Author: Bill Hartzer

Whether it’s a corporate blog, a news-type blog, or even a personal blog, optimizing your blog for the search engines is a must. There are some simple changes that you can make to WordPress and Moveable Type that will make your blog more search engine friendly and make the search engines beg for more (more post and content, that is!).

Optimizing a blog is just like optimizing any other website. The content and pages (posts) must be unique, they must be search engine friendly, and it needs links from other websites. If it’s a new blog, then you first need to make sure the blog software you’re using is set up so that it takes advantage of all of the possible optimization features. Then, announce it to the world, work on getting some links to it, and start making posts.

WordPress Optimization

If you’re using WordPress for your blog software, it’s important to make sure that your site is search engine friendly, meaning that it can easily be spidered by the search engine spiders. Just like optimizing a website, it’s important to have good title tags and meta tags. Keep in mind that blog software usually uses the title of your post as the title tag, so include keywords in your titles as much as possible. It’s important to set up your blog’s software so that the URLs don’t contain a lot of variables. Instead, use URLs that include the post title or post name in them. For example, if you’re using WordPress you’ll need to set the permalinks so that it uses %postname% in the URL. You can also set up a specific category for the post archives, and you might consider using a keyword that’s related to your blog instead of the default, which is typically the word “archive”. Fintan Darragh of www.dech.co.uk has a great blog post called “Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips” ( http://www.dech.co.uk/2005/11/ultimate-WordPress-seo-tips/ ). Mr. Darragh talks about permalink optimization and says, “The goal: stick more keywords up into the URL and remove the faff which nobody uses, to make the URL search engine and people attractive. Having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, especially when it’s as easy as WordPress makes it.” He also goes on to talk about getting rid of useless tags like the month, day, and year, as well as one important detail: whatever you do stick with the site structure you choose—otherwise you might end up with a lot of useless links to your site. Other tips that Mr. Darragh mentions are optimizing your page titles and your post titles--and installing a few plugins that are useful such as the “Related Posts Plugin” and the “Technorati Tag Generator”.

There are several other places where you can get specific tips about setting up WordPress in a search engine friendly manner, including: * SEO at Aleeya Dot Net - http://www.aleeya.net/category/WordPress/seo/
* The Best WordPress SEO Possible - http://WordPress.org/support/topic/49168
* Search Engine Optimization for WordPress - http://codex.WordPress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress
* Search Engine Optimization for Blogs - http://www.blog-maniac.com/blog-seo.htm
* DYI Search Engine Optimization - http://lorelle.WordPress.com/2006/01/15/dyi-search-engine-optimization/  One of the best tutorials out there is one called “DYI Search Engine Optimization” by Lorelle VanFossen. Specifically, Lorelle (lorelle.WordPress.com) has some great tips, including how to optimize your code, develop strong intrasite links, write with strong keyword usage, use categories and tags, and how to use ping services. Lorelle says that “the goal is to help search engine crawlers move through your website collecting information to be stored in the search engine’s database. The key to your blog’s data making it successfully into a search engine’s database is to: 1) Make sure there are no road blocks in the path of a search engine crawler.
2) Make sure the crawler can move through your blog, examining all your web pages.
3) Provide adequate keywords and key phrases which clearly help categorize your content.
4) Provide clearly labeled tags and categories recognized by tagging service crawlers and many search engines today.
5) Take advantage of pinging services.” There are several WordPress Plugins available that will help you take advantage of internal linking (like the Related Posts Plugin) which will link to other posts in your blog that are on the same topic.

Other plugins that might be helpful are plugins that automatically generate a Google Sitemap file as well as plugins that help you categorize the site such as the WordPress Subdomain Plugin ( http://www.webguerrilla.com/WordPress-subdomain-plugin/ ).

Movable Type Optimization
If you’re using Movable Type for your blog software, then it’s also important to make sure that your site is search engine friendly and can be spidered by the search engine spiders. Just like optimizing a website, it’s important to have good title tags and meta tags. Keep in mind that blog software usually uses the title of your post as the title tag, so include keywords in your titles as much as possible. Miles Evans (  http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/expertarticles/wpn-62-20060310Movable  TypeSEO.html) says that “Movable Type is optimized quite well out of the box, but there are a few quick tricks to easily providing the spiders with some dynamic content.” He goes on to say that you need to optimize your template. “For my main home page and category index pages I hardcode most of my meta data. Your meta tags will be at the top of the template within the tag. You can get fancy on your index pages but I cannot really see why. Optimize these two templates by hand for whatever keywords you are targeting site wide.” Mr. Evans also has another article titled, “Best Movable Type Plugins” ( http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/expertarticles/wpn-62-20060310BestMovable TypePlugins.html) that talks about his favorite plugins that help him get great search engine rankings. His favorite Movable Type Plugins for SEO are Dashify, MTPaginate, MT Blogroll, MT InlineEditor, MT-Textile, BigPAPI, as well as Ajaxify (a set of plugins that adds several ajax/javascript widgets into the Movable Type interface), CheckLinks, FormatList v1.0, and Better File Uploader for uploading files. Nicholas Carvan ( http://www.nicholascaravan.com ) has a great article about Movable Type optimization called “Optimizing your Movable Type blog for Google” ( http://www.nicholascarvan.com/blog/optimizing_your_Movable  Type_blog_for_google.html). In it he talks about PageRank (and how it relates to your internal linking on your blog), having keywords in your URL (which is important for all blog optimization) and blogrolling. He defines the term blogrolling very well, saying, “Blogrolling: Inbound links are gold, but in Google's eyes, not all links are equal. In particular, Google isn't wild about links contained within JavaScript - apparently they can index them, but that doesn't mean they always want to.”

Once you’ve set up and configured your blog’s software, it’s important to make sure that you leave it alone—if you change your page URLs then any links that you’ve received from other bloggers may not be valid anymore. If you need to change your site’s structure (perhaps you’ve been blogging already and wish to use the tips from this article to optimize your blog), then you might want to take a look at the Objection Redirection WordPress Plugin( http://WordPress-plugins.biggnuts.com/objection-redirection-WordPress-plugin/ ) if you’re using WordPress. The Objection Redirection Plugin gives you a simple interface to redirect users (and search engine bots) to the proper page, especially if you’ve changed your site’s structure.

Start Blogging
The best thing you can do is to start blogging. Go ahead and post to your heart’s content and write, write, write about your topic. The more content you can provide the better—and it seems as if adding content on a regular basis really helps, as well. Feel free to link out to other blog posts that are related to the topic you’re writing about. For example, before you publish a post, go on over to your favorite blog search engine and find another recent post on the same subject—and link to the post. Linking out to other bloggers will get their attention, and hopefully they’ll end up linking to you as well. If other bloggers have trackbacks turned on then their blog will link back to your post. Some trackbacks are moderated, so it might take some time before your link shows up on the other blog. And some bloggers have trackbacks turned off, so a link back to your site might take some manual intervention. Categorize your posts as much as possible, and feel free to add categories as you blog—it will help the internal linking structure of your site, and help the search engines and users find on-topic posts.

Promoting Your Blog
Whenever you make a post in your blog, your blog software will attempt to ping certain sites to let them know that you just updated your blog. There are many blog ping services out there, including Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat. Your blog software can be configured to ping sites automatically, and I’ve posted a list for WordPress of ping services on by blog ( http://www.corporatewebsitemarketing.info/cwm/WordPress-ping-list ). If your blog is new or you would like to get some more links, you can submit your blog to blog directories as well as other sites that will list your blog (don’t forget to submit to DMOZ.org, Yahoo! Directory, and the Best of the Web Blog Directory). About.com has a great article about promoting a blog ( http://weblogs.about.com/cs/blogpromotions/a/promoteblog.htm ) and even Biz Stone has great tutorial about promoting your blog ( http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1060 ). Lastly, don’t forget to turn on your blog’s RSS feed. And if you’re looking to promote your RSS feed, try searching your favorite search engine for “promote rss” to find a lot of good tutorials.

Promoting your blog is just like promoting a website—you need good spiderable content, links to your content, and you need to set up your blog software to take advantage of all the great features. There are also plugins that will help make blogging easier for all of us.

About the Author:

Bill Hartzer manages the Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing team at Vizion Interactive, a leading search engine optimization company, social media marketing, and web design firm based in the Dallas, Texas area.

Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/search-engine-optimization-for-blogs-461913.html

For many affiliate marketers, Google Adsense templates are a god-send. In fact, they are now realizing that good money is made from this source of revenue. Try the simple mathematical computation of multiplying those clicks for every page on your website and you get a summation of earnings equivalent to a monthly residual income with that little effort you have made.

Since this form of contextual advertising can be a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant and text-based Google ads on their website’s content pages and earn money in the process, the need for unique graphics and google adsense templates comes into focus (or any other contextual ad provider). Ever-conscious of spam or junk pages, ideal graphics with ideal ad locations make website creation less painful.

How much you will be earning will depend on how much the advertisers are willing to pay. It will depend also on the keywords required. If the keywords the advertiser have chosen are in high demand, you could receive more dollars per click. On the other hand, low demand keywords will earn you just a few cents per click.

How can you start making profits out of your website using Adsense?

1. First, register for an Adsense account. It will only take a few minutes of your time.

2. When the site is accepted, you will be receiving a bit of javascript code to include in your web pages. You can insert this code on as many pages or web sites that you want. The AdWords will start appearing immediately after.

3. You will be earning a few cents or some dollars per click when someone starts clicking on the AdWords displayed on any of your web pages. Trying to earn false revenues by repetitively clicking on your own ads is a no-no. This will result in a penalty or the possibility of your site being eliminated. The money you have already earned may be lost because of this.

4. View your statistics. Adsense earnings can be checked anytime by logging into your web site account.

Once you got your account working, you may still want to pattern them to the many sites that are earning more money than you are. It is important to note that there are factors affecting how your website will perform and the amount of money it will give you.

It is a common practice that when a site earning money, the tendency is for the owner to want to make more out of what they are getting already. It usually takes some time combined with trial and error to attain what you want for your Adsense contents.

Time and some important factors that you can practice and use. Remember to study your server logs and watch for any activity that seems suspicious. Report anything that you may find odd, may it big or small thing.

You may want to consider disabling ads for your own IP address and local geographic area. This will certainly prevent accidents and will not make Google mistake another user as you. You can do through a htaccess file. This will avoid Google mistaking as clicking on your own ads and be kicked out because of it.

But all-in-all, with quality and original content, it's a win-win situation if you think more about it. A favor for persons looking for quality content and information. For the persons writing the original content articles. And the person with the quality original content rich website. Of course, the search engines and its advertisers are getting targeted traffic and sales but so what? As long as you are getting something in your favor, it does not really matter what the others are getting for themselves. But with quality and original Google Adsense templates making the job MUCH easier, the only income way is up.

Joe loves both organic and pay per click web traffic. Read about his latest find: Jeff Johnson's superb collection of Google Adsense Templates here (and very affordable, too) Google Adsense Templates.

Printed from Self SEO (http://www.selfseo.com/story-19189.php)

Web directories are the website that content human made categories and sub categories. Directory provides an inbound links to the website. It’s no secret that search engines, especially Google, value quality inbound links to a website for higher search engine rankings.

Link building is a process of creating relevant and quality inbound links to a website with the intention of increasing the website’s importance resulting to an increase in page rank and thus generating more traffic and return of investment. If you are part of a very good link directory then you can be sure that the other websites listed in that directory quality sites to and are bound to give you quality links.

Link popularity is a major stepping stone for any online presence. Link exchanges could greatly up your site on search engines, therefore, drive more traffic to your site

Never participate in an automated link exchange program. These programs are useless. There are several link exchange scripts that allow build many good, relevant back links within a very short amount of time. Diversify your link portfolio. As well as submitting to thousands of web directories will brings you a huge amount of traffic.

Does not use search engine submission software to submit the site. Most quality search engines will see this as spamming the site and penalize you for it. These products are good for working on your page; they are not good for actually doing the submitting. You'll find that the path to affordable search engine optimization, and even professional search engine optimization, offers no short cuts.

For more information visit at http://www.mywebsiterankings.com/

Author: Karl Glantschnig

Keyword selection is one of the primary procedures to have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy implemented. It is extremely important that the right keywords are selected by businesses for their advertisements in order to maximize an online advertising service and gain profits. An advertising campaign can be deemed worthless is the wrong keywords are selected to represent it.



In a nutshell, SEO are methods that aim to improve the position or rank of a web site in listings produced by search engines. The benefits of getting a higher placement in the listings increases the chances that online visitors will view their pages and avail of the services offered by advertisers. It also gives visitors a feeling of security, because to them, a well-positioned ad equals high credibility.



Sites have different goals when it comes to optimization. Some sites employ broad search optimization strategy, they are in search for all traffic that comes along the way. It can be useful for sites that are generates broad interest, such as a directory or a periodical. Other sites go for utilizing keywords that are highly specific, and radiate the probability of a sale. In most cases, going for specific and carefully chosen traffic can prove advantageous, because it gives sales leads with more quality.



The process of choosing the appropriate keywords for a particular advertiser is not a simple task. An advertiser has to accomplish several things to pull it off successfully. First, the advertiser has to be well acquainted with the machinations of its target market. A thorough research into the keywords used by the competitor should be carried out, and whatever result that it will produce should be analyzed in detail. Keyword selection tools will assist advertisers in determining the keywords that is most suitable for their businesses.



Keywords selection can have many varieties, largely depending on the kind of web site that a client needs. These are the major types, static sites and dynamic states, where the former is more limited in terms of keyword numbers compared to the latter. If an advertiser is creating a brand new site, it is recommended to choose the initial number of keywords that will be needed, and afterwards, the architecture of the site can be prepared using the keyword selection criteria as a basis.



After coming up with the keyword list, the terms should be trimmed down up to the specific and necessary ones. In narrowing down the list, keep these factors in mind: Majority of the search engines do not bother doing word stemming, and that most visitors type keywords in lower case, and it is less difficult to gain a good rank for keyword phrases that are longer.



Here are some of the popular keyword selection tools available for advertisers:



1. Google AdWords Keyword Selection Tool

Google is the most successful search engine in the world, and it takes in more searches in the web than its competitors. This tool usually comes with the awards program of Google, and it shows the keywords that are actually utilized by users. Google AdWords provide users with the most sought-after queries, vast matches, and other keywords that the user may consider for usage.



2. Wordtracker

It is a database that people utilize as queries for searching terms. Aside from giving information on how often a term is utilized for web search, it will also inform users the number of competing sites that utilize the same term. The tool aids in finding combinations of keywords that is in any way related to the content of a web site.



3. Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool

A keyword selection tool that provides the number of searches in a month that proliferated within the Overture network. It provides the variations and phrase stems when a certain keyword is used. It also provides pay-per-click bids and a ROI Time CPM Calculator.



4. Keyword Destiny and Prominence Analysis

A keyword analysis tool which analyzes the words utilized on a web page by applying default settings or custom report options. It also reports on the number of times the word was used, and an analysis of a competitive URL. Other information provided includes word count, prominence values, the location of the significant keywords in the elements of the page, and density percentages.



Advertisers should choose the best tool that works for them. With various options available, it will not be too difficult to do so. Picking the right tool can make wonders for their business ventures.

Source: Submit Articles at ArticlesBase.com

About the Author:

A Million Dollar Work At Home Expert Shows You How To find the best home based business ideas and oportunities so you can work at home!
http://www.work-at-home-finder.com/

As you are aware, Google Adwords is one of the most popular PPC avenues because of several features.

* Low signup cost (only $5)
* Instant activation of your account
* Instant activation of your ad campaign
* Provision to set daily spending limits

As the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) goes up, your ad position improves and Cost-Per-Click (CPC) goes down. This really puts Google Adwords in a different league.

Here are some simple tips to improve your CTR --
1) Specific matching along with broad matching

Generally when you want to advertise for, say, online dating, you put online dating in the keywords list. I suggest that you all of these in the keywords list -

* [online dating]
* "online dating"
* online dating

This way, when a searcher types just online dating, the click is credited to the 1st keyword. If the searcher types a keyphrase including online dating in that order but as part of a bigger term like free online dating, it is credited to the 2nd keyword. And if both online and dating are present but not together and in that order, like online singles dating, it is credited to the 3rd keyword.

This improves the CTR for certain specific keywords and helps to lower your CPC and also improves your ad position.
2) Use a variable title

Did you know that your clickthrough rate (CTR) goes up when the searcher sees his keywords (that he searched for) in your ad? This is because Google shows these words in bold.

But you don't know what term this searcher has used. So how can you put the term in the title? Try this.

Put this string in the title field on the Adwords screen -

{KeyWord: Default Title} where you replace "Default Title" with a suitable text. Now Google will show the search term as the ad title if the searched term fits within the 25 character limit and your default title if the search term won't fit.

Example - say you use {KeyWord: Online Dating} as the title and dating as the keyword.

If someone searches for dating help, the shown title will be Dating Help. However if one searches for free online dating resources, Google will show Online Dating because the search term won't fit in the title space (25 characters).

Did you notice the capitalization? If you use Keyword, then only the first word would be capitalized. If you use keyword, all the letters will be in small case.

This tip alone can boost your CTR by 157% or more.
3) Variable destination URL

Did you know that Google now allows variable destination URLs? Why do you need that? Variable destination URL can help you identify the terms that the searchers are using and you can alter your page content to suit those terms for a much better conversion.

Let's see the syntax to get the search term in the destination URL --

http://www.articlestop10.com/pam.php?kw={keyword}

Here we are sending the searcher to a PHP program (you can use a Perl program also), which then stores the terms in a database for easy analysis. You can plan for yourself how you want to put this information to your advantage.

Frankly this tip does not increase your clickthrough rate directly but once you know what the searches were searching for, when they arrived at your site, you can change your message for a much better response.

Getting a new site page indexed and ranked are two things everyone should take into account. With all the competing web sites out there the importance of page rank becomes a top priority so that you can get free traffic and thus make money online.

There is no use to have the most informative website & unfortunately no one knows about it. Have you ever thought why your competitors always on the top positions and your website every time getting into the flux.

What is Page Rank?

Page ranks are defined numerically, from 1 through 10 - 10, being the highest. Very few pages have a page rank of 10, and anything above a 6 is considered very well. There are many factors that determine a page's rank, but the main variable seems to be based on how many websites link to your page.

Search engines rank Websites based on two major factors:

• Very exclusive content with related keywords in the body
• Link popularity - number of back links on your Website.

Importance of Page Rank:

Page rank is extremely important, in that it determines how high you get on search engine results. And just as it's helpful to have your incoming links be from reputable, trusted, relevant sites, your outbound links will also be more valuable to those pages you do link out to.

The higher your page ranking, the more desirable a link from your page will be to others - Including those willing to pay for said link.

Various ways to increase your page rank:

• Build more pages: Make sure to have at least 8 relevant pages including the main page, in order to have a healthy amount of content.

• How To Generate More At Cost: Getting a high ranking site to link to you isn't always the easiest thing to do. Sometimes it is necessary to buy that privilege via ads.

• Create Internal Links: Not only are you creating another link for the crawler, you're also making it convenient for your guest to find that page right then and there, if they so desire.

• Utilize Free Directory listings: They may not always be big high ranking sites, but they are an easy way to get your name out there.

• Avoid Dead-end Links: Make sure every page has a door out, other than a back button

Google uses a number of patented algorithms to determine the exact ranking of every indexed website. They also attempt to index as many websites and pages as they can possibly find. In order to do this they utilize tens of thousands of different hosts and over a dozen data centers.

Other important factors that determine your ranking are the architecture of the site, relevant keywords, title, underlying code and content of the site for making your site more appealing to the search engines.

Page rank is not the be all and end all, and people should not become too angry if they are not able to for example obtain a page rank five straight away. I believe hard work pays off and that a website should be seen as a long term project.

Page rank is a very real and vital aspect of web development that should always be kept in mind. Without it, your chance of being found easily on search engines is compromised. With it, you'll be on your way to a highly successful website.

Steve Buchanan writes articles on many topics including Website Submission Services, Article Submission Services, and Honda Generators.