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 -
Sunday, 28. March 2010
Save Money While Dining Out
Saving money eating at restaurants almost seems counter intuitive. Let’s face it, generally it costs more to dine out for two than it does to eat at home. For some people, dining out is a necessity some times. How many times have you been finishing up to go home and your supervisor tells you that the report that is due tomorrow morning is now due before you leave? By the time you are close to getting home it is late and you have no desire to cook dinner. Here are some tips, advice, and links to other articles to help get the most out of your dining budget.
Save Money – Plan Ahead
So, you know that eventually you are going to need to eat out. And when it’s time to be dining out, you don’t necessarily have the time to look on the internet for which local restaurant had a special going on. Have no fear, coupon man is here. Ok, I admit that was pretty dorky, but it emphasizes the point I want to make. Plan ahead by clipping coupons. I know this seems like pretty basic stuff, but you would be surprised by how effective this is.
Let’s start by getting your chain paid discounts. One popular discount is to use the restaurant.com gift certificate deal. You get a $25 gift certificate for around $10. Now that’s what I call easy money. I found an amazing selection of neat little eateries around my office in downtown Norfolk, VA.
Another great resource is the local coupon magazine that is often delivered in the mail or placed out front of local grocery stores. The one for the Norfolk, VA coupon magazine is www.MoneyClipMagazine.com. On a slow weekend I’ll clip out coupons for the restaurants that I know are close to the my house, my office, or the route between the two. A lot of people don’t want to clip and carry coupons around. So don’t clip and carry coupons. Put the entire magazine in the car, your briefcase, or your back pack. Don’t forget to carry one of those safety paper cutters.
Save Money – Pack Ahead
If you want to save money eating out, the worst mistake is to go to the local restaurant hungry. I know that seems like an oxymoron, but it is true. If you dine out while you are famished, you’ll generally eat and spend more. To counter this, keep some small snacks in your desk, locker, purse, brief case, etc..
I recommend either nuts or dried fruit as they are fairly healthy. But is could be one of those small 100 calorie snack packs, some crackers, or even a couple jelly beans. Eat a small snack and have at least 8 ounces of water 10 minute before you leave the house, office, or conference. By the time you get to the restaurant your blood sugar will be back on the rise, and the water you drank will turn off some of the natural hunger signals.
Save Money Eating Out Articles
10 Ways To Save Money When Eating Out – savingadvice.com
Tips For Saving Money When Eating Out – mommysavers.com
Eating Out Affordably, Restaurant Saving Money Tips And Advice – moneyinstructor.com
16 Strategies To Save Money Eating Out – www.couponsherpa.com
Posted in Save Money by -
Friday, 29. January 2010
The Importance of XML Sitemaps For SEO
XML Sitemaps are very important for every website, and even more so for a new website! XML Sitemaps provide a broad picture road map for search engines. Generally speaking, search engines spider three to four pages deep with no problem. After that, it is a crap shoot if those deep linked pages get indexed. If you leave it up to the search engines, you will get unpredictable results.
Do you really want your sitemap.html page being indexed? It provides very little information about your message or product. Yes, enables your visitors to be able to find every page in your site. But do you really want your new visitors to land on that page? Chances are not. But spiders love sitemap.html type pages because the contain great information on which pages are in your site.
XML site maps are great for big sites. If your site has over 100 pages of content which may lie three to four pages deep from your home page or landing page, then a XML sitemap is a must for you. By telling the search engine what pages are there, you stand a greater chance of the spider finding your important pages and indexing them. Let face it, every page that is indexed is a potential sale or lead. If only 25 of your 100 page site is indexed, you could be missing 75 per 100 searches for your keyword.
But by far, XML site maps are the most important for new sites. Older sites that are very informative tend to get linked to. If your site is linked to, then search engines can find your site. New sites don’t have the luxury of having a lot of different links pointing to their site. By creating a sitemap and telling the search engines that is there, your website will be spidered and indexed much sooner than if you didn’t. In my experience, the sites that I have submitted to Google via sitemap have had four pages or more crawled and indexed within two weeks of being live.
The best resource for the amateur or layman site creator is XML Sitemaps. The free service provided will search your site via links, and provide you with a properly formatted XML Sitemap. Once you upload it you the same directory as your index page, you need to register it with each search engine. To do that, you will have to create an account with each search engine. I have provided the links for Google, MSN Live and Yahoo.
Google
Yahoo
MSN Live
Ask is a little different To submit a sitemap to Ask, you have to type in this address:
Ask
Each and every time you make a change on your site, you should be creating or editing a XML Sitemap. Search Engines, Google in particular, like a site whose content is updated often. This is because search engines want to provide the best match for each keyword. So the more often you update your site, the more you are rewarded.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask it in a comment or shoot me an email. I will do my best to provide you with an informative answer. If I don’t know, I will refer you to a more informative resource.
Affordable Search Engine Optimization
Posted in Search Engine Optimization by -
