If you are blogging to attract new customers and prospects to your business, it is important that you have a successful blueprint to follow.

With that in mind I created my step by step Blogging Blueprint, which you can find below:

1 While writing a blog, think like a visitor, as this helps immensely. If a blogger dons the visitor’s thinking cap, there is more likelihood the words a visitor will use to query search engines will be present in the blog.

2. Add a good layout and catchy adverts to a blog. This helps because the visitor might want to stay longer reading the blog, rather than scooting away to another site.

3. Once the blog is published, it is a good idea to ‘visit’ the blog assuming to be a visitor. Going over links and various pages can give a feeling of how a visitor will react to the blog.

4. Inspect the site regularly, as this can uncover any broken links. Likewise, it is also a good opportunity to do some site maintenance as well. Jotting down points like what can be added to augment site appeal and what else could be added to the FAQ page can be of immense advantage.

5. Use key words that are more likely to be used by visitors to search for your blogs. If there are individuals who want to read about, lets say, power gardening tools, then missing out key words like power or gardening can be a huge mistake. This is because search engines will give the blog a go-by and opt it out of the listings.

Further, the visitor may even chance upon the blog in the listings, but may choose to avoid the site, because the keywords were not highlighted in the large search engine listing.

6. Posting articles about 700 words in length is considered good if taking into account search engine indexing tactics. You can make the post search engine friendly by inserting relevant keywords and links at the right places.

7. You can incorporate specific key words, which are adored by search engines. Integrate keywords into title, meta and alt tags to entice the search engine spider to give the blog a higher page rank.

8. Listening to feedbacks and visitor complaints can be a blessing for you. Despite a lot of effort, a blog might contain obvious technical glitches or perhaps the content might require further elaboration or alterations.

9. Spamming can sometimes be disguised as intelligent comments, which might include further links or invitations to a spammer’s website. Niche blogs might wish to opt out of the custom of inviting comments.

10. If you are into business blogging, picking up good categories like skin care, dry skin care, skin care specials, exclusive skin care products, etc can be particularly rewarding. A good post on niche products can improve keyword density while providing wholesome reading material for visitors.

11. Many bloggers give up after publishing a few blogs. Although there is no right answer to how often you should blog, the secret of profitable blogging is to publish regularly and as frequently as necessary while avoiding both extremes.

12. Use permalinks (permanent links) where servers allow their use. Permalinks allow the use of words as path names, unlike regular links to articles that may contain percentage signs or shorter cryptic pathnames. The secret is to use key words as path names on servers where the use of permalinks is allowed. This makes the site more appealing to those search engines that also look at links for indexing.

Today there are several SEO techniques that help you to optimize your site, but one trick whose importance is undervalued at times is a Sitemap. A Sitemap is a page on your website that indicates the entire structure of your site including different sections, links between them, and so on. In short it gives a detailed listing of your website layout. Sitemaps are very helpful as they make site navigation easy for the visitors and also help search engines index the site.

Sitemaps generally fall into two categories. One is a HTML version which is for human visitors and helps them navigate through the entire site and find the information they are looking for. The other Sitemap is an XML version which is meant for the search engine to know about all the pages on the website including all the URLs that may go unnoticed by the search engine spidering the site.

Sitemap Benefits
There are many advantages of using sitemaps which are listed below:

Easy Navigation
A sitemap helps a visitor know where to find particular information he is looking for on the site. It acts as a guide to enable easy navigation through the site without wasting time to find information.

Search Engine Indexing
Sitemaps help search engines know about any updates that you make on your site. It is not guaranteed that the search engine bot will immediately index the updated pages, but, the changes will surely be indexed much faster compared to when there isn’t any sitemap.

New Site
If you have a new site with very few links in it, sitemaps can be very helpful. This is because the search engine spider crawls through documents by following links from one page to another and if your site does not contain proper links, it would be difficult for the bots to index them.

Broken Links
If you have a site that contains a lot of content pages which are not properly linked to each other or have broken links then using sitemaps will help search engine bots to index your pages better.

Dynamic Content on Site
Sitemaps are also very helpful if you have a site where your content is updated or changed frequently. The search engines can be immediately informed of this change through your sitemap. However, this will not assure you that your changed pages will be indexed right away.

Sitemap Process
To create a Sitemap for your website there are a few simple steps that you need to follow. First, a Sitemap has to be generated after which it needs to be uploaded to the site and then finally Google needs to be notified about it.

Sitemap Generation
A sitemap can be generated in two ways. One is by using an online tool that can help you generate the sitemap and the other is by downloading and installing a sitemap generator.

The first option is much easier compared to the second one as there are several online sitemap generation tools available free of cost that make your work simpler. The second option of downloading and installing a sitemap generator is a little difficult but enables you to gain a better control of the output.

Uploading and Submitting Your Sitemap
Once your sitemap is created, it has to be uploaded to your website and Google needs to be notified about it. In order to notify Google you have to add your site to your Google Sitemap account. However, if you don’t already have a Google Sitemap account, this is the time for you to create one. Also, it is important to know that adding a sitemap to your account requires a verification indicating you are the legal owner of the website.

It is also important to know that Google does not guarantee that all the URLs in your sitemap will be spidered and indexed. For instance, if there are any image URLs in your sitemap, these will not be crawled and indexed. However, your sitemap can help the search engine to know more about your site layout which will help it to crawl your site better and faster when compared to not having a sitemap. Webmasters usually benefit from submitting sitemaps and will not be penalized for it.

One of the facts about search engines is that they utilize software programs known as bots or spiders that crawl the web and build their database. These spiders are sent to view and index pages which are later processed and retrieved from the database. If ranking on top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) is crucial for you, then it is important you understand the basics of creating a search engine friendly website.

Below it is explained in detail as to how a search engine works.

Crawling
Firstly, search engines crawl the web to gather information and build their database. This is done by an automated software called a search engine crawler or spider or a bot. These spiders crawl through a site and look at the content (mainly text) to know what the site is about and then start collecting, parsing and storing the data so that it can be easily be retrieved from its database.

However, since there are over billion pages on the web, it is practically impossible for a spider to revisit a site on a daily basis only to see if a new page has been added or an existing page has gone through any modification. Many times the spider may not visit your website for a month or more also, therefore, the true impact of SEO efforts cannot be known immediately.

It is also good to know that search engines are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, sounds, flash movies, javascript, frames, directories, and similar stuff. Therefore having lots of these on your website may not be very helpful from the SEO point of view as these will not be crawled and indexed for further processing.

Search Engine Indexing
Once a page is crawled, the next step involves indexing the content. This process entails finding those words that can best describe the webpage content and then assigning the webpage to specific keywords. The indexed page is then stored in the huge database for retrieval later. At times, the search engine may not be able to correctly identify the meaning of the page and in such a case optimization of the page can help it classify it rightly and achieve a better ranking for you.

Processing
This is done when a user enters a search query – in simple terms, the search engine analyses the information it has indexed in relation to the search request. Since there will be millions of pages containing the same search term, the search engine calculates the relevance of each page in its database to the search query.

The relevancy of a page is calculated based on various algorithms. These algorithms assign different weights for general aspects like Meta Tags, Keyword Density, and Links. However, one basic truth that you need to know is that all major search engines regularly change their algorithms and if you want to continue to appear on the top of the search results, you need to keep your pages up to date. Also, it would be a wise decision to think about SEO to rank on the top and also gain an edge over your competitors.

Retrieving
This is the last step in the process where the search engine retrieves the results, that is, it throws up all the relevant results before the user. The uses can see a vast pool of information related to their search query.

There may be questions regarding how differently each search engine functions. However, one basic thing that you need to know is that there are differences in the manner various search engines function but at the end of the day they all perform three fundamental tasks:

* Searching the Internet based on the search query entered by the user.
* Maintaining an index of all the information that gather from various pages.
* Permit users to search for words available in that index.

Search engine optimization is the activity of improving the volume and quality of real time traffic to web pages or whole sites from search engines through natural search results for targeted keywords. Most often a website that gets a higher position or ranking in the search results is the one which the searchers will visit more frequently. Therefore, it is important that a site is optimized to get real time traffic the right way to make it more search-engine friendly and get a higher rank in the search results.

Though SEO helps in boosting real time traffic to a website, it should not be considered as the marketing of the site. It may be easy for one to pay and appear in the paid search results for a set of keywords, however, the concept behind the SEO technique is to get the topmost ranking without paying since your site is relevant to the search query entered by the user.

The amount of time that can be spent on optimizing a website to get real time traffic can range from a few minutes to a long term activity. If your product or service is such that the keywords used are uncommon, then some general SEO would be sufficient to get a top rating. However, if your product or service industry is competitive or is in a saturated market, then it is important to dedicate considerable amount of time and effort for SEO. Even if one decides on simple SEO solutions, it is necessary to understand how search engine algorithms work and which items are crucial in SEO to get real time traffic.

The marketing approach that SEO adopts for increasing a site’s relevance is consideration of how search engines work and what searches are performed by users. The SEO process attempts to concentrate its efforts on a site’s coding, presentation, structuring, and also resolving issues that prevent search engine indexing program from spidering a website entirely.

Additionally, SEO efforts also include inserting unique content to web pages to make it more attractive to users and also to ensure that the search engine robots can easily index the content. Optimizing a site to get real time traffic can either be done by in house personnel or outsourced to professional optimizers who carry out SEO projects as a stand-alone service, like us – SEO Traffic Spider.

SEO tactics can be varied to achieve top ranking in search results. These fall into three categories (White-Hat SEO, Grey-Hat SEO, and Black-Hat SEO) depending on legitimacy and ethics.

White Hat SEO uses strategies which are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEO’s as well as search engines while spidering a site. It would be best to use this tactic as a means of achieving top ranking in the search results for real time traffic. These tactics will not lead to penalties which are generally imposed when Black Hat SEO is used and even though it may take some amount of time to reap the rewards of this process, it will surely bring in promising results in terms of high rakings.

Grey Hat SEO uses tactics which may be considered legitimate if they are used correctly. However, these have been subjected to misuse by unethical SEO’s and webmasters. It is possible that your website will not get penalized or banned for using this strategy and it may be necessary to use this process at times, however, webmasters are careful in the use of these tactics. This is because search engines may penalize tactics that are subjected to abuse even though they are used in legitimate forms.

Black Hat SEO employs techniques that are considered illegitimate and ethically incorrect and which have been or will surely be penalized and cause your website to be banned by search engines. Since Black Hat SEO is subject to abuse widely because it tends to harm search engine user experience, it is highly recommended to avoid using it as a means of attaining high ranking.