How To Create Your Own SEO Friendly Blog?

Posted on Dec 9 2012 - 9:14am by maddy acca

So you have created a blog spending most or all of energy on it. What now? Just because you worked hard on your blog does not mean everybody will visit your site. There are so many options for readers to opt from, then why to choose yours?

Your target should be to make your site stand out from others while staying within the limits of relevancy. This would require you to adopt marketing strategies designed particularly to attract the target visitors. Here is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) jumps in – your ultimate tool to direct quality traffic towards your blog.

This is not just an option you have; it is something you need to do even if you wish otherwise. Don’t forget, the reader has a million other options in competition to your blog.

Now arises the question, how to utilize to make your blog more popular with the readers?

At the basic level, have an overall critical look at the structural make of your site and think if it is really going to get you a good rank in the search results.

Ask yourself a few simple questions to really know where does your site stand as far as SEO techniques are concerned.

Ingredients To Make SEO Friendly Website

 1. SEO Friendly Permalink Structure

Your URLS or Uniform Resource Locators as they are called need to be as simple as can be for the reader to read easily and have a clear idea of what the content on your site is about at the first look. This will also make algorithms to index your blog.

Use a semantic format that lets you manage the webpages into a hierarchical form containing topic categories and their sub-categories.

Take, for instance, this link: http://yourwebsite.net/seo/tips/strategies-for-web-developers/

Mere look at the address tells both the reader and the spiders/bots to gauge the entire context of the article. Thus, be careful to buy your domain names from a good domain seller out there.

2. Speedup Your Website

Everybody, you included, prefers fast loading content over any other website. On average, reader will leave the page if it is not fully loaded within 5 seconds of visit. No blogger would want that to happen to his domain.

So keep the loading time within a time frame of 2 to 3 seconds if you want to keep the potential visitors on your site.

How can you do this?

Cut the unnecessary part in your content down. Writing pages long articles takes some effort but keep in mind, search engines will opt for to the point precise pieces over the lengthy ones. Hence, keep the information concise and helpful – a 500 to 600 words long article should be enough for you to get your point across.

Another step you can take that majority of the bloggers tend to ignore is related to the images. Lessen the pixels along with the file size also, keep the formats that are generally required i.e. JPEG, GIF, PNG.

 3. The ease of indexing your content

A webpage isn’t only a fill of written context but also has other ways of communicating the information to the reader. For instance, videos, visual instructions, audio aid and a lot of othergraphical content is found on the web pages.

On top of that, you must keep in mind that these elements play no role in getting your page indexed. Thus, to make it to the topmost SERP keep a few points in mind.

HyperText Markup Language system –For any web document you make, HyperText Markup Language system is the format you make use of, as a standard one. This format further allows you to use tags and attributes.

Alternative text – This is fundamentally for the visually impaired readers or the ones that are dependent upon screen readers to get the idea of a video, image or graphic. For this purpose, you use words that explain your images or videos the best in context.

Less Flash files and Java applets – As mentioned earlier, algorithms only index texts therefore; you need to lessen the amount of graphics and plugins you are using. To end up on top of the search results your context should be reader friendly to search engines more than the readers, in comparison.

4. Links and backlinks

In earlier blogging days, getting your page indexed was directly dependent on the number of links your page contains. On top of that, acquiring links was pretty easy since you could exchange as many as you wish or even buy a few links for the purpose.

With the advent of Google Panda and Penguin releases, there has been a shift in the elements in focus for index: to say the least, it is not the quantity anymore.

Updates like Panda and Penguin come with a number of data upgrades (Panda) and alterations (Penguin) in algorithms.

In short, to obtain backlinks and create internal links to authentic high quality content, you can use the methods given by Google itself in Google Webmaster Guidelines.

 5. Social media, an opportunity

Smart bloggers and others who shared traction found social media as an opportunity they could avail for promoting their websites without using extensive advertising techniques. And when SEO is added to this area of promotion, this advertisement method is optimized.

But how do they really use social media?

1. Do not go for direct advertisements that pop up every time someone visits a social media websites. Since these sites are fundamentally based on interaction, which would be the best way to let your audience know about your page instead of hard methods.
2. Keep your website visually constant on social pages using the same name and design strategies all over i.e. same font, color and themes.

6. Sitemap for your website

Before getting along with anything else first you need to know what the sitemap actually is. Asitemap is just a list of pages of your website available for ease of navigation for algorithmsand users alike.

You must be thinking what is the use of creating such a sitemap? Most importantly, it serves as the means to let the search engines know when you have new content added to your page. Then it aids fast and thorough indexing. Lastly, the visitors find it easy to access the information they require from your page.

You must keep your sitemap up-to-date with your content. For this, you can either hire a developer or use a plugin like Google XML Sitemap to do the job.

13 Steps to Successful Blogging

Blogs can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogs is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. In this article you will learn the 13 most essential steps to successful blogging.

1) Where to start?

 You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Journal Home or Blogger. Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It allows you to focus on your content and not the internal maintenance of the blog. The best benefit of starting with a free service is, in the case your blog doesn't become successful you do not lose any money or are you left holding the bill. The great thing about a blog is that they are organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first. When your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to upgrade to your own domain then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your "move". Simply add a last entry stating that your blog has "moved" and type the new blog URL address. Which directs visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without a major inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you need to...but only when you need to!

2) Niche

 A niche is a targeted product, service, or topic. You should first decide on a product, service, or topic which interest you. Choose an area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. You can use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics. It does NOT matter if your topic is popular as long as there is a audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused then your blog should be successful. Anything can be considered a niche as long as it has a target audience no matter how large or how small the audience is. A blog about your cat can be a niche or a blog about the species of the cat family can be a larger niche market, if there are people who are interested in hearing about your cat or the species of the cat family...you can even choose to build your audience for a market which an audience does not exist, but first you must build your blog.

3) Update Daily (nothing less)

 This step is a must and not a suggestion. Updating your blog daily not only keeps your blog more interesting to readers, but it also gives your blog fresh content on a day to day making it more appealing to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here and there is understandable to most, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog being unsuccessful. To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitors interest it is a must to update your blog daily with multiple entries. You should try to update your blog everyday with at least 3 or more daily entries. The best way to accomplish this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It may even be wise to schedule a set time which you dedicate to your blog each day. Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as a job, what happens if you don't come to work for days or weeks...you lose money or worse you get fired! Same applies here...if you don't update your blog for days or weeks you'll lose visitors.

4) Traffic

 It's no secret. You must have traffic to profit from blogs. There are numerous ways to build traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising like TrafficG, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word-of-mouth. You should always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or any other communication media. You should submit your blog URL address to search engines and blog directories. You should submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger. You should confidently share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates, and business professionals when it relates. Many blogs can be considered as a collection of articles, for this purpose you should submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ArticleCity.com. Once submitted your articles can be picked up and published by others. The trick is to make sure you include your Blog URL address in the "About the Author" passage. What this does is create link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone picks up your article from the syndication then publish the article on their website the "About the Author" passage is included with each publication and the link you included is followed, crawled, and indexed by search engines. Imagine if your article is popular enough or controversial enough to produce 10,000 publications across the web. The search engines is bound to find your site in no time with that many publications and credit you a authority on the topic, in return increasing your rank on search engines. The small effort of writing a well written article is rewarding. You should try to write at least 1 full length article every week for syndication and submit your article to at least 10 article syndicators.

5) Track Your Blog

 How do you know if your blog has traffic? Just because no one is leaving comments doesn't mean your blog isn't growing. Many visitors do not leave comments but they are returning visitors. I know it sounds crazy but with blogs people are more interested in what "you" have to say! Many visitors do not comment their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some do not comment at all, but are active daily visitors.

Tracking your blog does not have to be overly sophisticated usually a simple free page counter like StatCounter.com or Active Meter will do the trick. Install (copy/paste) the code into the html of your blog template and start tracking your visitors. Its better to use a service which gives you advanced traffic analysis, such as keyword tracking information, referral information, and search engine information. Visitors, returning visitors, and unique visitors should be standard for any page counter service you choose.

6) Listen to Your Audience

 When using the proper page counter you should begin to see how others are finding your blog and if through search engines then which keywords are being used to find your blog. If constantly your blog is being found by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to make it even more powerful. When writing entry titles and entries use the keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog legible and interesting.

7) Multiple blogs

 Use multiple blogging accounts to attract more people. This means you should have a blog with JournalHome.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog-City.com, tBlogs.com, etc. The more blog accounts the better. You can copy/paste from 1 blog to all others. Having different blog accounts is like having a publication in different newspapers. This enables you to attract more visitors and this also increases the chance that 1 of your blogs will be in the search engine results for your focused keywords.

8) Short & Concise

 Aside from the lengthy article a week for syndication and publication your blog entries should be short & concise (if you can help it). Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you have no choice but to blog lengthy entries, but try to avoid this as much as possible. You do not want your blog entries to become hours of reading. Visitors like to easily find information and skim through your entries. It is good to be detailed and provide useful information, but do not include useless information or run away sentences that veer away from your topic.

9) Digital Art

 Try to include non-advertising graphics, pictures, photos, and art in your blog entries. Not too much. Once a week is fine. Graphics can sometimes bring your blog to life. Of course, the content of the blog is the most important aspect and you do not want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a bit of spice to the blog. Be choosy about your graphics and make sure they fit your entry topic. You should add content with the graphic, at least a caption. Original graphics, photos, pictures, and art is recommended.

10) Keep it Personal

 A blog is most successful when it is kept personal. Try to include personal experiences which relates to the topic of your blog entry. Stay away from the business style of writing. Write with a more personal style and use first-person narratives. Do not write any of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and personal endeavors.

11) Interact With Your Visitors

 You now have the traffic you deserve. You should begin interacting with your visitors. Create a regular theme such as: "Monday Money Tip" or "Picture of the Week" which entices your readers to look forward to each week.

Give your readers advance notice about a product, service, or topic which you are going to review and then talk about later. If the President was scheduled to give a speech then in your blog you should state that you "will discuss the speech and give your opinion after the speech airs. Comments will be appreciated".

Try your best to find exclusive information that not many have. Do not disclose any confidential or secret information which is deemed illegal or can potentially get you into trouble, but try to get the scoop before everyone else does. Such as: If your blog was about Paris Hilton (the socialite) and you had a blog entry about "Paris Hilton Getting Married" then it would be interesting to your readers if you had a actual picture of Paris Hilton engagement ring. Give your best effort to dig and search the internet for exclusive information and you will possibly come up with something useful. Your readers will appreciate this and they show their appreciation through word-of-mouth referrals. Imagine how many readers will tell their friends, family, and others about information they only can find at your blog.

12) Make Money

 Once your blog has gained some real momentum and your blog traffic is increasing then it is time to start thinking about turning your traffic into profit. You should use contextual advertising, like Google AdSense or Chitchat. Contextual advertising is usually text links which use the content of your blog to publish targeted ads on your blog. The payout is usually based on a pay-per-click model, meaning for ever click an ad receives you are paid a small percentage of the profits. In addition to contextual advertising it is good to also use graphical advertising such as: BlogAds.com, Amazon.com, Mamma-Media, or General Sponsored Advertising.

13) You're a Professional

  You're a professional now! What are you still doing with that free blog hosting service? It is time to upgrade to a domain hosted solution. You need to get a web host and choose a domain name for your blog then check its availability. Select the blogging software you wish to use, such as: Squarespace.com, WordPress.org, MovableType.org, etc. When you have your new blog domain setup and ready for traffic then it is time for you to announce your move on all your previous blog accounts. Your last entry to the blog should be a "move" announcement. The title should be "Moved" and the blog entry should state something like "Old Blog has been moved to New Blog please follow and bookmark this link for future reference: http://www.YourNewBlogDomainName.com". This way all returning visitors and new readers should not have any problem finding your new blog domain.

At the level of a professional blogger you may want to team up with 1 or more other bloggers. This will create a more interesting and more powerful blog. The old saying "two heads is better than one", more authors mean more advertising and exposure because each author will have a vested interest in the blog. The idea of a team blog is to make it profitable and rewarding for all authors, while continuing to target the blog topic and keeping the blog interesting for visitors.

Following these blogging techniques should make your blogging experience much more rewarding. There is no guarantee that your blog will become popular or a household name, but the effort should at least put you one step closer. Making money online is not an overnight experience like many may think, but making money online is definitely a foreseeable possibility. As well, growing popularity on the web is not an overnight experience, but through time, dedication, and persistence you will be rewarded with all the royalties of blogging.

Pandamian: Type & Publish Books Online

Online blogging platforms do a wonderful job of letting you write an online diary. But what if you are an aspiring author looking for a way to write an entire book online? What you will need is a web service that organizes the chapters in your books and lets visitors comfortably go through them. This is precisely what Pandamian offers.

The first step in using the site is to create an account. Next you begin by starting your book. Add chapters by typing up new ones and saving them along the way. Like most blogging platforms, the text editor of the site supports special formatting, images, hyperlinks, and many other features. When you finalize a chapter, you can publish it – chapters can be edited after publishing as well.
Your book is published under a unique URL that you can share with others. Visitors to your book’s pages and chapters can leave their comments. The stats about your books, chapters, and comments appear under your Dashboard.

Features:

• A user-friendly web service.
• Lets you publish books online.
• Lets you separately write, edit, and publish each chapter.
• Book readers can leave comments.
• Similar tools: WEbook, Moglue and ePubBud.
• Also read related articles:
  How To Publish Your Own Book (In Print) Cheaply
  How to Publish a Children’s Book with StoryJumper
  4 Of The Best Online Print-On-Demand Book Publishers

Check out Pandamian @ www.pandamian.com (by MOin from Thumb Press)

Edit Flow: Manage & Collaborate The Flow Of Articles On WordPress Blog

One of the main responsibilities of any blog owner is to manage the flow of articles from writers, editors and other guest authors, and collaborate with them efficiently.  Edit Flow is a handy WordPress plugin that solves this problem.

By default when any author submits a post, it is set to as draft or pending review. Edit Flow adds extra statuses that define the stages of your workflow e.g. Assigned, In Progress and Pitches. You can even create custom statuses and assign them to different writers.
With Calendar feature, you can view all the upcoming posts over a customizable date range. The most important feature of Edit Flow is that it helps you organize users into groups (editors, reporters, writers, etc.).
You can even save details of every assignment you give to your team. You can change editorial guidelines according to your needs and send notifications to your team from your WordPress dashboard.
Features

• Simple and easy to use.
• Add custom statuses.
• View scheduled posts over a specific date range.
• Group team members.

Check out Edit Flow @ www.editflow.org

Defensio: Avoid Spam On Your Facebook Page & Blog

Spam is one of the biggest problems on the Internet, and you are not safe from it – either on Facebook or on your personal website. People use special bots and even JavaScript codes to spam your sites so it is important to save your Facebook page, since you are representing your business/professional identity.

With Defensio, you can avoid the spam problem on your sites. Once you visit the website, you need to select the place that you want to save from spam – either your Facebook page or your personal site. I chose my Facebook page, and I was then directed to the “Permission Page” where I gave access for Defensio to access my personal information and “Post on my behalf”.
You will then be required to give your email address and install the Defensio plug-in on  your Facebook page – there are various plans & pricing packages to choose from, such as: Personal (Free), Standard, Professional and Premium.
Once you have chosen the page you want to defend from scam links, malicious content and so on, Defensio will scan the links and posts to make sure they are all safe to visit. You can change the “Settings” to increase or decrease security protection.
Feature

• Have a safe browsing experience on Facebook, blog or website.
• Up to 25,000 posts/month and up to 5 employees can be protected on the Personal (FREE) package.

Check out Defensio @ http://www.defensio.com (via TroubleFixers)

SiteCake: Content Management Which Is A Piece Of Cake

SiteCake is a brand new CMS editor designed with small businesses in mind, focusing on allowing site editors to edit with minimal fuss and no technical knowledge. SiteCake lets editors edit the site while they browse it, including the ability to drag and drop media directly into the page.

Unlike some of the more powerful CMS tools available, like Joomla and Drupal, SiteCake has decided to limit the features in return for simplicity for the end users. This means that people who are busy running businesses and have no time to learn how to make a website can just get in there and edit content easily.
As soon as the site editor logs in they can immediately add, delete or rearrange the content of the site by dragging and dropping or simply editing the text in front of them.
Features:

• All visual WYSIWYG editor.
• Edit while browsing the site.
• Drag and drop web-based media directly into your site.
• CMS code is built using PHP.
• Similar tools: PBwiki and Sushiworks.

Check out SiteCake @ (By Ange of AngelaAlcorn.com) (Via Web Resources Depot)

Pygmyfoto: A Simple, Deployable Photo Roll Program For The Web

Are you looking for a way to show off photos on your website, but don’t need all the bells and whistles that come with sites like WordPress and other more advanced blogging platforms? Well, if so, Pygmyfoto might be right up your alley. It is an open-source, deployable web photo tool that allows you to share photos in a simple, bare bones photo roll. Sometimes, simple is all you need, and Pygmyfoto is just that.

With Pygmyfoto, you can share photos without any unnecessary extras. You can deploy it on even the simplest of hardware, so you don’t need a crazy machine to get it up and running. It’s open-source, so you can tweak it to meet your needs. Of course, it’s meant to be simple, but if there is something you feel is missing, you can always program it yourself.

The photo roll will display a smaller version of the pictures which is also a link to the full resolution picture. It also displays some important information about the photo such as the  exposure, aperture, focal length, and ISO. It also has a place for you to enter a little description of the photo. You can view a sample deployment of the program here.
Features:

• Open source photo roll sharing.
• Simple, no extras.
• Shows key data such as exposure, aperture, focal length, and ISO.
• Add photo description.

Find Pygmyfoto @ scribblesandsnaps.com/pygmyfoto