SEO Strategy Blog: blogging

Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts

Jan 6, 2010

How to promote a blog

Do you need to market your blog?

If you want to make money from your blog you need to market it as any other product out there. Blogging is not just writing and publishing articles. Visitors and income won’t just fall from nowhere upon you. You need to work hard to optimize your blog, create quality content, and promote them.

Content quality

In order to make money from your blog you need to have content that can bring people to visit again and again. Here is a set of simple rules that can help you:

Writing high quality content is the first and most important rule.
Use spell checking and grammar tools.
Read your post twice before publishing.
Find someone to read your post and find errors and misunderstandings before posting.
Write on valuable and popular topics.
Use simple but professional design.
Make your blog SEO friendly.

Ways to promote a blog
There are several basic ways to promote a blog.

PPC advertising
Social media marketing – promote your blog in services like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace.
SEO – hire a SEO company or do the job your self. SEO can bring you tons of targeted, SE traffic.
Forums – you can successfully market your blog on forums, especially your niche forums. Join some and give a try.
Blog commenting or guest posting – participate on other blog communities, share useful and relevant information.

Jan 5, 2010

HTML basics for SEO specialists

You need to learn the basics if you intend to do SEO yourself. HTML is very important for both on-page and of page SEO optimization.

You need to know how to structure a web site, what are the value and the meaning of the basic HTML tags and how search engines see them. During a link building campaign you must know which online directories, services and sites provide quality links.

Basic HTML tags you need to know

<html></html> - this tag tells that this is a HTML document. It is the root element of HTML document.
<head></head> - this tag is a container of all head elements like title, meta-tags, styles and so on.
<title></title> -this is your page’s title. It must be located in the head of the document. The title tag is very important – it provides basic information about your page to both human visitors and search engines. SE use titles in their result pages. The title must be short and descriptive with one or two keywords in it.

<body></body> - this tag defines the document body, all text and formatting elements must go here.

<a></a> - an anchor tag. This is the most important HTML tag for you as a SEO specialist. The anchor can be used for both creating a link to another HTML document or a bookmark within the same document.
The anchor tag has several attributes but the most important of them is href. It tells the link’s destination.
Another important attribute is rel. It tells the relation between this document and its target document. If a link is marked as nofollow (rel=nofollow), it says to search engines that this pages links to unverified document and it don’t want to pass its rank and quality to the linked document.
The text between the opening and closing anchor tags is the text that will explain to humans and search engines what kind of page is on the other way of this link. Search engines pay special attention to this text so it is the best place to put a keyword. Both search engines and human visitors pay special attention to the text around a hyperlink or anchor. Humans decide to visit a page according to this text. Search engines index the page content according to this text again. Humans and search engines are quite similar, aren’t they?

If you want to learn more:
What do you need to know about links

Headings - <h1> to <h6> - these tags are used to define HTML headings. The lower the number the larger is the text shown on your browser. Headings are great way to mark titles like blog post titles or category titles for example. This blog by default has several posts on a page and each post title is marked with a heading.

<img> - this tag defines an image. Here you have two SEO-important attributes. The first is src and marks the location of the image. The second is alt and is used to mark an alternative text to be shown to the visitors. Search engines aren’t exactly humans and can distinguish what is on the image. They use the other elements on the same page and the alt element of the image tag to index the image. Using a keyword here will help you get traffic from image searches.

Read more:
Getting traffic from your images

You can learn more HTML here.

Dec 23, 2009

How Twitter can make your business grow?

Twitter is a popular social network and micro blogging platform with great importance on online marketing practices. It enables its users to send and read short messages of up to 140 characters. Twitter users can and receive tweets via web, SMS, and custom applications.

Twitter can help your business in several ways. It can be used for building brand awareness, providing news and update information, even online support. It can also be used for surveying people opinion, getting real time news and reactions, keeping track on latest trends.

Twitter as a promotion tool
Building brand recognition will add an important value to your business relationships. You can use Twitter to provide information, news and updates to your clients. You can give some inner information, ask your employs to have twitter accounts and share some thoughts, and add some spicy content. Giving some preliminary information to your Twitter followers can start a buzz.

Twitter as a research tool
You can use twitter to participate in conversations in your niche. You can ask people for opinion on products, feedback for services and even advices. This can help you to build better relations with your clients. Searching for terms or just following the daily trends can keep you up to date with latest news and reactions.

Twitter as tool for getting traffic
Providing a link at the end of your news tweets can lead many visitors to your website. You can offer an option for your visitors to share or re-tweet the articles they like. One good article or information can be re-tweeted more than thousand times and reach enormous number of people.

Micro blogging can be a great tool for growing an online business. Using services like Twitter can help your business to get known and valued.

Dec 6, 2009

Best free ways to promote a blog?

There are many different ways to promote a blog and drive traffic. Here is a list of things I do for promotion. I hope it will help you.

Social media optimization works best for my blogs. Use sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg to promote your content. Create a community, join similar communities in your niche, participate in events and you will get people attention. Groups and communities in your niche work best. Also social media sites in you niche may bring you more visitors than big, global SM sites. For example, for one of my coding blogs I get tons of traffic from DZone – social bookmarking site for developers.
Offer social bookmarking buttons to encourage your readers to share what they like. Tweet and retweet buttons also can bring you many new fans.

Link building.
Link building is an essential part of a SEO campaign. Don’t skip it. Join the majority of blog directories and especially the ones in your niche. Share some personal information and write something interesting as a description of you blogs.

Press Release Sites – write a press release and send it to some of the biggest press release sites. If you have a specific niche like gaming – send your press release to the biggest news sites in your niche.

Register to search engines. It may sounds trivial but this may help you a little.

Run contest or offer something for free. You can offer an e-book, website template, or blog theme. Freebies tend to bring a lot of new visitors.

Forum posting and blog commenting.
Prefer forums and blogs in your niche. It would be better if they don’t add nofollow to your link.

Nov 19, 2009

Blogger tricks - limiting the posts shown per tag page

Blogger is quite useful and configurable blogging platform but most of the users simply don’t pay enough attention to it. Users have the freedom to change a lot of stuff on their blogs.
I’ll share some tips I find useful here and in some future posts.

How to limit the post count shown at a tag page
The tags are useful in order to maintain your content but the tag pages are too big – the default 20 posts may take too long to load even if your blog don’t have many images or videos. If you have a gaming blog with screenshots – the loading process may look insane.
How to solve this issue?

The solution is simple but first – back up your template.

If you don’t know how to back up it, here is the path:
Go to your blog’s layout page and select the Edit HTML tab. You will see a link – Download Full Template. Click it and save the file on your local disk. Voila, you have your template saved if you mess something later.
If you fail later, use the Upload template form to restore your template from you local hard drive.

Limiting the posts on a label page

What we need to achieve?

Ok, let’s look at a tag page. For example:
http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/search/label/blogging

We need to set the variable max-results to something appropriate – let’s say 5. So we must add ?max-results=5 to our url.

http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/search/label/blogging?max-results=5

One way is to hardcore the tag urls but this requires too much efforts. The other way is to change the blog template.
Again go to the Layout – Edit HTML tab. Check the Expand Widget Templates checkbox. Now, you can see the full source code of your template.

Find the text

expr:href='data:label.url'

and change it to

expr:href='data:label.url+ "?max-results=5"'

You may find it multiple times, depending on your template. Fix it everywhere. Save the template and try your tags. They must work fine, now.

If you meet some problems in the process, revert back to your original template and try again. I wish this tip will help.

Blogging, technically

Blogging may look very easy but creating a high-quality, money making blog requires a lot of efforts. Just posting content won’t make you rick. Your blog will need a lot of maintenance and technical work.

In order to grow a money-making blog, there are several things you need to know. Here I’ll generalize the basics.

Select a blogging platform

Part of the planning process is the selecting of a blogging platform. Here you must answer to several questions. The first and most important of them all is – do you have an initial capital? If the answer is no or you have a limited budget I’ll recommend a free blogging platform. There are several large scale and professional blogging software available for free. The same question is in force for the blog hosting. If you want to spend some money you better go for a free blog hosting.
Know your platform

The next part of a planning process is getting to know your blogging platform. Start with reading the available documentation, license, user agreement. You better know what to expect because changing the platform or even the service later will be painful.
Some experimenting with your future blog will help you solve some future problems in advance.
Help and Support

Find if your selected platform or service have some support. Search for user feedbacks and opinions. Be sure you can relay on a professional help when needed. Check the community forums and read the newbie and tutorial section there.

Blogging is a serious occupation and money-making through blogging is a serious business. If you want a success there you need to approach every part carefully and plan your strategy in advance.

Oct 24, 2009

10 reasons to use blogger

Blogger is a popular blogging platform used by many people.

Here are the reasons I use and like blogger.

It is free.
You don’t have to pay for domain name or hosting. You don’t have to pay for support. Of course you can use your domain, but there is always an option to make your blog totally free. The possibility to minimize the costs is very important for new internet businesses. And you have the freedom to experiment and learn without paying anything.
It is easy.
It is very easy to use. You don’t have to read long tutorials or boring documentation to do something with your blog. For example you can change your template with only few clicks.
It is customizable.
You can change almost anything to better represent your ideas.
There are many templates.
Blogger offers its own template API and a page with lots of templates. You can also download a template from many websites that offer free blogger templates. Just type “free blogger templates” in Google and you will find countless websites.
Editing your template is not hard either. You can code it from PSD with almost no efforts. You just need to know basic html and read the help page.
It is SEO friendly.
Your blog will be SEO friendly without any efforts. You don’t need to do or install anything.
It is professional.
Your blog can look professional and high quality if you provide good content. Yes, it is a free service but people choose it because of its quality. You don’t have down time or problems and its support and security are at high levels.
You can make money with it.
You can use Adsense or other network to make money. You have no restrictions as long it is legal and it complies with its terms of use.
It is multi-language platform
You can work with it on your own language.
It has many add-ons.
You can add many different gadgets with only few clicks. You can add search box, adsense widget or even a poll.
It is fun!

Oct 16, 2009

Short list of useful blogging tips

Blogs are taking over the world. They are everywhere and about everything. Everyone can have a blog. And people make money from their blogs. You can see good blogs and bad blogs, seo blogs, entertainment blogs, personal or even an autoblogs.

How to create a popular blog? It is not an easy task and many people start and then give up.

Here is my list of advices for beginner bloggers:

Establish a blogging schedule
Write good content
Don’t copy blog posts
Copy successful bloggers
Use common sense
Offer useful information
Get cool and easy to understand blog theme
Have simple blog navigation
Select a niche and stick on it
Comment on other blogs in your niche
Participate in comments discussions
Participate in forums
Create videos
Use photos
Drink your morning coffee before posting
Think before posting
Use twitter to promote
Use sense of humor
And have fun
Learn SEO
Read blogging news
Be creative
Create goals
Follow your goals
Analyze, analyze, analyze (your visitors, traffic, achievements)

Dec 13, 2008

Blog planning – how to start a high-traffic, high-paying blog?

After reading about a SEO experiment in DP, I gave a serious thought about what is the best strategy to start a blog. What is the best planning? How to attract more visitors? How to get maximum revenue? How to make people remember you?

I am not exactly a SEO expert, it is more likely that I am a SEO enthusiast. I am not interested in making money from SEO, my money source is programming. But for the past two years I do (and experiment on) search engine optimization for some sites. It is not a complete service and only small part of them are mine. I have some sites in high competition niches and some in low ones. And I make tests on different types of blog/website monetizing.

So what I have learned till now. The basic is – you have no guarantee in anything related to search engines. Two websites with no duplicate content but identical in niche/ marketing/ optimizing will have very different performance. This is not a rule of course but it happens most of the time. And all of this is just my opinion and analysis, I don't pretend to be fully right in anything.

I’ll make a simple plan for starting a blog, according to what I have learned till now. I choose a blog, not a website because it is a little more complicated for a website.

Initialization
This is the research part. If you haven't selected a niche for your blog - now is the time to do so. You must select a niche where you can provide quality content. If you are not a pro in writing consider hiring a professional writer. Make a deep research on your target niche. Analyze your competitors, niche forums, social sites, trends, keywords, etc.
Spending a little more time on this first part will help you to solve many problems of the future.
Actions - any of this step may be not appropriate for your niche, make the final decision what to do in a clear mind
- Make minimum 20 posts before doing anything else with your blog. Maybe this advice is not suitable only for political/ civil/ spicy blogs.
- Make gradual link building campaign – too fast link building may put you in a sandbox
- Make minimum 3-4 posts per week for the first 3 months
- Active membership to some related forums and communities – minimum 3-4 quality posts per forum per week
- Make 30 or more directory submissions per week – prefer high rank directories
Goals
Define your goals depending on the niche popularity in a monthly rate:
- Unique visitors expectations
- Performance
- Revenue
Keep in mind that in a high competition niche your blog will need more time and efforts to become popular.

I usually start to monetize my blogs after 3 months starting period. It is better to set goals according to the niche for the expecting revenue. Don’t aim too high because one disappointment at the beginning may be critical.
Selecting the type of revenue program is also a very complex task. I’ll live it for another post.

Nov 6, 2008

The most important SEO things to do after writing a cool new article

So you have written a new article and you think that it is cool and fascinating? Maybe it is so, but if no one knows about it, you won’t gain any profit.

What are the basics, what to do after writing new post or article?

First - figure out a describing title. It must contain the correct keywords for your article and blog/site. Select a meaningful subtitle – something that people will use in the search engines to found you. Always tag your titles and use bold to emphasize on some of the text. Your article must be human and search engines friendly, all of them must find easily what they need.

After finishing the article altering – it is time for making many deep links. Post your article to your favorite social network websites. Ask your network friends for opinion on the topic.
Post your article to digg and other voting and social bookmarking sites.
Select some of the biggest forums in your niche and start a discussion about the topic, ask for readers’ opinion.
Add your new link to the best local forums if you are targeting a specified location.

These are some of the basics in making a blog a little more popular.

Jun 25, 2008

Blogging, SEO with blogging

Nowadays blogging have become a popular hobby for many. It is not necessary to be a tech guy to have a blog. There are even some pretty popular house wife blogs out there. Anyone can blog.

Benefits of having a blog

Have you asked yourself why people spend so much time in this? There are some good reasons behind. Of course, there are some sole bloggers, writing only for the idea out there. But blogging is a great way to promote, market and SEO website or service.

Both people and search engines are interested in fresh content and regularly updated blogs have it. Blogs often get fast indexed and on the top for hard keywords. Also blogging for your service, website or product will boost their popularity.

In other hand if you manage to create interesting and popular blog, you will get some regular visitors. People that like your blog will recommend it to their friends and will share your URL in popular forums and social networks. So you will have many visitors and some new and cool natural backlinks.

So what do you need to have a fancy blog? Is it expensive?

No. There are many free blogging services. Most popular of them are blogger and wordpress, but there are also many others. Almost all of these services give the opportunity for customization. You can have your unique style and there is no need for paying.