Writing has always been a popular means of expression. The advent of internet use has seen the evolution of writing from traditional pen and paper diaries to online journals or blogs. Because it is people maintained and mostly written in first person, a blog’s content is varied and diverse. Subjects may range from the absurd to the factual, and commentaries, opinions and observations on different activities, industries and mainly everything under the sun can be shared through this medium. A blog’s power and energy comes from interaction among its publishers and readers through comments and feedbacks given.

The release of automated publishing software has skyrocketed the popularity of blogging and catapulted it to the frontline as a valuable source of information because it simplifies and accelerates the process of publishing entries online. One of the most widely used blog publishing applications is WordPress, an open source software that is free to use.

WordPress is user-friendly and can be easily installed without any need for mind-boggling configuration or other technical nitty-gritties. One key feature of WordPress is its template or theme system. It can be edited, customized and personalized by simply moving or switching widgets thus eliminating the need for editing html codes.

Another practical feature of WordPress is its integrated link management. To drive traffic to your site, it is important to have it optimized in order to improve its ranking in search engine results.  What exactly is a search-engine friendly site and how is it done? The smart use of keywords will improve your site’s visibility and make it more accessible to your targeted audience. Luckily, you need not go through the daunting task of overhauling your whole website because WordPress allows every single page on your blog to be indexed. Taking time to make minor tweaks can go a long way in streamlining your site and helping it get the attention that it deserves. Don’t overlook the simple stuff like titles, description and text or content. To make your site search-engine friendly, read on and consider the following tips:

Blog Title. Adjust your title format so that the actual title of your post or article is displayed before your blog’s name or title. To catch a reader’s attention, make it short, sweet and simple. Writing a good description for your page gives the search engine and its users an overview of what your site is about before they actually visit it. Here is a great, free, resource to analyze your titles for emotionally connecting with your audience. http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/

Meta Descriptions. Take advantage of WordPress’ All In One SEO plug-in to type in keyword-rich titles plus matching description for your entries. Make your site description unique and relevant to the content of the page. Similar to blog titles, meta description tags are designed to provide a brief description of your site’s content. This will be used by search engines and directories for indexing.

Rewriting URL’s with permalinks. Updating and customizing the permalink structure on web URLs and making it more comprehensive enables your site to become more user-friendly and search-engine friendly. Tags can either be date and name based, numeric, or fully customized by the user.

Using breadcrumbs. Breadcrumb navigation helps give people a perspective on where they are on your site. It can be added using a variety of plug-ins such as WordPress Breadcrumbs, Yoast Breadcrumbs and so on.

Generating a sitemap. If your site has lots of pages, site maps are a quick and easy way to help users browse the contents of your site. Several plug-ins and functions can be incorporated to the template of your choice.

Use proper keywords when naming photos and images. Again, we cannot stress how important keywords are. To be search-engine smart, you have to consider everything. For example, by renaming a photo of a weeping willow tree as “weeping willow” rather than just 0001.jpg, it gets a better chance of being displayed on the search engine’s photo search results.

Avoid content duplication. Weed out duplicate content on multiple pages by using the Robots Meta plug-in.

Link to related posts. Link building is an important part of the SEO equation. Keep in mind that you should only link to sites that are relevant and complementary to your own. Spamming is a definite no-no.

To achieve presence online, you need to have an edge over the others. This comes with careful planning, excellent presentation and valuable content. SEO is just one way of gaining momentum.  To stay ahead of the game it helps if you know your niche, keep realistic goals, become adequately informed and exercise best practices. One of those best practices is to comment relevant blogs, which gives you a link back to your site.  So go ahead, let me know what you think of this post in the comment section below!

Oh and by the way, on Thursday June 3rd at 7 pm eastern, I’m hosting none-other than The WordPress Chick, Kim Doyal in my Social Media “T” Room.  Click here Social Media “T” Room for more details and to register.  The teleseminar is free, so join us!

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Getting people to your page is just the first part of having a successful and profitable site. Making them stay there, is another matter. Website statistics just isn’t about driving traffic to your site, but it’s about making people want to stay there and come back over and over again. Bounce rates, which is defined as the percentage of visitors to any given site who arrive at a page and quickly leave before looking at any other page. Therefore, the lower the bounce rate of a site, the better.

So how does one keep visitors from ‘bouncing’ away? Here are a few simple tricks to keep your audience riveted to your website.

Optimize your site

No one likes to be kept waiting, least of all people who can leave your site at the click of a button. A site that loads quickly and pulls up all the information anyone and everyone may need will make it easier for visitors to poke around your website.

Clear and Intuitive Navigation

There’s nothing worse than arriving in a new city and not know where north, south, east and west are. Think of your website as a new place for visitors to explore – make sure the roads are well planned, and road signs clear and concise. A visible navigation bar, labeled accordingly and no broken links are essential to keeping visitors to your site.

Have relevant content

According to a recent study by BBC News, an average Internet user spends less than a minute per website. How can you keep people longer than that? By giving them what they need, of course, through relevant content. If you run a website about fashion, then make sure from the homepage that your design and content reflects this.

Keep content fresh and updated

A soap opera writer once said “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry and make ‘em wait.” The same could be applied to your content – keep people interested and coming back for more. Having something new each day (or even every few hours) will keep people on your pages.

Have all the tools available

Web 2.0 is all about interactivity and socializing. Many blogs and sites make it easy to share links and content to their own social networking profile and interact with other users. You can install some simple tools directly on your website. Skysa, for example, installs a non-intrusive navigation bar on your site that lets visitors quickly access sites like Facebook and Twitter right on your site, without directing them away. (see mine below)

By making these few simple changes, you’ll see less visitors bouncing and more people sticking around your website.

Take a moment to think about how you would really answer this question. If given enough thought just about any business owner who utilizes the Internet for any purpose will likely find that whether or not they intentionally organized an Internet marketing campaign, they may already be marketing their products and services on the Internet. Let’s look at some subtle ways business owners may already be marketing their business on the Internet.

Do you have a website for your business? Business owners who answer yes to this question are already marketing their products or services online just by virtue of the fact that they have a website online. Having a live website means there is the potential for curious Internet users to access your website. You may not be actively promoting your website but you may still find that your website generates interest in your products despite the lack of promotional endeavors; this is a form of passive marketing.

Do you participate in message boards and include a link to your website in your signature? Again business owners who answer yes to this question are already marketing their website online. Savvy business owners realize the importance of participation in industry related message boards to create an interest in their products and services, establish themselves as knowledgeable about the industry and offer a link to their own website even if it is in the signature line of their posts. However, even those who don’t realize this, may already be inadvertently enjoying the benefits of Internet marketing just by doing something they enjoy.

Do you include keywords which are relevant to your business in the content of your website? Business owners who answer yes to this question are also already marketing on the Internet by optimizing their website for these keywords. These search engine optimization (SEO) affects the websites whether or not they were even aware of the concept of keyword density and how it can help to SEO a website. Business owners will likely use certain words often depending on the type of products and services they offer just because it is natural and logical to do so. This tendency, however, can result in search engines boosting your website rankings for these particular keywords. The concept of SEO is much more involved and complex than simply using keywords frequently but business owners can gain some benefit just by naturally applying relevant keywords to their website. A great free resource is Free Keywords Suggestion Tool from WordTracker.

Do you solicit feedback from your customers online? This is yet another example of how business owners may be accidentally marketing their business on the Internet. Most business owners realize the importance of soliciting feedback from customers and those who offer products online might solicit feedback in the form of online surveys and polls. Although the business owners may be doing this simply for a business purpose, the fact that it is done online makes it fall into the category of Internet marketing.

We’ve discussed several ways business owners may already be marketing online but what about business owners who want to have an increased online presence? For those who may already be marketing online accidentally, they may wish to launch a full scale Internet marketing campaign. The best way to do this is to hire a consultant with experience in Internet marketing and social media marketing, to assist in creating a campaign which is effective for your target audience. Tasting The Internet, can help develop a successful campaign for your online marketing success!

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By Roger Smith February 4, 2010

Time and again, I see companies not satisfied with their SEO results and laying off their SEO staff because of their below par performance. To save you from the disappointment and financial losses which you may face due to improper skills and inefficiency of the SEO Company or Expert you hire, I am going to share a few questions which you should ask while interviewing SEO’s for your company. But, before that, I want to make a few things clear. Search Engine Optimization is a time consuming process which usually takes 3-4 months to get results depending on the competition in your niche. Give your SEO at least 3-4 months before making any decision about his/her performance. Now, without further ado, let’s see the questions.  

Which browser do you use? If the answer you get is IE, opera or any other browser except Firefox then it means that you are interviewing an amateur SEO. Professional SEO‘s use Firefox because of the free SEO plugins you can use with Firefox. If the interviewee is already using Firefox then ask him about the plugins he uses for SEO to test his level of knowledge

What is the difference between do-follow and no-follow? Ask the candidate to explain the difference between do-follow and no-follow links. Why was it implemented? How will they find out which link is do-follow and which one is no-follow?

What are your favorite SEO blogs and Forums? Search Engines keep on changing their algorithms; hence it is very important that the person doing your SEO keep himself updated. Asking about the favorite SEO blogs and forums will help you to analyze the amount of effort an interviewee spends on updating his knowledge.

What on-site factors do you think are important? Ask about the on-page factors which he thinks plays a role in search engine rankings. If his strategy is to put more keywords in meta tags then just throw him out. Ask them to review your website and tell you the scope for improvement on your website.

What are your favorite link building methods? Everyone among us knows the importance of link building and how hard is it to get the quality links if your niche is uber-competitive. Ask about his favorite link building techniques or tell him to show you the best link he built for his client and see whether the samples of links is up to your expectations or not.

What SEO tools you use? You should be aware of the tools – free or paid, your SEO will be using for your website. What kind of tools he uses for keyword research, competitive analysis, link building etc. What are his favorite tools and Why? If these tools are not free then how much will you have to pay extra for these tools and who would be the owner of these tools after the project end.

How would you measure results? No SEO can guarantee results and if somebody is guaranteeing it to you then either he is cheating you or he doesn’t have proper knowledge of SEO. Every SEO has its own favorite method. It could be on the basis of links or improvement in rankings or increase in traffic /sales.

 How do you like to get paid? Some SEO’s like to get paid on the basis of number of links they get for your website, some would prefer to bill you for the amount of hours they worked and some may prefer to do performance based agreements. If you don’t have any prior knowledge of SEO, then you can go with performance based payments, they are expensive but the results are guaranteed but if you have fair knowledge about SEO, then you should either pay on the basis of hours worked or on the basis of number of links built. 

Roger Smith is a freelance writer and mainly writes on Conversion Rate Optimization, Landing Pages, Web 2.0, SEO and affiliate marketing.

Keyword Research – It’s not that hard, according to Nick Stewart creator of Nick’s Traffic Tricks.  I recently stumbled upon Nick’s site and fell in love with all the great information he shares!  He shows how to easily get traffic to your site and he gives a ton of information away.

So today when Nick sent me an email about his Keyword Research ebook, with the link to download it immediately without signing up for anything or entering my email address, I didn’t waste a minute in getting my copy.  Then if getting it free wasn’t enough, he said I could give it away to you!  Isn’t he nice? 

So here’s a link to get your copy and starting driving outrageous traffic to your website and blog!

http://tastingtheinternet.com/freedownloads/KeywordResearchBasics.pdf

Oh, and be sure to visit Nick’s site at http://NicksTrafficTricks.com and tell him I sent you!

Blogging for business (or dollars) is not quite as straightforward as it may seem. Sure, blogging (web logging) grew from personal diaries, where angst-ridden teenagers poured their hearts out to the world but now it has become a competitive market segment, with bloggers vying for the top spot, competing for traffic and dollars. When people search for your topic, you want to come up first. After all, an old rule of advertising goes “you don’t have to be the best, you just have to be the first.” The same goes for search engine rankings. Various studies conducted by scientists, using behavioral studies, experiments and even eyeball tracking show that people tend to go for the first thing that comes along. To get this, keyword optimization – the use of possible search terms on your website – is a must to come out on top.

Many experts will tell you the “right” way of doing keyword optimization (or sell you their services.) The truth is, there is no set way of doing this, and most of these experts rely on the same techniques – after all, everyone is competing for the same search engines, which use the same bits of code to determine who ranks where.

Step 1: Determine the right keywords

If you were searching for the information on your blog, what search terms would you use on Google? Make a list of words or phrases people would search for in order to find your blog. If you’re running dry, try a simple tool like the Google AdWords Keyword Generator. By entering your website’s URL or sample text, it can give you ideas on what phrases are good. It can do the reverse as well and tell you what people are searching for.

Step 2: Use your keywords

With those words in arm, use them on your website – sprinkle them on your blog posts and titles, but in other areas as well, like meta tags and even image or link descriptions. Of course, be careful not to overuse them – twice per every 500 hundred words is optimal. Remember that you’re not writing for web crawling robots, but for a human audience as well.

Step 3: Monitor your progress

When you’re building a blog from the ground up or just starting your keyword SEO efforts, you won’t have much (or any) data to help you determine your success. But, over time, you’ll be able to determine which words work and which don’t. Use a web monitoring tool like Wordtracker to help you find out what search terms people are using to find your website.

Step 4: Make adjustments

The beauty of anything on the web is that it can be changed quickly and efficiently. So once you’ve found out what works – implement those changes. If you have to change one or two things, then do it right away so you can find which words are best for your blog.

Finding the right keywords is not an easy thing, so experiment with different ones as you go along. As you may have noticed, using keywords is not some miracle or overnight solution – and be wary of people making such promises. Getting real and organic page rankings is something you have to work on and the rewards you reap can be great.

On the Internet, traffic is currency. The number of unique visitors you get on your website is everything – determines how far up you rank on a search engine, how much advertising money you can get and charge and even how much a business can charge for goods and services. But doesn’t it seem like the proverbial catch-22? To drive people to your website, you need to rank #1 on Google, but the only way to rank high on Google is to have lots of traffic to your site? Still, some pages manage to accomplish this, continually bringing thousands of new visitors to their site each day. You can achieve this as well, by following these top 6 tips to drive traffic to your site and insure all those thousands of eyeballs are viewing your website.

Get Listed

Some people think that all they need to do is put up a website and bam! People will start visiting in droves. Search engines will eventually come by to crawl and index your site, but why not make it easier for them and submit your site? You can also go to various directories like DMOZ, which, while difficult to get in, will definitely increase your page’s rank.

Fresh Content

Having new content regularly, everyday if possible, compels your visitors to come back over and over again. Create a “news” or “what’s new” portion on your website. A blog is great and informal way to let people know what’s going on and if there are any developments. Here’s a secret from, believe it or not, soap opera writers – “make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.” Don’t give away everything away all at once – keeping them wanting for more will keep them coming back.

Get Linking!

One way to get people to your site (and increase ranking) is to have links going to your site. There are various ways to do this. One easy technique is to bookmark your webpage on different social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Diigo. It’s simple enough to sign-up for these sites and begin linking back to your site, though some people may argue these are not “organic” methods, but they can still be effective. With a little bit more elbow grease, you can create further links back to your site, by visiting other blogs, forums and message boards and leaving legitimate (not spam!) comments. Of course, remember to give some link love to get some link love  – have a way for people to leave comments and links back to their site.

Get Social (networking)

Last year was the year of social networking, and this trend proved to be so useful, its now become an essential tool for business. Reach out directly to your audience and tell them what’s new with you! So get on Facebook and Twitter and post your new stories on Digg and Propeller to let everyone know about you.

Get Writing

Creating interesting and informative articles is another way to get noticed! Short articles, focusing on what you know best (and related to your website) and submitting them to article directories like E-how, Articles Base and Associated Content and embedding links are a great way to direct people to your home page.

Give Away Prizes

People love getting something for ‘nothing’ and giving away prizes is a surefire way to get the buzz going. Running a contest is simple and low-cost (assuming you’re not giving away a Rolex or a car), compared to the amount of attention you’ll get from it.

Doing these tasks can be simple and will give you a good return on your investment. Armed with these easy tips, you’re sure to see a spike in your web traffic in no time!

 If you have heard about top secret search engine marketing strategies, and think they are fallacies. Then think again because they do exist. This how people get their sites listed within 24 hours on search engines like Google. In fact it’s the number one priority of most web owners. This is evident just by the information that you will see on the different forums.

The truth is, getting listed in Google within just 2 days is pretty easy. It is recommended not to use The Google Submission Form or any other search engine form like Altavista, Yahoo and Alltheweb.

If you want to get indexed quickly then you need to put some strategies in place. The following are just two of the many ways of getting indexed, although these are very important strategic methods.

You need to have a good idea what “crawling” is when referring to the search engines. This simply means how they maneuver around to find your site. For example, a search engine will visit a site. It will find all the links on that site, then crawl, them to see where they lead to. Then the site where they were lead to, will start to be tracked by the search engine.

You can see by what we have just said, which has often been said before, links are critical to the success of your website. Now if you are not listed on the search engines by now, go and get as much linkage back to your site as possible. Remember though the quality of those links are important and will be even more so in the future of your site.

Even if you don’t like to write articles you really need to make it an exception in this particular instance. You need to write an article that is relative to the content of your site. Somewhere near the bottom of the article you need to put a link back to your site. Now place this article on the directories that allow article submissions. You can guess what the purpose of this is for right. The crawlers are going to crawl the article, find the link, and head back to your site. This is exactly what you want, because it is going to mean your getting listed and very quickly at that.

I hope you enjoyed this guest blog while I’m away on vacation. Alfred Johnson is online marketer and Search Engine Optimization expert, his latest ecommerce project is selling Train Horn Kits online.

When you’re making a website for potential clients, visitors, or buyers, there’s a hidden “person” you’re trying to impress too: the search engine. Impressing a search engine isn’t easy, but you can start by putting your site in a form that it can read. Read up on how to put together a decent site map, and send that site map off to the major search engines so they’ll have you in their systems.

Second, the old phrase “Content is King” applies here. Search engines like to see that you have lots of content on your website – if you have a large website, the search algorithms tend to bump your site to the top. Don’t just create filler content though. Go through a freelance writers’ site if you have to build lots of unique, interesting content, or keep a blog. Blogs are great too, because they ensure that content is updated regularly, another essential part of keeping your SEO rating high.

Aside from keywords, search engines rely on sitemaps to determine how good a site is. Make sure your sitemaps conform to Google’s, MSN’s, or Yahoo’s standards before you send them off, and use relevant meta tags. Relevant meta tags should be researched in the same way that keywords are researched – there are several keyword and meta tag generators available online if you need some help with this.

Fourth, it’s important to put together a site map and use proper meta tags when you submit your site to search engines. It goes without saying that if you’re trying to optimize your site for search engines (SEO), you want to make sure that a search engine knows exactly what it’s doing with your site. Figure out the most relevant keywords that will make people want to visit your site, then put those in the meta tags.

All the SEO ranking tips in the world won’t help you if your content isn’t any good. Aside from writing interesting articles that people will want to read, your site should be large, and it should be frequently updated. If a site has lots of content, is updated every other day, with frequent repeat visitors, search engines will know that it’s a winner, and they’ll boost you to the top of the SEO ranking accordingly.

Brisbane SEO company is a leading company from Australia. Advanced SEO techniques are the only way to get high positions in main search engines.

Free Traffic-Getting SEO Plugin that’s what Jeff Johnson calls it.

It’s his newest free SEO software that you can use to grab more free traffic from the search engines. Version 2.0 was just released and it is WAY more powerful. All you have to do is plug it into your blog and his software does all the rest.

Plus, Jeff gives you dozens and dozens of Free Traffic-Getting Tutorials that show you how to…

Grab more Free Traffic from Google

Get your free SEO blog software here:

http://www.undergroundtraininglab.com/go.php?1089784

Don’t worry: If you already have a WP blog you can simply plug it in and let it work its Traffic-Getting magic.

And if you don’t have a blog Jeff shows you how to install a free one in as little as 2 minutes using a secret “push a button” technology that even the newest of newbies could use. The great thing about Jeff’s brand-new Free Traffic-Getting SEO Plugin is that it is 100% free and Installs in minutes.

Grab your Free SEO Software and Traffic-Getting Tutorials here:

http://www.undergroundtraininglab.com/go.php?1089784

Enjoy!