Monday, 29. March 2010
A Successful Blog Starts By Defining Your Audience and Niche
A successful blog can be measured in a number of different ways. The easiest way to measure a blogs success is analytically. How many visitors in the demographic you are targeting are visiting your site? The second way is revenue; how much money, duckets, dollars, chavo, or pesos. And finally, user interaction; is your blog truly Web 2.0?
Successful Blogs Define Audience and Niche
For instance, let’s say you have about dating. There are 180,000,000 pages that relate to “dating” indexed by Google. The chances of someone finding your site by searching for dating are pretty slim. But when you narrow the scope of your blog to free dating, the number of competing pages drops to 41,500,000 pages, about %23 of the total number of matches to dating. And if you take this one word further and make the search absolutely free dating, the total search responses drop to 2,060,000 indexed pages, about %1 of the original search.
So let’s say you are a dating expert, and want to start a blog about free dating. To bring in traffic from search engines, you’ll need to narrow your focus to article or pages with 3 – 6 keywords, often referred to long tail keywords. For example, the following are the top longtail keywords for “free dating”:
- Free dating online
- Free dating site
- Free dating service
- Free online dating services
- Dating for free
These different niche keywords all have to do with your defined audience, people looking for advice on free dating. If your blog has an advertising network showing relevant ads, the chances of increased revenue are maximized from the relevant ads being shown. If you have are looking for interaction with your visitors, the likelihood of people making contact are greater now due how specific each page is.
Now that you are writing your article topics for your target audience, you’ll want to breadcrumb your site. Simply put, if you are writing an article, and you mention a key word that is developed in a different page, use that keyword to link to the page in question. You can even use that keyword to link to a category or tag page. This will help your readers find the articles they are looking for, but as an incidental bonus, your entire site will start to rank better in the search engine results page.
If your site is already written, don’t worry. You can go back and make minor edits to individual pages to better optimize keywords, keyword density, and intrasite linking strategy. By employing these tips you can turn a broad keyword into longtail keyword magic.
Posted in Content Writing, Search Engine Optimization by -
Wednesday, 24. March 2010
Free Firefox Plugin – SEO For Firefox
SEO for Firefox is a free Firefox plugin that automates some functions of gathering data for SEO. By doing this you can analyze a page in a matter of minutes which in the past could take well over an hour. And in my book, saving time is as good as or sometimes better than saving money.
SEO For Firefox Has Many Useful Features
All of the features that are packed into SEO for Firefox make this free SEO software a must have for SEO professionals. The feature below help save time in researching competitors pages and also your site as a whole.
* PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
* Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
* Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
* .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
* .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
* .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
* Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
* del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
* Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
* Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
* Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
* dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
* Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
* dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
* WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.
Get SEO for Firefox Now
We all need more time, and this program gives you that. With more time available, making money on the internet is that much easier. Get SEO for Firefox today.
Posted in Free Software, Search Engine Optimization by -
Sunday, 7. March 2010
Internet Promotion And Search Engine Optimization Are Not The Same
As a business owner or manager, you probably realize the importance your website in making sales or promoting your brand or message. Your website is often the primary resource for clients, customers, and information seekers. Without these visitors, your site is not adding anything to your bottom line and may even be costing your business money! You are wasting money paying a web designer money for constant updates to your site if the site isn’t converting visitors into revenue. But do you know how to get visitors to your site?
Internet Promotion And SEO – Two Different Ways To Get More Visitors
Internet promotion is leveraging the power of the internet to bring visitors to your site. “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results…” [1] To get a better idea of how each one has a place in your online marketing strategy, let’s take a look at how each one accomplishes this task.
Internet Promotion
Internet promotion can be thought of advertising and marketing for your website. This can accomplished in many different ways. The most commonly recognized and accepted way is advertising on another website that attracts the same visitor demographic that you want to target. Another popular and widely accepted form of internet promotion is the use of social networking. This grassroots promotion includes sites like Facebook and Myspace and also the use of blogging and micro-blogging. Search engine marketing is a form of advertising in which you ad is placed in a search engine results page when someone is using a search engine.
Other forms of internet promotion that aren’t as widely used or accepted are traffic exchanges, paid to read emails, paid to surf sites, and viral marketing such as ebooks. These typically are low cost/low reward methods that do not produce long term results. Instead they are used as a “short term stop gap” measure or as a form of blitzkrieg marketing used to deliver large amounts of traffic for a short duration. A good example of blitzkrieg internet marketing is the use of a traffic exchange, paid to read email, paid to surf, and search engine marketing over the period of 3-4 days leading up to a release of a new product or a massive sale.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is the manipulation of website code, site structure, inbound and outbound links, and site content to provide a favorable position in search engine results. For example, search engines recognize bold text and place more importance on the emphasized term search engine optimization than the do on the non-emphasized term search engine optimization. Including keywords into your site and page web addresses can have a positive affect on search engine results placement. Finally, the number and quality of links pointing to and away from your site can affect your results placement.
Online Marketing Strategy
As you begin to develop your website, a very important consideration to have early on is your online marketing strategy. Simply put, how you are going to get people to your site. SEO has a lot of importance in the initial design of the site and slowly tapers off to periodic maintenance and support. Internet promotion initially is important to get the word out that the site is live and people should visit it. After that, promotion is a small daily task until there is a new release, sale, or important news to spread.
As with most businesses, your internet marketing budget is limited. It is important to deploy your resources at the correct time to maximize the rate of return on every dollar spent. By identifying the differences between internet promotion and SEO you can now get the most out of every dollar spent.
[1] “Search Engine Optimization.” Wikipedia. 05 Mar. 2010. Web. 06 Mar. 2010.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization>.
Posted in How To..., Paid To Read, Promotion, Search Engine Optimization by -
