Tips to Create a SEO Friendly Blog

Tips to Create a SEO Friendly Blog

In order to run a successful online business blog, you will have to think about making it more SEO friendly. Blog will help you to gain more traffic and visitors therefore encourage more sales. So just what exactly is SEO and how can you add it to your blog?

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and used to make your website rank higher in search engines. You do this by using certain keywords that show your site on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. However, it can be difficult getting your website noticed on the major search engines as they usually prefer your website to have been up for at least a year or two and having it linked to from other websites, is also sometimes needed.

How to Use SEO for Your Blog

If you are looking to use SEO to promote your online home based business blog, you will need to take various factors into consideration. The first is that it is good to use as many keywords as possible to highlight your site, you should never use too many.

If you do use too many keywords, the search engines that you want to help you will actually ignore the site and consider as spam. They do not want you to overstuff your website with SEO content because if you do, it is likely not to be of a good quality. So, you need content in your website that reads well and has a good amount of keywords, but not too many.

The good news about a blog is that you can generally get away with using more keywords than you can in an article. This is because it makes more sense in a blog because it is shorter and it is a summary of whatever it is that you want to say. However, saying that, it would still be a good idea to limit the keywords and ensure that the blog does make sense with them all included. Hence you can improve your, internet business opportunity.

Finally, the main thing to keep in mind with SEO and blogs is that you need to make any external links that you may provide relevant to your website. If, for example, you have a website about cars, it would be pointless having a link to site about office furniture. The search engines will pick up on all of the links that you have and they will simply push your website down the list if they notice anything funny about your submission.

SEO in your blog can help you to gain more business, make extra money and it can help you to get higher rankings on various different search engines too

Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies

Internet marketing can attract more people to your website, increase customers for your business, and enhance branding of your company and products. If you are just beginning your online marketing strategy the top 10 list below will get you started on a plan that has worked for many.

1. Start with a web promotion plan and an effective web design and development strategy.

2. Get ranked at the top in major search engines, and practice good Search Optimization Techniques.

3. Learn to use Email Marketing Effectively.

4. Dominate your marketing niche with affiliate, reseller, and associate programs.

5. Request an analysis from an Internet marketing coach or Internet marketing consultant.

6. Build a responsive opt-in email list.

7. Publish articles or get listed in news stories.

8. Write and publish online press releases.

9. Facilitate and run contests and giveaways via your web site.

10. Blog and interact with your visitors.

By following the above tips you'll be on your way to creating a concrete internet marketing strategy that could boost your business substantially.

source ->http://marketing.about.com/od/internetmarketingstrategy/a/internettips.htm

Important measures to avoid mistakes while dealing with link building

It has been seen that people tend to make many mistakes while making efforts to boost up the page rank of their respective websites.

Such mistakes are pretty common mistakes and made by almost everybody who tries to up lift the page rank. It is very important to learn from those mistakes and never repeat them. Here are some important Search engine optimization mistakes one must always avoid.

Excess use of Keyword:
It is very important to use keyword as they help achieving optimization as per the search engine requirement. But one must avoid excessive use of keywords. It is a misconception that if keyword is used many times it will result in better page rank. It is advisable to keep in mind that search engines do not blindly follow the keywords they have set algorithm to track the genuine contents. There is a possibility of getting penalized with excessive keyword use. if you wish to have better rank and good optimization in terms of search engines then always use fresh content with appropriate use of key words.

Index without Page rank:
It is a wide spread misconception among people that if page is indexed then its page rank will automatically get increased by search engine. What they fail to realize that there are some very basic optimization techniques which can help increasing page rank. How ever hard you try to make your site better to get higher page rank but if it is not optimized properly then you will never get the desired results.

Social media is not enough:
Over the years social networking sites have gained tremendous popularity, they are not only famous but carry millions of fan following as well, for example face book, orkut and twitter. Major reason for such massive spread is that they hit the target bang on right and sing the right chord of emotions. They play good role getting traffic but not good for back links. They ends up getting you no follow back links. Thus start looking for more meaningful sources to get good traffic and back links.

Unethical link building:
there is no short cut to success. Always avoid unethical promoters who promise you to get fast and useful links in jiffy. You may encounter sudden rise in page rank due to links but they are unethical links could result is penalizing your site or permanently banning it.

Embed Flash Video In A WordPress Blog

There are many reasons why people want to add Flash videos to their WordPress blog sites. Maybe they want to introduce their website and products to their visitors, use as a training aid, show a webinar or simply show the new baby to distant relatives. What ever reason, website videos are used more and more every day.

If you have a real estate agency what could be better than a walk through tour of a property, a walk through of a yacht if you are a yacht broker or tours of sports clubs, hotels, workshops or what ever product you want potential customers to see.

You can hardly visit YouTube or Google Video to find a video about your hotel or sports club, you will have to make your own video or have it made for you. But let’s not talk about hotels and sports clubs, lets talk about you and the eBook or software program that you want to promote which is the reason lots of us have.

To get Flash video up and running we need to download some files and prepare our site. So lets get started now.

Step One: Preparing your site.

There are several plugins available for embedding flash video on your website, some are better than others and some are more user friendly. WP-FLV is one, FLV Embed is another and WordTube is the one that we will be using here. Visit the site, read up on the plugin and download it. Unpack the zip file and upload the folder into the WordPress plugins folder. Note do not change the folder names. You will also need the free, for personal use, Flash Media Player from Jeroen Wijering. Download the player from the website, unzip it and upload only the mediaplayer.swf file into the wordtube folder. Activate the plugin.

Go to your admin area, then Options, Manage, WordTube to set up the options. You can use the default upload folder or change it to another such as wp-content/videos. You can upload your files via Manage-Media Center. Note for streaming videos the Flash player will not show a preview, therefore you need also to upload a image (thumbnail) file. After uploading your video you can insert the tag (MEDIA=ID) into your post where you wish the embedded Flash video to be displayed. ID is the number of the video in the Media Centre. Make sure that you use UPPER case otherwise it will not work.

Google Instant

Last week, search engine giant, Google, announced that it was speeding up its Internet search engine by launching a product called Instant, which displays results as soon as users type in queries. It works by modifying results as more letters are typed in the search box. It is going live this week, and will be available on mobile devices as well before the end of October.

On the surface, the Instant Search system is a significant change in how we look for information online. Google believes that the new system will save between two and five seconds per search. If we take that figure on a global scale, 11 hours will be saved every second! Not bad at all, as it improves efficiency for everyone.

Not everyone is happy with this new improvement though. Predictably, one of the unhappy group would be Google's competitors, other search engines, as this new development is clearly targeted at tightening Google's strangle hold of the search market, a lead which in the last few years has slackened a bit, especially since Microsoft introduced their Bing search engine.

The surprising complaints, however, are coming from the online marketing community, especially Search Engine Optimisers. These are people who take money from you to get your website to the top of Google's rankings. With this new technology, the algorithms that they use in their craft would have to undergo a massive change. But Google has been quick to try and pacify them by saying that the core of their search technology (which decides the most relevant results) is still the same, so that they have nothing to worry about.

What will be more interesting to watch is how tools such as Instant will change the face of mobile communication as we know it. In Nigeria, with the proliferation of the Internet, especially on mobile devices, a tool such as Instant would be extremely useful in the coming elections with more searches showing up in real time and especially if more Nigerians pick up the trends and post results to the various social networking platforms, such results would be picked up VERY quickly by Google's bots and would be out for the whole world to see in no time.

Imagine a scenario where you want to know the results in the Ugbojiobo area of Edo State. All you would have to do would be to type U-G-B-O and Google would do the rest for you. The psychological effect of not having to type the full thing, hit the ‘ENTER' key, and wait for the results is enormous. Even more important is that in typing those four letters, your search engine would help with suggestions, so you can also see results in Ugbowo, Ugbomwanta, Ugboke, Ugbo Wunagweh, and other such remote places. This means people can modify their search queries on the go if something interesting pops up elsewhere. One can't help but wonder just how far this would go in helping to reduce electoral fraud...

A note of warning, though. To be able to access all of the Google Instant goodies, you have to actually be typing your search query from Google's homepage, not from the seach bar that most browsers come equipped with nowadays. I am not yet clear on whether you can use Instant directly from the address bar in Google's Chrome browser, but that is a moot point as Chrome is not available on mobile devices, yet.

301 and 302 Web Page Redirects

What exactly is a redirect, and how do they function?

Why do web page url's change? Site owners change their domain names, will restructure their web sites or launch a new way of delivering, and these are just some of dozens of reasons that url's can change.

If you change the name of your URL, your site visitors and search engines will also have difficulties finding the new page. If your page was indexed with a high ranking then how are people going to locate it? Redirection is one solution. With redirection, site owners can have the ability to send a request to the search engines letting them and visitors know where the new page is locate d.

Server-Side Redirection

This is where your web server does all the work of pointing from one place to another.
When servers complete a redirection, the server will send out an update code about the request in which it processed. When you run into a code called "404 Not Found" error, that's a type of update code a server will send, which results in the showing of that "404 Not Found" web page.
The two type of codes that go out regarding redirection are 301 and 302 redirects. These numbers you may have run across or heard of regarding redirection and hijacking situations.

Use this code For 301 redirecting in PHP:



301 Redirect in HTACCESS:

• Moving a page:
RedirectPermanent /old-file-name.html http://www.new-domain.com/new-directory/new-file-name.html
• Moving a directory:
RedirectPermanent /old-directory http://www.new-domain.com/new-directory/
• Moving an entire site:
RedirectPermanent / http://www.new-domain.com/

A 301 ASP Redirect:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%Response.Status="301 - Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader "Location", " http://www.newsite-url.com" >

302 Temporary Redirect (not recommended)

The 302 'temporary redirect' guidelines from W3C, state that 302's are used when a page has been 'temporarily' moved to a new location on the web or within the site and but the site owner still wants visitors and search engines to keep the old site address rather than making note of the new one.

In other words, say one day kosmossupersite.com gets Slash-dotted or receives very heavy traffic, way too much to keep serving up things as normal. So, you decide to temporarily send people off to a mirror site, mirror.kosmossupersite.com. You want people and search engines to reach the new location but not record the address as a permanent change. You'd do a 302 temporary redirect like this:

Kosmossupersite.com --- 302 Temporary Redirect ---> mirror.kosmossupersite.com
Do that, and it's the site doing the pointing whose URL should be retained for use in search listings. This though is not recommended because this is a common spam practice and search engines will potentially black list a site or at least penalize those pages for performing any type of temporary redirect.

Use this code for 302 redirecting in PHP
:


302 Redirect in HTACCESS:

• Redirecting a page:
Redirect /file-name.html http://www.domain.com/temporary-directory/temporary-file-name.html
• Redirecting a directory:
Redirect /directory http://www.domain.com/temporary-directory/
• Redirecting an entire site:
Redirect / http://www.temporary-domain.com/
Try to avoid a 302 redirect on your site if you can (unless it truly is only a temporary redirect), and never use them as some form of click tracking for your outgoing links, as they can result in a "website hijacking" under some circumstances.
404 Page Not Found:
Search engines prefer 301 redirects when a page or site has been moved.

If your removing a page permanently they would prefer a 404 Page Not found error.
Code:


Meta Tag Refresh Page Redirects (not recommended)
Meta tag redirection is a page-based method of pointing from one place to another. In other words, it's something you put on the actual web page.
For example:

The below code would have to be placed within your Meta Tags of your old page.
< equiv="refresh" content="5;URL=http://www.kosmoscentral.com/seo-articles/reciprocal-Links-Management.html">

What you're telling a search engine is that the new page will load automatically in 5 seconds, because the old page is forwarding to the new location. Just copy and paste the code in and change the time frame from 5 seconds to what every you wish and the destination url.
When placing redirects on old pages, we also recommend you tell your visitors exactly what is going on.

7 Advanced SEO Tactics

If you're like most online webmasters, then you have probably read one article after the other about search engine optimization. Most of them rehash the same old information and you end up wading through tons of fluff. However, this isn't one of those articles. Listed below are 7 advanced SEO tips that you won't find on every digital corner.
1. Syndicating Articles that Link to Your Sitemap

As you probably know, syndicating articles is one of the best methods for obtaining one-way backlinks.


They are also valuable pieces of search engine bait because search engine crawlers are frequent visitors to many high-profile article directories. If you want to get the spiders quickly crawling your site, simply submit an informative article to a site like EzineArticles, GoArticles, or ArticleCity.

However, there's another article marketing strategy that isn't mentioned much in marketing circles. This tactic can get the crawlers searching deeper into your site and indexing more of your pages. Simply link to your sitemap within the resource box. This will send the spiders straight to a content buffet where they can quickly slurp up all of your pages.


2. Translating Your Website Into Other Languages

Are you marketing in just one language? If so, you are missing out on 64.8% of your marketing potential. This is because 64.8% of the world is surfing the internet in a language other than English. By becoming a multilingual marketer, you immediately open up a stream of new markets. Google alone crawls web pages in 35 different languages.

One of the best ways to attract worldwide traffíc is to translate your site and register it with both English and foreign-language search engines and directories. If you are a seasoned SEO, you'll be happy to hear that the competition in foreign search engines is much less than in those of the United States.

In addition, online foreign language markets are currently growing at a much faster rate than English speaking markets.

You have the opportuníty to tap into this market while it's in an exponential growth phase.


3. ROR Sitemaps

As you probably know, sitemaps are important for making sure your site can be completely spidered and indexed by the search engines. Unfortunately, many of these sitemaps are specific to one search engine or another. For this reason, there have been a number of Google and Yahoo site map generators produced in recent years.

However, there is an alternative that is even more exciting. These are ROR sitemaps and they are readable by all search engines, not just by Google or Yahoo.

ROR is an exciting new sitemap tool that uses XML feeds to describe your website. These sitemaps are structured feeds that enable search engines to complement text search with structured information to better interpret the meaning of your site. With a ROR sitemap, search engines can better understand your products, services, images, newsletters, articles, podcasts, and anything else that you want to describe.

For example, if you are selling products, a ROR file enables you to document your product names, descriptions, prices, images, availability, affilíate programs, and any other

relevant information. Search engine crawlers like the Googlebot have an enormous job to do. It's time we start helping them to better understand our content.


4. Keyword Phrases that Convert

Selecting the right keyword phrases is the single most important aspect of any SEO campaign. Unfortunately, many webmasters target the wrong keywords. Too many of us target very general keywords like "real estate" or "internet marketing". Although these terms get lots of visitors, it is unlikely that you will be able to rank highly for them. Then, even if you do, this type of traffíc produces very low conversion rates because it does not target prospects.

You will be much more successful, if you target keyword phrases that are 3-4 words long. These terms are much less competitive and have been proven to convert much better than keywords that are 1 to 2 words long.

Who do you think is more likely to buy; someone who goes to Google and searches for "ipod" or someone who searches for "4gb black ipod nano"? Obviously, the person who searches for a more specific phrase is much closer to making a buying decision.


5. GoogSpy

Would you like to get an in-depth view of how your competitors run their business? Well, you can do exactly that with an online service known as GoogSpy. GoogSpy is a free research tool that will tell you what keywords your competitors are bidding on.

This tool tracks over 500,000 keywords every day from Google and then loads this goldmine of information into the GoogSpy.com database. Using this tool, you can browse by company or by search term.

This tool is extremely powerful. Unfortunately, many people take it for granted. This service basically hands you a business strategy on a silver platter. Maybe we should just keep this one to ourselves and enjoy the benefits of being one step ahead of our competition.

For example, let's say you wanted to do some in-depth research on Overstock.com, one of the largest companies online. You would simply go to googspy.com and type in overstock.com. You will then be shown thousands of words that this company bids on. These keywords are proven profít generators. Research like this would normally cost thousands of dollars, but they are providing it free of charge.

If you want to find keywords with high conversion rates, simply type in words such as buy and purchase. You will be shown keyword phrases that are bid on that include the words buy or purchase. These are very lucrative keyword phrases because the person who types in "buy sony playstation 2" knows exactly what they want. They're not just looking around, they are in buying mode. These are the type of keywords you want to bid on. Using GoogSpy, you can uncover these hidden gems in seconds.

Other high-converting keyword phrases include brand names and product names. Type in the keyword "camera" and you will find thousands of different brands and product names for cameras. These keywords are some of the best keywords because of their high conversion rate.


6. Internal Links Within Content

The navigation of your site is a crucial element of your search engine optimization campaign. Each link within your navigational structure should correlate with a keyphrase that you are trying to rank for.

However, you can also include internal links within your content. For example, let's say you have written an article about online marketing. Within the article are a number of keyword phrases. Some of these phrases include "link popularity" and "web site traffíc". If you have other articles within your site that pertain to these topics, then you should definitely link those keyword phrases to those articles. By doing this, you can increase the link popularity of other pages within the same site.

There are very few sites that take advantage of this optimization technique. By doing this, you enable the search engines to find and index much more of your site. These internal links also contribute to a higher ranking because of the anchor text that is used.

Many people only think of inbound links from outside websites when trying to raise their link popularity. However, the internal link structure is also a major ranking factor.


7. Using Your Log Files for SEO

Your server logs reveal very important information about your site. If you learn to use them properly, they can quickly help to maximize your site's traffíc and conversion rates.

One of the most valuable pieces of information found in your log files are search phrases. The log files will tell you exactly which keywords people are using to find your website.

Once you have optimized a page, the log files will tell you how people are finding that page and what keywords they are searching for to get there. If you find that people are using keywords that you hadn't thought of to get to a certain page, it would probably be in your best interest to further optimize that page for those keywords.

You might also want to create a new page optimized for that particular term. This is especially true if a new page would enable you to serve better information on the phrase being searched for.

In addition, by looking at how your site is found organically, you can determine whether the same keyword phrases belong in your paid search campaigns. Only choose the ones that are highly relevant. You will find that these keyword phrases have the best conversion rate.