Tuesday, October 16, 2007

5 Ways To Make Money With Blogs

There are hundreds of ways to make money on the internet, but most oversee the idea of making money with blogs. Blogs are a great way to promote articles, discuss various ideas, and promote your website itself. However, there are several ways you can make money with blogs as well. Here are 5 ways to make money with blogs.

1. Sell advertising
The most common way people make money with blogs is selling advertising. If you build a large blog you can sell advertising space for people to put their ads on your blog. However, a majority of people aren’t capable of building a blog big enough to do this. That is where Google AdSense and BlogAds can help you. It is free and they pay you based on the number of people that click their ads for further information.

2. Sell your products
A blog is a great place to discuss advice and opinions on various subjects. It can also be a great place to promote your product and tell them how it can benefit them. Whether it’s your blog or someone else’s, look at it as an opportunity to fulfill peoples’ needs, not that you are just selling your product.

3. Affiliate programs
This is a great way to make money with blogs that hardly anyone even considers. By mentioning the product, the affiliate program will provide you with a clickable link to hyperlink the word with. This way if people are interested in your blog post and click on the product word, they are directed to the affiliate program website where you make commission on all products they buy.

4. Sell your website
It may seem cliché because everyone sells their own website and business through blogs. However, it is your approach that can mean the difference of you making money with blogs or not. If you spend the whole time talking you will seem uninterested in others’ insight. If you incorporate others’ thoughts and opinions and strike up a conversation with little bits and pieces about your business, you soon will have them reeled in. By talking about their business and showing interest you will find that more people are interested in your business in turn.

5. Consistency
The more you post the more chances people have to see you and your website link. It is vital that you make one post a day or at minimum a few a week. This way people become accustomed to seeing your posts and hearing your advice or questions. This is a great way to build relationships, which will help you sell your product, share ideas, and promote your website.

If you take the time to put in the effort in blogs you can easily make money with blogs. There are some people that make a living through making money with blogs. However it is commitment, consistency, and your approach that can either break your or make you money with blogs.



http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/5-Ways-To-Make-Money-With-Blogs/27636

How To Determine A Name For Your Business Blog

The growing popularity of blogging by the general public is making business blogging a necessary marketing tool to stay competitive. There are many factors that can determine the success or failure of business blogging, and how successful it is with the business's target market. These factors include how well the blog is marketed, how easy it is to comprehend the blog content, and how well the blog entices people to take action. Determining the name for the blog is one important factor in driving the right kind of targeted visitors to the business website.

Why the name of the blog is important

The name of your blog is important because it sets the tone for the blog and it is the first line of marketing for your desired visitors. If a business names their blog 'Jim's Blog' or 'Jane's Blog', it isn't descriptive enough for people at a first glance to decide if they even want to visit your blog.

Another important result of how you name your business blog, is that most blogging software will put the name of the blog in the title of the browser. Many search engines will list the title of a web page in their results page. If your blog name isn't very descriptive and accurate, you will risk losing potential customers or prospects coming to your site if they stumble upon your blog from a search engine results page.

Research the keywords for your blog:

This is an important step because you will want to include some keywords in your business blog name to get maximum results. In order to determin which keywords you should use in the name of your blog, you will need to research the viable keywords for your industry. There are many free and paid tools that you can use that will tell you what keyword phrases are being used in searches. This information will tell you what phrases your target market uses to find businesses in your industry.

While performing your research, you will find many results for keyword phrases. The ones you should be most interested in are the keyword phrases that don't have too many words (no more than 4), as we will be adding more to the name if possible. You will also want to pick the keyword phrases that have a relatively high number of total searches for the month (10,000 or more).

Once you have decided upon a few keyword phrases, experiment with some different arrangements of the words to create the beginnings of a compelling business blog name.

Pick a clear benefit of your services to use in your blog name:

You are in business to fill a need or pain for your target market. If you aren't doing that, you won't be in business for long. Pick a clear and concise solution to a problem that your business provides for your target market, and try to incorporate that benefit into the name of your blog. You should end up with a name that will include relevant keywords and also contain a benefit for your clients or customers. Following these steps will give the title of your business blog a more relevant and enticing name.

How to put all the elements together for the name of your business blog:

How do you put together a keyword phrase and a clear benefit to create a powerful blog name? Let us go over an example for the travel industry. We will use a hypothetical company that provides travel insurance to travelers. A common problem for travelers that need travel insurance is to replace lost property and luggage. The benefit of this particular travel insurance business is that it provides coverage that is over and above what the other travel companies provide, or provides a service that makes it quicker and easier to process claims.

Our keyword research for this industry finds that 'travel insurance online' has just over 10,000 total keyword searches for the month (total of all 3 of the major search engines). So in creating the name for the blog, we could call it 'Quick Claims in Online Travel Insurance' or 'More Than You Expect From Online Travel Insurance'. We have included a benefit, and the keyword phrase in one short sentence, and we did not make the name too long to make it look awkward.

As you have seen, the name of your business blog serves a couple of functions. The biggest one is that it can be used to help drive targeted visitors to your website, but the name also plays a role in search engine optimization for your business blog. When choosing a name of your business blog, don't leave out the fact that it should also fit into the branding strategy of your business. Choose wisely and do your research well and you could reap the benefits and rewards for your business.



http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/How-To-Determine-A-Name-For-Your-Business-Blog/28199

Monday, October 15, 2007

Search Engine Algorithm Quandaries

Before you make drastic changes to your website after a rocky search engine update, take time to study your web server logs, changes in traffic to your site, and your ranking in the search engines.

Making Changes Before Analysis

Making rash decisions when you are hearing one thing then another from forum postings and articles is not the best choice to make. Much of the talk about fluctuations in the search engine rankings is just that--talk. Cold hard facts come from established tests of what is going on and why. Don't jump ship before examining what is going on with your website first. Panic will lead you nowhere.

Let's talk about basic search engine fundamentals you need to know.
Search Engine Rankings Fluctuate

First, you need to know that search engine rankings fluctuate; that is just the way it is. Google is a prime example of ranking changes happening throughout the day. The best way to find out how you are faring is to study the traffic coming to your site over time. Nope, not just a day or two, try a week or two at least to see if your rankings return. A search engine update may last a week before finishing and the rankings settle. Most importantly, are you receiving traffic at your website? Are you still making sales? Okay then, something is working. Don't jump on the "change everything" bandwagon. Pay attention to what is true in regard to your website.
No One Knows Algorithms Like The Search Engines

The truth is much of the talk about organic (natural) search engine marketing information is speculative. The people who know exactly what the search engine is doing are the engineers who created it, and they are not going to give away their secrets. This means that understanding what happens when updates occur may be difficult to pin down. Keeping tabs with leaders in the industry through articles, forum postings and blogs may give you a general idea of what is happening. Take that information and then apply it to what is actually happening with your website traffic and sales.

You Need A Log Statistics Program

If you do not take anything else away with you from this article be sure you heed this advice: you need a log statistics program in place. With a good log statistics program you will be able to see various reports showing the number of unique visits taking place on your website, what keyword phrases visitors use to find your pages, what pages are being visited, which search engines are being used to find your website, and much more. Knowing what the "normal" website traffic of your website is will give you a good idea of what may be actually changing over time when updates do occur.

Resubmitting Doesn't Help

Don't resubmit your web pages in the crush of an update. Search engines have crawlers, known as search engine robots or spiders, that are able to pick up a web page through links in order to add it to the search engine databases. For this reason you do not need to submit your pages to search engines anymore. Even if you mysteriously go from "top ten" to number 500 in the rankings, the fact that you are still listed means that you are still in the search engine's database, and you do not need to resubmit. Watch search engine robot activity in your server logs and you will be able to see when your web pages are being revisited by the robots.

Google PageRank Should Not Rule Your Life

So many people fixate on Google's PageRank. I suggest you should be more concerned about the traffic coming to your website, sales, the amount of content on your site and the number of on topic or directory backlinks you have acquired. PageRank is part of a much bigger equation of over 100 ways in which Google evaluates your website. Don't forget about the traffic that comes from the other search engines as well. Google may not always be the leader in search engines, keep current with the other major search engine players in the industry.

Common Sense Makes Sense

Use common sense. If you are a small business you can ill afford to make changes that may adversely affect your bottom line. Observation and patience will gain you more than quick fixes. In my experience, the true test of an update is watching the search engine results settle over at least a week or two worth of time. Let the dust settle, analyze the situation, and see what happens from there.

Moderation may be helpful, whether in gaining backlinks, making website changes or your reactions to changes. Don't panic. If it isn't broken...don't fix it.



http://www.searchinnovation.com/search-engine-algorithm-quandaries.asp

Saturday, October 13, 2007

The Secret of Black hat seo

Are your seo efforts at a standstill while everyone else seems to be getting results? Maybe it's time to take some tips from the guys that know the limits of optimization and the benefits of playing in the grey area.

So let's see what black hats do to get traffic:

1. Go for the long tail - black hats do this because it's easier to rank for a 4,5 or even 6 keyword search that has no direct competition than it is to rank for a search phrase that has hundreds of thousands or millions of results.

Of course, spam sites have the advantage of massive numbers of pages, so even if that page only brings one visitor per month it's still enough - spam sites are created in only a couple of hours and usually have from 30 000 pages and up.

But if you keep writing daily (or even more than once a day), it will add up. This brings us to the next point:

2. The money's in the archives - although some visitors will first see the main page of your site, many more will first see one of the inside pages as these will be the ones that come up for specific, long tail searches.

With each page you publish you increase your chances that at least one more visitor will find your site and more importantly, if it's a good resource, it will more than pay for itself by getting backlinks from many different sites that will diversify your inbound links profile.

3. Small degrees of separation - this is one of the best methods for writing new content: if you have a page on a certain subject just write another that has some differences.

For example: you've just written an article on how to promote a site on Digg - now write another on how to promote on Del.icio.us, and yet another on how to promote your site on Slashdot (of course, don't just change the names and URLs, you actually have to change the article a little bit).

Please understand this: if you have a 30 page site don't put up 10 pages that resemble each other very much. By doing this you'll surely trip a duplicate content filter.

4. Comment spam but without the spam - let's face it: black hats are synonymous with spammers. They rely on comment and guestbook spamming to get their huge websites indexed and this proves one thing that i've tested and found to be true: even "no-follow" links have the power to rank and index your site, although most optimizers say these are useless.

What to do: find 10 or 15 blogs that are on the same subject as your site and start contributing with valuable information. Don't spam, don't say "Nice blog!" every time just to get a link! You must actually participate.

5. Create (legitimate) doorway pages - this is a great method for link building and actually getting customers while your site is in the sandbox or not ranking very good.

A very good example is Squidoo.com: it's a very powerful site with lots of link juice that lets you create pages on almost any subject. Start by creating 10 or 12 pages with unique content on various subjects that match your site and then place various links to your site on the Squidoo pages you have created.

Even better, you can actually create a very big network of pages which you can logically structure as a homepage with categories and product pages - it's allowed, encouraged and in the end very good for you.

Now think of other powerful sites on which you can put your content: Blogger, Google Base, Wordpress.com, Xanga, Livespace and many more.

6. Blog and ping - this is very simple and yet a very good method to get indexed fast. Each time you write a new article go to Pingoat.com, put in the name of the article and the url and ping away. You'll be indexed in no time!

Apply these tips now and just watch your rankings improve and traffic increase!



http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/The-Secret-of-Black-hat-seo/35709

Optimizing with Firefox

One piece of software any optimizer should love is Firefox. Now some may say "Why Firefox, it's only a browser?" Yes, it's a browser, but one that supports a big variety of plugins, some of them very useful for search engine optimization. So let's see what those plugins are:

1. SEOpen ( https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/570/ ): this is one of the best and most used Firefox seo plugins, and has many tools that make it a favorite of mine. So let's see what it can do:

* in Google it can check for: backlinks, indexed pages, related pages, cache and PageRank.
* in Yahoo and MSN: backlinks and indexed pages.
* for Alexa: overview, traffic details, backlinks and related sites.
* keyword density of the most used words on the page.
* DMOZ checker: see if the site is included in the directory.
* check for robots.txt.
* validator to check your page for errors (it uses the validator from www.w3.org).

There are other things, but these are the most important.

2. SEO Links
( http://www.webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/firefox-extensions/seo-links/ ) is another extension I use everyday. When the extension si active and you hover over a link a tooltip will appear that will show you Yahoo, MSN, and Google link popularity and ranking data for the URL and anchor text pair. When you're simply browsing this can be annoying, but you can simply deactivate it with a right-click!

This could be very easily used to check your search engine rankings for a certain page, and here is how: write up a list with all the keywords and keyphrases that you want to rank for, and then link those words or phrases to the web pages associated with them!

Now every time you want to check your ranks activate the SEO Links extension and hover over the links -- you will see where your pages are in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

3. Don't waste anymore of your precious screen real estate just to find out what your PageRank and AlexaRank is! SearchStatus ( https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/321/ ) can sit anywhere you want (I keep it in the status bar) and you'll receive the precious info at a glance. But this little tool can do a lot more than that:

* it shows what metatags a site has
* checks for backlinks and indexed pages in Google, Yahoo and MSN
* it shows the robots.txt file
* keyword density report function
* and best of all: the highlight "nofollow" links will show you what links will be followed by search engine spiders -- very useful when you want to submit your site to a directory and don't know if it will matter from a seo perspective.

So in case you're not using Firefox, go get it! It could be your best friend when it comes to search engine optimization!



http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/Optimizing-with-Firefox/35712

Tips for Choosing a SEO Companyhttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=509534821990831325

Even if you have a good knowledge of SEO & you try hard to get a good ranking, your site doesn’t do well. It is simply because your site needs to be optimized & maintained on a regular basis. It is a ongoing process which requires a lot of time. So, in this case, it is advisable to hire a Search Engine Optimization Company in UK for your website.

There are many search engine marketing company in uk but choosing a right internet marketing service in uk is the most important. Here are some of the main points that should be kept in mind while selecting SEO services.

Do they provide website analysis report – a good semcompany will provide you a complete analysis of your site regarding what all needs to be done. The hampering elements in reading & indexing of your pages can be in functionality, page design & its content.

Do they understand “traffic” and “qualified” traffic – if unqualified traffic is coming to your site due to irrelevant keywords, then it will not be productive for you. They need to work on relevant keywords.

Tools to determine keywords – what tools they use for searching keywords. What methodology they use for keyword analysis? There are suggestion tools provided by google adwords or they use basic tools.

Collecting back links – from where they get back links as back links are very important for good SEO working. They should have it from good sites only.

Cost structure – a good SEO company will give the costing after analyzing the work involved. High prices do not ensure high quality always. Prices should be consistent with the services provided by the company.

Timeline involved – If sheer hard work & proper planning is involved then only results can be achieved in time. Some SEO packages claim to get first page result in 10 days. No SEO company can guarantee you of no. 1 ranking in Google in just 10 days. This is the guideline published by even google. So, beware of false promises.

There could be some other factors too but the main thing is that if you’re looking for long term SEO partners for your site, you should get some knowledge about it. SEO services enable your site to get maximum exposure within search engines and it means more prospective traffic to your site. A Website marketing company will analyze the overall functionality of your site. Links are very important in website optimisation. A good SEO company can also give an off-page optimisation linking strategy. But a linking strategy is a long term process. So, now-a-days SEO packages do not include this.

Your SEO services should not be secretive of their services. If it does something deceptive on your behalf, your site could be out from Google’s indexing. And later you will be in trouble. So, getting familiar with some knowledge on search engine optimisation will help you to choose a right search engine company for your website.



http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/Tips-for-Choosing--a-SEO-Company/43404

KEYwords: Are the Key to SEO

Search engine optimization will help increase the traffic generated by your online business‘ website or Web page by ranking high on search engine results, and one way that this can be achieved is through the use of appropriate keywords in describing content to your website or Web page. In order to optimize and improve your website‘s search engine result so that you can increase your online business‘ chances of gaining profit, you must be able to draw targeted traffic to your website. Keep in mind that people who are searching in the Internet find websites and Web pages that are easier to find more appealing, which is why making your site easier to locate in different search engines will help your online business draw in more potential customers.

It is important to remember that already a lot of online businesses are using SEO, so in order for you to beat your competition in SEO, you must be able to know what keywords and criterion to use in order to improve your search engine results ranking. Using the appropriate keywords will help you share your site‘s content to a lot of Web users who are also searching for similar content. This will also help inform people of your site‘s content even before they visit your site. Keep in mind that people will most likely overlook your website even if your site ranks high in the search engine results if they are unable to derive what your site‘s content is through your keywords.

Using good keywords and their placement are essential in how your site is going to place in search engine results. So it is important that you use only relevant and appropriate keywords to your site in order to get the most traffic. Aside from this, it is also important to constantly use them all throughout your website‘s content and text. You can use description and keyword tags whenever you can, especially on certain page elements such as page titles, headers, links, whenever possible. Try to avoid, however, spamming unrelated, different, or grossly repetitive keywords in a single page as this can have a negative impact to your ranking. Make sure that you only use text or keywords that you want your potential customers to read.

Common SEO Mistakes

There are some online business owners who commit the mistake of ignoring their keyword selection, which is actually the most crucial factor in SEO. When they do take a notice to it, they sometimes do not use good choices of keywords, choosing very general keywords, or keywords that not a lot of people would be searching instead of using specific keywords in what they are optimizing. If a lot of your competitors are using the same keywords, then it is best that you try to find an alternative that will still bring traffic to your site.

Resources :
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http://www.articlejoe.com/Article/KEYwords--Are-the-Key-to-SEO/43538