Your Blog’s On Page Search Engine Optimization

November 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Click here to learn how make profitable blogs with Blogging to the Bank. Now, you should have a blog full with content you have passionately written. It should be a very interesting grapevine for the community of your chosen niche, as opposed to a lifeless factsheet.

However, no matter how delicious your content is, if there is nobody to read it you can’t generate profit from it. Even if you talk about compare life coverage quotes. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract people, you must offer attractive information. Simple enough.

However, to get traffic onto your site, you have to think backwards. Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using search engines like www.google.com, www.yahoo.com and www.msn.com, to name a few more popular ones. So, to get these people on your blog, your blog needs to rank high on search result pages of these search engines. When these people search for information through the search engines and see your site among the top results, they will naturally click through to your blog!

The art of getting your blog or website onto high rankings on search result pages is called SEO. It is a very complex and hard subject to master, but that doesn’t stop us from learning simple yet effective techniques to conquer the search results for certain keywords. The more complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive and general keywords such as “fat loss”, but I’ll teach you how to overcome that later.

For now, let’s determine the keywords that you want to optimize your site for. For example, your blog talks about tech gadgets. Now, you’d want to check in Google whether it is a very competetive keyword. At this time of writing, there are 29, 000 ,000 search results. Think you can beat 29, 000, 000 sites at your first attempt? I don’t think so.

Now, let’s try to narrow down our scope. Let’s look for “technological gadgets” instead. At this time of writing, Google lists 792, 000 results. That’s more manageable, but you’d like to search for more focused keywords. However, let’s optimize your blog for “technological gadget” just for the sake of learning.

First, you have to pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you’re optimizing for technological gadgets, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title. For example, a line like “Your Best Technological Gadget Blog!” would work great. You can change the title of your blog in the Blogger control panel or the Wordpress blog when you’re creating it. If you’re proficient with HTML, you can even do that on other blog engines like Moveable Type. Bottom line? Learn a little HTML!

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you’re optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your code that is enclosed within the tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, “technological gadgets”). Since we’re posting a blog, the tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant.

One last bit, you should also sprinkle the words “technological gadgets” in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will hint the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic.

However, this is the most important bit of all. Always keep in mind that you’re writing for real life people who read your blog to obtain information, so it is very stupid to spam your blog with keywords! In fact, if you do that, the search engines will end up thinking you’re spamming and drop your ranking further down into oblivion… So keep in mind! Write for humans, not search engines!

Click here for more on how to make money blogging

Essential blogging skills required

November 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Blogging is an easy job, agreed. But that’s also it’s disadvantage. Wondering how ? Well, just imagine this. If you are finding blogging easy and interesting, so is 10000 people out there, and that adds to your competition. Moral of the story - Be original and top notch.

I guess every blogger would agree on it. Unless you are different and exclusive, readers will find you very dis-interesting and boring. So the whole point is about making yourself stand out from the crowd. So how can you accomplish it ? How can you actually stand out from the rest and make an impression on the visitor ?

Here are a few pointers.

  1. Be up to date
    For this there are many methods. Go to alltop.com and select your favorite category and it will list you all the top sites breaking news in that category.
  2. Read as many blogs as possible
    Reading others stuff can give you lot of ideas on what is hot and not. So if you are the kind who reads more blogs, then you have a chance of staying up to date.
    Ex: - Technology updates blog, SEO blogs, Digital photo tips blogs
  3. Follow digg
    Digg is a nice to place to hang out, have fun and at the same time get to know the top news. It is a social media site and gets a lot of inputs from geeks all around the world. Use it.
  4. Follow news sites
    News sites like cnn.com and cnbc.com ar egood resources to stay uptodate with news. Subscribe to them and get to know the latest stories first.
  5. Social media interaction
    These days, everybody is on a social media site like orkut, facebook, hi5 and myspace. Use this community to know what people are talking about and indulge in them.

Overall, stying up to date is about joining the top communities and subscribing to top authority blogs and regularly following them. I’m sure, if you love blogging, then you will love this too.

Four WordPress Search Engine Optimization Components to Concentrate Your Efforts On

October 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment

A mountain of advice can be found on the word wide web in terms of exactly what people should do in order to achieve high rankings with the search engines for WordPress blogs. It is easy to get bewildered if you read all the information that is available, because some people concur with others while another group altogether disagree and offer different advice.

In modern search engine optimization terms, anyone who promotes you should submit a website to the search engines to be indexed is very out of date. Such an approach has been unnecessary for a substantial time. The search engines have become very good at spotting new sites and they index them without you submitting the sites to the search engines.

In short, below are the 4 most important SEO ranking elements, in accordance with their consensus opinion.

The Right Keywords in the Title

The use of the appropriate keywords in crafting the text for the title tag of a WordPress page is very important. It does not only help with better rankings, it also promotes higher click-through from the SE listings to your WordPress blog. It’s of reduced use to be listed high in the results and not receive that many clicks. The ultimate goal is to get as many targeted visits to the site as possible.

Those keywords that were used by the searcher are bolded in the search results. If part of your page title is shown in bold, it stands a higher opportunity of being noticed and receiving that click. Nevertheless, highlighted keywords don’t comprise the only thing to consider when composing the title tag.

Lots of additional clicks can be pulled in from a smartly written page title tag, especially when it invites and entices the user to click. It’s better to receive 100 clicks from the 5th position through having a great page title compared with fifty clicks from the third listing with a badly written page title, correct?

Anchor Text of Links to Your Site

The anchor text that is utilized in the hyperlink that points to your site from another site weighs heavily in the search engine computations to decide what your web site is all about. And, what your site is focused on influences largely what it will rank for in the SERPs.

If you can influence in any way the anchor text that external web sites utilize when they link to you, then it’s an extremely productive way of investing your time.

The more web sites that have links to your web site employing a specific keyphrase, or variations of that keyword, will prompt the search engines to more eagerly compute that your site is focused on that certain keyphrase.

It is far more advantageous when the content of the destination page on your site contains that specific keyword and its latent semantic equivalents.

The Universal Link Popularity of the Web Site

The number of hyperlinks that point to a web site is used by the search engines to figure out the relative importance of your site. This includes both quality of links and the quantity of links.

The more different web sites that have links to your web site, the higher the SE’s will compute the perceived importance of your site.

Building links doesn’t stop. One can never have enough links pointing to your site.

True, one can build links too fast and that could trigger some flags in the algorithms of the search engines. Notwithstanding, if it’s done as an ongoing action employing a long-term outlook, every backlink is worth the effort of getting it. They all add up to an improved perceived importance of your site.

Link Popularity within the Internal Link Structure of the Site

Naturally, some of your web pages will gain more external backlinks than others. Those that do not attract a lot of backlinks might be the real money pages that you’d aim to rank well in the search engines. The internal linking structure, as well as the anchor text used in the internal links, is how you distribute PageRank and reputation inside the perimeters of your site.

The best way to do that is with the best WordPress SEO plugin that’s expressly designed to do just that.

Some SEO experts say that an internal link carries the same value as an external link.

That does not mean your web site will rank by having nothing more than internal links. What it means is that you can get a certain page ranked by pointing internal links to it even though it doesn’t have many external backlinks, provided that the remainder of your web site has accumulated enough trust from external links.