Five Steps to a Successful Blog

1. Have a reason. A blog without a purpose is just a daily blah blah blah. You should have a vision for your blog from day one. There needs to be a purpose for it to fill the voids in your website advertising and marketing plan. Use it as a testing ground, a news release center and a central location for all of your info to trace back to.

2. Optimize the darn thing. There is no point in wasting time on unutilized content. We can‘t say it enough: make SEO a habit for every single thing you do. Print out your keywords and keyword phrases in large type and tape them to the wall above your desk. Live, breathe and think those words until optimizing becomes second nature Use distinct title tags separate from the on page titles. Tag. Tag. Tag. Tag. Do you hear me? TAG.

3. Plan ahead!! If you have a new product or service coming out, start creating a buzz. You have the power over your blog. It is a tool. Use it. You can run polls, take surveys, have contests. Use your blog to disseminate information,. Link back to it from articles as well as linking back to your website.Double the fun, and give your customers what they need.

4. Make your blog part of the social network. Think long and hard before enabling comments. You need to be responsive. Link to other blogs in your niche. Make your blog the natural hub for all of your social applications - MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, LimkedIn, etc. All roads should lead back to Central - your blog.

5. Track your blog’s success - Decide what your objective is, then take a few minutes to determine your blog’s bench mark. Track your visitors and see who you are attracting, and what demographics you are weak in. ROI can be a sketchy idea in social marketing, but track the time you put in with the conversion rate from consumers who make the jump from your blog to your site or who click an affiliate and you can get an idea of performance.

If you can actually make a blog productive, it is more than well worth your time.

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Write Your Keywords for the Front and Back of Your Web Pages

Here are a few things about search-engine optimizing copy to keep in mind:

1. When people talk about keywords, what they’re really talking about are keyword phrases.

2. Stuffing the front of your pages with your keywords willy-nilly isn’t going to work. Searchbots look at keyphrases and sequences of keywords, the proximity of keywords to each other, where they appear on the page and at synonyms that are contextually related to your keywords. Over do it, and searchbot will recognize your stuffing the page and calculate it’s all spam.

3. Over doing your keywords will also make your readers seasick. Vary your sentences and work on making your writing compelling. You can keep the reader in mind and make your Web design and blogs search-engine friendly without being boring.

Here are a few tips for keyword integration and SEO:

1. Titles

Your keywords should be on the top shelf, where are the good stuff is always displayed in liquor stores (or “packies” as we say here around Boston). Put keywords into the titles of your post but don’t forget you’re just as interested in writing compelling, descriptive titles that pull in readers as you are in feeding searchbots.

2.Headlines

Also use your keywords in headlines and put them first when you can. The head should express one complete idea or thought, which is what Sister Mary Agnus taught me in parochial school. If I didn’t think so, she’d whack me with a ruler, so it must be true.

3. Subheads

Subheads break up long blocks of copy and give readers some white space to help them scan. It’s always better to be clear than cute. I’m not always terrific at practicing what I preach, I’ll admit. Searchbots give more weight to subheads, so put your keywords there too.

4. Body copy

Put your keyword phrases toward the top of pages and in opening paragraphs. While you’re at it, anticipate the sequence of words someone might enter into a search engine and make sure those on your site match up. If your business is designing motorcycle engines for drag racers, your keywords might be: motorcycle, engines, drag racing. Now, if someone needs a fancy motor, what would they enter into a search bar? It will probably be something like “drag racing motorcycle engines.” That a keyword phrase to aim for.

Your pages should be keyword rich but not keyword dense. Searchbots tend to suspect too much of a good thing is bad. Some researchers claim keyword density should vary between 5% and 20% of the words on a page. A searchbot could interpret pages that exceed those numbers as spam and ignore them, they say. Sounds good to me.

Searchbots give more weight to bold, italic and underlined fonts. Not many writers underline copy because readers might confuse those words as links. “You pays your money and you takes your choice,” my old man says way too often.

Omit “Welcome to…” and “Our company is…” and other needless words. Get busy and start your sentences with keywords related to the products and services you sell.

Put your keywords into press releases, buyer’s guides, how-tos, instructions manuals—everything you can get your hands on. Use HTML and PDFs.

5. Numbers and bullets

As I noted the other day, readers love numbered and bulleted lists. They’re easy to scan and contain loads of information but don’t take up much real estate. Those are primo places for keywords.

6. Links

Use keywords in your links and make your links descriptive. You need more than click here and continue
links. They must say something meaningful so the reader knows exactly where that link will take them. The other reason is that should others link to your site, they’ll use the same keywording that you’ve used and that will help raise your flag a bit higher. As I mentioned the other day, links also break up blocks of copy and help the reader skim.

8. Call to Action

The profs in every ad-writing class I enrolled in in college hammered on the need to include a call to action in my copy. What do you want the reader to do? Send money to you in Nigeria? Marry your sister? Whatever it is, point them in the right direction. Reinforce your call to action with your keywords. I covered a lot of that in AIDA is an Old-School Writing Technique that Still Works in a Web World earlier in the week.

Conclusion

Keyword-rich content matters most. The trick is to use keywords to guide readers and to feed searchbots at the same. Keep in mind the reader comes first–always. If you write for the back of your pages, the front of your pages won’t work hard enough for you.

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How to Get People to Re-Visit Your Blog

You can make your blog something that people look forward to simply by setting up a pattern of themes throughout the week. Get people interested, and give them something to share. The following are some ideas you could use to set up your blog - just make sure once you start a program like this that you follow through - even if it means writing a bunch of content like mad for a week or two to create a stockpile, or hiring a blogger to take care of daily posts. (Make sure you can trust whomever you hire to provide original content!)

1. Monday can be a kick start to the week. Try a theme like “Tip of the Week” to make everyone’s work week go better. Add a funny photo to beat the ‘Monday Blues’ and ask for people to offer captions. You can publish the winner later and have a token prize for best caption. Add an interesting informative article to get people thinking.

2. Tuesday. Everyone’s past the Monday Blues and digging into the work week. Time for ‘Tuesday Trivia’ so have a quiz, a list of little known facts, or something else that tickles the brain.

3. Wednesdays are that pothole in the middle of the week that suck us down and we start to flag. Just go with it, and do a “Pet “peeve” of the day, maybe followed by a “I hate such and such because” article that can be tongue in cheek to get a wry laugh.

4. Thursday. I like to add a ‘Mythbuster’ somewhere in the week, and Thursday is as good a day as any. Burst somebody’s bubble. Also do a poll, people need to feel like their opinions count.

5. Friday is a happy day, a cause for rejoicing. Post the winning caption and photo, post a completely unrelated and hysterical TGIF video, post yourself doing the Snoopy dance on YouTube. Oh, and the results from the poll the previous Thursday, maybe with a short article pertaining to the topic.

Weekends can be a free for all. If you post something really good, make sure you feature a snippet and link on Monday. If you can keep people interested and coming back for more, they will eventually start linking to you to share, and you can also funnel traffic to your website!

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How to fast Indexing Search Engine to website / blog

1. Create a link on that page is indexing search engines to the direction of our new website. We emulate the profile (for example: “www.friendster.com / okam” is a good example to link to the blog or our website. Because this page usually has terindeks search engine. The higher the position of the pages in search engines (PageRank) means the more quickly we terindeks new webiste.
You can contact your friend is terindeks the blog search engines to install a link to you.
* If the profile / emulate in your blog / Multiply terindeks already, you can install a link in your profile is.
* Every fill your blog. Google Analytic is a plug-in idea will always monitor your activities.
2. Submit manually through the following URL (FREE):
* Google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
* Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
* AltaVista: http://www.altavista.com/addurl/
* DMOZ / ODP: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html
* Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/support/get_archive.html
* MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
3. Submit the URL pay:
* Lycos: http://home.lycos.com/addasite.html
4. Before downloading you submit the URL of your website, make sure that:
* Website or blog so you have (not under construction).
* There are no dead links in your website.
* Website or made to your search engine friendly.

After you submit your URL, wait with patience. If the website you will be lucky terindeks in less than 24 hours, if not prosper you must wait 3 months, possibly even your application is not accepted Search Engine. You can re-submit if within 3 months of your website not appear in search engines.

What should be done during the wait? Building the link. Can be suddenly your website because nongol not submit manually, but because of a link from another website.

Congratulations to try.