Web Hosting,Domain Registration,Blogging » Internet Marketing

ABOUT BLOGGING

admin — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 07:03:50 +0000

There is a new way to update friends and family on what is happening to your life. Using the internet, you can create a personal journal and share with people. This is called a web blog or blogging.

A blog is similar to a journal or diary where you can post your activities or thoughts on a regular basis. Just like a diary this is solely maintained by you but the difference is that you can give access or allow people to read your blog or post comments on what you have written.

There are different types of blogs depending on the subject:

The most common type is a personal blog. Blogspot, WordPress and other blog sites make available spaces for personal blogs. Personal blogs are online diaries or journals. You can post anything on your blog including images and videos. People also make cultural blogs which cover topics about the arts, music, painting and culture in general. Most of these blogs are made for educational purposes. Niche blogs are also called topic blogs. These blogs focus on a specific subject like acne remedies, diet methods, etc. This type is usually created in support of a website which sells the product or service. Business related topics are covered by business blogs. This type of blog is used by people to update others about business and its environment. Good examples are the blogs about the stock market. Science blogs are made by those who want to inform others about a particular scientific field. Usually the blog is restricted since some information is sensitive or confidential. Blogs written by two or more people are called collaborative blogs. This type of blog is maintained by clubs or interest groups. Students have also found a use for blogging. This type of blog is similar to a cultural blog though the subject maybe about a particular course. When a discussion about certain topics is made though a blog this is called a forum blog. Using a blog for advertising purposes is called spam blog or splogs. This kind of blog advertises a product or service blatantly.

Anyone can make a blog especially that it is FREE. Let us discuss how to start a blog.

Choose a blog site service for which your blog will be published. You will then be asked to give your blog a title. Most blog site services allow you to choose a theme or style. This will make your blog look interesting. There are blog site services that can make you set your publication for public or private view. For private view blogs, only those given access usually through logins and passwords can read your postings. After making the aesthetics and access level for your site, you can publish your site. You can start posting to your blog.

Blogging has now become not only a hobby but has become an interaction point between people on a personal level. Business owners have found ways to use blogs to support their business as well.

Find a blog site service that you will be comfortable. Happy Blogging!

15 Tips to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engine Optimization

admin — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 17:19:30 +0000

Blog SEO is one of the most effective way to build automated traffic to your blog. You might have learn some basic SEO strategy, but have you heard that blog has a very different way that allows you to get your blog on the first page very quick and easy.

Most blogger will rush to build backlinks, but they will discover ranking is hard and struggling because they have forgotten to do some “On-Blog Optimization” that would help them to get to the first page few times quicker. These On-Blog Optimization are:

1. Use Domain Name That Contain Keywords

Domain name gives you a huge advantage to get to the first page on the search engines. I’ve seen websites that have only few links that rank higher than sites which have hundreds of backlinks. The difference is just these sites domain name contain their keywords. This makes the search engine thinks that the domain name is dedicated to show only contents about the keyword.

2. Does Your Blog Title Contain Keywords?

Type keywords in your blog title. When the blog title is your keywords, the h1 tag and title tag on your blog will become your keywords. Each page of your blog will link back to the main page of your blog with the keywords too. All of these gives you extra SEO benefits to your blog.

3. Does Your Tagline Contain Keywords?

Every Wordpress blog’s general setting, you’ll realize something below your blog title called ‘Tagline’ or description in other blog platform. Tagline is another important location to type your keywords. Make sure get it done.

4. Do You Miss Out Ping?

Ping is a important function of each wordpress blog will have. Everytime you publish a new article, your blog will ping itself to inform few websites you’ve created new information on your blog. Ping also helps to inform search engines you updated new information on your blog. Search engines like websites and blogs that update themselves frequently because they offer their users up-to-date and quality information. Search engine will usually rank your blog high if you ping often. Remember to import more ping services in your setting.

5. Are You Using Duplicated Contents?

Beware of duplicated content on your blog. Try not to reuse your own or others’ content on your blog. Reusing same content doesn’t help in ranking because search engines don’t index many pages that contain the same content because it might annoy their users and it might be a way to avoid spammers to increase their page by duplicating same contents.

6. Applying The Technique Of Keyword Density

Do you mention your keywords in your blog? Repeat your keywords often. Try to keep your density of keywords above 2% and below 7%. It means you got to have keyword you aim for 3 to 6 times in every 100 words you wrote. The more often you use the keywords in your post, the more the search engines thinking your blog is relevant to the keywords. Many people already aware of this method, this makes some internet marketer stuff keywords in their page. Google penalize page that overuse this method. Try to keep it below 7%.

7. Relevant Keywords

Since many people discover the keyword density method, Search engines have created a different algorithm that can judge websites’ content by the amount of relevant keywords. If you are using Wordtracker or Google Keyword Tool, these tool is able to give you many other keywords that are related to the keywords you aim for. Use some of them in your articles too. For example, you’ll see “pimple” and “blackhead” as related keywords when you search for acne.

8. Speed Blogging

If you post a new articleon your blog 3 times a day on your blog or more, Google think that your blog have the latest news about a topic and always provide fresh contents. As a result, you’ll rank easier. If you have a new blog, start posting once every 3 days and increase your post to once a day after 1 month. If your blog has been there for certain period, it’s up to you.

9. Page Volume

Another tip many Black Hat SEO trick users know is increasing the vloume of webpages. However, we try to do it in a white hat approach by posting more new articles. The more pages your blog has, the more content rich and informational the search engines think your blog is. As a result, your blog will be ranked higher.

10. Is Your Page Long Enough?

Publish posts have contain more than 250 words to get your page indexed quicker and stay in Google longer. As I mentioned, there’re many spammers who use the technique of increasing blog page quantity to manipulate search results. They might simply use a few words to publish a page. Search engines have ways to calculate the words to ensure it doesn’t happen.

11. What Sites Are You Linking To?

Do you know that your blog will get lower ranking if you link to a spam site or bad site? It is the same the other way round. If you link to a high authority site, your blog will have a higher ranking too. I haven’t did any experiment to prove it yet but I am a strong believer of this concept.

12. Interlinking

Is your blog posts linking to each other? Interlinking is a tip many internet marketers apply to increase Blog SEO traffic from keywords you don’t aim for. Although backlinks from the same site is not as good as backlinks from other websites, they are useful in ranking too especially you are able to have it done automatically with blogs. Use “Similar Post” plugin and create links to your popular posts at your sidebar.

13. Change Title Tags On Each Of Your Posts

Another tip to get more search engine traffic from untargeted keywords, it’s crucial to have the title tags of each of your blog post start with the post title first. You can use a free plugin called “All In One SEO Pack Plugin” that will do this automatically.

14. Create SEO Friendly URLs

The url of each of your blog post will not contain any keywords which people would search in the search engines in it by defaul. It might be something such as http://your-blog.com/?p=123. To make each of your blog posts more seo friendly, it is important to change your blog’s url to keywords. You can go to the blog’s settings and customize the permalink into “/%category%/%postname%”. This permalink structure will turn change the url of your post into urls that have the words in your post title.

15. Does Your Blog Has A Map?

Having a sitemap on your blog will definitely help you to rank faster because robot bots from Google could only crawl certain amounts of links. If your blog has a good sitemap that allows the bots to crawl your blog easily, more pages will get indexed and continue to get a lot of traffic from the search engine. But creating your own sitemap requires

Alex Liu is a full time blogger who specialize in Blog SEO to increase blog traffic. He shares tips and strategies to get traffic to blog at his blog-http://blogtrafficgeek.com

Don’t Forget a Blog Strategy – ‘free People’ Didn’t!

admin — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 19:40:33 +0000

Blogs.

As an Internet strategist – my life daily is consumed with social media feeds, blog alerts, feedburner stats, google alert updates, monitoring, strategizing, execution – all of these overused terms and time consuming tactics certainly take a toll on you.

But one thing I do often, as I do for all my clients, is research – taking notice of the growing digital space around me – thinking of ideas to implement innovative strategies among the community and with my clients.

One of those key strategies that are a must in today’s Internet spectrum is a blog. A blog is key in driving not only traffic, but interest to your brand, product, or company. Blogs help you appear authoritative in your industry – allowing you to give views on the latest events in your trade, offer reviews, insights, and so on.

This expands into relationship building tools, as you are able to speak more freely and in a more informal and personable style, as compared to how you direct the voice on your main website. Through the blog channel, they are more likely to trust you, and then all the more likely to visit your main website and then click your links and possibly purchase your product.

It also offers insight for your customers, and allows them to leave comments and ’speak’ to you on a key level. In addition, blogs are extremely search engine friendly – through thousands of possible keywords and fresh, updated content on a regular basis – blogs are simply great facets to have on your website today. Your simply misguided if you think otherwise.

*Read More for a detailed blog breakdown of the popular clothing line Free People.

Now, another aspect of blogs I enjoy are creating them, not only content strategy, but programming and designing them on a unique level. One aspect of ‘branding’ a blog is considering the number of possibilities you have when actually build the blog.

How do you want to approach a design? Are you a creative or less scalable brand? Do you have the ‘assets’ to build a ‘creative’ blog? Do you have a content strategy built before you blog? Do you know how to ‘market’ your blog on a daily basis?

These are all important questions you MUST think about before diving into the blog space – thinking you know what to do, when you might need a refresher.

And always remember that blogs vary, depending if you are in the business-to-consumer or business-to-business parallel – but your Plan of Action (POA) should always remain the same.

Case Study.

Free People. A blog that does it Right.

Free People is a ’boutique’ style of women’s and young girl’s clothing – offered both online and in brick and mortar stores around the world. It is a sister-brand to another well-known bohemian-type clothing, accessories and furniture store – Anthropologie.

Now, the Free People store design is a very creative, bohemian look that stylizes the brand well, and does many good things as far as marketing the brand on the main website – but their blog page does an even better job in terms of look, strategy and content.

First, when you come upon the page – you have a nice flash banner on the top portion of the blog that draws instant attention. It’s 3-D style and moving parts, keeps the user engaged enough to move the mouse over the falling curtain rod and press it – which then drags the screen over, as if you were in puppet show – making note of their blog’s name “Caravan of Curiosities” – to keep the user engaged enough to follow through the blog to discover its true meaning.

Another side point here – naming your blog something different and marketing that along side your main brand is a nice change of pace on occasion. But it won’t work for everyone – so carefully think about that before you go off and name your blog something completely different. The nice touch here is that ‘Caravan of Curiosities’ still has an engaging tone to it, and how they display it in the blog is effective as well.

Working your way down the page – you recognize the 3-D style curtain outline the navigation header, which is simple – and elegant. And then just three blog pages dress the navigation header:

Blog: links to the blog homepage Videos: links to a custom video channel page in the blog Shop FP: links back to the main website

And from a design aspect – you have to appreciate the look with drawn curtains going down the sides of the pages – very instinctual and effective.

Now, the opening page here is the blog homepage – which after the navigation has your standard blog format and layout with a search box, archives, categories, and a blog roll entitled ‘favorites’. They also added a store locator and 6 products that are simple photos and text that link back to the main store. The column layout is a three-column layout morphed into two columns, and in that side right column they squeeze in the blog widgets. All of this is complimented by a great ‘notebook’ style background. As complex and rich as this design is overall – remember, it is their content that gets the job done…not the design. Even though I truly applaud them on such a layout – very engaging for a user to traverse through.

Finally, at the bottom of the page — a nice connection with the footer, in relation to the header — similar to how you tie any story together — you must connect the beginning with the end of a story…as you do a website — design and content including.

Content of Free People.

Now, with any website, content is king, always will be king, and on the Free People blog – it is King. Content on blogs are crucial for search engines because you can create thousands of keywords, all of it search engine friendly, and all the content you create is new and updated – so search engines will love you for it.

Free People does a fantastic job with approaching the all around marketing term – “On Target, Off Topic”. Free People have a target audience, girls, young women ages tween to 45; easily, and for the more trendy women who may breach beyond that age – even an older woman can wear their clothing. With that target audience in thought – as a marketer – go ‘off topic’ for a bit, and consider talking about content that is not directly related to you, but still, in a way, is connected.

Free People’s breaks up its blog into 26 different categories; topics such as art, books, decor, crafts, food, home office, magazines, polls, music, and so on. At the same time, they intermix direct categories related to some of their external social media tools, such as their flickr, myspace, facebook, and download pages.

The point is, their content is intellectually placed, and interesting…which is even more important! They do occasionally drop in content that will push a new outfit, piece of clothing and so on…but not as often as you think. And they are blogging everyday – with NEW content, and using this to their advantage.

Video.

Another aspect of their content they included was a blog page devoted exclusively to video. This custom designed video player they added features behind the scene videos of their monthly catalog shoots, as well as a video featuring their 2007 holiday party. These simple videos are barely 1:30 minutes long, edited with appropriate music, mostly indie stuff, and cut to look a bit grainy and eclectic, as their brand appropriately exhibits now.

This simple idea of placing video on the blog is a great marketing tool. First, the video takes an editor, all of about an hour to edit and post. From there…he can take this video – submit it to any external video channels, i.e. YouTube, Viddler, and so on. They can then upload them to their Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr pages – only enhancing their exposure – through something as simple as video.

For those who don’t know what this is or means; essentially this creates secondary brand exposure that allows you to initially reach out to possible consumers who might not have seen your brand before, allowing them to now find you. It also allows you to create ‘backlinks’ to your website – this all counts in that SEO puzzle so many clients and people I speak to are always trying to solve.

Final.

Here is the point about all this – what this blog does right is pretty much EVERYTHING. What they do wrong, next to NOTHING, nearly. And let’s be clear on this, they have people who are supposed to be blogging and acting as community managers to maintain this blog, and update their external social networking profiles, and so on. This all takes time, and we all know what time ends up being — $$$. But, the effect of what they have created has allowed them to ‘connect’ with their consumers, and harness new customers, and so on. Their blog has been around since November 2006, and has amassed a huge amount of traffic daily to the blog. Agreed – they are a major brand and can spark that type of traffic, but honestly, the simplicity behind their blog strategy only enhances those numbers.

Any company or brand that is thinking of starting a blog strategy need to follow a similar model in structuring their content and direction when beginning or ‘changing up’ a blog for your brand or product.

If you need help in developing a blog strategy for your business, feel free to contact me @ anytime. nicholas.cifuentes@gmail.com