As blogs are recognized by search engines as small bits of information which are updated on a regular basis, blogs get quite a lot of preference in the search results.

Thus, after you understand this, your next question must be how you could optimize your own blog to help it get better search engine rankings.

Based on the service which you use, there are some basics that you could make use of. WordPress is the top blogging platform. If you desire to have an advantage with search engine optimization (SEO), then you should go ahead with WordPress, since RSS is fully integrated into Wordpress. For that reason, your blog will be indexed faster into the search engines.

If you’re new to blogs, you should know that blogs are not very different from other websites. Blogs are considered powerful in the search engine ranking world because of the frequency with which posts are made on blogs. Search engines will actively spider the site which it sees to have about one post every day or at least three posts every week. And if your blog is associated with some topic which is a hot subject of discussion on the Internet, then it’ll be boosted quite easily on the ranking charts.

If your blog is such that it makes business leads and helps build customer relationships, it is imperative that you optimize your blog. This article will outline some easy ways you can do that.

Firstly, you have to understand that once you learn how search engine optimization works, you will have no problems optimizing your own blog. If you know how to optimize a website, it’ll be easier, as some of the guidelines are the same. For instance, when optimizing blogs, you have to use the keywords and keyword phrases very often, but always aptly. These keywords should also be included into the titles and the URL. And moreover, it is recommended that you have links to about twenty of your archived posts on the main page of your blog. Ensure that the titles do incorporate your keywords.

The most important constituent of the blog is not just the keywords but also the pertinence and relevance of the content. It is relevant content which is going to draw readers and the search engines. This naturally means that the content of your blog must be interesting, innovative and well-informed. When your readers like your blog and add comments and also links to your blog, this actually helps to improve the search ability of your blog’s content. Your blog’s content should be concentrated on some key issues important to you, and it must be fresh and interesting.

One more thing which is essential for blogs is that its content should be up to date. Just like you don’t want to read backdated news in a newspaper, you don’t want to read old stuff on blogs either. Marketing and advertising experts call this ‘hot content’. It will be pointless if you copy and paste content from popular blogs or websites because the search engines will completely ignore whatever you come up with. And even if your blog does get indexed in the search engines, you will simply get a complaint as your content is actually someone else’s. The means to hot content is originality.

On the blogging page, your content will be arranged in the reverse chronological order, and thus, you just have to have new and original content. The most current post will be placed on top of the page and will be followed by other posts which were made right before this one.

Blogs are wonderful due to their viral nature which allows them to be distributed for free through an Atom, RSS or XML feed which enables readers to subscribe to a blogger’s entries just like they would do for a newsletter or magazine. This channels repeat business to your blog and thus, also raises chances of affiliate marketers picking up and spreading affiliate links inside your blog.

When designing your blog, select two to four colors and one or two fonts and stick to them. The nicest sites are minimalist. If you use too many colors and fonts, your blog will look amateurish and unprofessional. Try and choose colors which match the topic of your blog, such as, grays and blues for blogs of a political, technical or authoritative nature, and pinks and whites for a blog about baby showers and weddings, etc. Your blog will convey a feel of respect and professionalism if your fonts are classic and small. It would be wise for you to choose Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana or Bookman. Short, squat and large fonts will make your blog look less impressive. Plus, you should use fonts which are present on other people’s computers which will enable them to read your page. If their computers can’t read your page, then your site will be put on a default font which might make your blog’s layout go awry and make it look unattractive. The common fonts which computers can read are Arial, Verdana, Times Roman, Times New Roman, Georgia, Palatino and Tahoma. Make your blog’s layout simple to prevent any misalignment on others’ computers.

You should definitely not use the black hat SEO method of making your keywords the same color as a web page. Search engine spiders are aware of this technique and you’ll be penalized for it.

You should try and ask owners of others blogs which complement your blog to link exchange with you. Search engines will promote popular sites and improve their rankings. Thus, when more blogs link to yours, you have higher chances of finding favor with the search engines.

You could use paid advertising to increase traffic to your blog. Some commercial blog service sites could generate traffic for you. You have to turn that into repeat readers who will create extra word-of-mouth traffic for your site.

The most widespread method of popularizing your regular content is through social marketing. Actually, for blogs (and even for websites), social marketing is becoming the de-facto method of link building and a fool proof method to generate enormous amounts of targeted traffic. Above all, social marketing is totally free and you don’t need to spend even a penny.

The most popular social marketing and news sites are Digg, Propeller, Stumble Upon, Newsvine. If your blog is specific to Internet Marketing, then, PlugIM is also an excellent choice.

You may download and read the highly acclaimed free ebook Authority Black Book to learn how to market, monetize and exponentially increase free targeted traffic to blogs.

ShareThis

Related posts

• Utilizing Web 2.0 Sites for Affiliate Marketing (3)
• How to Make a Dynamic Web Page With Comments (0)

Add to Onlywire

Blogs are vital to any business or organization. If you have blogs then you have to also take into consideration the matter of blogs and search engine visibility. Basically what this refers to is how easily Internet users are going to be able to find your blog via a search engine, and because this is such an important issue there are thus a few factors in particular that you have to be aware of.

Keyword Usage

The first thing you have to think about when it comes to blogs and search engine visibility is keyword usage. Basically the more relevant keywords that you use for your internet ad, the more easily people are going to be able to find you. Also keep in mind that people often make spelling mistakes, and so you will want them to be able to find your blog even if they make a spelling error when they are typing out the name.

Another factor to take into consideration in terms of blogs and search engine visibility is how much information you actually post on your blogs, as the more detailed you make them, the more interested people are going to be in finding and looking at them, and thus the better business you are going to have.

Social Networking

It is not only adequate to post articles and other tips in your blog. It is also necessary to make it known to everyone on the internet about your posting and allow them an opportunity to visit your site. This is where social bookmarking comes into play. This is also a part of the Web 2.0 techniques.

I will give below a list of social networking sites where you should submit your posts. But, please ensure that your article is of very good quality and relevant to the social networking site as otherwise your listing will be rejected. If you keep submitting sub-standard or irrelevant information, then you are more likely to get banned.

When you submit your blogs to the various social networking and news sites, search engines will automatically find and index you. You do not have to do any more search engine submissions and waste your money on the SE submission agencies who normally fleece you month upon month.

I follow a thumb rule for posting in my blogs. When I start a new blog, I create one blog post every day for the first 90 days. Then, I post 2 - 3 times a week to that blog for next 90 days. After these six months, I post once or twice every week to that blog.

Every time I post, I submit my blog post URL to at least the following social networking and news sites for a high search engine visibility. With this sort of a strict regimen, you will see your blog reach at least Google PR 2 by the end of 90 days and your blog can reach to Google PR 5 or more by the end of six months. But, as I said earlier, your blog will become popular only if you give excellent quality information to share with your visitors.

I do agree that with this sort of a posting schedule, it does put lot of pressure on your content creation needs. Even though I can write fairly well, content creation used to take away a major chunk of my productive time which I could have better utilized in planning and implementing various marketing and monetization techniques.

So, I outsourced the content creation work. I tried various agencies like PLRPro’s ghost writing service, Elance, etc. but I was not at all satisfied with the quality of ghost writing, their level of commitment as well as the pricing.

Finally, I found out the outsourcing agency, Need-An-Article which I have found to be excellent in every respect. In my experience, I have known them to deliver always on time, high quality articles, committed, very helpful (both the writers as well as support) and above all extremely reasonable pricing. Need-An-Article has a number of high quality writers who are able to handle any niche that I had asked them to write. They not only do ghost writing of original articles but also do article rewrites and Press Releases. Very shortly, they are also starting on:

• Product reviews
• Auto responder follow-up series
• Ebook / mini report creation
• Sales copy including sales pages, landing pages, etc.
• Proof reading of various content

With the extra time in my hand due to content outsourcing, I have seen a highly noticeable spurt in the total revenue generated from my sites because I could implement several improved marketing and monetization techniques.

List of Social Networking and News Sites

OnlyWire is a syndication service which submits your post links to around 18 social bookmarking sites.

Ok…Ok, I can hear you complaining.

“How the hell do you expect us to submit to all these social networking sites. And that too, you are asking us to post and submit on a daily basis. This exercise alone would take us several hours every week.”

Well, folks. Let me tell you one thing. Web publishing and internet marketing business is not easy. It does have excellent revenue potential provided you work towards earning it. It does require lot of dedication, perseverance, hard work and a will to succeed. Like any other business, you need to consider internet marketing as a business and not as a hobby if you want to earn real big money.

Ok, enough with my advice. Let me give you a solution to this daily bookmarking hassle. Jack Humphrey, one of the owners of the reputed Authority Site Center, has brought out an excellent software tool to tackle this bookmarking hassle. The software tool is called Web2Submitter. It automates the process of submissions to social networking and news sites thereby saving you several hours per week. I use Web2Submitter tool all the time. It is a real time saver.

Word of mouth is one of the biggest marketing tools in the world, and so you really want to make sure that your blogs are full of interesting, educating and knowledge sharing information, and then word will travel about this and you will continue to have more and more visitors to your site.

Blogs and search engine visibility is mainly so crucial because the majority of people use search engines to find what they are looking for on the Internet. In fact, 9 out of 10 people use a search engine at least once a day, and so it is easy to see just how many potential customers you are missing out on if you do not have proper blogs and search engine visibility.

Other Factors

If you want to have an effective and successful business there are many other factors that you have to take into consideration as well. For instance, you have to determine what other marketing and selling techniques can be used to help your business. Marketing is the key element to any business, and you need to realize that without proper marketing you simply will not have any customers.

ShareThis

Related posts

• No related posts.

Add to Onlywire

I found a website iWebTool.com which has a number of Webmaster and SEO tools. They have a tool, Google PageRank Prediction Tool, which gives you a fairly good prediction of what your PageRank in the immediate future is going to be.

Check your future Google PageRank here!

Another tool that I liked at iWebTool is the Visual PageRank. The PageRank for each and every link, both internal and external is shown visually. This is, again, another excellent tool.

They have another useful tool, Google Banned Checker. With this tool, you can check whether your domain has been banned by Google.

iWebTool has several more tools up their sleeve. Just to name a few more, they have Backlink Checker, Link Popularity, Rank Checker, .htaccess URL Rewrite, etc.

Please take your time and check this site thoroughly as they have several good things to help with your web publishing.

ShareThis

Related posts

• No related posts.

Add to Onlywire

For getting clarity of what Google’s Supplemental Index is, I will quote Google’s own definition of their new supplemental index.

“A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

If you’re a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn’t affect its Page Rank.”

As per what we have learnt from Google, the supplemental index is used by Google to store pages which are difficult to crawl or are of low quality or the content of those pages are duplicates of existing web pages. GSI is basically a second rate low quality index.

Even though, there are no apparent ways of influencing whether your pages get added to main index or supplemental index, you may take certain precautions which will help you to stay away from GSI. It is believed that the Automatic PLR rewriting software will hasten your chances of getting into the GSI trap.

So why do so many pages end up in Google’s Supplemental Index?

These are the few things that may trigger your page into GSI…

1. Using Duplicate Content (on the same site or externally).
2. The page in question contains the same Title and META tags as other pages on your site.
3. If you have a blog, posting to multiple categories will generate duplicate content.
4. Your site creates crawling problems due to redirects, java script navigation, or simply too many parameters used in the URL or session IDs.
5. Having loads of unrelated external links on one page (just don’t do it!), or not enough internal or external inbound links to add “weight” to the page.
6. Your web page no longer exists, or is orphaned with no internal links pointing to it or buried too deep to be crawled properly.

There are certain steps that you may need to take to avoid your pages getting added to Google’s Supplemental Index…

1. Remove duplicate content from your website and keep your remaining content as fresh and unique as possible.
2. If you’re using PLR content - rewrite at least 30-50% of it.
3. Make sure your domain name appears consistent (i.e. with “www” or without “www”.)
   In this connection, you may refer to this post of mine on Domain Name Switch. It gives you tips on how to make your entire domain consistent with or without “www”.
4. Keep the site structure and navigation system simple.
5. Reduce the length of any URL to an acceptable level and simpler.
6. Increase relevant inbound links and use contextual linking where possible.
7. Use deep-linking (linking to other pages than just your index page), but try to keep within 2-3 levels.
8. Create and submit a Sitemap which will allow Google easy access to all your web pages and ensure that all your pages are indexed regularly and correctly.
9. In your blog, do not post to multiple categories. Each post should be posted to only one relevant category.

The above points, even though not exhaustive, will help you to avoid the GSI tangle.

At Jack Humphrey’s Blog, Friday Traffic Report, Jack has made a post which gives you an excellent solution, albeit lengthy, to avoiding the supplemental results foreover and on auto-pilot. This page of Jack discusses how to check how many of your pages are on the supplemental results and this page gives you a comprehensive solution for the GSI problem.

ShareThis

Related posts

• No related posts.

The most important thing that you need to understand is that search engine algorithms keep changing. My suggestion to you is that never give over emphasis to search engine rankings directly. Because, just when you think you understand what is going to make you the Number One for a search phrase in a search engine, something could change, and you might have to spend months trying to find out the engineering of the algorithm again.

The best way to improve your search engine ranking is to understand what elements are your competitors using that are getting them the higher rank.

There are, actually, three elements that you need to concentrate on:

1. Number and quality of [tag]inbound links[/tag] pointing to your site
2. [tag]Keyword density[/tag]
3. Fresh content

Let us discuss each one of them in greater depth.

1. The first thing to observe from your competitor’s sites is the number and quality of their [tag]in-pointing links[/tag]. This means the number of sites that have a link pointing to their website. You can easily measure it by going to [tag]Google[/tag] and type: “link:http://www.YOURCOMPETITORSITE.com” (without the quotes). You need to repeat this on Yahoo and MSN as well, as they are much more accurate in measuring the back link index.

Your observation should not only include what the links say, but where the links are coming from. Observe the quality of the sites that are pointing their links at your competitors sites. Which categories are covered? If you start to see a recurring pattern, you should start actively searching for links coming from that category.

Out of desperation to get better search engine ranking fast, do not use special software for robotic [tag]content creation[/tag]. This will result in quick demise of your site sooner than later. Some marketers will encourage you to do it saying that they generate thousands of pages with links pointing to their sites. This practice can be very dangerous, as Google may penalize unnatural linking or violations of their terms of service. The growth of both the website as well as linking should look natural and organic. Hence, this sort of robotic content creation will not seem natural to the [tag]search engines[/tag].

If you understand how to observe, this will never happen to you. You will learn how to look at your competitors, and observe how they are getting linked to.

In fact, I will suggest a very good website that will help you to grow reciprocal linking in a very organic fashion. Their website is called Link Metro. They do have Free Membership but if you opt for an Advanced Membership for a nominal monthly fee, then the linking process is pretty much automated with very limited manual intervention.

2. Secondly, you need to observe the keyword density of your competitors. How many times should we repeat our main keyword? In which part of the web page should our main keywords be mentioned? We need to observe and measure the following parameters:
• Meta tags
• Alt tags
• Titles and Sub-Titles
• Names of the images on the page
• Titles Tags, i.e., H1, H2, H3…
• Frequency and position of the keywords on the body text
• and, so on …

Each one of these items should be measured independently. There are tools to run keyword density against your competitors. If you run them against the top 3 or 5 sites, you may start to understand the secrets of top rankings.

Again, your keyword density needs to look natural; otherwise you may fail due to over optimization. This may happen when you use keywords too often or too early. If you look unnatural, your page ranks will suffer as a result.

The key to success is to understand what Google likes about their top 5 pages, and to apply this to your own website promotion.

In fact, there are two softwares that I like the most when it comes to optimizing your website for Search Engine Ranking. I would have loved if there had been a single software with all the features combined from these two softwares, but I have so far not found any such softwares. The softwares that I am referring to are:

• SEO Elite
• Internet Business Promoter (IBP)

In IBP, apart from the [tag]Search Engine Optimization[/tag] module, [tag]Search Engine Submission[/tag] and [tag]Link Management[/tag] modules are also integrated. I use IBP for SEO as well as SE submission but when it comes to Link Management, I still use the Advanced Membership of Link Metro as I find it to be a much better option for Link Management.

3. The last thing to observe is how much fresh content do the top sites have. If they have many articles and they are continuously adding new content to their sites, then it is clear that the search engines like content and are ranking better those sites which have more and more updated information.

With regards to fresh content which contains timely and useful information, we do not need to compare with any other competitor’s sites. It is proven beyond doubt that if you give your visitors good quality relevant content which is dynamic, then the search engines will love your site.

If you have problem creating content, then use Private Label Rights articles to add content to your site. There are a few very good [tag]PLR membership sites[/tag] that I would like to mention here for your benefit. Ideally, you should be a member of around 4 or 5 good PLR Sites. This will help you with a regular supply of good quality content for your various websites on different niches. The only problem with good PLR sites is that they allow only a limited membership. If some of the following PLR membership sites are offering any membership now then you should just grab the offer.

1. PLRights - They give two excellent [tag]niche PLR products[/tag] every month. These include ebooks, audio, pre-built websites, articles, sales and thank you pages, etc.
2. Info Go Round - This is the cheapest of all the PLR sites that I am a member but I would still say that it is the best. Here, you not only get niche article packs every month totalling around 300 - 350 articles but they also have a database of 1000’s of PLR articles from where you can download content as and when you require them. Also, they have Instant Niche Site Builder and Instant Newsletter Generator. Above all else, you can also become an article publisher with them and get paid for writing articles and get your PLR membership practically free.
3. PLR Pro - This again is an excellent PLR article site. They give you 11 niches with 40 Articles per niche every month. And, all of them are keyword optimized and very well written.
4. Article Underground - Every month, you receive 400 keyword optimized very well written articles on different niches.

People that surf the web are usually searching for information, so content fuels internet traffic. If you want to attract many potential customers to your site, then you need to make sure that you provide enough content which is relevant to their interests and at the same time it is of best quality.

If you can concentrate on the above three parameters, you are sure to get a good search engine ranking.

ShareThis

Related posts

• No related posts.