Archive for May, 2010

Most of the weight as to what terms are significant to your site come not from what you say on your website pages, but what other websites say around you. And this is by how they link to you.

Each link has what is called an anchor text – this is the piece of text that the visitor will click on to use the link. But the search engines take a look at this anchor and use it as a vote for the website. So, if the anchor text is “search engine tips” then you have 1 vote for that term pointing to your website. Get an adequate amount of votes and you will be top of the collection.

Historically, website owners have done this by running link exchange sites on their websites. Mass exchanges, where you link to another website in return for them linking to you. This was fine, but as with the content issue, everything to optimse a website needs to shout out ‘natural’. Search engines can simply spot huge directories and most have no page rank and are useless.

So, we need a way of link building that gives natural links, ideally from web sites that we are not enforced to link to in order to keep the link back in place. And the remedy to this is article writing. I’ll look at how and the other reasons later in the article.

So filling meta data and tags with keywords is old hat and link sites are out of the window because they have no value. But we need links and to do that we write articles. But, what is so good round article writing? Article writing certainly does get sites to the top of search engine rankings, but that is only one part of the story.

For numerous web-sites, there is a market of potential customers that spread far and wide and some of these are researching more information by reading article directories. Others might be looking for offerings and services and will stumble onto articles on sites.

Either group, if interested in the article, could then see the author’s biography at the end of the article and then visit the author’s web site. With one recent brand new website, before it had even been cached by the search engines, I managed to get it up to 40 new unique traffic per day, merely through people reading a few articles on 1 top article directory.

Also, given that a chief incentive for writing articles is the search engine benefit, the plusses go on. Not only does the article get printed on the directory that you submit it to, but other sites and websites will pick up the article, print it and link back to you.

So, we write articles for 2 reasons. First they are amazing with the search engines and boost our ranking position and second people will read them on the sites we submit them to and visit our websites. But how do we write them?

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What Does Pinging Do to a Blog?

If you are writing a blog then you want people to know what you are doing so they visit you. You want sites such as Technorati listing you and recommending you, but these all require a ping. So what does pinging do?

Are You There?
You can ‘ping’ a lot of things, not just a blog. Many years ago, before blogs took off, we would ping machines remotely and if we got an answer back, then we knew they were up and running. You can even do this yourself from your computer, maybe across your network to other machines.

And that is basically what a ping is – one computer seeing if another computer is responding.

How Does This Help?
But this does not exactly help our blogs. The ping service evolves a bit from just a basic message saying “I’m here, are you there?”. If you ping a website service, rather than just them answering that they are there, it is taken as an indication from the site sending the ping that they want some attention.

The site receiving the message will reply back that it has received your message, usually with a “success” message. Of course, to reply they need to now what site sent the request, so as well as “Are you there?”, your message has included your website address as the sender.

Getting Clever With The Process
This is the clever part. The recipient strips the message apart and stores your website address for processing. It takes the ping as an indication that you want them to visit you, usually because you have created new content that you want them to look at.

Identify New Content, Quickly
So, at a later point in time, maybe instantly, maybe later that day – it is entirely up to the service what they do – their robot is sent to visit your homepage to see what is new. It is a flag to various systems that you have updated your website.

And this is why we use pings. It enables us to tell a variety of other websites that we have new content and that they should come over and see it. On a good day, I’ve seen Google come visiting quite quickly after the post has been published, thanks to the ping, and then the post listed and the new page cached on Google within a couple of hours.

The Future Is Pinging
This is the way that search engines like Google are moving. They want to be able to grab new content as soon as it is made public and by pinging them they are able to do that. So it helps them to do what they want – get new content and quick – and helps us do what we want – get our new content onto the search engines.

A Little Message Goes A Long Way
So, pinging just basically shouts over to various important websites that we now have an update on our own website and we want them to come and visit it. And by sending this little message, we are hoping to increase our search engine exposure.

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If you want to create your own business at home, then you need a product to sell. But what? If you are skilled in an area, then maybe you could make something or provide a service. But what could the rest of us do?

For a start, unless you desperately want to, the product or products that you will sell through your work from home scheme do not actually need to be delivered to you for repackaging and sending elsewhere. There are loads of other choices!

You can try drop-shipping, where you accept the orders and then pass them on to a wholesaler who sends the items out for you. But, this still leaves you handling payments and orders. Not only does your business grind to a halt when you go on holiday, you are exposed to chargebacks and fraud.

So, for me, the best items to sell for a homeworking plan are affiliate products. Here you are only matching possible customers and available sellers. Let someone else deal with packaging, chargebacks and customer complaints whilst you move on to the next customer, earning commissions along the way.

But, where do you start? Well look to your interests and hobbies. Not just does this make you more authoritative in creating your adverts, it makes the marketing more interesting and later steps such as article writing much simpler.

Once you have decided on a niche, such as golf, scuba diving or soccer, pay a visit to affiliate forums and affiliate directories. Also, visit some of the better known, and maybe not so well known, retailers in the industry and see which ones advertise their own affiliate schemes.

Now that you know what retailers you could work with, see if any offer up stats let’s say Earning Per Click (EPC), which will show you for every affiliate click to their site, what the average order is. Be aware that some may offer stats for Earnings Per Hundred Clicks and still call this EPC, or EPM, which is per thousand clicks.

This can give you a good idea as to which stores to sign up with and maybe start working with. All you need to do now is to maybe decide which of their product range you are going to work with at first.

But keep your mind open to change. You might like to pick a few products from several merchants and see which stores work best for you, rather than relying on general trends.

Of course, heaps will also depend on how you will be selling. If you are merely promoting within your own country then this works well, but if your promotion will work outside of your country, but your merchant could’t handle foreign orders, then you have a problem.

In this case, someone like ClickBank who provide electronic goods that could be sold round the world might merely have an edge. Maybe, instead of trying to promote highly expensive drivers, which each pay good commissions, lower cost ebooks that sell around the world would be a better choice.

Find a product you are happy to work with, but be ready to change if the merchant is not serving you well.

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If you are struggling to optimise your site for one or more of the main search engines, then no doubt you will be wondering what you need to do to get to the top of one or more of them. But, what are the differences in methods for optimising for each search engine? What does each search engine favour?

Much is talked around search engine optimisation tactics and what is required to get to the top of any particular search engine. But, most of these discussions centre around what is required for Google optimisation. This is fine, considering they currently carry most of the search traffic, but what around Yahoo and Bing, both of which have loads of visitors?

A while ago I started to optimise two of my own different sites for the same keyword phrase, and over the 15 months since I started this I have watched them move around and finally one of them take top spot on Google. At the same time, the other web site takes 2nd spot on Yahoo and Bing and 4th on Google.

This is remarkable, but the site that is 1st on Google is not on the top page of Yahoo nor MSN, which tells me ample round the different tactics used to optimise for these search engines.

Now I have to point out that I have done heaps more work for the site that is top of Google and that is why it, rather than the other web site, takes top spot there. But, that indicates clearly what is required to reach the dizzy heights of first place on Google – a load of article writing and guest posting. I have lost count of how numerous articles and guest posts I have submitted to a whole arrange of directories and websites, but it has been done on the side of other activities, so it is achievable by anyone.

The crucial factor is that the site does not feature top 10 in Yahoo and Bing, though the other site is second, with less articles and guest posts. For these search engines other factors are important.

With these search engines, the inbound links have been indispensable. That website would not have risen the way it has without them, but Yahoo and Bing do not put so much total faith in the incoming links. For the web site that does well on these two search engines is also the website that I did a little bit (but not too much!) work on the code.

Both web sites have the keyword phrase in the title meta, but it is only the one that does well in Bing and Yahoo that then goes on with supplementary mentions of the phrase. This website also has the search terms in the meta description, the keywords and twice in the body (once being in emphasised text). They also appear in a h1, but as part of a longer expression.

So to reach top spot in Google, one mention on the page is enough (and even that is not required), but to rank well for Bing & Yahoo, make certain that you do at least reference the search terms a couple of times, but do not go excessive.

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Lots of so called self confessed professionals will say to you that you ought to use certain entries in your Title, Description, alts, keywords and other places. Be sure that you have enough H1 and H2 tags and use bold a few times. Forget that! These worked very well years ago, but for Google in particular, these are more or less overlooked. I have successfully got web sites to the top of Google without even mentioning one or more of the search terms anywhere in the code.

I am not sure why people still insist on using these tags and attributes. From time to time, I think it is just to baffle less technical people. There might still be a small help in filing these attributes and tags with your desired keywords, but I doubt it is much. The difficulty is that they are too simple stuffed with random, irrelevant, keywords.

Search engines instead are putting loads of value in what happens off the website. So do not worry if changing your website code sounds too difficult or you do not maintain the code. You could do everything that is needed without changing a line of code!

Well, for my own web site design web site, I appear on the first page for various local listings, without mentioning the local areas on the site. As for instance, Merseyside does not appear in the code, yet I appear on the first page of Google for searches on site design Merseyside.

My home page does naturally discuss web site design and gives more details on the services offered. And this is the key to how a well optimised website page should look. The page should naturally mention and deal with the keywords. A few mentions of them, probably in different contexts and mentioning them in different ways. For example, website design and designing a web site.

Do not ever over-do the number of times that a keyword is mentioned in a website. Some people suggest a rule of each keyword representing no in excess of 2% of the words on a page. So, if the web page contains 300 words, which is a detailed page, then you could have no over 6 mentions of any of your individual keyword.

Take this to the extreme of a 200 word page, and if you used a keyword in the title, description, and keyword meta tags and once in an alt attribute, then you would have hit your 2% exclusive of mentioning it once in the text. So, for the finest results, be certain that that you declare keywords naturally instead of stuffing them everywhere that you might. But it is the next stage, link building, that is vital.

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Essential Plugins For Every Blog

Plugins add a lot of value to WordPress blogs, but too many will slow down your pages. So, which ones are the essential ones to use?

Akismet
Where would we be without Akismet? When I first used WordPress Akismet was near enough standard and everyone downloaded it. Now, it is standard and included in the latest versions of WordPress. And it is certainly worth using if you are leaving comments open. So get yourself an API key and make sure that you activate it. If you do not, then you are leaving yourself open to loads of comment spam.

WordPress.com Stats
I first started using this as part of another plugin, but very quickly grew to find the plugin very useful. Previously I had always relied on Google Analytics for my website stats, but this plugin, which gives less detail, presents what you need to know right in your blog. Graphs of up to the minute visitor stats, where they have come from, how they found you and where they went. Invaluable information to improve your blog.

WordPress.com Popular Posts
This is the plugin that requires the stats and why I discovered the stats plugin. This plugin in itself allows you to display a list of your most often referred to posts. These popular posts are a good way of steering visitors around your blog to areas of interest and a way of keeping them on your blog for longer. Ultimately, this builds trust and makes them more likely to join your RSS or newsletter.

Contact Form 7
A simple and easy to use contact form. It does what it says! But I think it is one of the most useful plugins because it gives you the basis for a contact page, without having to display your email address. If you do display your email, then spammers can scrape it and start filling your inbox. But do not have any contact method available and then no-one can make you advertising offers and so on!

Really Simple CAPTCHA
Again, does what it says! Only one function to this plugin and that is to display a CAPTCHA box on your newsletter. But by using this plugin you are almost fully preventing spammers from automatically submitting your contact form and saving yourself a load of spam!

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Where are your readers going to go once they reach the bottom of the post that they are currently reading? Well, install this little plugin and it will suggest similar themed posts on your blog that might interest them. You know what they are reading about now, so offer them more. Again, this is a simple method of increasing the time that visitors spend on your website and the chances of them becoming a regular reader of your blog.

Post to Twitter
Almost perfect this plugin, I use it frequently on my blogs. It just sends the title of your post to your Twitter account every time you publish a new post, which not only saves you the effort, but gives your posting more exposure via Twitter. This can increase your Twitter followers whilst increasing your blog’s readers. As I said, almost perfect, I just make a simple change to the way that it posts the title, but this is not really required so use it as it stands.

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Website flipping is a way of earning cash by buying domains, creating a blog and selling the result. But to make a decent income, you need to be working on a few websites at a time. How can you handle that?

If you are website flipping, then you might be trying to turn over the sites quite quickly, or you may prefer to really establish them and sell them further down the line for a bigger amount. But either way, the income is not going to be that remarkable if you are just working at flipping one or two websites at a time. So, how do you handle numerous websites at once?

The first steps might be to invest in reseller hosting space. Take a look at how much your hosting is going to cost if you continue with it for 10 or 20 sites and decide if a reseller account, with unlimited websites, can save you money.

Next, buy your domain urls and install WordPress. But think, what urls are you going to purchase? If you acquire 20 totally varying Domain names then you are spreading your work across varying niches and when you come to sell them, you are not saturating any one section of the market. Conversely, if you acquire 20 Domain names on the same theme, then although there is not the variation when you come to sell, there are advantages when it comes to writing.

My suggestion is, therefore, to acquire in groups. By 4 sets of 5 urls along the same theme. Now, start writing or acquire in some articles (do not use PLR articles!). At the same time, invest in an article spinner. The one I use is available for a one off payment of $47. Use this to create unique versions of each of the articles, so you write one article, publish that to one blog and then spin 4 more articles for the other 4 blogs. Suddenly, maintaining 10 or 20 sites and posting to each one 3 times a week is not all that difficult!

Now, all that you need to do is to start driving traffic to the blogs. You might work on them all evenly, or you might prefer to give preference to 1 blog of each group. By favouring some sites these will become ready for sale ahead of the rest of the group. You then put them up for sale and when they sell, but another domain name to replace that website within the group it was sold from.

Of course, blog flipping isn’t merely about the sale at the end. Ideally you could make an income along the way and this could also be a selling point. If the blog is currently earning $100 per week without you buying traffic, there are going to be more takers than if it is earning nothing. So make sure that you add in Google Adsense and any appropriate affiliate schemes and keep a monthly record of all incomes. You might even take part in sponsored posting once the weblog is old enough and again, keep records of these earnings. You might find that whoever buys it is interested in such avenues and evidence of existing success will be a benefit.

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How Can A Forum Profit A Web site?

What benefits could a forum give to a website? Is it only creating a headache for yourself as you try to get rid of spammers, or are there real hard reasons for using a forum? There might be a good reason for using one that you might have overlooked, we look at that.

Getting More Traffic To Our Web-sites
Virtually all web-sites on the internet can do with a bit more visitors and gaining ample more visitors is the goal of a load of website owners’ desire. For this, there are two ways of improving your traffic. First and most obvious to most people are the array of methods used to get more people visiting your site, for instance search engine optimisation, pay per click adverts and so on.

The second method of ensuring more visitors is missed by masses of owners as it sounds too daft – this is making the most of the visitors that you are getting arriving onto your website. Obviously, this implies that people are finding and visiting your site one way or another. You cannot make the most of them on a brand new website, with undeniably no visitors!

There are lots of ways of making the most of the traffic that are arriving on your website, from improving navigation and so on, but one of the better ways, with a lot of advantages, is by running a forum on your website.

What Is A Forum?
A forum is just an simple way for traffic who are coming to your site of sharing their thoughts. A forum might be used in several ways. The most basic is for it to be a method of traffic communicating with each other and communicating whatever they are feeling at the time. This should be monitored by yourself to check what is being said. But a forum can also be used as a very useful question and answer area, where traffic might ask you questions and you then reply.

Whichever way you decide to use a forum, the benefits are the same.

The Benefits Of A Forum
1) You are building an amount of unique content on your site, that search engines will take an interest in and hopefully cause people searching the interenet to find your forum and then hopefully for some of these to then become buying customers of your main website.

2) You are building loyalty and repeat visits to your web site, because people make their post and then want to come back later to read what other answers and replies are given, This causes them to not only become a member by signing up, but to actually feel like a member and part of your site. Then, when they are ready to buy services, they are more impending to be loyal to you.

And it is this second benefit, increasing the amounts of visits that each customer makes to your site and from that their loyalty to you that is so beneficial.

To Recap
So, while it is true that use forums on our websites as there is a search engine benefit of creating ample of unique content that could contain search terms people are looking for, the biggest reason is that we are creating a brand loyalty factor and encouraging one off traffic to our web sites to come back again in the future. Much cheaper and simpler than trying to find the equivalent number of new buying visitors.

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What Is A Blog?

What is a blog? What can you do with a blog and how do you get started?

A blog, in the shortest possible answer, is any thoughts that you want it to be. It could be you talking about what you have done that day to a technical blog detailing latest releases and news from your organisation. In all probability, it is somewhere in the middle.

A blog is what you want it to be. If you just want to get into writing down your thoughts each dayand sharing them with the world then there is no harm in doing that. If you are training for a mass participation event and raising money for charity, such as the London Marathon or the New York Marathon, you might find that documenting your training and fund raising inspires you to keep up with both, whilst giving sponsors a point of contact.

For someone wanting to raise a bit of extra pocket money, a blog can be anything from a general chit chat to an ongoing discussion about a particular topic that the writer is a specialist on. Mommy blogging, where the writer talks about what she is doing and topics that are affecting her can generate good followings and, therefore, significant payments from sponsors. Whilst if you are qualified in a certain field then blogging about that field could generate highly specific traffic, which would generate less specific adverts, but highly profitable at that.

A blog can be anything from an online diary to a help desk to support a huge organisation, as long as you can get it onto a website. It is anything that you wish to use it for – the sky is your limit.

But, how do you get started? Well, there are plenty of popular blogging tools available, depending on how complicated you want to get. You can use simple tools such as Blogger or WordPress.com to get online and blogging instantly, using their free services, or you can buy your own domain name, download the latest version from WordPress.org and arrange some hosting and have a very powerful tool.

You can also have your blog look just as you want it to look. There are plenty of off the shelf designs, or themes, to use on your website, depending on what you are using. And there are also loads of plugins that you can use to give it all of the extra functions you might want. From easy to bookmark with Facebook to showing your Twitter status on the site to surveys and contact forms.

The world really is your oyster when it comes to blogging. You have it your way, talking about whatever you want to talk about and doing whatever you want with it. At best, your readers will also interact with you and leave comments, then you can also reply to. It makes it excellent fun, potentially very rewarding and something that everything should be joining in with.

So, that is what a blog is – whatever you want it to be!

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If you want to start work from home, then it is potential that you will need some kind of site. But you might want to stay away from the high costs of a professional designer. Can you still get a website?

Yes, you might get yourself a website for your own working from home scheme. There are a lot of DIY site tools, but I do not really rate ample of these. For those wanting to get an internet presence quickly and simply, then blogging is the answer?

Not convinced? Well, the best site tools have everything that you need, including:

  • straightforward to update via content management systems
  • professional templates for the design of your website, free to download and straightforward to activate
  • loads of added features to include, via plugins, for stacks of extra functions

But isn’t a weblog merely for blogging?
But, surely a website merely means that you might then merely keep blogging around your products? Well actually no, with the best blogging software you could add a range of pages to your web site, with a hierarchy of pages if you want to add a lot. Then, you could add weblog posts on top of these, which is another extraordinary benefit.

What is the best blogging software?
So, which is the best blogging software to use? Which should you be using? Well, my recommendation is WordPress. If you are slightly technical, then you will be able to sort yourself a domain name and suitable PHP hosting with a MySQL database and upload the latest version of WordPress.

Does all of that sound foreign to you? Do not worry – only look around for a host that offers straightforward WordPress installation. You might pay a touch more, but with a press of a button or two, the entire site will be created for you in WordPress.

Customise WordPress
Then, start working on your website! Select a suitable theme that matches what you want to sell and has a good navigation structure.

If you are promoting merely a small handful of products then you just need to create a page for each and link to every page from the main navigation area. This should happen automatically if you are careful selecting your theme. If you need ample of pages, then create high level category pages and then create the product pages as sub pages for these. Again, with a decent theme, all of this will be managed for you, or you could only talk round the products in the category pages and link to them manually.

WordPress is the best
WordPress is wonderful for quickly and easily building your own website. I do not know of an simpler to use tool available on the market, it beats all of the DIY site tools that I have ever tried. Plus, because it is a blogging tool, it has all of the indispensable weblog tools built in, which means that you site can also include a website. This is essential for the ultimate success of your site.

So, find yourself a domain name, buy some hosting, activate WordPress and customise it and you have your own simple to build web site!

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