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
Banner Advertisements
November 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment
When you are trying to make money off of the articles on your website, it is important to effectively promote your site so that you will attract customers and they can see just what a good, quality site you have. There are several ways so market and promote your website, one of them being though banner advertisements.
What Banner Ads Can Do For You
Banner ads can help bring visitors from others sites to your own. Although monthly fees can be expensive to advertise on high traffic sites, in the end it may be cheaper and/or a faster way to start seeing significant revenue from your website efforts, rather than waiting for SEO techniques to bring your own site to the top of search engine results. Aside from paying to advertise on someone else’s site, there are also free banner exchanges to choose from. We will look at the pros and cons of each banner advertising method below.
Free Banner Exchanges
Free banner exchanges are when you and other sites exchange each others banners. Their banner will go on your site and your banner will go one their site. Although this option is free, there are two main problems with it. First, if you want your banner on a significant number of sites, it will mean cluttering your own site up with these banners. This could even shot you in the foot if you run an affiliate website because, instead of clicking on your affiliate links, your visitors may be clicking on your banner exchange links. Secondly, you have to be really careful about the types of sites that you exchange banners with. Some sites like to gather a lot of banners so that they can be a directory or portal site and not have to have any real content. These “banner farms” or “link farms” will do nothing positive for your site and, in the meantime, you will be bringing them potential traffic.
Paid Banner Ads
As we saw above, paid banner ads cost money, but they will eventually pay off if you choose the right ones. You need to ensure that the site produces the amount of traffic that they say and that they have your ad placed in a way that invites visitors to click without being too pushy. You also want to choose a site that does not house too many other banners on the same page as yours or that there are no competitor links on the same page.
All in all, banner ads can end up being profitable for you site if you go about it the right way. If you do decide to check out banner advertisement as a marketing avenue, be sure to keep the above tips in mind.
