Scott Lindsay asked:


Nowadays it’s almost unfashionable for an online entrepreneur to not have a blog or two. Since the web abounds of personal blogs, informational blogs, art and poetry blogs, and so on, a business blog has to compete against all of the above-mentioned and business blogs for a high ranking in the search engine results pages.

For a blog to be successful it needs to be well written, frequently updated, well designed and honest. A business blog needs to focus on a target and discuss topics related to that target. The “know your audience” rule is the very foundation of a successful business blog.

Assuming you are not an online entrepreneur but still want to have a successful blog, here is what you should do:

Pick your topic. As a blogger you have the chance to write about anything you want. So what it will be? An online diary or a news outlet? Choose whatever is more appealing to you, a subject you are good at, and a theme that will reveal your talents, your passions and your knowledge.

Write in a personal manner and post frequently. The more you post, the more content you ad on your pages. And content is food for the search engines that scan blogs on a daily basis. A frequently updated blog has more chances of success than “lazy” blogs where people post a thought or two every once in a while.

Make your opinion known: that’s the whole idea behind blogging. You have to be an active member of the blogosphere, visit and post comments on other blogs as well. A good comment will attract traffic to your blog.

A blog is a great promotional and marketing tool. Use it wisely. Don’t use a blog to insult a person or to damage another business. Use a blog to provide quality information for the online community. If you have a business blog don’t use it to sell products, but to offer customer support, to request feedback, to make announcements and to publish advice. Use a website for sales and let the visitors decide whether they want to visit the “products” page or not, by providing a direct link to it from your blog. If you are a writer, the more quality content you post the higher chances to become popular and be recognized online as an expert in your field.

Promote your blog. Include your blog’s URL in your email signature, mention it in your newsletters and submit it to blog directories.

Companies and online entrepreneurs should really think twice before starting a blog. A blog needs constant updates and quality content. It will not be successful without these two important ingredients. A professional writer paid to update the blog on regular basis is sometimes the best alternative for business blogs. A professional writer will create a blog with attributes of clarity and simplicity. For blogs, SEO writers are preferable because they know how to write content that is keyword rich but not keyword stuffed and quality headlines that will grab the attention of the readers.

Last but not least, the content of the blog should be included in an RSS feed to increase blog’s popularity.

David Fishman asked:


Many sites link back and forth to each other simply because it makes good business sense to do so. Search engines still count reciprocal links but they are not valued as much as one way links. By establishing reciprocal links will help your site move up in the search engine rankings. For a very long period of time all the webmasters traded links. But now, because of the new search engine algorithms, reciprocal links are not as powerful as they once where.

Consider paying for submission to some important directories. For a fee, these directories will index your site in their database within two to five business days. Links from any directory that is not popular is not going to help your overall link popularity, but as these sites grow in popularity you will receive more and more relevant links which will bring your link popularity up.

Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is one of the best ways in creating one way links and increasing popularity to your website. Search engines index text links a lot easier because a text link can be analyzed for certain keywords and it can check for relevancy of the keyword with surrounding words.

One way links are more favorable than reciprocal links; Google assigns different weight to one way links and reciprocal links, usually the reciprocal links are lower. If you have a site that is on the same ip do not link to each other, search engines to count this as a link.

Writing articles is very popular now and if you are not doing it you need to start producing articles and distributing them among article sites. Your articles should be of good quality, helpful to the audience and display to the internet world your knowledge and expertise. One way links will really push you up in the search engines. Writing articles is the best and easiest way to get one way links. Creating a bio and including your links at the end of the articles is a great way to rapidly grow your one way links. Writing articles is the easy way to get one way links.

It’s like a voting system. If 100 sites think your content is worth linking to, then search engines like Google will take notice. The link anchor text is more effective if the page receiving the link has the anchor text in its title tags, and even in the page unique URL. Of course, the on page content should include the keyword phrase at the appropriate density. Writing articles and posting them to article sites is one of the best ways to generate traffic to your site, it takes time but it is worth it. As everyone says “content is king” everyone is wants new original content on their sites to drive traffic to it.

Obviously, the higher your website is ranked in the search engines the more visitors will click on your site and the more traffic you will have. The best ways to get good targeted visitors are search engines. Reciprocal link exchange is not dead, if you provide links for the benefit of your visitors. Linking for the sake of visitors is a win-win scenario.