White Hat Blogging in Black and White and Now Muted Colors

Increase Web Traffic – SEO Optimization

March 18, 2010 by Wilson Tan  

Filed under SEO

Churning out good quality content is important to increase web traffic but that is not all. You will also need to optimize your each and every blog post with search engine keywords which is what I have done for the whole of today. I went through all my blog entries starting from the first, optimizing all of them with search engine keywords. It is a very tedious process. Imagine you have a blog that is not SEO optimized and you have hundreds of entries.

This is one thing I would suggest new bloggers to do. Optimize your blog early on so that you do not have to go through every single one. Go over to Google to search for this plugin called All in one SEO pack to download this useful Wordpress plugins if you are a Wordpress user. Upload this plugin into your plugins directory and activate it. When you start on a new post, you will be able to see it below. Click on the + sign to expand it.

Enter your title which must contain your search engine keywords. Do not enter more than 5 keywords into the keyword field. It will finally appear in the meta tags which will be read by the web spider.

Scatter your search engine keywords in your title, first paragraph and last paragraph. Do not overuse your keywords by repeating it many times or the web spider will think that you are keyword spamming. Keep it to 4 of the same keywords or less than 5% of the whole article.

After you have done all that, copy a small section of your blog entry that contains your keywords into the description. You are now ready to publish it. It will take a while for the Google to index your blog but it’s good for long term web traffic.

Author: Wilson Tan
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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WordPress – Before The Blog

March 18, 2010 by Cathy Perkins  

Filed under SEO

What do you want your blog to accomplish? Hint, hint, the answer is not to make money (well, ultimately, it is), but before you can make money, you have to decide on many things. The first one is: What do you want your blog to accomplish? Why are you getting a presence on the web? Or, why do you already have a presence on the web? What is yourpurpose? And, what do you want the purpose of your blog to be? These may seem like some tough questions as we go along, but they’re really critical (critical to your success). So we are going to talk in depth about a lot of these things.

Next is: What is the title of your blog? The title is what will appear in the browser bar when people are on your site. You want to use keywords in your title because the title can either help or hurt your SEO and the effect of how people see you. It’s really critical for people and for your SEO that you get the title right.

Now you need to write a brief Elevator Speech for your blog. Do you all know what an elevator speech is? It’s what you can say about yourself in the amount of time that it takes an elevator to go wherever an elevator is going. You need this for your blog too, because it’s going to go in the meta tag of your blog for SEO purposes (SEO – Search Engine Optimization). So, people in your blog won’t actually see this description, but Google, Yahoo, MSN, whatever search engines are spidering your blog will see it. This description is what will appear when you are indexed and you get listed as a search result. If you have ever searched for anything (and I’m sure you have) on Google, then you know that the title comes up and then underneath that title there is a little, not quite paragraph, but several lines of text about the title. This is where your description will appear, so make it good, make it so that people will want to click on the title of the result and go to your blog to read it. Don’t just say, This blog is about… Say what your purpose really is.

Author: Cathy Perkins
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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Blogging and SEO – A Perfect Small Business Internet Marketer Match

March 18, 2010 by Aubrey Jones  

Filed under SEO

It has become pretty obvious that blogs have been become an important part of marketing for almost any type of online business. They are unmatched resources when it comes to connecting with customers and potential customers.

But, there is an additional benefit that shouldn’t be over-looked: there impact on your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Blogging can greatly enhance any websites natural search results through regular postings, and natural keyword placement. There in fact is no stronger way to market ones website for free than by blogging with natural keywords.

Similar to article marketing, posting daily blogs with the keywords of your business included can have remarkable effects on the ranking of your site in any given search engine, and thus net you more traffic. One key to gaining more traffic from keywords is to use ‘niche’ keywords. These are keywords or keyword phrases that may be searched for less often, but that have less competition. This means you may be able to rank much higher for these keyword. An example: The keyword term “baseball” is certainly searched for often, but there are millions of websites optimized around this keyword. However a keyword phrase like “Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz news” would have fewer competitors. The longer keyword also increases the likelihood that your blog contains exactly what the visitor is looking for.

Getting picked up in search engines can lead to increase volumes of traffic heading to your site every day. There are top keyword placers that use blogs to retain huge amounts of daily traffic to their sites just by integrating a variety of niche keywords into their posts. The amazing thing about blogs is they are often picked up by the search engines almost as quickly as one posts to it, which makes it an even more powerful tool for SEO purposes. Our experience has been that blogs that take advantage of Google’s Blogger or Wordpress are quickly indexed.

Another way blogging can help your site’s search engine ranking is by the quality score. Most search engines, including Google rank sites with a quality score, the more unique, user provided content, the higher it appears the quality score becomes. If a website is just a sales page, and a few pictures, the quality score will most likely be low. But if a site has a blog on it, with fresh, daily posts, the quality score becomes much better, and thus the site gets ranked much higher when people are searching for your niche, or keyword terms.

If you haven’t considered a blog for the pure marketing aspect of it, it’s probably time you considered it from the SEO perspective. You’ve got nothing to loss but website visitors.

Author: Aubrey Jones
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Canada duty

Article Marketing with WordPress Blogs

March 18, 2010 by Charity Adams  

Filed under SEO

Wikipedia defines WordPress as a web publishing system (a.k.a. content management system) written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. WordPress is used to manage frequently-updated Web content, especially Weblogs. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License and is available free of charge.

If you are freaked out by the technical jargon don’t be. If you have your own web hosting account with mysql access you can easily install the software on your server or have a php programmer install it.

The software is free and can be accessed at http://wordpress.org The benefits of have the software hosted on your server include link popularity. Because you will be promoting a blog with a link back to your original domain you will get backlinks. The downside is managing the software on your hosting account which can cause added stress and take some time to maintain.

If you are not at all technical you can sign up with several free wordpress hosting services like http://freedesktopads.com that will host the software on their server. All you need to do is log in with a username and password to use the service. You will not receive backlinks to your direct domain but you will create backlinks to the blog you are working on. One other issue is the host can pull the plug on your blog at any time so be sure to have some back up of the material at least if you are forced to move.

Blogs can target specific keywords for Search Engine Optimization just as traditional web pages can. The benefit of article marketing versus a web page is content pure and simple. The blog is an ongoing listing of your articles one right after the other. If your blog is full of articles on one particular niche you are likely to use the same keywords throughout various articles. Your blog will be full of good information with keywords scattered through it appropriately instead of concentrated for SEO benefit.

Your blog can all be distributed through RSS feeds. Think of an RSS feed like an email list. If you have a number of people who find your blog worth while they will add it to their feed service. When your blog gets updated your RSS feed will send it out to your subscribers. How cool would it be to have your blog feed to thousands of RSS feeders and all you need to do is add content.

Word press makes it really easy to tag your blog. Tagging a blog means that your keywords are tagged and picked up by popular pinging services like technoratti. A tagged blog is more readily available for users searching for your particular content. Tagging a wordpress blog is extremely simple. Create categories based on your keywords. When you publish your articles on your blogs select the specific categories that related to your articles. As you create more keyword rich content create more categories. You will see a solid spike in traffic based on tagging alone.

Get instant traffic to your blog with a pinging service. Pinging is the act of letting other content sites know you have new information on your blog. Services suc as Pingoat [http://pingoat.com] ping several services with one click. Every time you update your blog use the ping service. Pingoat pings top notch services like technorati. You can also submit your blog to hundreds of blog directories like http://www.blogcatalog.com

Blogs are beneficial because they are easy to update, they can keyword rich and are easily announced to the world. The content should be kept fresh and up to date to keep people coming back for more. Use your blog to direct traffic to other sites, monetize it with Google Adsense or Clickbank products.

Author: Charity Adams
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Excise Tax

Market Samurai – The Ultimate SEO and Keyword Analysis Tool

March 18, 2010 by Jan Pascal  

Filed under SEO

Search engine optimization starts with keyword analysis. Keyword analysis means finding search phrases with high volume search and low competition. Competition evaluation is a difficult task. You need to check many parameters for top ranking websites in order to estimate their “strength”. All the operations can be done manually–with tools freely available on the web. A much better solution is to use specialized tools like Market Samurai. This is a dedicated keyword research and SEO tool with modular design.

Market Samurai modules include Keyword Research, SEO analysis, Rank Tracker, Promotion, Monetization, Publish Content, Find Content and AdWords.

Monetization
With this module you can search for affiliate programs like Amazon, ClickBank, Commission Junction andPayDot.com, and you can also generate code for AdSense ads.

Find Content
This tool is useful to find articles, blogs, pictures, videos and news about specific keyword. Each found page can be opened in an internal browser where you can read or copy content. For each page you can check PageRank, number of links and keyword frequency.

Publish Content
This module can publish articles to WordPress or WordPress Direct blogs.

Promotion
This tool finds website promotion opportunities. You can search for Web 2.0 sites (Squidoo, HubPages), blogs and forums. For each found website you can check PageRank, nofollow attribute, pingback and trackback support. You can open pages in internal browser where you can post messages in blogs or forums. With this module you can easily find blogs and forums with high PageRank and do follow links.

Rank Tracker
This is a state-of-the-art tool to track ranking of individual pages or domains. You can check all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) down to 1000 results. You can also add individual urls and keywords. Each time you perform checking the data is saved for later comparison. This way you can monitor how ranking, PageRank and the number of backlinks changes over time.

Keyword Research
Another state-of-the-art tool. This module is probably one of the best keyword/search phrase research tools on the market. You start with a seed keyword for which Market Samurai generates synonyms and related keywords. This list is then analyzed with more than twenty parameters. With some fine tuning you can quickly generate a list of search phrases that match your criteria.

SEO Competition
This tool analyzes top 10 websites for specific keyword. For each page you get domain age, PageRank, number of backlinks, indication of keyword presence in title, meta description, header tags and URL, presence of the website in Yahoo and DMOZ directories, number of indexed pages and the age of cache in Google search engine. With all those parameters you are able to estimate the competition and make a decision if this keyword is tough or not.

Author: Jan Pascal
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Import duty tariff

Blogging For Profit – How to Make Money From Blogs

March 18, 2010 by Carol Debra Oon  

Filed under Blogging Basics

Blogging for profit is one of the most compelling reasons to operate a blog, and if you know how to make money from blogs, then it can be a very good source of income. Most bloggers monetize their blogs with Google AdSense: allowing Google to place adverts on their blog in return for a small payment every time somebody clicks on an advert.

Do you know the drawback to that? What happens when a visitor to YOUR blog clicks on ANOTHER’s advert? Yes, you got it – they leave your blog and end up on the other person’s website. Google do not allow their adverts to be opened in a new window, so your visitors have gone. Before we look at how to overcome that problem let’s have a look at blogs, and what benefits they offer you and your visitors.

What is that most people use the internet for? No, it’s not to play games or listen to music; it’s actually to find information. The vast majority of internet users are seeking information: sports results, latest news, how clocks work, how to train dogs, cheapest prices for what they want to buy, how to run their own blogs and websites, how to make money from blogs and websites: all information.

Blogs are ideal for that. Blogs not only provide content, but they also provide fresh content. They are constantly being updated with new content, unlike regular websites that tend to remain unchanged for lengthy periods of time. That is why search engines love blogs, and tend to list them higher than web pages. However, the main benefit of a blog to you is not how the search engines view it, but how your visitors see it. They love blogs because:

1. Readers feel catered for rather than just being regarded as potential customers.

2. They have a more ‘human’ feel to them than regular websites.

3. They can contribute by making comments

4. If they want to keep up with your blog they can subscribe using an RSS feed: make sure you provide them with one on your blog. If you don’t know how, your blog host will help you out. It is very easy. Your readers can also easily unsubscribe, which makes them feel less ‘put upon’ or committed.

Blogs tend to attract more regular visitors than websites. The vast majority of visitors to websites leave and never return, but blog visitors can return time and time again. There is a downside to that though: blog readers have less of an inclination to register with opt-in forms, likely because they know they are going to be visiting the blog in any case, so why fill in a form for information? You just have to make your promotions using your blog, and if you can get it right, then you will find that blogging for profit is easy. It is actually easier to learn how to make money from blogs than from a website.

Not only that, but a regular blog visitor is of significantly higher quality than a website visitor. They comment on your blog, and how you can improve it. They also suggest it to their favorite social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us, and talk about it on their social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. You therefore get a lot of links back to your blog plus a great deal of credibility and new traffic.

So, back to AdSense and losing your visitors. There are better ways than AdSense to make money from your blog. In using these, however, don’t get too blatantly mercenary. You can lose your readership if your blog becomes too commercial, but there are ways to overcome that. Here are some suggestions:

a) Offer affiliate products that might interest your readers. The best way is to offer them a free product, and when they click to download it offer them an affiliate product as a back-end ‘One Time Offer’ before they download the free ebook or software. You can get loads of free products to offer if you join a Private Label Resale site – Google it and find a whole load of products that you can rebrand as your own, and Clickbank offers the biggest selection of affiliate products online.

b) Offer your own eBook, CD or DVD. Make a video about how to change a car tire, spark plugs and other simple car maintenance tasks and sell it to women as ‘Essential Car Maintenance Tasks for Women’. If your blog covers a specific niche do something similar relating to your niche.

c) Carry out promotions for your products, or those of others (for a return of course!).

d) Sprinkle a few text links around your blog, leading to products, reports, recommendations and so on, all relating to the theme of your blog. Write your own report and sell it for $5 – keep it cheap and they will think you are offering them a bargain.

So that’s how to make money from blogs. Blogging for profit is a pastime rather than an occupation, and if you have a website or two, you can promote it from your blog. That will not seem commercial to visitors – even those that dislike commercial blogs. Don’t send them to your sales or squeeze page, but to a good content page, at the end of which you offer a product that relates to your article or review.

There are many ways to make money from blogs – all it takes is a bit of imagination and ingenuity, and you will find blogging for profit a breeze.

So, what are you waiting for? Go and blog your favorite stuff! :)

Author: Carol Debra Oon
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Creditcard Currency Conversion Fee

What Type of Blog is Right For You?

March 18, 2010 by Tom Canyon  

Filed under Blogging Basics

Because blogs originally started as online journals, many people still believe there is only one type of blog, the personal blog. That belief was overtaken by events long ago. Today, there are many types of blogs and bloggers in the blogging world (or blogosphere).

When you are starting your own blog, it’s important to consider what type of blog you desire. This will affect your choice of a blogging service or program and even the content you create.

Personal Blog or Online Journal

This is a blog on which you post your thoughts and opinions for others — perhaps for the entire world, or maybe just for your friends. You may desire a full-blown blog solution, such as WordPress or Typepad. However, many personal blogging solutions today are inexpensive and easy to start up. You can set up a simple blog on Tumblelog to see how you enjoy blogging. Or, you can add a blog to your individual page on MySpace or Facebook. With Facebook, for example, you can control who can view your blog, and trick it out with many free and fun widgets. Personal bloggers today are moving into blogging on the go from their cellphones using the Twitter “micro-blogging” service.

Blog to Enhance Your Professional Reputation or Business

Blogging is a great way to position yourself as an expert and enhance your professional reputation. If you are blogging for a business, you can raise your business’s profile and use blogging as a simple way to communicate with your prospects. You even use a blog as a way to pass along simple customer support information.

For example, Google engineer Matt Cutts operates a well-known blog that gives public insights into Google’s services and policies. Yahoo operates a blog (ymailupdates.com/blog/) that gives useful customer service updates.

Business bloggers will want a professional appearance. WordPress (.org) and Typepad are both popular solutions, with many templates available, and many designers who can adapt a template or craft a custom design to give highly customized look. Both of these solutions also include features to enable bloggers to syndicate (i.e., distribute) their content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) data feeds and to write postings to be published later at set time. For extra convenience and speed, both solutions permit blog posting just by sending an email. Typepad is an easy solution to set up, with a very professional look.

Blog for Traffic

Some bloggers desire the internet traffic that a blog can create. Many search engine optimization (SEO) experts believe that blogs are an excellent way to generate web traffic, because frequent blog postings will attract the attention of search engines such as Google and Yahoo, who will spider or crawl the blog often, and give favorable search results positioning to the blog content. One such blogger is Rosalind Gardner, an author and columnist on affiliate marketing, who blogs in order to bring web traffic to her web sites. WordPress.org and Typepad are popular solutions for them, but WordPress.org is the leader because it provides more search engine optimization capabilities.

Blog for Money

Blogging directly for money is the most difficult approach. It requires a large amount of traffic for success. Although smaller bloggers try to get by using Google AdSense alone, many of the most successful bloggers combine several methods of making money on one blog. Noted blogger John Chow uses at least eight methods. Likewise, Darren Rowse, who writes about how to make money by blogging on ProBlogger.net, uses a combination of income sources, including affiliate programs (such as Amazon Associates), private advertising sales, and several — not just one — ad networks (including Google AdSense, Chitika and Text-Link-Ads). Consultant and coach Yaro Starak supplements his blogging with traditional email list marketing.

Bloggers for money need robust blogging solutions that can be highly customized and search engine optimized. Many of them use WordPress.org due to its flexibility.

Blog as the Starting Point for an Emerging Media Company

Blogs with the highest levels of traffic are emerging as media companies in their own right. They may have more visitors and readers than traditional mainstream media. BoingBoing and TechCrunch are consistently leaders in Technorati’s index of top blogs. Political blogs such as Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Instapundit have large exposure and influence. Nick Denton’s Gawker Media has assembled a network of over 10 blogs, including Gawker, Gizmodo and Lifehacker. The emerging media blogs generally rely on a team of bloggers to post several times a day on a single blog, or even several blogs. They also have more sophisticated advertising sales, and are run like true media businesses. It is not too late for new bloggers to start small and hope to grow to this ultra-elite level.

Author: Tom Canyon
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Benefits of electric pressure cooker

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