Starting a blog suddenly becomes easier when you have a system to follow. Typically, one would have to search far and wide for a workable system. Fortunately, We’ve Done the Searching For You and Have Found the Very Best Blogging Systems on the Web at http://www.profit-from-blogging.com
Blogging Systems
November 8, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
To verify that your blog will be profitable and that you aren’t wasting your time with tactics that do not work, consider investing in a bit-by-bit tutorial also known as a blogging system.
There’s an almost limitless amount of blogging systems available and each is bundled with rich blogging resources. Some of these resources include SEO plug-ins, keyword research tools, and Google sitemap generators. Intimidating as it may seem, especially if you are fresh to the blogging universe, having a deep desire to earn a decent income from blogging will grant anyone the intensity to move forward. A blogging system comprises of all the things you need to get going. This beats having to explore the internet for strategies, which may not be nearly as worthwhile in the long term.
If you’re expecting the blogging system to get things done for you in an auto- pilot fashion then you’re surely in the wrong line of work and should consider spending your time elsewhere. Regardless of the high convenience that a blogging system offers to the blogger, he/she still has to commit a significant amount of effort in order to utilize those resources to their full potential. This is typical for any form of business. Blogging is deceptively difficult and at this advanced level, laziness will annihilate any chance of success.
Most bloggers, on a personal or business level, recognized the effectiveness and started utilizing blogging services like Wordpress. As a result, the blogging service (and not your actual blog) gains success in the Search Engine standings. Numerous blogging systems are integrated with hosting services which allow you to set up your blog on their server as a stand-alone site. These blogging systems also help the blogger personalize his or her blog. These systems do not always contain the amount of resources offered by systems that do not offer hosting but are obviously useful nonetheless. There is an enormous number of bloggers that take advantage of these blogging service websites making it easy for your blog to become lost among them. Try utilizing your own website so that your blog will stand out more. Obviously this requires a further investment of money but if you put sufficient effort in you should expect to make that money back and a lot more on top of it.
Ten SEO Tips to Keep in Mind
November 4, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
If you’ve been reading my “How to Avoid SEO Brainfreeze” series at TalentZoo, you should have a good idea of what you’ll need to do to optimize your website for the search engines and your users.
So today I’m providing you with a summary of what we previously discussed as well as a few more tips thrown in for good measure – all of which should help get you to the top of the search engines if you really work at it.
1. Do not purchase a new domain unless you have to. The search engines put a lot of stock in how long your website and domain have been around. While you can purchase a new domain and redirect your old one to the new one, your best bet is to use your existing domain/website if at all possible. If you’re redesigning or starting from scratch and you have to use a brand-new domain for some reason, you can expect at least somewhat of a loss in search engine traffic. It could be anywhere from a few weeks to a few months or more.
2. Optimize your site for your target audience, not for the search engines. This may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. The search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into their little search box. If those “someones” are typing in search words that relate to what your site offers, then they are most likely members of your target audience. You need to optimize your site to meet *their* needs. If you don’t know who your target audience is, then you need to find out one way or another. Look for studies online that might provide demographic information, and visit other sites, communities, or forums where your target audience might hang out and listen to what they discuss. This information will be crucial to your resulting website design, keyword research, and copywriting.
3. Research your keyword phrases extensively. The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect. To find the optimal phrases to optimize for, use research tools such as KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker or Google’s Keyword Tool. Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page. Never shoot for general keywords such as “travel” or “vacation,” as they are rarely (if ever) indicative of what your site is really about.
4. Design and categorize your site architecture and navigation based on your keyword research. Your research may uncover undiscovered areas of interest or ways of categorizing your products/services that you may wish to add to your site. For instance, let’s say your site sells toys. There are numerous ways you could categorize and lay out your site so that people will find the toys they’re looking for. Are people looking for toys to fit their child’s stage of development? (Look for keyword phrases such as “preschool toys.”) Or are they more likely to be seeking specific brands of toys? Most likely, your keyword research will show you that people are looking for toys in many different ways. Your job is to make sure that your site’s navigation showcases the various ways of searching. Make sure you have links to specific-brand pages as well as specific age ranges, specific types of toys, etc.
5. Program your site to be “crawler-friendly.” The search engines can’t fill out forms, can’t search your site, can’t read JavaScript links and menus, and can’t interpret graphics and Flash. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use these things on your site; you most certainly can! However, you do need to provide alternate means of navigating your site as necessary. If you have only a drop-down sequence of menus to choose a category or a brand of something, the search engine crawlers will never find those resulting pages. You’ll need to make sure that you always have some form of HTML links in the main navigation on every page which link to the top-level pages of your site. From those pages, you’ll need to have further HTML links to the individual product/service pages. (Please note that HTML links do NOT have to be text-only links. There’s nothing wrong with graphical image navigation that is wrapped in standard <a href> tags, as the search engines can follow image links just fine.)
6. Label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes (aka alt tags) as clearly and descriptively as possible. Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your links (aka the anchor text) to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click through. Don’t make them guess what’s at the other end with links that say “click here” or other non-descriptive words. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you’re pointing to by using its main keyword phrase.
7. Write compelling copy for the key pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases and your target market’s needs, and make sure it’s copy that the search engines can “see.” This is a crucial component to having a successful website. The search engines need to read keyword-rich copy on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site. This copy shouldn’t be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash. Write your copy based on your most relevant keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor. (This is where that target audience analysis comes in handy!) Understand that there is no magical number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy. The important thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason isn’t going to cut it, and it just looks silly. (Purchase and read our Copywriting Combo for exact tips on how to implement this correctly.)
8. Incorporate your keyword phrases into each page’s unique Title tag. Title tags are critical because they’re given a lot of weight with every search engine. Whatever keyword phrases you’ve written your copy around should also be used in your Title tag. Remember that the information that you place in this tag is what will show up as the clickable link to your site at the search engines. Make sure that it accurately reflects the content of the page it’s on, while also using the keyword phrases people might be using at a search engine to find your stuff.
9. Make sure your site is “link-worthy.” Other sites linking to yours is a critical component of a successful search engine optimization campaign, as all of the major search engines place a good deal of emphasis on your site’s overall link popularity. You can go out and request hundreds or thousands of links, but if your site stinks, why would anyone want to link to it? On the other hand, if your site is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will naturally link to it without your even asking. It’s fine to trade links; just make sure you are providing your site visitors with only the highest quality of related sites. When you link to lousy sites, keep in mind what this says to your site visitors as well as to the search engines.
10. Don’t be married to any one keyword phrase or worried too much about rankings. If you’ve done the above 9 things correctly, you will start to see an increase in targeted search engine visitors to your site fairly quickly. Forget about where you rank for any specific keyword phrase and instead measure your results in increased traffic, sales, and conversions. (You can sign up for a Google Analytics for free, which easily tracks and measures those things that truly matter.) It certainly won’t hurt to add new content to your site if it will really make your site more useful, but don’t simply add a load of fluff just for the sake of adding something. It really is okay to have a business site that is just a business site and not a diatribe on the history of your products. Neither your site visitors nor the engines really give a hoot!
Jill’s 12 years in SEO makes her a knowledgeable industry source. She developed a brand of SEO that has become the industry standard for SEM companies, and also “invented” SEO copywriting. Jill wrote, “The Nitty-gritty Guide to Writing for the Search Engines”, founded the popular High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum, hosts the High Rankings Advisor and co-founded Search Engine Marketing New England (SEMNE)
You may also find articles by Jil at the TalentZoo.com
Step-By-Step, Do-It-Yourself, SEO Guide
October 27, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one internet marketing strategy that any internet entrepreneur would want for their website. Well maybe except for those that really established a strong name over the web, but as for those that started out in ecommerce would really need to learn about SEO. Let’s get to the point, SEO is used as a way to raise a website’s rank in any search engine like Yahoo! and Google (any of the top 10 slots will do, but It’ll be greater if it would be in top 1). By doing so, the possibility of visitors that visits a website would increase, thus increasing sales and profit margin. So long-story-short, SEO is all about increasing the visibility of a website in the world wide web by use of search engines. Now the question is, how do you do SEO?
SEO companies are now available for hire around the world, such as SEO Philippines companies. Some companies have outsourced their SEO needs to these establishments. But it can also be done by anyone that knows basic SEO procedures, even at home. So here is a step-by-step, do-it-yourself, guide on SEO and how to increase visibility in the world wide web.
Step 1: Get Your Keywords
The first step that any SEO Philippines company would do is to research on keywords that perfectly describes the website. Free online keyword research tools like Google Adwords Keyword tool or SEO Book’s Keyword tool are popularly used by many SEO specialists. Highly competitive keywords is the main ingredient in any successful SEO dish. But highly competitive doesn’t only describe single words such as “SEO”, it also emphasizes on the keyword structure, if it really describes the website like “SEO service in the Philippines”.
Note: In a keyword research, always make sure that the keywords are relevant to the website to be optimized. Irrelevant keywords pointing to a website could earn a one way trip to “Ban“svill courtesy of search engines.
Step 2: Know Your Enemies
Well not exactly “enemies” per-se, but competitors. After doing a keyword research, It’s time to look up on your competitors by use of your chosen keywords. Try looking at what SEO tactics or strategies they’ve done. By viewing their source code (ctrl+U for Firefox), you can see the keyword density, meta tags they used, alt tags, and title tags (I’ll explain these later on). To learn the number backlinks (I’ll explain these later on) of a website, try using SEOpen’s free backlink tool, this way you’ll know what you have to beat to gain their spot. Using your competitor’s strength against them is one successful way to succeed in an SEO campaign.
Step 3: Start On-Page SEO
So here we’ll start the first pace of SEO, the on-page optimization. Actually, SEO is divided into 2 parts, the on-page and off-page (which I’ll discuss later on). On-page optimization involves making changes within the website to make it more “search engine friendly”. The strategies and tactics used here are as follows:
- Content Optimization – This strategy involves changing the content of the website, particularly with it’s text elements. One way is to embed the researched keywords on texts found throughout the website, focusing mainly on the headers (those with the big bold letters). It is said that keywords used should be take about 7% of the total number of words in a content. Let’s say you have 400 words in a single page, so 7% of that 400 (which is 28) should be keywords. Note: Make sure that the content is still readable after placing those keywords. Remember that the users are still your prime target, not the search engine spiders.
- Site Map – Site maps are an important part of websites optimized for search engine. This way, search engine spiders (or robots) could easily crawl through the whole website by use of site map. Making it easier for spiders to crawl through the website is one way to make a website “search engine friendly”.
- Meta Tags - Meta tags are comprised of the Title, Description, and Keywords of the website. Other than the content of websites, meta tags are also the perfect place for keywords. The only difference is that these things are like a “Free Buffet” sign for search engine spiders, it’s the one responsible for attracting search engine spiders to crawl your website. But remember that it still depends on the structure of the meta tags.
- Alt Tags - Alt tags are those found in HTML image codes. Let’s say your keyword is “SEO Philippines“, your image tag should now look like this: <img src=”images.png” alt=“SEO Philippines”> Just like the meta tags, alt tags are also an appropriate place to put several important keywords. Note: Make sure that only one (1) keyword should be placed on every alt tags found all over the website to avoid keyword spamming (which is part of black hat SEO)
- Title Tags – Like meta tags and alt tags, title tags are also an appropriate place to put some keywords in. By adding a keyword, let’s take for example “SEO Service”, in the title tag, the HTML hyperlink tag should look like this: <a onClick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(’/outgoing/article_exit_link’);” href=”default.aspx” title=“SEO Service Online”> Note: Alt tags are not seen by visitors, only the search engine spiders so it wouldn’t hurt to just leave it with the keyword. But title tags are seen by visitors, so make sure that the title tag is still readable after embedding the a keyword or two.
Step 4: Start Off-Page SEO
Unlike the on-page, off-page optimization involves SEO strategies outside of the website. This part of SEO is divided into two categories, backlinks and public relation strategies. Backlinks are links all over the world wide web that points back to your website. It has long been considered that the many backlinks you have, the more popular you’ll get. Another theory added is the weight or importance of the website where the link is coming from. Tools used to determine the popularity of a website is through Google’s PageRank and Alexa traffic tool. Here are some of the strategies used by SEO specialists to get backlinks.
- Link Exchange - One of the earliest forms of backlinking involves exchanging links with other relevant websites.
- Article Marketing - This type of off-page SEO can be considered both for backlinks and public relations. An article commonly generates an average of 3 links (depending on the kind of article directory it was submitted). It’s also considered as public relations because these articles commonly promotes the business they’re trying to market.
- Blog and Forum Commenting – Forums and blogs are also a popular trend to generate backlinks by using their signatures as links linking back to your website.
- Blogging - Other than commenting on other blogs, creating your own blog and embedding links is another popular way for generating backlinks.
PR or public relation strategies of off-page SEO involves generating traffic not only through search engines but also with other types of media. This type of off-page SEO mainly works by marketing their service through word of mouth. These strategies involves the use of:
- Social Media - Social media such as Friendster, FaceBook, Twitter, and MySpace are the perfect place to start a buzz that could benefit the website through the marketing strategy they call “word of mouth”. Adding a link could also help in getting more backlinks.
- Social Bookmarking – By using the articles in bookmarking sites such as Technorati or Digg, people could easily learn about your services through your article. This is also another way for the articles to gain more importance in the web, thus increasing the chance for your websites to be visited through your articles.
Other forms of off-page SEO is submitting your website to search engine directories. Make sure to submit your URL for free to Google, Yahoo!, Alexa, www.altavista.com, www.alltheweb.com, www.excite.com, www.lycos.com, www.webcrawler.com, www.Jayde.com, www.whatuseek.com, and more. DMOZ and Yahoo Directory listings are tremendously valuable. There are a lot more free and paid search engines and directories to submit, but if you do not have time to search for and submit, you can also use our search engine submission service.Visit http://www.myoptimind.com for more information.
Margarette Mcbride is a copywriter of Optimind Web Design and SEO, a web design and seo company in the Philippines. Optimind specializes in building and promoting websites that are designed for conversion..
6 Tips To Help Generate Free Website Traffic
October 26, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
If you have a website, one of the most important things to do is search engine marketing to help get your website known on the big search engines. The higher your website appears on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for your targeted keywords the better. If you’re looking to generate some free website traffic it’s not difficult to do, you just have to know how to start. Here are 6 search engine marketing tips to help you get where you want to be.
1. Optimize For Your Target Audience
Search engines are looking for pages that suit your audience’s needs and answer their questions more than anything. By finding out who your target audience is, you can begin optimizing your keyword use and generating free website traffic the way the search engines want you to.
2. Find The Right Keywords
By doing extensive research to determine the best keywords for your website, you will bring in more free website traffic than planned. You want to use research tools such as Wordtracker, Google adwords, and overture to find out what keywords are best to optimize for your website. After you have compiled a list of the better keywords for your site, then determine what is best for your target audience.
3. Worthy Content
One of the most important search engine marketing tips is to have content that is fresh and rich to interest your visitors. You want to make sure you provide new and intriguing content to your visitor’s that includes your target keywords. By doing so you will find that you are getting more of a returning visitor base.
4. Link Trading
In order to get free website traffic you have to trade links with other websites. Depending on the search engines you are looking at, some want quality links that are relevant to your website whereas search engines like Google are looking more for a site that contains a large quantity of links. Do some research to determine what is going to get you more traffic to your website. Either way, the better your website is the more people will want to link to your site without you having to ask.
5. Avoid Lots Of Graphic
If you want to be high on the search engines and begin receiving free website traffic, try to stay away from large banners and flashing animations. That’s not to say you shouldn’t use a couple here and there, but content is what is going to get you more traffic than anything. Using a large number of graphics just clutters the page without informing your visitors about anything they want to know.
6. Article Writing
Article writing is one of the best search engine marketing tools. By writing articles you can optimize your targeted keywords, inform readers about your website in a few sentences, and give them your link to your website. After writing articles, you can submit them to article directories or place links to your article on blogs and in forums to spread the word.
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