got two of them: One for my wife, and one for me. They really save on long distance and we never have to worry about tying up the phone line if we need to make a call. We can just use the Magic Jack.

The web site for it is www.magicjack.com if you want to take a look at it.

Have a phenomenal week!

Russell

The funny thing about SEO copywriting is that it's just copywriting with a few page tweaks based on keyword research, density in the right places, proximity (how close to the beginning it is), and the other words on the pages.

I use WebCEO Professional to do related keyword search. You can even do this in the free version - and it's really neat. The program has a lot more capabilities than just keyword research - it can actually tell you what to do to your pages to get better rankings, and lots of other useful stuff. ( http://www.webceo.com/ if you want to look at it.)

In the Explore Niche tab, you type in your main keyword. You want to know what the top ranking sites are also using on their top ranked pages for the keywords in your niche. For an example, I typed in "internet video" for the keyword I want to try to rank well for, then hit the enter key. I want to know what other words are on those pages so I can be sure to include a lot of them, too, in the copy I'm about to write.

If they fit naturally, or can be made to fit naturally within the other product and market research, then great! If not, I don't worry about them. For Internet Video as a keyword, other words that should be on the page include: youtube, video clips, internet tv, funny videos, internet television, news, media, movies, free videos, iptv, humor, animation, video clip, tv broadcast, google video, funny movies, streaming media, streaming video.

Yeah, that's quite the list, right? If the content can include those words, and have Internet Video in the page title, meta keywords and description tags (which may or may not make a difference, but there's no downside to having them), top of the page in a header tag (like H1), and so on (just regular on page optimization stuff), then it becomes a matter of getting the links to your site to have "internet video" between the anchor tag from all kinds of different sites, and all that.

You know how sometimes you really want to contribute to others? You read a blog post on a popular blog and you want to leave a comment? Well, make sure the links on the pages don't have the nofollow attribute if you want the comment link to count in search engines. If you don't mind that the SEs won't follow the link (and thus not count the link), and just want more exposure, then leave the comment anyway. Make sure it's a great comment, something that you wouldn't mind having someone leave on your own blog.

You know, the old golden rule of "do unto others". Contribute to the success of others, and then someone will probably come along and help you out, too, someday. (Keyword: Probably)

For other SEO and SEM stuff, I use Keyword Elite, SEO Elite, and Keywords Analyzer in addition to WebCEO. Some might say that's overkill, but I really don't think so. Different results for different searches gives a more complete picture, even if some say some of the resultant info is inaccurate - I don't really care. It's based on today (okay, probably last month, but...), and online that's what we have to work with. It's data to give me direction.

Not knowing the linking structure of your higher ranking competition is tantamount to (the same thing as) shooting in the dark. While that's fine if you're trained to do so, it's not if you're not.

That's where WebCEO and SEO Elite come in: They give you details about your incoming links that you probably don't even know yet.

ANYWAY... So the basic SEO stuff is out of the way. Now you can focus on the copywriting aspect. Look, copywriting is really nothing more than putting your excitement into words so your reader (who is in your audience simply by virtue of being on your page) feels that excitement and wants to take the action you want him/her to take.

Yes, there's a lot more to it, but if you can convey your excitement about a fantastic offer that your reader wants, the rest is a lot easier. It's trying to sell something, make someone take an action with fake scarcity crap that turns off today's readers in a big, huge way. Real scarcity is quite another thing, and so is "reason why" on everything you write.

Anyway, back in 2000 I wrote some tutorials on copywriting. If you want to learn copywriting then it's free. It's not a massive course, but the most to the point free course online that I'm aware of.

Write well, brer SEO Copywriter!

Russell

Thanks to Joel for setting up this networking site for those of us who do any Internet marketing. This thing is really neat and really user friendly.

I've been online for a long time - since 1994. Built my first "site" back in January 1996, and took a three year break from business online. Man, what a mistake that was! There were so many things different when I "returned" that it took me a few months to catch up, and I really don't think I'm all that caught up yet - still!

With all of the releases by big named gurus and lesser "experts", it's difficult to keep any focus on one thing. I have found that just focusing on one thing accomplishes the focusing on one thing at a time. Yeah, the answer to the question is the question kind of thing.

The best purchase I made online in terms of Internet Marketing material was Joel Comm's The Secret Classroom. It re-awakened me like nothing yet has. The contents are amazing, and won't be going away. People I'd never heard of were giving info that was absolutely mind-blowing. Mike Koenigs gave incredible info on video and his passion really came through in his video. Dave Taylor's info was crazy powerful, and it still is and will be for a very long time. Those were my favorite two of the twelve, which really surprised me because I'd never heard of them before.

Mark Joyner gave a visual of his Simpleology material and it really did do something that the simpleology.com site doesn't do. I still can't figure it out, but I'm more productive than before listening to him. Go figure.

Anyway, I'm on the PLF2 stuff now, and it's just AWESOME. Jeff Walker, who was my biggest disappointment in The Secret Classroom (only because my expectations were so high, and all he did was give social proof, proof that his stuff on launching products really works and not tell much on how - but note that I did fork over a couple grand for PLF2!) When he releases it to the public again, just get it. In the mean time, get The Secret Classroom because I STILL watch it every spare moment I get. STILL. And that's saying a lot considering that my wife and I work at home and homeschool our five incredible kids.

Anyway, stay great. Kick ass, take names.

Russell