Search Engine Optimization for Blogs
December 19, 2008
Optimizing a blog is just like optimizing any other website. The content and pages (posts) must be unique, they must be search engine friendly, and it needs links from other websites. If it’s a new blog, then you first need to make sure the blog software you’re using is set up so that it takes advantage of all of the possible optimization features. Then, announce it to the world, work on getting some links to it, and start making posts.
WordPress Optimization
If you’re using WordPress for your blog software, it’s important to make sure that your site is search engine friendly, meaning that it can easily be spidered by the search engine spiders. Just like optimizing a website, it’s important to have good title tags and meta tags. Keep in mind that blog software usually uses the title of your post as the title tag, so include keywords in your titles as much as possible. It’s important to set up your blog’s software so that the URLs don’t contain a lot of variables. Instead, use URLs that include the post title or post name in them. For example, if you’re using WordPress you’ll need to set the permalinks so that it uses %postname% in the URL. You can also set up a specific category for the post archives, and you might consider using a keyword that’s related to your blog instead of the default, which is typically the word “archive”. Fintan Darragh has a great blog post called “Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips”. Mr. Darragh talks about permalink optimization and says, “The goal: stick more keywords up into the URL and remove the faff which nobody uses, to make the URL search engine and people attractive. Having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, especially when it’s as easy as WordPress makes it.” He also goes on to talk about getting rid of useless tags like the month, day, and year, as well as one important detail: whatever you do stick with the site structure you choose—otherwise you might end up with a lot of useless links to your site. Other tips that Mr. Darragh mentions are optimizing your page titles and your post titles–and installing a few plugins that are useful such as the “Related Posts Plugin” and the “Technorati Tag Generator”.
There are several other places where you can get specific tips about setting up WordPress in a search engine friendly manner, including: * SEO at Aleeya Dot Net.
DYI Search Engine Optimization, One of the best tutorials out there is one called “DYI Search Engine Optimization” by Lorelle VanFossen. Specifically, Lorelle (lorelle.WordPress.com) has some great tips, including how to optimize your code, develop strong intrasite links, write with strong keyword usage, use categories and tags, and how to use ping services. Lorelle says that “the goal is to help search engine crawlers move through your website collecting information to be stored in the search engine’s database. The key to your blog’s data making it successfully into a search engine’s database is to: 1) Make sure there are no road blocks in the path of a search engine crawler.
2) Make sure the crawler can move through your blog, examining all your web pages.
3) Provide adequate keywords and key phrases which clearly help categorize your content.
4) Provide clearly labeled tags and categories recognized by tagging service crawlers and many search engines today.
5) Take advantage of pinging services.” There are several WordPress Plugins available that will help you take advantage of internal linking (like the Related Posts Plugin) which will link to other posts in your blog that are on the same topic.
Other plugins that might be helpful are plugins that automatically generate a Google Sitemap file as well as plugins that help you categorize the site such as the WordPress Subdomain Plugin.
Movable Type Optimization
If you’re using Movable Type for your blog software, then it’s also important to make sure that your site is search engine friendly and can be spidered by the search engine spiders. Just like optimizing a website, it’s important to have good title tags and meta tags. Keep in mind that blog software usually uses the title of your post as the title tag, so include keywords in your titles as much as possible. Miles Evans says that “Movable Type is optimized quite well out of the box, but there are a few quick tricks to easily providing the spiders with some dynamic content.” He goes on to say that you need to optimize your template. “For my main home page and category index pages I hardcode most of my meta data. Your meta tags will be at the top of the template within the tag. You can get fancy on your index pages but I cannot really see why. Optimize these two templates by hand for whatever keywords you are targeting site wide.” Mr. Evans also has another article titled, “Best Movable Type Plugins” that talks about his favorite plugins that help him get great search engine rankings. His favorite Movable Type Plugins for SEO are Dashify, MTPaginate, MT Blogroll, MT InlineEditor, MT-Textile, BigPAPI, as well as Ajaxify (a set of plugins that adds several ajax/javascript widgets into the Movable Type interface), CheckLinks, FormatList v1.0, and Better File Uploader for uploading files. Nicholas Carvan has a great article about Movable Type optimization called “Optimizing your Movable Type blog for Google”. In it he talks about PageRank (and how it relates to your internal linking on your blog), having keywords in your URL (which is important for all blog optimization) and blogrolling. He defines the term blogrolling very well, saying, “Blogrolling: Inbound links are gold, but in Google’s eyes, not all links are equal. In particular, Google isn’t wild about links contained within JavaScript – apparently they can index them, but that doesn’t mean they always want to.”
Once you’ve set up and configured your blog’s software, it’s important to make sure that you leave it alone—if you change your page URLs then any links that you’ve received from other bloggers may not be valid anymore. If you need to change your site’s structure (perhaps you’ve been blogging already and wish to use the tips from this article to optimize your blog), then you might want to take a look at the Objection Redirection WordPress Plugin if you’re using WordPress. The Objection Redirection Plugin gives you a simple interface to redirect users (and search engine bots) to the proper page, especially if you’ve changed your site’s structure.
Start Blogging
The best thing you can do is to start blogging. Go ahead and post to your heart’s content and write, write, write about your topic. The more content you can provide the better—and it seems as if adding content on a regular basis really helps, as well. Feel free to link out to other blog posts that are related to the topic you’re writing about. For example, before you publish a post, go on over to your favorite blog search engine and find another recent post on the same subject—and link to the post. Linking out to other bloggers will get their attention, and hopefully they’ll end up linking to you as well. If other bloggers have trackbacks turned on then their blog will link back to your post. Some trackbacks are moderated, so it might take some time before your link shows up on the other blog. And some bloggers have trackbacks turned off, so a link back to your site might take some manual intervention. Categorize your posts as much as possible, and feel free to add categories as you blog—it will help the internal linking structure of your site, and help the search engines and users find on-topic posts.
Promoting Your Blog
Whenever you make a post in your blog, your blog software will attempt to ping certain sites to let them know that you just updated your blog. There are many blog ping services out there, including Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat. Your blog software can be configured to ping sites automatically, and I’ve posted a list for WordPress of ping services on by blog. If your blog is new or you would like to get some more links, you can submit your blog to blog directories as well as other sites that will list your blog (don’t forget to submit to DMOZ.org, Yahoo! Directory, and the Best of the Web Blog Directory). About.com has a great article about promoting a blog and even Biz Stone has great tutorial about promoting your blog. Lastly, don’t forget to turn on your blog’s RSS feed. And if you’re looking to promote your RSS feed, try searching your favorite search engine for “promote rss” to find a lot of good tutorials.
Promoting your blog is just like promoting a website you need good spiderable content, links to your content, and you need to set up your blog software to take advantage of all the great features. There are also plugins that will help make blogging easier for all of us.
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How Blogging Can Help You with SEO – A Beginner’s Guide
December 17, 2008
Blogging is fun and easy to do, and you may be interested in learning how blogging can help you with SEO. You don’t have to be a programming genius to set up and maintain a blog. You don’t even need to know HTML. If you are new to blogs, websites, and online business in general, start by taking the easy road to learning how blogging can help you with SEO.
First, sign up with a free blogging service, such as Blogger at http://www.blogger.com or Blogit at http://www.blogit.com . Setting up an account is very easy, and takes about five minutes. This is the easiest way to get started blogging, and you can increase your website popularity in the search engines a bit while doing it. Simply use your website URL in each of your blog posts. In other words, every time you write your blog, make sure that you refer to your website. This provides you with inbound links.
Once you get the hang of blogging, your next step in learning how blogging can help you with SEO is to set up a blog on your website. Many webhosting accounts now include blogs. If you can’t figure out how to set one up on your website, contact your webhosting company. They will either do it for you, or tell you how to do it. Some webhosting companies charge for the setup, some do not.
Once your blog is set up on your website, continue doing what you’ve already learned how to do, but add another step. Each time you post, you can still refer to specific pages on your website, but also use your keywords throughout each of the posts. For a post that is three or four hundred words long, use your keywords and key word phrases five or six times. This will optimize those posts for the search engines.
As you continue to blog, you will continually be adding new content to your website. As you add new content, your ranking will go up in the search engines. Each time you finish posting to your blog, you need to let the rest of the world know that you’ve done so by pinging it. This is done through Ping-O-Matic at http://www.pingomatic.com. This will send a ping to several blog directories.
You should put a link to your blog on your website – whether it is hosted remotely or through your webhosting account. This will help increase traffic to your blog, and help you develop a readership. As people become more and more interested in your blog, two things will happen. First, your search engine ranking will go up simply based on the amount of traffic your blog is getting.
Second, other bloggers will start sending Trackbacks to your blog on their blogs so that their readers can see what you have to say on certain topics. This helps build your readership as well. It is a never ending circle that just keeps getting bigger if you know what you are doing!
You should also send Trackbacks to other people’s blogs as well. When they see the Trackback, they will usually visit your blog to see what you had to say about theirs. Again, this increases your traffic, and potentially increases your readership as well.
Make it a habit to post to your blog regularly. You can post daily, weekly, or even monthly – but posting daily or weekly will get you the best results if you are trying to learn how blogging can help you with SEO. Blog posts can be long or short. If you have a lot of time to write, make them long. If you only have a few minutes to spare each day, write one or two paragraphs – just be sure to use your keywords and key phrases!
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Building Successful Blogs & Earn Money
December 17, 2008
Actually, blog online marketing is not all that hard if you know what you are doing. However, if this is your very first blog and you are wondering how to get readers or subscribers to it then you are in the right place.
Here are some great tips to use when trying to get your blog out there and get new readers. You learn workable tips and secrets of how to build successful blog and earn money with your blog.
1) The first key for your successful in blog online marketing is to update your blog frequently. We can not put enough emphasis on this tip. If you tell your readers that you are going to update your blog daily, then do it. For more results please login on to www.blog-and-ping.com. Your readers are what make your blog successful. You may not realize this in the beginning, and you will have few readers in the beginning as well, but you will eventually build a readership base and have people checking out your blog regularly.
2) You are going to want to be sure that all of your posts are formatted. Doing so will leave out any confusion for the search engines and you will have everything nice and neat and all organized. The label tags are there for a reason when you are dealing with blogs. So using them and not leaving them out is a great idea.
3) Having a Google account and submitting a sitemap is almost a must when you are blog online marketing. Doing so will allow Google to know how often you are updating your blog and they will automatically know of any changes that you have made to it as well. There is a certain way you have to do the sitemap for Google, and they can explain that to you. Just know this is an important step to blog online marketing.
4) Exchanging links with authority blogs and websites that are in your same market is another great way to get the word out about your blog. The authority sites are going to have a higher page rank, and will also be listed high in Google’s search results. So do some searches and check those out and see if they are up to exchanging links. If they are not, you could always just add those into your blogroll. You do not need permission to do that if they are not into linking. However, in the world of blogs, most blog owners are thankful for all links, and are willing to return the favour.
5) Tracking is another part of blog marketing that is so very important. You want to be able to track your visitors and clickers to know where they are coming from. You want to be able to tell what keywords they searched on to find your blog and where they did their searching. Doing so will help take out all of the guess work when it comes to blog marketing. You will know what keywords are working, and which are not.
6) Allowing RSS feeds from your blog is also another great blog online marketing tool. You are going to find that when you allow RSS feeds, your blog is going to end up all over the internet with a link back to it and that is a good thing. You can also log on to www.your-own-blog.com. This is a wonderful way to get links to your blog with little or no effort. People that subscribe to your blog’s RSS feeds are able to then post your blog posts on their sites or blogs. This in return gives you a link on their site or page that they have you on.
7) Learn and apply SEO to your blogs. SEO is search engine optimization. You are going to find that if you want your blog to go anywhere, you need SEO, and you need to know how to use it to the advantage of your blog. Just like a website, a blog will be better off optimized.
Final thoughts, blog online marketing is only as hard as you make it. Use these powerful tips and get your blog out there and seen today.
www.blog-and-ping.com
www.profit-pulling-toolbars.com
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Make Money Online Now With Blog SEO
December 16, 2008
The problem for most people is that they write up a decent post, but they don’t know where to go from there, and then they think it’s just not working. That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in handy.
There are a few decent ways to optimize your blog for the search engines to help you make money online now so that the search engines spider your site and make your posts available when someone does a Google search for a topic within your post.
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Blogging For Newbie- Free Related Facts For New Bloggers
December 16, 2008
Are you searching for information related to blogging for newbie’s or other information somehow related to e-commerce blogs, or blog site design? If yes, this article will give you helpful insights related to blogging for newbie’s and even somehow related to blogging advice and dedicated hosting that you might not have been aware of.
The first way is to start your own blog and attract top talent to your blog site. This is not an overnight marketing cure-all, and it will require some patience. However, cultivating a readership of professionals in your niche field is a highly effective means of reaching candidates who would have never otherwise learned about your career openings. The key to making this work is to learn to attract a specialized readership to your blog, just like a beacon in the night. You don’t need millions of readers, just hundreds of the right readers.
Utilize the resources at Ezinearticles or GoArticles to add added relative content to your blog. Make sure you give attribution (don’t remove the links). You’re not the only with good ideas, so don’t hesitate to add other author’s valuable content to your blog. It’s only fair to give them the link back; it won’t really hurt your SEO rankings like a traditional website linking strategy. Ezinearticles is a great cure for writer’s block!
The first thing that you want to do is to try to blend your ads in with them color the theme of your blog. It’s important that your ads look as much like the other links on your website. I don’t know why this works, but it is something psychological in the brain that makes people not want to click on stuff that looks different from the rest of the page. Therefore, try to blend your ads as closely as possible.
You should not forget that if this article hasn’t provided you with exact blogging for newbie’s information, you can use any of the main search engines on the Internet, like Ask, to find the exact blogging for newbie’s information you need.
On the other hand, if you don’t have a business, look into having products created for you, or buy products which you can resell on your blog. Look in your local Yellow Pages for manufacturing companies: you may be able to find products that you could resell at a profit. Of course, there are many wholesaling companies online, but the benefit of dealing with a local supplier is that you can inspect the products that you’re selling, to ensure quality. Your shipping costs will also be low, resulting in more profit for you.
This really is a general overview of web logging for money, which is a big picture. However, do be reassured of its relative ease. The most important thing is just to make a start. Identify what you wish to write the blog about, register a free web logging account at BlogSpot or Word press, and then start posting! After that, you will surely pick up hints and tips about monetization and driving traffic along the way. Many internet marketers will confirm that blog optimization is a lifelong learning process, so do not feel you have to get it right first time. Web logging for money should be fun, so ensure you enjoy the process.
Also, search engines are more likely to spider your site regularly if you update your content frequently. With blog software, making changes to the text on your web pages is as simple as sending an email; you just fill in a subject line and post body and then click submit.
We discovered that many people who were also searching for information related to blogging for newbie’s also searched online for related information such as free blogger, NBA schedule, and even online blog software.
