It is important for a brand new blog to start getting traffic as soon as possible. Traffic brings more traffic. So the earlier you can start driving traffic to your blog, the better it is. After defining the purpose of your blog, setting your goals for it and modelling after other successful blogs, now it is time to set up your blog so it is ‘traffic-friendly’.

There are a few ways to make your blog traffic-friendly. There are two parts to this.

Part 1: Make it easy for your target market to find out about and come to your blog.

Part 2: Make it easy for them to stay and revisit your blog.

To make it easy for your target market to find out about your new blog, it is important for you to know what your target market wants. Assuming you already know your target market and what they want, then you must set up your blog to provide them with what they want. Write articles that solve their problems, fulfil their needs and desires. The golden rule is: ‘Give them more of what they want.’

On top of writing articles that are beneficial to them, you also need to make your blog search engine friendly by doing some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies. One simple and highly effective SEO strategy is to ensure that your article postings contain the keywords that are highly searched by your target market. For example, if your target market is looking for a cure for back pain, then you need to write articles that contain the keywords ‘cure for back pain’ or ‘back pain cure’ or something along those lines. You need to include the keywords to the following elements to make your blog optimized:

- Title of the article / post

- The first paragraph of your of article / post

- The body of the article (include the keywords a few times in a natural way, but do not overdo it! About 3-6 times in a 500 – 600 words article should be good.)

- The keyword tags

- Webpage meta-data: Webpage title & description

By doing the above, you will make your articles/posts highly optimized for search engines to find them easily. This also means that your target market will find them easily and arrive at your blog.

Once they arrive at your blog, you want them to stay at your blog as long as they can, and return to your blog often. The more they return to your blog, the more loyal they become. And when they are happy with what they find on your blog, they will refer others and drive traffic to your blog. That is why it is important to model after successful blogs because you can learn where they place certain elements of their blogs to make their blogs more ’sticky’.

Luckily there are plugins that can help you make your blog more reader-friendly and sticky. There are literally thousands of different plugins available for free. You can find most of the plugins at http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins. Here are some of the plugins that will be useful for you:

- Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to prevent spam from getting into your comment box.

- Feedburner FeedSmith: Detects all ways to access your original WordPress RSS feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every subscriber.

- Get Recent Comments: Displays the most recent comments or trackbacks in the sidebar. This encourages interaction with your readers.

- Google XML sitemaps: It will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. This makes your blog search engine friendly.

- Headspace2: Meta-data manager, allowing complete control over meta-data such as keywords/tags, title, description, stylesheets, and other goodies. This makes your blog search engine friendly.

- Optimal title: This makes your blog page search engine friendly.

- Popularity contest: This plugin shows your readers the most popular posts on your blog. This encourages interaction with your readers.

- Related Posts: Shows a list of related posts based on active/passive keyword matches. Encourages readers to stay longer on your blog.

- Sociable: Automatically adds links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites, also making it easy for readers to subscribe to your blog.

- Subscribe to comments: Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Encourages interaction and frequent re-visits.

- Ultimate Tag Warrior: For easy tagging and makes your blog search engine friendly.

- Wordpress.com stats: To keep track of the stats of your blog.

Once you have these plugins in place, they will help to make your blog more reader-friendly. However, ultimately, it is still the content that will bring people in and keep them coming back for more. Imagine arriving to blog that has only one article or a blog that offers nothing useful to you, would you return again? Of course not. So before you start to drive massive traffic to your blog (which I’ll discuss in the next part of this series) you need to ensure that there are some good content in your blog.

To be continued in part 3.

Author: Sant Qiu
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Latest trends in mobile phone

However it can still be improved further to get higher rankings in search engines. Here are 5 simple yet important SEO tips.

1. Use Friendly Permalink Structure

There are some debate which permalink structure is the best for SEO. Whichever you choose you must include the title of the post within the URL. It is no point in creating keyword rich titles if they don’t actually show up in the URL.

2. Create Keyword Rich Post Titles

The 2nd tip is to create keyword rich post titles for every post. The keywords must be relating to the content that you have written. It is important that you make the title interesting to attract people clicking on it.

3. Optimize Meta Description Tag

Meta description is a very important tag in SEO. It allows you to control the description showing in the search engine result pages. You can put in your keywords to strengthen SEO effects. Besides, writing interesting meta description can help potential readers to click on your link.

4. Generate XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps is essential for search engines to know how many content in your blog. It doesn’t help your search engine rankings but it helps search engines to index your web pages.

5. Optimize Your Post Content

The last tip is to write content with optimization in mind. You should repeat a few times the keyword you are targeting in various places in your post.

Author: Bey Luen Chung
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Credit card currency-exchange fees

ALT Tag

Often overlooked but incredibly important, the ALT tag helps tell search engines and visually impaired users the purpose of an image. It’s a great chance to add some important keywords to your code, but keep it sensible. Remember the golden rule of SEO; never make a website for a search engine, make it for your users. Spammed out alt tags will only harm your optimisation, keep it below 4 words and make sure it makes logical sense.

alt=”" src=”../images/logo.gif” />alt=”Something Logical” />

B

Bold Tag?

Never B always STRONG

and (bold and italics) are used purely for visual effect and mean nothing to search engines, where as and are semantics to add emphasis. Google will see something in a tag as more important than something in a tag. However, like everything in SEO it has to be used within reason, making your entire content bold will not help your rankings. The less times you use the tag on a page the more importance the one or two keywords wrapped in a strong tag will have.

C

Cache

This refers to a copy of a website stored on a search engine. Google as well as other search engines will let you view their current cache of a website via a link in their listings. It is important to stay on top of when your site was last cached, changes you make to your site will not get picked up on until the search engine includes them in their cache index.

D

Demographics

“Lenin said that people vote with their feet. Well, that’s what’s happening. They either go, or they don’t go. It’s all politics. It’s all demographics.” – Warren Beatty

Demographics is crucial in any form of marketing, understanding your potential market, their ages, sex, race, income, location etc will help you lead a successful marketing campaign and will result in a higher conversion rate. Adwords and Adcenter, allow you to target PPC ads at searchers who fit amongst a specific demographic, doing this correctly can make the difference between a good PPC campaign and a highly profitable PPC campaign.

E

Everflux

Major search engine indexes are continually updating and refreshing, Google coined this process ‘everflux’. Previous to this Google would update their index roughly one a month and this was referred to as a ‘Google Dance’.

F

Fresh Content

Some SEO firms see adding fresh content as simply updating a page once and again, if your a webmaster and you really want to rank highly in the search engines you will need a consistent flow of original high quality content. Firstly it builds the size of your site and secondly it shows the search engines your content is fresh and that people will want to read it. Low quality, short and unoriginal content will not help and will only jeopardise your rankings.

G

Google

Google truly is the key player in the search engine world, it has revolutionised the internet and how people use it. Google started as a brainchild of two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998.

Now it has ventured into marketing, the browser wars, phones and online software development.

H

Headings

Where’s your heading at? Use headings accurately to structure your content, improve readability and transmit your site’s message. Make sure you get your important phrases in, but don’t start cramming. Analyse the importance of each phrase and fit with the appropriate heading,

H1 being the most important and H6 being the least. You don’t need to use all 6 on one page, just as many as you wish, also try and keep them in order so H1 first and H2 second. Using more than one H1 will take away from the importance of the tag, so only use it once or twice and make sure it is well written. I

Internal Linking

This refers to the process of linking to other pages on the same site, it can help users navigate the site and enable search engines to quickly find and crawl pages, which may otherwise not be linked in the navigation or footer. However, this is commonly misunderstood and a lot of SEO companies see the need to link each of their keywords, this isn’t necessary and it will only water down the importance of other links on the page and confuse your users.

J

Javascript

Javascript is a client side scripting language, which is embedded into HTML to add more dynamic features to a website. Although Javascript itself isn’t indexed by search engines the HTML it controls is. So with the rise of javascript libraries including jQuery and Mootools, web developers are now able to add more interactivity and animation to their sites without using Flash.

K

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

* Why have you chosen them?

* Are they relevant?

* How many people are competing for them?

* How many people are searching for them?

* How much is your competition spending on them?

Just a few questions you really need to be asking yourself at the start of your optimisation campaign. We have attached a few helpful links below to help you on your way to prosperous keyword research.

L

Link Building

Link building, when performed correctly is the process of gathering high quality links from around the web, which in hand show to the search engines that the site being optimised is authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy.

A few tips to get you on your way..

* Build high quality content, get high quality links.

* Be creative with your link building, think of new ways to gain high quality links, competitions, social bookmarking, april fools etc.

* More links doesn’t mean better links; it’s all about quality, not quantity!

* This is especially true for a new site, you need to ensure your first set of links are from high quality sites, if you plan on getting to page one anytime soon.

* Dmoz, although this has became a highly debatable subject in SEO over the last 6 months, Dmoz is still very much link worthy and authoritative.

* Never, ever, EVER use directory submission software or companies.

There are many more examples and we aim to cover this subject in much more detail in a new post during our SEO season. M

Meta Tags

Meta tags appear in the section of an html document and were a way of helping search engines analyse the content of your site.

Some of the Meta Tags include:

* Meta Description

* Meta Keywords

* Meta Distribution

* Meta Author

* Meta Language

All but the first (meta description) are not worth the time they take to implement into a site. Meta tags are no longer seen as a worthwhile SEO technique and will make no difference to your rankings. We have a slightly controversial view on these, however from experience we can honestly say that only the Meta description tag can help an optimisation campaign. And that is purely to do with the fact that it appears in your listing under your title in the major search engines. Use it to gain searcher’s attention and give them a reason to click through, mention your special offers, pricing, services etc.

N

NoFollow

Nofollow is a link attribute used to prevent a link from passing any link authority (PageRank, age etc) and is commonly used on user generated sites, such as blogs and forums. It was introduced by Google as a way to cut down on blog comment spamming. However, some blogs chose to remove this attribute and chose to reward their reader with a link back if they take the time to comment, this referred to a ‘DoFollow’.

The nofollow link attribute looks like this:

rel=”nofollow”

O

Organic Search Results

Most major search engine listings comprise of paid ads and unpaid listings. The unpaid listings are formed using the search engine’s algorithm and are called the organic search results. The organic search listings are selected by relevancy, link data, domain name and arguably age. Typically these are more popular than paid ads, hence why they appear on the left hand side and have more space compared to the paid adverts. Users also tend to see them as a more reliable and relevant source, meaning they have a higher click through rate. However, to appear on page one in the organic search results you will either need a high understanding SEO or a reliable firm.

P

PageRank

PageRank is Google’s attempted scale at measuring a web documents importance based on its link capital.

Google describing PageRank

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.”

The PageRank formula is:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

* PR= PageRank

* d= dampening factor (~0.85)

* c = number of links on the page

PR(T1)/C(T1) = PageRank of page 1 divided by the total number of links on page 1, (transferred PageRank) For any given page A the PageRank PR(A) is equal to the sum of the parsed partial PageRank given from each page pointing at it times by the dampening factor plus one minus the dampening factor.

A variation of Google’s PageRank appears in their toolbar, this is often referred to as ‘Toolbar PageRank’ and ranges from 1 to 10 (10 being the best), Google has yet to disclose any kind of precise info of how they determine a Toolbar PageRank value, it also updates periodically, on average once every 3 months.

Q

Quality Links

These are the links you need to be aiming to achieve to start ranking in the search engines.

A trusted link can be broken down into the following categories.

* Relevance – The more relevant the link the more power it has, if you were optimising a veterinary website, links from internet marketing sites wouldn’t carry as much strength as links from somewhere like the RSPCA or another veterinary clinic.

* Trusted source – Authoritative links are the best kind of links. If you can build links from government or educational site you will have your foot in the door. However, this is no easy task, the best way to gain these kind of links is to be creative and think on your feet. See if your local council has any kind of local business directory.

* Age – Search engines tend to trust links from well-established sites over new websites.

* Amount of Links – The harder it is to gain a link the more value that link will carry and the less likely that your competitors will be able to get a link off of the same site. Take into account the amount of external links on that page, that’s one of the best ways to judge the strength of a link.

R

Reciprocal Links

This is where websites agree to trade links with one another to try and build a false authority. They made also use 3 way linking or other low quality link building schemes to try and trick the search engines. Overall this kind of link building is not recommended especially if the site you are trading links with isn’t relevant to your industry. Google will pick up on the fact that it is reciprocal and mark the link as a low quality link. However, It is worth considering developing a resources page where you can list useful websites and in case an opportunity comes along to trade with an authoritative and relevant website, you will have somewhere to place their link without spamming your homepage or any other important pages.

S

SERP

This is one of the SEO top buzzwords, SERP simply means Search Engine Ranking Position and refers to where your site is currently positioned in a search engine. You will hear this thrown around a lot in the SEO playground and you don’t want to look like the dumb kid, pretending to know what it means. It can be used in the following contexts.

“I’m not sure what happened to my SERP’s after I used that directory submission service, I have fallen 10 pages.”

T

Title Tag

Experts agree, us included, that this is the most heavily weighed piece of on-site optimisation.

Here are some points to help you on the way to writing a search engine and user friendly title for each page.

* Uniqueness – Each page title needs to unique for that page, do not have the same title for any two pages.

* Length – Try to keep it below 70 characters, anything over that will not only look messy but it will also get ignored by the search engines.

* Logical and Descriptive – Sum up your site and try to get your most important keywords in, however DO NOT spam this, it appears in the search engine listings and something like ‘web design, website design, web optimisation, search engine optimisation, SJL’ will not only get ranked lowly by Google it will also lower your click-through rate. We would recommend something along the lines of ‘Web Design & Search Engine Optimisation Specialists | SJL Web Design’.

U Usability

You may think usability and SEO are two completely different things, but getting visitors to your sites is only half the battle, the other half is getting those conversions. If your site is complicated and your users can’t find their way around, the whole point of optimising will become useless, because they will just leave and you will have a rocket high bounce rate.

So take into account the usability of your site, ask people who have never used it before just to browse it in front of you, watch them carefully, but try not to put them off. See if they become confused and take notes on where they experience problems and what could be done to improve them. If they can’t find things like a link to your contact page in less than 10 seconds your site may be losing you potential enquiries.

V

Viral Marketing

Apart from sounding like some kind of allergic reaction to a bad marketing campaign, viral marketing is an effective way of promoting your brand identity and increasing visitors to your website. Channels for viral marketing include emails, youtube and simply enough word of mouth.

W

Wordpress

Wordpress is a popular blogging platform created by Matt Mullenweg in 2003. Installing and maintaining a blog is great way to build a transparency for your business and forms a basis for trust between client and company. It also helps by adding a source of fresh content, which will help your site improve in the search engines. Wordpress is easy to manage and with the abundant amount plugins and templates available it is highly recommended by us at SJL.

X

XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language)

XHTML is a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to the XML syntax. XHTML along with CSS has dramatically changed the way we build websites, if you are serious about appearing high in the search engines it is worth taking the time to get the coding right, even if it means hiring someone to do it for you. It may be tempting just to drop into tables or even just use the slice tool on photoshop or fireworks, however this is becoming increasingly outdated and you will have to do twice the work to get anywhere in the search engines.

Y

Yahoo!

We saw yahoo rise to fame during the dot-com bubble of the early 00’s. It was formed by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994, who were also Stanford University students like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. During the last 7 years we have seen Yahoo fall behind Google as the world’s most favorite search engine. Nowadays, Yahoo is heavily in the shadows of Google and its fate has been hanging in the balance throughout 2008, with multiple failed acquisition attempts by Microsoft.

Z

Zeitgeist

Well sorry, I guess. This is the best we could come up with; Z isn’t one of the easiest letters to put SEO terms to. If you can think of anything better please drop us a comment below and we will consider adding it.

Anyway, Zeitgeist is one of Google’s tools for analysing search trends over time, split by country. It is describe by Google as providing ’search patterns, trends, and surprises’. It can be a good tool for extensive keyword research and we applaud for being with the letter Z.

It is pronounced ‘tsIt-”gIst, ‘zIt’ if that helps and it means ‘the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.’

Article Written by Sam Logan, Senior Designer and SEO Consultant at SJL Web Design.

Author: Sam J Logan
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Canada duty

Well writing and updating your blog daily does not mean people will automatically receive this information! A blog, just like any other website, needs to be promoted in order to drive traffic to your blog and to get people to read what you are posting everyday! So here are a few things that you can do to start getting traffic to your blog for Free!

1) First of all, you want to try to build your email list! This is the most important thing you could ever do if you are planning on making ANY money on the internet! The money lies in the list! You have a fantastic blog all set up, you are posting useful information daily, so start getting people to sign up or subscribe by adding a form on your blog! Start building your list immediately!

2) You need to submit your blog to all blog directories. Use http://pingomatic.com to ping your blog after every post you make.

3) The other ping service that you MUST use to ping your blog is [http://pingoat.com]. Pingoat pings to over 50 blog ping services at once for you. This way your blog is automatically pinged and you don’t have to manually search for directories to ping to.

4) Submit your blog to the blog directories. Get the best and most comprehensive list from the following directories:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

http://www.rss-feeds-directory.com/blog_lists.html

5) Next go to my.yahoo.com and set up an account if you don’t already have one. Then attach your blog by setting up a feed on my.yahoo.com so that yahoo search engine will regularly spider your blog and get your blog a good ranking in yahoo. This is a real good way to get traffic to your blog!

6) Once you’ve done that, then go to your blog and add the following code in to let others put YOUR feed on THEIR “my yahoo” account. Can you imagine what this will do for your blog? Here’s the code:
“http://add.my.yahoo.com/content?url= http://www.yourblog.com/urblog.xml“

7) Do the same thing stated in point (5) for your “http://my.msn.com” account. This will get your blog included in the MSN search engine real quick!

8)The MSN code to add on your blog just as in point (6) for yahoo would be “http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id= rss&ut=http://www.urblogfeedaddress.com/urblog.xml”

9) Go to forums related to your blog and add your creative comments to posts. Do not mention your blog in your post as most forums do not accept self promotions. But instead, add a link to your blog in your signature. Post as many comments as possible so people will see your link in your signature and click on it. Please take note that writing comments could make or break your blog reputation. If you write useful and creative comments that would actually spark some interest in other readers, then this will help your blog traffic but if you were to go in and just add things like “I agree” or “great post” or worst some comment that is going to cause huge conflicts, then this could be very bad for your reputation and your blog traffic!

10) Place your blog on all major search engines. To do a free submission, go to

http://addme.com/submission.htm

http://submitexpress.com

http://submitfire.com

11) Write articles relevant to your blog and submit them to article directories. Write at least 3 articles a day, every single day! Here are some article directories you can submit to:

http://goarticles.com

http://ezinearticles.com

http://isnare.com

http://articlebase.com

12) Go to other blogs that are related to yours and write comments with your blog link in your signature.

13) Add a link to your blog in your email signature. This means that every email you send out will have your blog link at the end.

14) If you have a website, then most certainly add a link to your blog on every single page of your website as you never know which page a visitor will land on your site.

15) And just as you should write articles everyday to promote your blog, you should make it a point to blog everyday. All it takes is 10 minutes to make a new post to your blog but the rewards are multiplied by 10 because search engine spiders love new content and this will make them crawl your site and get you much more traffic than you can imagine.

Now that you have the basic ways to increase traffic to your blog, you should start doing these right away. However, in order to get the latest ways in order to make tons of money just by using your blog, click on the link below and learn many many free, and most unique, never seen or tried before techniques in driving a massive load of traffic to your blog all for FREE! I was amazed at the amount of information I never even thought of, that are being used these days in blogging! Go ahead and find out for yourselves!

To Your Success!

Author: Sharon S S
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Bumper guardian

Blogs, and especially WordPress or ‘WP’ platform based blogs, quickly overtook static HTML web sites, appearing in the tens of millions from about 2004. However, the default or classic templates and themes supplied at no cost by WordPress.org were not optimized for the search engines. There were problems such as duplicate page titles — while it is absolutely essential to have unique titles. Another problem for search engines was the question mark which appears with dynamic page generation. PHP is a neat ‘pre-HTML processing’ system but it needed a better way of creating permalinks that displayed key phrases, rather than using a question mark followed by a page reference number.

Technical aspects become very important with blogs, when you need to know how to get more traffic, meaning web visitors, to a WordPress blog. Whole new industries have sprung up on The Internet to provide:

1. Custom graphical WP themes.

2. Software plugins to perform specific functions.

Getting more web traffic to a WP blog automatically, using the major search engines, can be achieved by gaining a lot of inbound or incoming links. In the eyes of big Google, Yahoo and Bing, these inbound links count as ‘votes’ for your blog or web site. The more votes you get, the higher you will rank in the search engine results pages. (SERPs). You should use your creativity to get other blog owners to link to you. Please note that this will happen naturally when your web content is seen to be of the highest quality and value to your readers.

An SEO plugin is a smart, technical way to go. Search engine optimization is both a refined art and a mathematical science. In order to get more traffic to your WordPress blog you need a plugin that will perform some secret configuration settings. It must also modify your permalink structure to make the best use of your main key phrases. The plugin should help create XML sitemaps and also ping the aggregators like Technorati.com and Yahoo, Weblogs.com and all the news and announcement sites. Finally, but not exhaustively, the SEO plugin needs to ensure that page titles, descriptions and keyword meta tags all contain one instance of the focused keyword or phrase. Did I forget the automatic generation of larger numbers of ‘tags?’

Is this techie stuff all too much for you? Has it got your head in a blogging spin? The writer has resorted to trusting this expert work to one Jeff Johnson who generously gives away a highly developed SEO plugin which does all of the above, and probably more. This software is best applied at the very beginning with a new blog because it can mess up the configuration of an existing blog. Jeff Johnson has outstanding results online, which include winning many affiliate marketing competitions, both in The United States and internationally.

Author: Geoff Dodd
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Programmable Pressure Cooker

All In One SEO Pack – Installing this plugin has made SEO so much easier. You can create separate search engine optimized titles for your posts as well as meta tag keywords and descriptions.

Sitemap Generator – Having a sitemap portrays your blog as a legitimate site. A sitemap not only makes it easier for your readers to find information but the search engines seem to like it as well.

Google XML Sitemap – This plugin is essential for ranking well in Google. If you use Google’s Webmasters tools then you know that submitting an XML sitemap makes it easier for Google to search your site. This plugin puts updating the sitemap on autopilot.

Photo Dropper – If you like adding photos to your posts, this plugin makes it super easy because it searches for photos on Flickr which fall under the creative commons license. You simply search for a photo related to your topic and it will place the photo directly in your post with credit text and a link back to Flickr.

Those are the main plugins that I am sure to install with any Wordpress blog that I create. I find that my blogs are even indexed faster. I’m not sure if it’s due to the plugins but I’m sure they don’t hurt. You can find all of the plugins mentioned above by searching for them in any of the main search engines or by searching the various Wordpress plugin directories.

Author: Eartha Haines
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Canada duty rates

Blogging with Wordpress offers two huge advantages:

1. It’s FREE to download and use
2. The Search Engines, in particular Google, love Wordpress blogs

Wordpress is open source software, which means it’s free to use. When you choose a hosting account, try and choose one that uses a control panel called “CPanel”, because installing Wordpress becomes as easy as clicking a handful of icons, it really is simple!

So you’ve bought a domain name, found a hosting company with CPanel and installed Wordpress on your new domain! In theory you’re ready to make your first post! But before you do, read on!

Before you post, you need to configure your blog and optimise it for the search engines, doing this before you post makes life a lot easier for the future.

As Wordpress is open source, developers around the world have written literally hundreds of plugins that enhance the functionality of your blog, and again the majority are free to install. Take a look at Wordpress.org where you’ll find hundreds of free plugins. Ones I recommend are:

- Installer (install this one first, simplifies plugin installations)
- All In One SEO Pack (optimises your posts)
- AdSense Manager (adds AdSense blocks to your posts)
- Google XML Site Maps (creates a site map for your blog)
- Ultimate Tag Warrior (essential plugin for managing tags)
- Sociable (assists with social bookmarking)

Next, within your dashboard, select Options in the menu and then Permalinks. You need to change the settings on this page in order to optimise your post’s URL for the search engines, this change will ensure your keywords appear in the URL. In the Custom Options box, insert the following text:

/%category%/%postname%/

Typing this will optimise your posts, but you must be careful only to ever select one category per post in the future, and not change a post’s category after you’ve published it!

When you post with Wordpress, it automatically notifies (known as pinging) blog directories of your new content, they index it based on the tags you assign. The search engine robots regularly visit these directories, and as a result your new post will be indexed by them very quickly. Rapid indexing is one of the huge advantages of blogging!

In your blogs configuration, you should add as many directory sites as possible to ping, in addition to the default URL. Simply search on the web for “ping list”.

Finally, you need to optimise the appearance of your site. You don’t want to use the basic template that comes with Wordpress. There are lots of free themes available on the web for download, take a look at Wordpress.org again in their themes directory. Whilst there are hundreds of free themes around, I never seem to find one that perfectly meets my needs, so I often end up buying one!

Once you’ve installed the theme of your choice, activated all of your plugins, and made the configuration adjustments I’ve recommended, you’re ready to post, so what are you waiting for!

Author: Richard Taylor
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Import duty tariff

Askimet – Spam has become rampant in blog comments. One of the best protections that you can have against having to deal with hundreds of spam comments is to make sure that the Askimet plugin is installed and active or your MLM blog.

All in One SEO Pack – If you think that search engine optimization (SEO) is a real pain, then you will love this plugin. This plugin will help you to optimize each page and post on your MLM blog for the search engines. So there is no need to worry about SEO.

Google XML Sitemaps – Sitemaps are very helpful any helping the search engines to find and index all of the content on your MLM blog. This simple plugin automatically builds and updates your site map whenever you update your site, making it easy for Google to index your content.

WordPress Database Backup – Everything that you post in WordPress is saved to a database. If you have ever suffered a computer crash, then you know just how trying it can be to get everything situated again. Your WordPress database is subject to crashes and corruption as well, so backing up your database regularly is a must. This plugin makes it child’s play with a few clicks.

WordPress Thread Comment – One of the great things about having an MLM blog is the interactivity of such a site. Your visitors and prospects are allowed to comment on the information that you post. This particular plugin makes it easy for users to comment on existing comments as well. It displays these discussions in a nested style format.

Author: Mark Saenz
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Canada duty rates

I’ve had a great experience with WordPress and setting up my blog/website. I’ve done Marketing for years but had no web programming experience (unless you consider making copy bold and underlined). In the past I’ve always leaned on my team of experienced web gurus. But when I started poking around and doing some research, I found that it’s not all that difficult.

Unless you’re a web designer, creating your own blog means you have to do a lot of reading to figure out all these new functions. Try this Forum section on WordPress, there’s lots of info on how to get started, go to WordPress and it’s under “support.”

I also recommend going to YouTube. I’m a visual person so I like to “see” how things are done. They have a lot of video tutorials that show you how to do different things. Just type WordPress in the search field.

I created my own site/blog on Wordpress within a day or two and have been able to add plug-ins that add forms, get traffic stats, help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and much more. I’ve had a few issues adding photos but I’m about to upgrade to the newest version of Wordpress (2.7) to see if it helps.

You’ll want the name of your company in the title and on an “About” page. You can create static pages, to let people know about your company, products, services, etc. Then use blog posts or articles to discuss things that are of interest to people who may buy your product/service.

As far as optimizing your site for search engines, you’ll want to look at some of the plug-ins available to help you with optimizing and measuring traffic. I recommend All-in-One SEO and Google XML Sitemaps. These will make your site easier to search for the search engines. Also add plug-ins like AddThis Social Bookmarks, to encourage visitors to bookmark your site and make it easier for them to come back and visit if they like what they see.

For content you don’t necessarily want to have your company name mentioned over and over to help increase traffic, unless your company name is so well known that thousands of people will be searching for it. You want to make sure you include relevant keywords that your potential customers will search for.

Also try a plug-in called WordPress Stats. It will allow you to see how much traffic you are getting. Eventually you will want to set up Google Analytics to see where traffic is coming from and which keywords are most popular.

Author: Chrisanne Sternal
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: US Dollar credit card

I managed to resolve the problem, and after a lot of hardwork, frustration and after what seemed like a life time, Google has started sending traffic to my new WordPress blog. I naively thought that this would be straight forward process and I wasn’t alone as when I first started writing about this issue on my blog I was surprised to find that this is a common problem.

So when I finally found the solution I thought I would create an article and summarise the steps taken to resolve the problem.

It was certainly easier to get Google traffic to a blogger hosted blog as most of this process seemed to be automated.

These are the 7 steps I followed to get Google to send traffic to my WordPress blog:

Step 1: Tell Google your site exists, go to Google’s add URL page and enter your sites details.

Step 2: Register an account with Google Webmaster tools. This will give you a meta tag so that you can be tracked by Google’s tool set, by using the Google Integration Toolkit plugin for WordPress.

Step 3: Install the Google Integration Toolkit plugin for WordPress. This plugin is useful to integrate a number of different Google tools into your blog i.e. Webmaster toolkit, AdSense, & Analytics.

Step 4: Install the XML-Sitemap plugin for WordPress. This plugin is useful as it automatically creates and updates a XML-Site map of your site. Sitemaps are useful as they help search engines like Google crawl through your site.

Step 5: Install the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows you to potentially increase your page ranking by incorporating SEO techniques into your blog. When you create a post a new section becomes visible which allows you to fill in a few details for SEO, then the plugin does the rest.

Step 6: Create some internal links. Google appears to like internal links, so I wrote a blog post which linked to every other post.

Step 7: Allow Google to see your site. Make sure your robots.txt file allows Google to crawl through your site – Google WebMaster tools can easily provide a working robots.txt file. There is also an option in the privacy settings of WordPress to block or allow search Engines, make sure this is set to allow.

I hope these 7 steps help some people out there.

Author: John P Mitchell
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Canada duty tariff