Use Keywords In Page Titles

What Is Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site on tops. It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. New sites need not be "submitted" to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site. If you are unable to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues. Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.

How To Build Fast Traffic To Your Blog

With the growing interest in blogging as a means of online promotion and branding, a lot of marketers are starting blogs to promote their opinions, products, books and services. But a blog is like a website. "Write and they will come" isn't exactly a magic formula to bring in traffic by the boatload. If you need to promote your website in order to build traffic to it, you need to promote your blog as well. Here are some ways you can become a well-read and influential blogger. 1. Write Posts That People Will Want To Read This should be common sense, but many marketers tend to forget that their readers are real people and that you need to use the principles of online copywriting to make your headlines and copy interesting to your readers. If you write posts that people enjoy reading, they will reward you by returning to your blog regularly. Make your posts conversational, pithy and topical. Keep them short and stick to one topic per post. Write often and regularly so that both readers and search engines visit your blog more often. 2. Optimize Your Posts for Search Engines I cover this topic in detail in my article on "Search Engine Optimization For Blogs" http://www.blog-maniac.com/blog-seo.htm But here are the most important rules to follow to get your posts listed for keywords of your choice. * Make sure your blog URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for * Use your primary keywords in the title of your post * Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post * Use your keywords in the anchor text of links in the body of your posts 3. Submit Your Blog and RSS Feed To Directories If you publish a blog you should submit your blog and RSS feed to big directories like Yahoo and Dmoz, as well as the numerous blog directories and search engines. Here is the best list I've found of places to submit your feed or blog, compiled by Luigi Canali De Rossi, who writes under the pseudonym Robin Good. Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/ Another list of sites to submit your Blog. http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm 4. Ping The Blog Services There are a number of services designed specifically for tracking and connecting blogs. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know you've updated your blog so they can come check you out. Bookmark the Ping-O-Matic ping results page so you can visit it and quickly ping a number of services with a single click. http://pingomatic.com 5. Build Links To Your Blog I recommend the methods here as the best ways to get links pointing to your blog * Link to your blog from each page on your main website * Trackback to other blogs in your posts * Post legitimate comments on other blogs with related topics * Offer to exchange links with other similarly themed blogs and websites 6. Edit Your Blog Posts Into Articles One of the best methods for promoting your website is to write articles and submit them to article directories. The suggestion for extending this to edit your blog posts into articles and submit them to directories came from the coach at "Explode Blog Traffic" who also has other noteworthy suggestions at his blog here. http://bloghit.blogspot.com/2004/11/how-to-explode-blog-traffic.html You'll find an extensive list of article directories here http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/write-articles/submit-articles.htm 7. Create Buzz About Your Blog Creating a buzz about your blog posts and topic in the local and online media will give your marketing a viral component. * Create a controversy around your blog or it's topic. * Distribute bumper stickers or other merchandise with your blog's URL and tagline. * Write a press release about something newsworthy and tie it in with your blog topic. 8. Capture Subscribers By Email It may seem strange for a blogger to send out updates by email, but email is still the #1 choice of most people who want to receive news and information. Using a free service like Bloglet to manage your subscriptions is easy and it allows your subscribers to manage all their subscriptions from one interface. http://www.bloglet.com However, if you want more control over your list and don't mind mailing out the updates yourself, you can use an autoresponder system to capture and follow-up with subscribers. RSS responder is a new script that allows you to keep in touch and follow-up with your subscribers without the hassle of email. http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/rssresponder.htm These tips should give you a good start to building your blog traffic.

Speeding up your blog

Does your blog load slowly? Many bloggers don't have a clue on this. They assume everyone is seeing their blog at the same speed they are. If it is your personal blog, it may be a big deal to you. If you are trying to run a business, or offer people important information, this can be very important. If your front page takes a great deal of time to load into a browser, then you may want to do a little redesigning to increase the number of visitors that decide to stay at your site. First, remember that not everyone has a T1, cable modem, or ISDN connection to the internet. In fact, there are still a large number of surfers with modems less than 56K. So, as web designers we must see to it that our sites load as quickly as possible without losing anything important. Let's start with the obvious bandwidth hogs: images and other media. My suggestion here is to take out every form of multimedia embedded in you front page except for images. Sure, a background song can be nice, but these sound files can take up a great deal of bandwidth, especially if the sound is a .wav file. (I made a 30 second .wav on my computer- It came out around 140K). Videos can be even more taxing, (1 MB or more at times) and should probably be avoided unless absolutely necessary. As a surfer, if I have to wait more than 10 seconds for something like this to load, I'm tempted to hit "Stop" or "Back". So if you use these, keep the file sizes small (Probably 30-40K or less would be OK). Better yet, save them for a later page. Your images will be your next big worry. These can also get quite large, so caution is necessary when dealing with images. For starters, do not make an image any larger than you need it to be for the effect you desire. If you have an image that is 600 pixels x 600 pixels, your page could take forever to load. One of the easiest ways to reduce the file size of your image is to simply give the image smaller dimensions. Go to your image editing program, and resize or resample your image to make it smaller. You can also compress your images using special services on the web which reduce the file size of images for you, and let you choose the images that still look good once they are compressed. After you have the images as compact as you can make them, you can save loading time on other pages by using one or more of the images from the front page on other pages. The image you loaded for the viewer on the front page will be in the browser's cache, and will load instantly when it is called on your other pages! This will allow you to load other things you may need without needing to worry about the image again. Another trick you can use is to define the width and height in all of your image tags. This way, the browser knows how much space the image will use on the page, and will not have to adjust everything once the image starts loading. It will save a little time, and will also keep the page from jumping when an image loads. Finally, be sure your front page is as short as possible as well. A longer page can take a long time to load, even if it is all text. Put extra information on another page and use a link for people to go view it. You will save a little extra time, and maybe reduce clutter a little bit.

Blog Search Engine

Blogs do very well with the search engines, as we've pointed out many times. You can create a blog today and be ranked 4 or even 5 in a month with Google without half trying. A corporate business site might be lucky if it gets that ranking in a year. Besides Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines, you should be sure to not overlook the importance of blog-specific search engines: * DayPop.com * BlogSearchEngine.com * Feedster.com * BlogStreet.com * Blogarama.com * GlobeofBlogs.com * BlogDex.com * Weblogs.com * BlogWise.com * BlogHop.com * BlogUniverse.com * Bloogz.com Some blog search engines search the blogosphere while others keep their own directories of blogs. You should visit each site, see how your own blog fares, and add your site to those engines that allow submissions.