John Sylvester

It is now two months since we started to regroup our efforts in contemporary SEO strategies. A real estate start-up was taken as the guinea pig for the exploration of our new SEO techniques -and with staggering early results. As one can imagine, a huge uplift in the site hits of a property company is worth a awful lot of money.

The site is still only four months old and therefore in the pending tray of Google’s, and to some extent Yahoo’s ’sandbox’. Still, the strategies we have employed this year has seen site traffic quintupled, after taking advice garnered from a raft of sources, especially SitePro News and ProBlogger.

The days of organic submissions are still with us but those of reciprocals, unless of specific benefit, are moribund -thankfully. Our latest methods have been passed on to our partners in the UK, Strategy Consulting, and they have been integrated into their new year’s marketing efforts.

What we did was to install WordPress as a seamless addition to the website, fill it with highly relevant copy, with Technorati trackbacks, register all of its pages with Google Sitemap and ping a hundred or more news aggregators. Blogcrawler now dominates the referrers list.

Alongside the on-site blogs, we saw that a certain blogspot was appearing above many of the established estate agents in Bangkok. We therefore researched (via Overture) all the property-related keywords and set up blogs with Blogspot for each, slightly amending the on-site copy - so as not to get blacklisted - and optimised the selected keywords, linked them all together with them all pointing to the website. Now, when searching for ‘tenancy management bangkok’ the site completely dominates the stage: the website plus blogs are #1-14 on MSN. As the site does not reciprocate, they now have twenty quality inbounds, helping the site’s real keywords to succeed.

Another helpful addition is article writing for sites having high PR. They seem to burn and fade very quickly from the search engine’s perspective, but very still a valuable part of our strategy.

So, in 2006, we can now offer our clients a five-pronged assault on the majors: quality, well-researched SEO on url, title, metas, alts, content and outbounds; relevant one-way, high PR link building; on-site blogging, thus elevating PR, building relevant content and auto-pinging RSS feeds; intelligent registration of keywords on Blogspot with specifically-crafted copy, with headline and alt tagging key phrases, linking them all together with links into the main site; last but not least, writing atricles for sites such as this to get feedback from experts to further enhance the strength of these strategies.

Now, we can also offer small companies templated but effective CMS solutions through WordPress for $250.

But how to relate this information to clients outside of demonstrating results?

About the author:

Media Director of V9 Design & Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com), providing both local and outsourcing web and SEO services: we provide both brochureware and custom-designed websites, with tasteful design and branding, professional design and build, proven and successful SEO and e-marketing, e- commerce-driven database integration and content management systems.

Priya Shah

Copyright © 2004 Priya Shah http://www.priyashah.com

Blogging software is really a simple Content Management System (CMS) that easily adds new pages and integrates them into your site’s navigational structure and linkage.

Blogs and blog posts are naturally search engine friendly because they are text-rich, link-rich, frequently-updated webpages that use stylesheets or CSS, and have very little extraneous HTML.

Optimizing a blog is very similar to optimizing a website, and optimizing a blog post similar to optimizing a web page. But depending on the blogging service or software you use, the results may look somewhat different.

If you follow some simple rules for search engine optimization, your blog can rank much higher than static website pages in the search engine results pages.

Here are the most important rules to follow to get your posts listed for keywords of your choice.

1. Use your primary keyword in your blog domain

Whether you purchase a separate domain (recommended) for your blog, or host it on a blogging service or a subdomain of your own site, try to ensure that your URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for.

For example, if you want your blog to get found for the keyword “rss” get a domain with the keyword “rss”, or use the keyword in a subdomain as in http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/rssnews/

Getting a domain name with your own name might make for good branding, especially if yours is a personal blog.

But if you’re doing it for business and want the targeted traffic to flow your way, keywords in the domain or subdomain are a move in the right direction.

2. Use your primary key phrase in your blog header tags and the title of your posts

If your primary key phrase is “business blogging” make sure that the word business, or blogging, or both, appear in your blog headers (the H1 or H2 tags) as well as the title of each of your posts.

Most blogging software will take the keywords in your post title and put them into the file name of the permalink posts it creates.

For example, if you have a blog on Blogger and title your post “Search Engine Optimization For Blogs”, Blogger will automatically create a page with your post and name the file “search-engine-optimization-for-blogs.html” or something similar.

With other server-side software like Wordpress and Movable Type, you may require the mod_rewrite command to save the title of your entries as a permalink.

3. Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post

If you want to get listed for secondary keywords use them infrequently in the body of your post and pepper your blog titles or links with them appropriately.

Don’t overdo this or your posts will end up sounding unnatural and spammy to readers.

4. Use your keywords in the anchor text of links

Keyword in links have more importance than simple text.

Use your primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text of links when linking to other blog posts or to other pages on your main site.

Link keywords where they naturally appear in the body text, but again, don’t overdo it, or you’ll end up with spammy looking pages.

5. Make sure search engines can spider your blog easily

Set up your blog so that the side navigation bar is present on all pages.

Make sure your archives and previous posts are accessible from all pages of your blog so they get spidered easily.

6. Get backlinks from other blogs or websites

Links pointing to your blog or posts are essential to build pagerank and make your blog rank higher in the search engine listings.

I’ve seen many people recommend Blogrolling as one method of building links to your blog.

BlogRolling is a one-stop linklist manager for your blog or journal. http://www.blogrolling.com

But all this service actually does is give you a bit of javascript code that “calls” the links.

As far as search engine rankings go, this method of linking is of little use, because spiders can’t read external javascript code.

Instead I recommend that you focus your linking efforts on the methods here.

* Submitting to Blog Search Engines and Directories:

Submitting your blog and RSS feed to blog search engines and directories is essential for getting high-quality links back to your blog. Here is the best list I’ve found of places to submit your feed or blog.

Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

* Link Exchanges:

Many similarly-themed blogs are often willing to exchange links with other blogs and form richly interlinked networks or communities. Link exchanges with other blogs are easy to implement with most blogging software.

* Trackbacks:

You can also get links back to your blog using trackbacks. One of the disadvantages of using Blogger is that it does not automatically create trackback urls that others can use to link back to your posts.

Haloscan is a free service that will automatically add comments and trackbacks to your Blogger blog. http://www.haloscan.com

But if trackbacks are an important component of your linking strategy, I would advise using another software or system that adds this feature automatically.

* Comments:

You can also get back links to your blog by posting legitimate comments in response to posts on other blogs.

7. Update frequently

There’s no better food for search engine spiders than fresh content.

Post and update your blog frequently using all the rules outlined above and there’s no reason why your blog will not get you top rankings in a short period of time.

8. Stay put

Once you create your blog, try to stick to the same domain and blog host or system for as long as you continue to publish.

You could end up losing a lot of your traffic, your readers and all your search engine listings if you decide to move.

For more ways of building traffic to your blog, read the article “How To Build Traffic To Your Blog.” http://www.blog-maniac.com/build-blog-traffic.htm

About the Author

Priya Shah publishes an internet marketing ezine at http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com by day and doubles as a Blog Maniac by night http://www.blog-maniac.com Blog Brandz http://www.blogbrandz.com is the legitimate offspring of her affair with the blogosphere.

Rakesh Ojha

Setting up your blog to target a niche market is one of the best things you can do with your blog, provided you know the craft and have the requisite skills to run it successfully to start generating instant traffic (through syndication or Rss) and possibly start earning as well.

Niche blogging, has it own silver lining. With people suffering from information overload, specific information dissemination through niche blogging will attract instant attention as more and more people will subscribe to your Rss feeds and would love to syndicate with such informative blog. Thus with the power of blogging software like Wordpress and your niche marketing skills, you can earn handsome profit.

With Wordpress, setting up a blog is easy and in few minutes of point and click you can have the most powerful tool to make money online. You can instantly start publishing your contents and let the world know of your blog through the Rss feeds. With Wordpress, your syndicating tool-Rss feed, is automatically created. No sweat!

To promote your niche blog and generate instant traffic, submit your Rss feeds to top search engines and Rss directories meant specifically for Rss feeds. Allow readers to subscribe to your Rss feed and send our news reads as well.

You can also promote your Wordpress blog though activating search engine promoting functions. Nothing can replace good and killer contents on your blog, after all readers are going to

To generate revenue though niche blogging, you can follow simple steps.

Most popular ways through which you can earn money is from Google AdSense. Subscribe to Google AdSense and start earning profits through Google Ads, being published on your blog. You can also become Amazon Affiliates. Select the product you want to display on your blog and start earning profit.

There are varieties of plug-ins developed for niche blogging especially if you are using Wordpress. Adding Google AdSense in your posts to protecting your bog from being spammed or hacked, you can download and easily install little programs and make your job easy.

To add Google AdSense ads in your post, you can download the Phil Hord plug-in and in few minutes of working, you have the money minter in your blog.

About The Author

Rakesh Ojha is a SEO specialist and Online Marketing Consultant with over 5 Years in SEM Industry. Contact him at rakesh@searchengineoptimization4u.com or visit his website at http://www.searchengineoptimization4u.com.

Read latest SEM and SEO articles on his personal blog at http://semblog.searchengineoptimization4u.com