Blog Optimization for Profit - Part 3

Optimizing your blog for fun and profit can be a daunting task. There are secret tricks of the trade that separate newbies from techies but that does not mean you cannot do some of it yourself. This article is one of a series that lifts the curtain on this shadowland of optimization.

In Part 2 of this series, we talked about how getting high quality links from authoritative websites in your field can boost your search engine rankings. This time, we're going to explore further into linking strategies and how to determine and obtain "high quality" links. We're also going to talk briefly about Google's PageRank system.

First, let's examine a regular link. It's a piece of text. It can also be an image that links to your blog but, for our example, we are using text.

Some of the factors that matter most are:

1) The address which it links to

2) The text of the link

3) The PageRank of the page on which the link resides

Let's analyze this information one by one.

You naturally want the link to link to your blog but to which page of your blog? Do you want to link to an individual post or to your blog home page? Since your blog is a constantly updated website, it is always wise to point to your main page instead of individual posts because individual posts tend to be very time-sensitive. One of my blogs, on News and Commentary, is a good example of this. Usually posts are outdated within hours or days of posting.

The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword.

Let's say your blog is about "technological gadgets" and another site has a link that says "Miss USA Pageant" and links to your blog. Doesn't make much sense, right? You want a lot of links to your site that contain the terms "technological" or "gadget" to greatly boost your rankings for those keywords. You see, the links from other similar sites with your keywords is what the search engines read. The more accurate the keywords of the sites linking to you, the better you will rank in the search engines. Hence, it is essential to put some thought to requesting links from other webmasters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate keywords.

Now, about Google's PageRank. It's basically a scale set by Google to measure the popularity of websites. You can read more about it on Google.com/technology/.

It is claimed that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the more frequent Google's robots will visit the website to index it. It is also claimed that the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in Google's search engine results. In short, having a high PageRank might bring you many benefits.

Now, there is much debate among webmasters about PageRank. Some webmasters say it really doesn't make that much difference. They are half right. Page Rank, in itself, is not the key to worry about. The actual power of search engines to affect your blog's visibility is in the keywords of your blog. When people do a search, using your keywords, you will automatically get a high PageRank if your keyword combination is unique and a low-competition keyword or phrase.

Remember this: Page Rank is only a side effect of our real goal which is to get people onto your blog. People do not search according to Page Rank they search with keywords they type into the search box. If your keywords are poorly thought out you will not rank at all.

Your blog will start with no PageRank at all if Google has not indexed your blog. Once Google's robots find your blog, through links on other sites, your blog will start with a PageRank of 0 (zero) then, depending on the PageRank (keywords) of the referring page, your blog PageRank will also rise. The referring page is the website/blog that is linking back to your blog. Google will find your link on their page and follow it back to your blog. Simple, eh?

Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targeted visitors to your blog, who are interested in your niche, thus enabling search engines to find and index your blog and ultimately rank you higher in search engine results.

Yours for success in life.

Jim DeSantis

P.S. - Please forward this article to someone who can use it.

About the Author:
Jim DeSantis is a 15 year broadcast News veteran. For all Parts of this 6 Part Series and lots of Free Resources go to Jim's blog at http://on-line-tribune-you-can-blog-too.blogspot.com
Added: 07 Jan 2007
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/47267.html

Blog Optimization for Profit - Part 2

In Part 1 of this series we optimized your blog to rank well for search results of certain keywords that we inserted into your blog. This is called onpage optimization. Onpage optimization affects your ranking in only very minor ways. However, don't skip it as every little bit helps when you're competing for search engine rankings!

Now, we are moving to offpage search engine optimization. These are factors that are not inserted into your blog but affect your search engine rankings greatly. There are many offpage factors. I will cover the major ones in this article.

The first and most obvious one is the number of links to your blog. These are links that point back to your blog from other locations/websites on the web.

As a general rule of thumb, the more links to your blog, the more the search engines think you are an authority in that particular niche and hence the higher they rank you. However, take care to observe the quality of the links. For example, keeping to our theme, a thousand links from totally irrelevant sites like online dating sites, when you have a tech blog, would not help at all because your blog is a technological product blog. In contrast, a single link from a highly authoritative site about technological gadgets will get the search engines crawling about your blog like SWAT storming a meth lab.

Anyway, the most cost effective way of getting high quality links from authoritative sites is simply to ask for it. If your blog contains high quality content that is original and will provide valuable information, chances are the webmaster of the site you want to get a backlink from will link to your blog to get the information you are providing.

Let's talk about how we should ask these webmasters of authority to link to your blog. We are discussing this based on the presumption that your blog is really content rich and offers high quality information. The most viable option would be to send an email directly to the webmaster and request a link back. Here's how.

First, let's look for the top sites in your niche. Simply search the major search engines for the term that your are targeting. In this case, let's search for "technological gadgets". The first few results will likely be commercial sites, so don't bother asking. We are looking for community-based sites and other blogs that are more accessible to a complete newcomer like you. Seems like www.gizmodo.com would be a good option!

A word of caution - stay away from Link Farms or Reciprocal Linking sites. You don't want hundreds of links overnight. This will be seen as spam and you know what happens, right? La-La Land for your blog!

So, compose an email to the webmaster of www.gizmodo.com (whose email address you can find on the site). Start by stating how you came across their site, i.e., "looking for gadget information, I came across your site". Do NOT say "looking for link partners."! Tell them how you think their site provides valuable info. Basically, try to say something really good about their site. Take some time and look over their site and maybe make a comment on a particular article or feature that you like and you think your readers might like it too.

Then, suggest that so-and-so content on your own blog will be a good fit to their site's content, as well. Ask that you be allowed to put a link on your blog to their site and ask subtly if they might be able to do the same to forge a mutually beneficial relationship between the site and your blog.

This is very important - all your emails, no matter to whom they are being sent, should have a link to your blog in the signature of the email! This means that everyone and anyone getting an email from you will see your blog address and this can mean even more traffic. This also gives webmasters an easy way to check out your blog to see if it's worth linking to. Make it easy for them!

In your email message you can even suggest what your link should say - "Your Source for TechnoGadgets"- as an example.

Along the way, you will find people who will not even respond to your email. Forget about them and move on. Remove their links from your blog to their site if they have not responded to your email within two weeks. You can set up a folder in your email program to store your link requests so you can go back and check in two weeks or so. But, really, if they do not contact you within two weeks, forget them. There are plenty of quality sites who will link to you.

Keep doing this for the first 30 search results that pop up and, before long, you should have quite a few good sites linking to you. In the next article, we'll explore more advanced offpage factors and ways to improve upon them!

Yours for success in life.

Jim DeSantis

P.S. - Please forward this article to someone who can use it.

About the Author:
Jim DeSantis is a 15 year broadcast News veteran. For all Parts of this 6 Part Series and lots of Free Resources go to Jim's blog at http://on-line-tribune-you-can-blog-too.blogspot.com
Added: 07 Jan 2007
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/47266.html

Blog Optimization for Profit - Part 1

If you have read my articles about what you should be blogging about you should have a blog filled 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. So, how do you get your words where others can read them?

No matter how delicious your content is, if nobody knows it exists you can't generate profit from it. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract readers, you must offer exciting and unique information. Simple enough, right? Common sense? Not exactly.

You see, 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 Google, Yahoo, and MSN, to name the more popular ones.

So, to get these people to visit your blog, your blog needs to rank high on results pages of these search engines. When 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 high rankings on search results pages is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. It is a complex and technical subject to master, but that will not stop you from learning some simple, yet effective techniques, to conquer the search engines for certain keywords. The more complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive and general keywords such as "fat loss". I'll teach you how to overcome that later.

For now, let's determine the best keywords 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 (twenty-nine-million!) search results. Think you can beat 29,000,000 sites at your first attempt? I don't think so. In fact, I know absolutely that you cannot.

Let's try to narrow our scope to keywords you can successfully optimize for. Let's look for the keywords - "technological gadgets". At this time of writing, Google lists 792,000 results. That's more manageable but still not narrow enough. You would still need to search for more focused keywords. An example is - "technological lap top gadgets", however, let's optimize your blog for "technological gadgets" 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! Note: You will find some resources in the sidebar of this site for optimizing your blog.

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 template 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. For example, write an article/post titled - "Cheap Technological Gadgets for Everyone!". It has your keywords in the headline.

You should also sprinkle the words "technological gadgets" in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will hint to the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic. But, don't overdo it. Use of the term "technological gadgets" just a couple of times in your posts is quite enough. More than that and it may appear as spam to the search engines and, more important, your readers will feel the same way. The real downside to over use of the same keywords in a single article is that the search engines may de-list your blog and you will be cast out into the internet darkness.

So, keep this in mind: Write for humans, not for search engines, using your targeted keywords!

Yours for success in life.

Jim DeSantis

P.S. - Please forward this article to someone who can use it.

About the Author:
Jim DeSantis is a 15 year broadcast News veteran. For all Parts of this 6 Part Series go to Jim's blog at http://on-line-tribune-you-can-blog-too.blogspot.com
Added: 07 Jan 2007
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/47265.html

How You Can Explode Your Affiliate Sales with Your Home Business Blog

To be successful in affiliate marketing, people simply must know about your program. You must advertise as many ways as possible the product or service(s) your affiliate opportunity provides. If you know anything about advertising, it doesn’t come cheaply unless you are utilizing a weblog. Using a weblog costs you nothing to start. Just set one up and in about 15 minutes you can start promoting your business.

A weblog or blog for short serves as a personal journal for commentary, opinion and uncensored sources of information. Each new entry, also called a blog post, includes news articles, commentaries, photos, audio and video files. Blogs will allow your readers to leave comments also. To explode affiliate sales, making entries in your blog is something that affiliate marketers should be doing regularly.

Setting up a blog is a very easy process. Visit any of the popular blog platforms available to set up your own personal blog advertising your affiliate program. Not only is setting up your blog easy but it is very simple to use. With a few clicks of your mouse and a few keystrokes, you can post new material. Cutting and pasting are features you will enjoy when blogging. This makes adding content to your blog as simple as 1, 2, 3.

Updating your blog regularly with pertinent, informative and timely information about your affiliate program is essential to your success. By doing this, search engines will grant you a higher position on search engine results because these sites are usually indexed much faster. Because search engines love content, you have the potential for more sales because blogs are content driven.

There are many types of content that could be included in your blog. Writing articles is one of the more popular ways. Suggestions on topics to write about would be: your specific affiliate program, the affiliate marketing industry in general, someone successful in the affiliate marketing industry or a testimonial to others about your successes in affiliate marketing. You could write reviews on affiliate products or programs. The most important thing to remember is to be certain the content you provide is high quality and informative. Posting valuable and unique information on a regular basis will increase the likelihood that you will have return visitors. By providing good content, you will gain an increase of both first time visitors and repeat visitors. You will begin building a relationship and credibility therefore resulting in their trust in you. Your repeat visitors to your blog will be exposed to your messages and begin to value and trust your recommendations resulting in an increase in sales and referrals. It’s a known fact that visitors are 7 to 10 times more likely to purchase something from a blog recommendation than from any other source.

Blogs are a wonderful way to keep in touch with your potential customers. Be passionate about your affiliate progam and your blog. Success in blogging will not happen overnight but by steadily keeping your blog fresh and informative, over time you will start to see how this tool can be a fantastic viral marketing machine.

About the Author:
Kevin T. Smith has been helping people succeed online for over six years. www.EZWealthFromHome.com
Article Submitted On: September 13, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Creating A Blog To Promote An Existing Business

If you belong to any of the following groups, then this article is for you.

* You already have a business and a website that serves as the official hub for your online sales. The website may be serving as an online store for your enterprise.

* You need a venue wherein you can promote your affiliate links.

* Your already have a website, which may not necessarily be a commercial one, and it is enrolled with a Pay Per Click (PPC) program, like Google AdSense.

Success in these fields depends on one essential principle which you might have already realized: traffic is the key to your online business thriving.

You may have in your digital inventory the best products in the world, but they won’t mean squat if no one would get to see them. This is why each and every online businessman will fight tooth and nail just to have a piece of the Internet traffic. After all, the more visitors who get to visit your site, the more potential clients you have.

And blogs can most definitely help you drive visitors to your pages. Here is how you could use them to achieve such a purpose:

1. Download the Wordpress blogging software, which is available for free at www.wordpress.com . An alternative is to go with blogger.com. I have posted instructions for setting up a Blogger blog at your own server in this PDF file:
http://www.pluginprofitstraining.com/blogsetup.pdf

2. Remember that good content is always at the heart of a progressive online traffic stream. People are always looking for information, and if you will give them that, they would read what you have to offer. Dedicate your blog to the subject of your main website. Publish informative entries that would hook your readers and make them come back for updates. In between purely educational entries, strategically include a link to your site by suggesting their importance to your readers.

3. Using the above mentioned strategy, you could also include your affiliate links to pre-sell your affiliate products. The more traffic you drive to your affiliate merchant’s site or sales page, the more chances you will have of effectuating a successful sale and bigger commissions.

4. Links from blogs are unilateral, meaning, they are one way links to your websites. The more traffic a unilateral link generates, the more it becomes prominent in online searches. Avoid reciprocal links at all costs! Do not include a link to your blog from your website. Search engines abhor reciprocal linking.

5. 80% of your traffic will come from the search engines. You have to tweak your blog to attract the attention of the search engine spiders. Now, blogs are already search engine friendly. However, there is a very big possibility that you would be competing with other blogs on the same subject. You have to make sure that once you upload your blog, it is able to outperform its competitors in the search engine rankings.

One way you can do this is by using the title of your post to match the keyword phrases you are targeting, plus put a sprinkling of your keyword phrase in the post itself. I am doing this with great results.

6. Check your blog offline. It should be as readable and as navigable as possible for your prospective readers. Make appropriate adjustments if necessary.

7. Upload your blog to a reliable server that has enough bandwidth to accommodate many viewers.

8. Constantly update your blog. Search engines love regularly updated content, so publishing new entries will greatly increase your blog’s page rank, and consequently, your main website’s traffic.

9. Accepting links from other related blogs will also bring to your site some traffic from sources other then search engines. The way that a blog is designed fosters the building of a community of blog sites, and this will provide for an added stream of visitors for you.

10. You could also decide to enroll your blog site in the Google AdSense advertising program. This will give you an additional income stream. We will discuss this in future articles.

Blogs are excellent promotional tools for your existing business. Use them well and you will harvest the rewards in a matter of weeks.

Copyright 2005 Mal Keenan

About the author:
Mal Keenan
Get Your Hands on My FREE and Exclusive 7 Day Blogging Report by Sending and Blank Email to freeblogreport@getresponse.com In this Report I Reveal All The Secrets for Creating and Running A Successful Online Blog.
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